Top lot at the sales at Sotheby's in New York on 15 April was Arkhip Kuindzhi's Birch-Grove. I saw this work at the Moscow preview; it was strangely underwhelming in its execution, all the more so because Kuindzhi is such a sumptuous painter. To me it looked like a copy by another hand, and I even wrote to Sotheby's to that effect. However, that was merely one person's opinion; the provenance as given seemed excellent; and one assumes Sotheby's were absolutely sure of the work before putting it on the block.

I've been told that the auction houses regard a 70% selling rate as a good result, so the 52% for the contemporary section was no doubt a disappointment; but this is a highly unpredictable market and Sotheby's in New York (as, too, in London) deserves credit for trying to expand the roster of living artists saleable at auction. Good prices were achieved for outstanding works by Kabakov and Rabin, and a Rukhin fetched a record (for him) $265,000; but an overpriced Tselkov went nowhere (John Varoli/Bloomberg).

In general, lots that sold on 15 April were doing so within or around estimate, unlike the Faberge icon on 16 April (John Varoli/Bloomberg). In the secondary market, as indeed in contemporary art (I'm thinking of the major events of 2007-8: Kulik's Veryu show and Osmolovski's Kandinsky-prize-winning bread icons), what rules now is a somewhat nebulous "spirituality":

``Religious artworks are more popular now with Russian and Ukrainian collectors,'' said Alexander Tabalov, a Ukrainian food- processing tycoon and art collector. ``Rich people in our country are thinking more about spirituality.''