Could an uptown auction house’s multimillion-dollar loss help pay for a downtown gallery’s new British starchitect-designed building? In the fall, when the stock market took a dive and the art market started to slide, Sperone Westwater announced plans to build a nine-story Norman Foster skyscraper, below, a block from the New Museum on New York’s trendy Lower East Side. The cost of the project — $15 million to $20 million, according to Angela Westwater — may seem excessive, but not when you consider the $15 million guarantee that Gian Enzo Sperone, the gallery’s Italian partner, is said to have gotten from Sotheby’s for Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 painting Half Face with Collar, which failed to sell in November’s big contemporary sale.

"Guaranteed Growth" originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2009 Table of Contents.