On May 5, Oliver Barker arrived in Stuttgart, Germany, to oversee an auction. Barker’s been with the contemporary art department at Sotheby’s since 2001, and since 2016 he’s been the chairman of all European operations. Which means Barker sells a lot of art. Last month he oversaw Sotheby’s $408 million modern art sale in New York, where a Monet landscape of the Grand Canal in Venice sold for nearly $57 million with fees.

But Barker wasn’t in Stuttgart to sell art. He was there to sell a car—not just any car, but an ultra-rare Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut, enshrined in the Mercedes-Benz Museum after being used as the personal coach of the automaker’s legendary chief, Rudolf Uhlenhaut. After holding it for half a century, the company decided to part ways with the car in order to create a Mercedes-Benz fund for youth charities.

For car collectors, this was the holy grail of roadsters. When the groundbreaking auto was first unveiled in 1955, it was the fastest street-legal speed machine ever created, capable of clocking a pace of a staggering 180 miles per hour. That kind of velocity comes in handy sometimes. Once, Uhlenhaut was in Munich when he realized he was late for a meeting at the H.Q. in Stuttgart. He made the two-and-a-half-hour trip in under an hour.

Barker arrived in Stuttgart from London, and immediately got down to business. The auction was conducted in secret, only revealed to the public after it went down, and all collectors who wanted a paddle had to be thoroughly vetted by Mercedes-Benz. With the bidders at the ready, Barker began the proceedings at an astounding figure.

“I’d like to open this evening’s auction at 50 million euros,” he said in a video later released by RM Sotheby’s, the auction house’s car arm.

The opening gambit was already nearly as high as the last most expensive car ever sold, a $70 million 1963 Ferrari GTO that won the Tour de France, bought by mega-rich WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil.

Suddenly, one of the Sotheby’s reps lifted a paddle number to bid.

“It’s in a new place at 85 million euros,” Barker said, shifting his eyes to the natty men in a row on the rostrum.

“People, this is it, your final chance,” Barker said, gavel held high in the air.

Then, another bid, this time a historic one.

“The first man to bid 100 million euros for a car!” Barker exclaimed.

And then, after several more bidders from the rostrum, it was a man in the room who lifted a paddle at 135 million euros, beating off the underbidder and securing the car for a client.

Not only was this the most expensive car ever sold at auction—at $143 million when converted to dollars, it became the sixth-most-expensive anything ever sold at auction, edging out the Francis Bacon triptych portrait of Lucian Freud that Elaine Wynn bought at Christie’s in November 2013 for $142 million. (Apart from the $168 million gigayacht rumored to have been bought by now disgraced Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich on eBay in 2006, every other item in the top 10 have all been artworks.)

And it could prove to be a turning point in the car market, establishing automobiles as a legit place to park funds.

The auction could not have taken place if it weren’t for the efforts of the car dealer, adviser, and enthusiast Simon Kidston, who got the ball rolling on the sale. A swashbuckling rare-auto aficionado, Kidston comes from a long line of English car lovers, and set up his business outside of Geneva, giving him quick access to the autobahn, the stretch of asphalt freedom that forbids speed limits. He’ll often hit 220 miles per hour in his McLaren F1.

And he thinks the Mercedes sold for right around the right number.

“I’m not surprised at the price,” he said during a phone call Thursday. “As somebody commented to me, it’s just a number when there are no benchmarks—there are no Mercedes SLRs that have come to auction. With this car, there was no last sale; the client took the view that he would pay whatever it is.”

There’s perhaps no better person to ask about rare cars than Kidston. (He’s also a Vanity Fair contributor, another sign of his general erudition, though we haven’t met.) His clients at one point included the designer Marc Newson and the fashion mogul Ralph Lauren. On his website, there’s a stacked list of testimonials from various bigwigs from around the world, including a former president of Microsoft, industrialists from Japan and Spain, and Hartmut Ibing, the Düsseldorf-based car collector who showed up in the Paradise Papers due to his status as the president of the Malta-based Robinson Yachts Limited.

Kidston—whose father, uncle, and grandfather were all part of the pioneering English racing team called the Bentley Boys—isn’t afraid to fight for material if he believes it can sell for a big price. Once, he drove across the desert near Dubai to make a deal to buy 10 cars previously from the collection of the shah of Iran, and had to ship them home on a rented 747. But it was all worth it once one of the cars, a rare 1971 Lamborghini Miura SVJ, sold at auction to an American buyer for $497,500, almost twice its estimate. The buyer, it turned out, was Nicolas Cage.

As for the record-breaking Mercedes, he thinks it will go a long way to legitimizing the idea that billionaires should be buying nine-figure cars alongside their nine-figure artworks.

“I’m not sure if it completely changes the market, but I think it opens collectors’ eyes that cars can be mentioned in the same sentence as art in terms of the value for collectors and their perception by the general public,” he said.

And so he spent 18 months lobbying Mercedes-Benz to sell a car that it had already effectively said would never go on the block.

“For a year and a half I went to Mercedes, discussing the car, discussing the car market,” he said. “They had the ability to blow all the pretenders out of the water in proving the value of Mercedes as the most valuable car in the world.”

This car, he said, has it all—it has the looks and it has the motor muscle, a rarity that combines aesthetic beauty and power under the hood. It has an unbeaten racing record and deep historical significance. And it sounds like no other car ever conceived, an overpowering roar more like a gigantic beast than a bundle of aluminum cylinders. Kidston recalled the one time he saw a Mercedes 300 SLR, as a child, at a car fair in Tuscany with his father. “The noise drowned out the Italian cars and gobbled them up like sharks swallowing fish,” he said.

The average price of a car Kidston sells to clients is around 1 million euros, but he knew that some autos are so rare that the price they draw at auction could be stratospheric. Clearly, the Mercedes 300 SLR was one of them, and there was one bidder willing to go further than anyone else to win it. Naturally that bidder was on the phone with Kidston himself—the mastermind of the sale was also the one who won it, sitting in the museum in Stuttgart and outbidding the clients on the phone with Sotheby’s reps, rocking paddle number 3007.

And while Kidston will take home more than $7 million in fees if he gets his customary 5% cut of the deal, it’s the client who will get to take home the prize itself. Immediately, the high-end race-car-collecting community started guessing which billionaire could have been the one to muscle ahead of other bidders and win the thing.

The underbidder, according to a source, might have been Samuel Robson “Rob” Walton, the Walmart heir and a billionaire nearly 60 times over, who already owns a 1961 Ferrari GTO, a 1967 Porsche 911 S, and a 1957 Maserati 450S.

As for the winner, it could be, according to the same source, the billionaire Swiss pharmaceutical heir Ernesto Bertarelli, whose family is worth nearly $20 billion. An art collector and sailing enthusiast with a longtime nautical rivalry with fellow billionaire Larry Ellison, Bertarelli was recently spotted in Monaco for the Formula 1 races, model Naomi Campbell on his arm. Or another source tells me it could be Lord Bamford, the English car collector who’s close with embattled prime minister Boris Johnson.

Kidston said that, alas, he wasn’t permitted to say anything about the buyer, other than to say he has plans (it’s a he; that he did let slip) to show the car on certain occasions. And it won’t just sit there—it’ll be driven.

“The owner won’t appear, but the car will,” Kidston said. “It will be shared with the public over the years to come. It will be shown at cultural events. You will see the car again, and you will most certainly hear the car again.”

Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…Missing from the three-week spree of auctions, art fairs, and openings was Leonardo DiCaprio, once such a ubiquitous presence in the skybox of Sotheby’s and Christie’s (where he once organized a show) and art fairs around the world. Okay, well, he did pop up at the Met Gala after-party at Casa Cipriani early last month, and then at the Gordon Parks Foundation gala at another Cipriani on the island of Manhattan. But no. Zero Leo–on–a–Citi Bike sightings at The Shed or the Park Avenue Armory. Well, thank God the king of the world turned up at Cannes, where he attended the black-tie AmFAR gala at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, former stomping grounds of Gerald Murphy and Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In front of DiCaprio, who was in a black T-shirt and all-black Yankees hat, Simon de Pury conducted a live auction, selling work by artists such as Austyn Weiner (who got engaged at the gala, mazel tov!), Marc Quinn, and Kenny Scharf, and raising nearly $20 million. And what do you know, Leo was also at the after-party, which got started at 1 a.m. at the Villa Domaine la Dilecta and enforced a strict no-photo policy. For shame, as that meant you couldn’t take pictures of Diplo and Swizz Beatz DJ’ing, or DiCaprio hanging with the likes of Naomi Campbell, Ciara, LeBron James and his former Cavs teammate Kevin Love, Petra Nemcova, Casey Affleck, and others, who partied until 7 a.m. My lord, doesn’t anyone work anymore?

…Frieze announced that its Los Angeles fair will be moving from the tony confines of the Beverly Hilton to a hangar at the Santa Monica airport, mostly due to construction at the upscale hotel that Frieze occupied earlier in 2022. While the new location is purportedly just 21 minutes, sans traffic, from the original digs at Paramount Pictures Studios, there’s always traffic. And it’s a world away in the mind of the eastside-dwelling Angeleno, who goes to the beach once a year, maybe. Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the L.A. fair that reigned before the British arrived, forced fairgoers to come to the west side for a decade before it finally moved back to Hollywood in 2020. And then there’s the question of where to get dinner—surely the collectors will still stay at the same three hotels in Beverly Hills, and dealers will still have their post-opening soirees at the Hollywood hot spots that they’ve become accustomed to: the Tower Bar, Horses, the Chateau Marmont, the San Vicente Bungalows, etc. Which means, expect a lot of schlepping between the beach and the hills.

…Hauser & Wirth is opening its first gallery in Paris, steps from the stretch of Avenue Matignon that in recent years has welcomed new outposts of White Cube, Perrotin, Kamel Mennour, and Chicago’s own Mariane Ibrahim. Gagosian’s Parisian outpost is also steps off of Matignon, at 4 Rue de Ponthieu.

…Insiders have long known that one of the best places in New York to buy art is the annual fundraising benefit for White Columns, the pioneering art space in the Meatpacking District that gives shows to artists not represented by commercial galleries—artists brand-new to the scene, or artists who have been overlooked during their lifetimes. In the weeks leading up to the event Wednesday, White Columns director Matthew Higgs used his Instagram presence to slowly reveal the lots that would be offered at the benefit, juxtaposing the upcoming works with ones that have sold for eye-popping low numbers at galas past. In 1995, a Lisa Yuskavage had an opening bid of just $450, and in 1996 a Francis Alÿs had an opening bid of just $600. Also that year, you could have bought a Cady Noland for $3,000, which is truly insane. And you have to be present in the room to place a bid, no cheating! Surely some deals went down Wednesday as well.

…You take the Renaissance Society, one of the oldest contemporary art spaces in Chicago, and combine it with a fundraising benefit and you get…that’s right, you get the RenBen. It went down last Thursday at the Windy City’s South Shore Cultural Center, with Ren director Myriam Ben Salah holding court, Gucci sponsoring, and the artist Piero Golia getting full oversight into what the whole shebang looked like. Artists in attendance included Harold Ancart, Theaster Gates, and Pope.L, as well as the top staff at the MCA Chicago and Obama Presidential Center Museum director Louise Bernard.

…Ignacio Mattos’s restaurants within the Dimes Square hotel Nine Orchard have opened for friends and family, and regardless of the effect a luxury hotel has on the neighborhood, well, there’s no denying that the spaces are gorgeous, especially the show-stopping lobby bar. The view from the rooftop is also stunning. Get ready for this place to be extremely popular.

…And a few blocks down, a new sushi restaurant, simply called Time, has opened on the corner of Canal and Forsyth streets, with wraparound views of the Manhattan Bridge Arch and Colonnade on one side and Sara D. Roosevelt Park on the other. Maybe call that little area—and I apologize for this—Time Square? It’s run by a team involved with Dr. Clark and The River, and owners include the rapper Despot and the architectural designer Nick Poe—who, in the interest of full disclosure, happens to be my brother-in-law. This is the sushi place that will be the site of post-opening dinners and parties, plus the sashimi and uni are fresher than anywhere nearby.

When Mark Tribe founded Rhizome in 1996, it was simply a listserv, an email he sent to fellow artists who worked in the digital space. It grew quickly, building an archive of digital work and teaming up with the New Museum in 2003. But it could be argued that there has never been a year for digital art like the last one, from the sale of Beeple’s The First 5,000 Days at Christie’s for $69.3 million and the mania for NFTs across platforms old and new, to the recent fracturing of the market that’s leaving the skeptics bursting with schadenfreude. 

Boom or bust, Rhizome is doing better than ever. Zora, a start-up that allows creators a platform to build both NFTs and the marketplaces to sell them, sponsored the Rhizome gala, which means it was held at the Bowery Hotel.

“We’re at a different kind of venue this year, and that’s because of Zora,” one Rhizome staffer told me during the gala Tuesday at the hotel, the chosen crash pad for celebs visiting from L.A.

It’s certainly a step up from Forlini’s, the beloved but modest, now closed red-sauce joint where the last Rhizome benefit was held in February 2020. And it proved to be the perfect place to honor Rachel Rossin, an artist who, perhaps more than anyone, has embraced the field of V.R. as a medium, alongside Julie Martin, who cofounded Experiments in Art and Technology around 1966 with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and engineers from Bell Labs. As the night wound down on the Bowery Terrace, the gala dinner segued into a party hosted by the artist collective Club Cringe, with kids spilling into the hotel’s posh environs off the street. It was, indeed, a long way from Forlini’s.

And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.