Bacon Breaks Record as Art Market Sizzles

A 1976 triptych painting by Francis Bacon became the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold when it went for $86.2 million at auction last night, Reuters reports. Seventeen other artists also set records at the sale, boosting Sotheby's to the best night in its 300-year history and quashing predictions that the economic slowdown would douse the red-hot market for postwar art. (More Francis Bacon stories.)