Sotheby’s, Christie’s auctions rescheduled for Asian bidders

Six-figure prices are few and far between. This new reality was clear during Sotheby’s and Christie’s marquee summer live-streamed “evening” auctions of modern and contemporary art in post-Brexit London, which this year started at 2 pm to make sure wealthy bidders in Asia were awake.

“We live in a world that’s more global than ever,” said Melanie Clore, co-founder of the London-based art advisory company Clore Wyndham. “There is big growth in Hong Kong,” said Clore, who once served as a chairwoman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in London. “There is a new wave of young people in Asia who have a lot of disposable money. Tastes have changed.” Sotheby’s two-part livestream auction of British and international works of modern and contemporary art in London raised a combined 156.2 mn pounds with fees, or about $215 mn, from 91 lots. Bolstered by the inclusion of modern British works, this represented a decrease of 11 pc on the total proceeds from its equivalent pre-pandemic evening sales of British and international art in June 2019.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction categories have gone through a dramatic shake-up in London. Last summer, with the pandemic choking both demand and supply, and with 19th-century art having fallen out of fashion, Christie’s and Sotheby’s both abandoned their traditional stand-alone evening sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art, and experimented with innovative part-live, part-online auctions that merged 20th- and 21st-century material to adapt to the changing tastes of younger, international collectors.

Sotheby’s, like Christie’s, no longer offers specialist selections of big-ticket Impressionist art in London. The occasional late-19th-century gem, like a Degas or van Gogh drawing, is still included in evening auctions of 20th- and 21st-century material, if of high enough value. This week, for example, Sotheby’s sold an 1883 Degas pastel of a woman bathing for £2.7 mn, or $3.7 mn, and Christie’s an 1885 van Gogh drawing of a man digging potatoes for £862,000, or about $1.2 mn. Phillips didn’t hold any major art auctions in London in June, focusing instead on the inaugural sales at its new New York headquarters. “London is down,” said Christine Bourron, chief executive of Pi-eX, a London-based research firm that tracks the performance of international art auctions. “It needs to reinvent itself. Brexit is making the trade more difficult.” At the moment, it remains difficult to disentangle the effects of the Covid pandemic and Brexit on the British art market. But it is clear that auction houses with bases in London are already reinventing themselves by coming up with new sale formats, as well as looking further afield. Sotheby’s is opening a new headquarters in Cologne, Germany, and is transferring Alex Branczik, its London-based head of contemporary art, to Hong Kong. Christie’s live-streamed London auctions of 20th- and 21st-century art are now routinely paired with sister offerings in Paris.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s historic auction rooms have now been transformed into TV studios for their live-streamed sales, leaving limited space for a small invited audience. Today’s digitised top-end art auctions are all about selling to global clients, and London has become effective at it, helped in part by a plethora of guaranteed minimum prices to sellers and by a favourable position in the international time zones.

Reyburn is a writer with NYT©2021

The New York Times