Art market news: Joseph Beuys suit sells for $69,000 Christie's made a cracking start to the Islamic sales in London last week, with its first sale of manuscripts and miniature works on paper for 20 years doubling estimates after bidders competed heavily for ancient Ottoman manuscripts. One Turkish calligraphic panel estimated at £2,000 sold for £115,000. But the buzz did not last. In the seven further sales, including specialised sales for 19th-century Orientalist and contemporary Turkish art at Sotheby's, not one achieved even its lowest estimated value. French graffiti artist Blek le Rat, who is said to have inspired Banksy with his use of stencilled imagery, said "the art world is all about cheating people of their money," in an interview ahead of the opening of his solo show at the Opera Gallery in Bond Street last week. Of course, no one took a blind bit of notice, and 80 per cent of the show sold out before the opening party was over. A felt suit made by the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, in an edition of 100, could be an indicator of how this hugely influential artist has come in and out of fashion as far as the market is concerned. In 1989, Christie's held a sale devoted to Beuys in which a felt suit sold for just over £50,000. With the recession, several other felt suits went unsold. The market could hardly be said to have recovered by 1999, when another suit sold for just £13,000. But recently the price has bounced back. Last week at Phillips in New York one sold for $96,100 (£59,000), which Phillips has claimed as a record. For anyone keeping track of the price of sunflower seeds, Sotheby's has a one-ton installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, laid out like a carpet, with an estimate of £370,000 to £490,000. This seems cheap compared with the much smaller 100 kg work which Sotheby's sold last year for £350,000 ($560,000). But then maybe people have worked out that there an are awful lot of sunflower seeds available. Apart from the 150- ton installation at Tate (of which Tate now owns about 8 per cent), these are various piles of seeds, priced by weight, each of which come in editions of 10. Ladbrokes the bookmaker is having a bit of fun with odds on how Edvard Munch's The Scream will perform at auction on Wednesday. You would get very good odds of 10-1 if the picture underperforms and sells for less than £30 million, which is unlikely because the seller will have set a bottom limit nearer the £50 million estimate. Shortest odds are 6-4 that it sells for between £60 million and £90 million, becoming the most expensive picture ever sold at auction. Some insurance folk think it's a safe bet. Robert Read of Hiscox says: "I could easily see this iconic work becoming the most expensive ever to be sold at auction."