Peter Brant to Sell Basquiat’s ‘Now’s the Time’ at Sotheby’s for $30 Million

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work will make headlines again during the marquee spring auctions in New York as a second major painting by the late artist comes to market.

Now’s the Time, 1985, Basquiat’s ode to jazz and saxophonist Charlie Parker, will be offered Thursday, May 18, at Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale on behalf of the businessman and collector Peter Brant. The 7-foot diameter painting is expected to realise more than US$30 million and is being sold without a third-party guarantee.

On Wednesday, Christie’s announced it would sell Basquiat’s triptych, El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), 1983, for an estimate in the range of US$45 million, at its 21st Century evening sale on Monday, May 15 .

Brant, who held a 70-work Basquiat exhibition at his foundation’s Manhattan gallery space in 2019, has owned Now’s the Time for “several decades,” Sotheby’s said in a news release, noting that this is the first time the sparely wrought piece is being brought to auction. The work pictures a simply rendered vinyl record painted in matte black on rough plywood with the words “Now’s the Time” PRKR in white lettering.

According to Sotheby’s, the painting “encapsulates the importance of music on his technique and style as a painter.” The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts featured the work on a catalog of a multidisciplinary exhibition held at the institution last year that explored Basquiat’s connection to music. The show was organised in collaboration with the Musée de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris.

“His oeuvre is replete with depictions of musical instruments alongside references to opera, classical music, jazz, bebop, hip-hop, and rap,” the museum said of Basquiat in a synopsis of the 100-work exhibition titled “Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music.”

Now’s the Time is a reference to Parker’s jazz composition from 1945, and “is the ultimate expression of Basquiat’s passion for music and the way it fundamentally impacted his practice,” Sotheby’s said. It also immortalizes Parker, an idol of the artist, whose revolutionary style “represented the spirit of freedom and improvisation” that defined Basquiat.

The painting will be exhibited at the auction house’s Los Angeles galleries Thursday through Monday, April 24, before it comes to New York on May 6, ahead of the sale.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.