BASEL, Switzerland—When we first spotted the fountain, we thought, “Ah, here’s a gallery that has taken a chance.” A good 1/3 of the total floor space at the Donald Young Gallery (Chicago) was taken up by a striking indoor pool/fountain made of epoxy resin and fiberglass: a large, deep-black container, a little like a kiddie pool for the children of Goths, at whose center three heads were spouting water.

But if it was a gamble to devote so much space to a single work, it was one that certainly paid off: Bruce Nauman’s 3 Heads Fountains (3 Andrews) sold “for around $1 million,” Donald Young told us. A nearby pencil-on-paper drawing of two of the heads in the fountain went “for around $110,000.”

Nearby, another six-figure deal had been sealed: A large-scale painting at Galerie Barbel Grasslin (Frankfurt) from 1981 by Albert Oehlen, Sturmschaden (Damage Caused by a Storm), went for €220,000, a price that seemed justified as the turbulent, earth-toned strokes abstractly, but aptly, conveyed the chaos caused by gale-force winds.

At Regen Projects (Los Angeles), Jack Pierson’s At Sea, with each letter of the title spelled from found signs, sold for $100,000. A Richard Prince joke painting (“I was so poor growing up, if I hadn’t been a boy, I’d have had nothing to play with”) was still available at $175,000 (as were six of the seven Raymond Pettibon drawings, priced in the $20,000 range).

It was also reported that Takashi Murakami’s 727-727, an oversize acrylic on canvas the artist only recently finished that was brought by Blum and Poe (Los Angeles), sold to a North American collector for $1.5 million. Murakami recently spoke with ArtInfo.

At Galerie Gisela Capitain (Cologne), a Martin Kippenberger work from 1992, Farbeier, sold for between €600,000-€700,000. Although pricey, the buyer will get the satisfaction denied to the rest of us: the work features 48 canvases stacked on a Plexiglass shelf. While only the edges of each canvas are viewable to the Please Don’t Touch public, the buyer (presumably, unless there is a cruel rider attached to the work), can pull out and admire each canvas at his or her leisure…