On Friday, Sotheby’s announced one of the top lots for its contemporary art evening auction: Francis Bacon’s 1981 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, a large-scale, three-part oil painting that will carry an estimate of $60 million. The work is inspired by ancient scholar Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies dated from the 5th century B.C. and will be offered at the house on May 13 in New York.

Triptych comes from the collection of Hans Rasmus Astrup, a Norwegian business tycoon who ranks on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list and the heir to his family’s real-estate and shipping conglomerate, as well as the founder of a private museum in Oslo that houses his collection of over 1,300 modern and contemporary works. The proceeds of the sale will go to the benefit of the consignor’s family foundation, which provides funding for the museum’s maintenance and development.

In a release announcing the sale, Alex Branczik, head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s Europe, called Bacon “the great tragedian of his age,” emphasizing the artist’s capacity to grapple with his subjects “so that timeless power of the Ancient Greek genre is brought to bear on the human condition in the 20th century.”

Bacon, who was never formally trained as a painter, is considered one of the foremost British artists of the postwar era. His work frequently features semi-abstracted scenes of carnage, and he claimed influence from Picasso’s early work featuring religious imagery, as well as photography’s ability to capture to the uncanny.

“Excited?” “Nervous?” “Purell-ed?” Greetings and salutations took on curious tones as the Armory Show opened Wednesday morning in New York, with art on offer from 182 galleries from 32 countries—and lots of talk of the coronavirus that has made travel and mass assembly a major issue around the globe. No more than a few seconds went by without some kind of mention of it, however serious or nonchalant. After all, New York announced its first confirmed case of the virus just a few days ago. But the spirit of the fair remained expectant, even with uncertainty in the air.

Attendees in the early hours of a warm and sunny pseudo-spring day included lots of familiar faces. Some dealers said they are expecting slightly less attendance than in the past, but just as many said the response they gathered in advance from clients and collectors suggested that art buyers are not cowed. In any case, those walking the aisles in the early hours included Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler, collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, Glenn Lowry from MoMA, Kathy Halbreich from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, artist Maurizio Cattelan, curator couple Massimiliano Gioni and Cecilia Alemani (the latter of whom was recently appointed artistic director of the 2021 Venice Biennale), Thelma Golden from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and designer/actor Waris Ahluwalia, among many others.

Despite all the fears of hosting an art fair at a time when thousands around the world are sick with the coronavirus, business largely proceeded as usual. Just two galleries from the original exhibitor list—Pearl Lam Galleries (Hong Kong and Shanghai) and ShanghART (Beijing, Singapore, and Shanghai), the only enterprises set to participate who solely operate out of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore—didn’t wind up showing at the fair in the end. (An Armory Show representative did not confirm whether the coronavirus had been the cause for them dropping out, saying only that both enterprises didn’t make the list that was finalized in mid-February. The galleries themselves did not respond to request for comment.) Galleries from Italy, where there have been more than 3,000 documented coronavirus cases, still turned out for the fair, with enterprises such as Galeria Lia Rumma (Milan and Naples), A Arte Invernizzi (Milan), and Apalazzogallery (Brescia) running their booths as normal, despite closures in the cities where they’re based.

Nicole Berry, the Armory Show’s director, said that the fair followed recommendations from the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, offering information about best practices for health to visitors at the fair—and more hand sanitizer than usual. Hugs, kisses, and handshakes are frequent sights at art fairs around the world, but fewer were seen on Wednesday, when many people opted instead for elbow bumps to avoid spreading germs. “We put everything in place to take precautions, but the crowds speak for themselves,” Berry said. “People are undeterred.”

When the fifth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial opens to the public on October 24, the 2020 elections will be only 10 days away. That looming date was very much on the minds of the exhibition’s two curators, Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, when they began thinking about selecting the 51 artists and collectives that will participate in the sprawling city-wide triennial, which has become one of the country’s biggest art events.

Keith, who is vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Nawi, an independent curator based in Los Angeles, said that, when they took on the project in 2018, just over a year into Trump’s presidency, they were only beginning to understand what the coming political era would look like.

“We were really thinking about this discourse around the unprecedented nature of this moment,” Nawi told ARTnews. “And this counter-discourse saying, ‘Well, we’ve always been here.’ For many people, this doesn’t come as a surprise. And so, how do you hold both of those things that are true? How do you hold them together at once and how do you think that through? What does that mean?”

The two arrived at the theme of “Yesterday we said tomorrow”—which plays on the name of 2010 album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow by jazz musician Christian Scott—as a way to think about the ways in which the past informs the present, particularly in a historically rich city like New Orleans, which experienced disastrous flooding during Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago.