The Art of the Sale

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What’s it like to work in a corporate culture with such a romantic history?

 

Having a storied and a venerable history can be a blessing and a curse. It’s mostly a blessing, because people associate trust, longevity, and expertise with our company. The problem is that sometimes you can get moored by that same venerable tradition and collapse under the weight of it. It’s important to celebrate your traditions and honor your heritage. At at the same time, we’re operating in a quickly changing world, and we need to be able to adapt to those changes. So that creates an interesting tension.

 

There are Sotheby’s auction houses in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Milan, and you’re trying to sell items in all of them. How much time do you spend on a plane every month?

 

A lot. Probably 20 hours. I’m traveling about one week out of every month.

 

Okay, so you’re at your office in London or New York–what might a typical day entail for you?

 

It’s a lot to grapple with, the things that fall in our universe– the Web site, Sotheby’s at Auction, all of our catalogs, the special events and sponsorships, design, external advertising. Like any job, some days the world explodes, and you find yourself reacting to 11 different things. And then there are days when everything works.

 

There’s a sale today–

 

In London. We have two sales, Italian contemporary and contemporary.

 

You’re visiting campus today, but is your head in England?

 

It’s interesting that you ask. We feature all of our live auctions on the Web and the simulcast wasn’t working this morning, so there was a little drama around getting the contemporary sale up and running. But it’s been resolved, so everybody can take a deep breath.

 

Are people doing more bidding and buying online and over the phone these days? Or do they still have to be in a room with a paddle?

 

We do have online bidding capabilities for some of our sales, but right now that’s reserved for wine and watches. We just had an amazingly successful wine sale in Hong Kong and 56 percent of the bidding came from the online feature. That’s pretty significant.

 

 

In 1744 Sotheby’s was founded as a bookstore in London.

 

 

You’ve been with Sotheby’s for nearly 16 years. How did you get there?

 

After graduation, I went out to Sun Valley for a while with a couple of other girls from Denison. I worked for a landscaping company and, later, for a catering company, and I worked in an art gallery on the weekends. I interviewed with Sotheby’s and was hired into a role called “a floater”–that’s basically a warm body to go wherever they need a person to go, to help out in specific departments if they have an absent employee or extra work. I started doing that in the marketing department, and that lasted for about 10 months before I took a full-time position as an editorial assistant for our magazine, which was then called Preview. I also worked in our proposals department, where we write proposals to solicit new business. From there, my career at Sotheby’s has gone through a lot of incarnations. I worked in the jewelry department, both online and in the auction division, for four years. I was involved in pulling together a lot of our big sales, so I worked on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor Estate, the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the Barry Halper collection of baseball memorabilia. The thing that was so fascinating about those sales is that I learned the entire auction process, from going to the clients’ homes, to tagging the property for sale, to organizing it to be brought into the building, into the auction, prepping it to be photographed, cataloging, setting up the exhibition, and finally targeting the right people who come to the events as potential buyers. I got to see the nuts and bolts of the entire operation.

 

Given how much you need to understand in order to market, that’s an amazing background. Even being a floater, being able to move through all of the different areas.

 

You learn a lot by osmosis. Our specialists’ community is a bottomless well of resources. They advise us and guide a lot of the things we do–who might be the audience for a potential picture, for example. We understand the mechanics of marketing, but they give it its soul.

 

Do you get to go backstage and touch the stuff that we only get to read about?

 

Absolutely. That’s part of the magic of working at Sotheby’s. Like any job, you become absorbed in the minutia of your day-to-day activities, and sometimes you forget to take a deep breath and take a look around. When you get up from your desk and open your eyes, it reminds you of how extraordinary it is to work in an environment like that.

We live with the art and the exhibitions. We have 250 to 300 sales annually, so you can imagine how quickly they rotate. If you blink, you could miss one.

You can walk through a jewelry exhibition and try something on, see how it works, and really examine the property. It’s incredible to look at a painting with a black light and really see what’s underneath the surface.

To look at the signature up close. To look at the stickers on the back of a canvas that detail where it was exhibited and who owned it. To take a drawer out of a piece of furniture and see how it was put together. Was it made without nails? What finishes were used? Were the legs original to the piece or added later?

It’s fun to sit with the specialists and talk, because they are some of the most knowledgeable people in the world. It’s like you’re walking around with museum curators.

 

You get to try on and examine jewelry worth millions of dollars. So, in your expert opinion, what makes, say, a Cartier piece worth so much more than an antique of Grandma’s?

 

You can’t really compare a Cartier and Grandma’s antique brooch. But Cartier’s Tutti Frutti watch, for example, is much more historically significant than an unstamped watch with the same stones, because Cartier has been a venerable name in the jewelry world since the beginning of the 20th century.

Cartier was the apex of all watch-collecting during the 1920s and 1930s. They used rare, carved, colored stones that were imported from India through Cartier’s relationships with the maharajas. The brand is held in high regard due to a loyal and distinguished client base.

 

 

Even in a down economic environment, there is still a vast appetite for works of exceptional quality. In November, a Salvador Dali work estimated at $150,000 to $200,000 sold for $1,874,500–a record for the artist.

 

 

Is there any item you’ve seen that just took your breath away?

 

There are lots of collections that are completely mindblowing for a variety of reasons. Certain collections you might think about in terms of the breadth of the areas that they cover. This past November, we sold property from the Collection of Mary Schilled Myers and Louis S. Myers, collectors and arts benefactors from Ohio. The Myers built up a collection of contemporary art that encompasses a wide range of American artists, as well as European and British artists. For more than 40 years they collected great works of art by Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Krasner.

Other collections are just incredible because of their historic components. For example, one of the things we didn’t sell, but we exhibited at Sotheby’s, was the Magna Carta. To get up close and personal with the original Magna Carta is an experience beyond comparison. We also had Martin Luther King’s body of work–his letters, his sermons, his manuscripts. We sold the estate of Betsy Cushing and John Hay Whitney. Paintings of that quality so rarely come to the market. We sold an incredibly rare Picasso from the Rose Period, Garçon à la Pipe.

It went for $104 million. That’s the world record for a painting sold at auction.

 

What inspires someone to dish out that kind of money?

 

It’s a combination of how something looks, the rarity of the piece, and its freshness to the market. Plus, people have very personal reactions to what they see. One painting that’s incredibly meaningful and emotionally powerful to one person, might not get a second glance from someone else.

We recently sold a group of items from one of the most stunning collections relating to the Romanovs –the last imperial dynasty of Russia–ever to be offered at auction. The items evoke the grandeur of the original owners and provided tremendous allure to potential buyers. The coupling of the items’ rarity and their relation to the Romanov’s fabled dynasty led to the atypical “White Glove Sale,” meaning every single lot offered in the auction sold.

 

Has there ever been a sale price that you thought was just plain crazy?

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that’s what makes the auction business special. All it takes are two people to compete for a picture to drive the price up. I don’t think anything’s crazy if you want it badly enough, especially if you have the luxury to be able to hang some of these things on your walls and adorn your home with them. It’s worth it to the buyer. It’s so important to make those aesthetic judgments based on what inspires you or what motivates you, as opposed to how much money it might be worth someday. Those are important considerations when you’re looking at a piece of art. Am I prepared to live with it on my walls, to wake up every day and see this picture?

 

 

It’s incredible to look at a painting with a black light to see what’s underneath the surface. To look at the signature up close. To look at the stickers on the back of a canvas that detail where it was exhibited and who owned it. That’s part of the magic of working at Sotheby’s.

 

 

You market high-end property to high-end clients, but the economy is affecting buying–and marketing–habits. How does this change the way you do your job?

 

Economic volatility has been a challenge for everyone, requiring most companies to make difficult choices and sacrifices along the way. We spend millions each year producing lavish–and very important–publications that support our auction sales. We’re a visual business. We have a responsibility to the people who consign those works of art to expose them in elegant ways and make sure we’re reaching all of the potential buyers who might be interested.

That being said, the world has changed, and people are more accepting of a variety of mediums. Print is important to our business and always will be, but the Web is becoming increasingly important, and I think clients want the choice. Do they want a print publication they can carry with them? Or do they want to go online and go much more in depth with a particular item? We have to be able to support both in a way that makes economic sense. In five years we might be having a very different conversation about the Web versus print, but I don’t think we’re at that tipping point yet, where one is more necessary than the other. They need to be complementary experiences.

 

Are buyers and sellers still buying and selling with the same gusto? Or are they hovering around, waiting for bluer economic skies?

 

In the first six months of this year, soliciting consignments was more challenging than it has been historically, but the success of the sales we were able to pull together and curate illustrated that there’s still a lot of demand in the market for high-quality works that are fresh and have great provenance.

The sale of property from the Lake Como residence of Gianni Versace took place last March, at a time when the world was still wary of the global economy. Still, the sale proved to be a major success, more than doubling the presale estimate. The celebrity factor helped bring worldwide attention to the items being sold (the catalogue sold out just two days after the exhibition opened), resulting in a very active auction room with lots of bidders.

Even in a down economic environment, there is still a vast appetite for works of exceptional quality. The first lot of our November evening sale, for example, was a Salvador Dali work on paper estimated at $150,000 to $200,000. It sold for $1,874,500–a record for the artist for a work on paper. This lot set the tone for the rest of the evening, and the sale surpassed the high estimate, bringing in a total of $181,820,000 and breaking several records for artists, including Marino Marini and Berthe Morisot.

 

Given the kind of buyers and sellers that you’re dealing with, what’s customer service like?

 

The auction business is not like a retail environment– you can’t just walk in, buy something, and carry it out with you. The auction world is more complex than most people are used to. And we have some work to do to support the post-sale part of a transaction, to facilitate it, to make it as smooth as possible for our clients.

As you can imagine, our clients live complicated lives. They often have multiple homes in multiple countries, so there are import and export implications. There are tax restrictions. We need to be very transparent about this before a transaction, so everyone is clear about what they’re getting into if they decide to make a purchase or a sale.

 

Areas of specialty seem to come and go in popularity and availability. Is there a pattern to it? Can you predict what’s going to be en vogue?

 

Tastes change. Like any market, the auction market has periods of buoyancy and periods where it’s less robust. There are certain areas where scarcity will always contribute to success. Impressionist and Modernist are two of those markets where there are limited works available at any given time. Contemporary is different. Because of the very nature of what it is, you have artists entering into that world all the time, creating new works. It’s not the same for some of the post-war and modern artists–there’s a limited supply. In the decorative arts, those markets are much more influenced by changing tastes in the world. One year French furniture may be incredibly popular, and the next year it may be 20th century design–which is certainly having its moment right now.

 

 

Is there anything that’s particularly hard to market?

 

There are some markets that are very niche, that have very particular audiences. Those can be more challenging. The audiences for Scottish or Scandinavian pictures are slightly smaller, for example, but there are small pockets of collecting categories for everything. It’s just that sometimes those communities of people are harder to unearth than others.

 

How is globalization affecting the art market?

 

It’s a more global art market than it’s ever been, like every market is these days. That has helped contribute to the buoyancy of the art market, because there’s competition for great works of art coming from everywhere now. We certainly have seen active participation from the Americans, from the Europeans, the Asian communities, and the Middle East.

Our community of buyers is far-flung, and it’s not just from one particular industry, so you can’t say that it’s all from the financial industry, or entrepreneurial wealth, or oil money.

These days there’s a lot of wealth created in many different fields, and that makes for some interesting competition at auction.

 

I guess it would provide a stability too, if one currency weakens, there’s another to take its place.

 

When you look at the art market crash of 1989, it was broadly affected by the Japanese buyers. Their economic conditions caused them to fall out of the marketplace and that had a dramatic impact on the art world. In today’s market, we’re less dependent on one particular currency and one audience of buyers.

Our November sale proved to be truly global with participation from 51 countries.

 

So what’s hot on the auction block these days?

 

I wish I could tell you what’s going to be really hot. I wish I could bust out my crystal ball. Great works of art in any category do well. It’s all about finding the best and rarest works of art and offering those to a discerning group of potential buyers.