The expected recession in the art market just doesn't want to happen. Wednesday evening's auction at Christies in New York set a new record for a work by a living artist, when a Lucian Freud painting sold for $33.6 million. MAO, Modern Art Obsession, has the grizzly details. (Cai Guo-Qiang, whose exhibition at the Guggenheim I was criticising a couple of days ago, saw one of his drawings go for $481,000, which is about $481,000 more than what my drawings usually sell for.)