The physical appeal — or beauty — of a work of art is only part of the rational and emotional response to parting with cash for an artwork. However, there is a category of artwork which seems to transcend narrow collecting areas, and may even buck market trends, sending art world experts back to their crystal balls wondering why such and such a work sold for a tremendous price, when all the trends or data or analysis and expertise from connoisseurs and specialists point in the opposite direction.

Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi might qualify, especially so as the picture was heavily restored prior to sale. Another example is Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in California, though bought for a huge price at the height of the market for British eighteenth century portraiture.

The Rothschilds were very good at buying spectacular works of art, often at outrageously high prices, usually in competition with other family members. Queen Marie-Antoinette’s writing-table by Jean-Henri Riesener is just such a piece: Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild paid the enormous sum of £6,000 at the Hamilton Palace sale at Christie’s in 1882. The Times reported the next day “If Juvenal had been present at the auction rooms in King-street yesterday, he would have seen the man who gave six thousand sesterces for a mullet outdone by another who gave six thousand pounds sterling for a writing-table”.

Such breathless writing captures precisely the mix of admiration and incredulity with which the press greeted the idea that a mere table could command such a price. The same goes for art which is sometimes deemed incomprehensible to many, and consequently becomes an elitist prize: the huge sums paid for the drip-paintings by the American artist Jackson Pollock, often elicit a similar reaction.

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Whatever one thinks of the artwork or the prices paid, these are unquestionably trophies. The more public the battle to win one of these prized possessions, the more rewarding it is for the (very rich) owner.

trophy art must fulfill the following criteria: 1. rarity: either there are simply a tiny number of similar artworks by the same artist, or most surviving works are now out of reach in museums. 2. panache: it must look punchy. It will be a centrepiece and therefore cannot look pale and interesting. 3. quality: it must actually be a good work of art.

And that’s about it — any more criteria and the field narrows too much. Provenance matters to some but not all. The rule can be applied to just about any big ticket sale since the Battle of Waterloo, after which the international art market began to expand. The trend in buying dinosaur skeletons can be interpreted in this way.

In early July the remarkable sale of “The Hamilton Laocoön” (above), as Sotheby’s dubbed it, is a case in point. This was one of four life-size bronze casts made from the famous ancient Roman marble statue in the Vatican. It had rarity because whilst there are many other large and small versions in marble and plaster, few are in bronze.

Cleaned and given a sympathetic polish when on view in Sotheby’s London in late June it had panache. It was not the very best cast — one at Houghton Hall in Norfolk by Girardon is probably the best — but the Hamilton Laocoön was by the little-known bronze sculptor Auguste-Jean- Marie Carbonneaux and of good quality (above).

Sotheby’s estimated it at £2 to £3 million which many thought might be a bit much for a late cast of the Laocoön by an obscure sculptor. On the contrary: several private and institutional bidders competed for it and it sold for a record auction price of £13.6 million, apparently to a buyer who does not normally buy “old” sculpture.

at christie’s, two ravishing flower paintings by Dutch artist Jan van Huysum also fit the trophy description. They are high quality and packed a visual punch, although they are not especially large, they are larger than most Dutch flower paintings. They dazzled. Flower paintings by van Huysum are not that rare, but these two are probably the best. Both sold to the same buyer for double the low auction estimate (£6.5m and £5.5m)

Could it be that buyers of trophy art by Pollock, Klimt, Basquiat or Picasso are now seeking much more reasonable trophies from other parts of the art market?

This article was published in the August / September 2026 issue of The Critic.

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There is a particular kind of Englishman, usually well-intentioned but misguided, who arrives in a foreign country dressed for a role that ended eighty years ago, and I had a strong feeling that in spite of my best efforts, I would end up being him. I had brought tweed breeks, a shirt and tie, and a waistcoat cut on a northern Pakistani pattern by an English tailor, which is either a compliment or a circular joke depending on your point of view. My host had invited me to Pakistan to escape the British winter in early February to shoot partridge and to look at his manuscripts. My natural reticence in examining Islamic manuscripts was overcome by my desire to pay my first visit to this fascinating country, and to take up the generous invitation and rare opportunity to witness truly wild grey partridge shooting.

Pir Muhammad Sadiq is Pir of Luari Sharif and of Qazi Ahmed, hereditary guardian of two Sufi shrines and spiritual leader to a great many people across Sindh. The two shrines link his family’s line, respectively, to Abu Bakr, the First Caliph, father-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed, and to Abd al-Mutalib, grandfather of the Prophet. He is also, it turns out, a man who keeps Fortnum’s cheddar in the fridge of a shooting lodge two hundred miles from anywhere.

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Karachi

Karachi traffic is not a system but a negotiation, conducted at speed and settled by nerve. Our driver’s technique at junctions - all drivers disregarded traffic lights - was to advance into the oncoming column without hesitation or apology, on the theory – correct, as it proved, every time – that a Toyota Land Cruiser moving with conviction will be given room. I sat in the back and thought about the phrase ‘defensive driving’, which had suddenly acquired the quaintness of a Victorian parlour game.

We stopped at the Garden House, the family’s former home near Karachi Zoo: a late nineteenth-century villa in European classical dress, with coloured glass set in round-headed windows, now used chiefly for storage and for meetings. Shoes off. A sofa. And then, unwrapped from their textile sheaths came the historic illuminated manuscripts, one after another, the Qur’ans – Arabic above, Urdu below, commentary in the margins, gold laid on with a confidence that has not been achieved by Europeans for centuries. Pir’s librarian watched me look at them with the particular patience of a man who has seen a good many visitors fail to know what they are looking at. I sympathised with him as I was not entirely sure if he approved of my being there.

Lunch was at the Boat Club, overlooking Chinna Creek, in the company of politicians, businessmen and the heads of two interfaith organisations, which is a combination that in England would take a fortnight to assemble and here took a telephone call.

Qazi Ahmed

We drove north at eight the next morning. Somewhere past Nawab Wali Muhammad the car was suddenly full of rose petals, thrown through the open windows by people at the roadside who had come out to honour their Pir. This happened again at the shooting lodge, and again as we got out. I have been welcomed to a good many houses in my professional life, but never once by petal.

The ground was mustard, laid out in fields of about an acre. The guns – four of us – took position along one edge. Beyond, below an embankment, stood a long line of men in bright clothes holding poles with white streamers at the tip. A whistle went. The line began to advance, hollering and bellowing, and I stood there in my tweed with a borrowed twelve-bore, watching a great many local people walk directly towards me, and experienced a brief and instructive vision of what my forebears had made of this country.

The feeling passed. It was replaced by the more pressing problem of the partridge, which behaved as though it had been briefed. A bird burst out far to my left and departed unharmed. Another rose in front of me and flew too low to shoot. This pattern held, with variations, through something over twenty drives and most of a day. I have shot in England for years. I could not hit these birds.

At two o’clock we were led to a tent hung on three sides with printed cottons, where a table stood loaded with nuts, cake, fruit and orange juice, and the four guns were seated while local dignitaries came and went. Then back to the mustard until the sun went down, at which point my gun was taken from my hands with a finality I chose to interpret as courtesy.

Dinner was a goat, slow-cooked with rice packed into its belly, served with curries, roast partridge, chicken and salad on a low table before the four of us while a considerable crowd watched from the edge of the room. The goat’s head arrived on its own plate and the brain was scooped out for my benefit. It is excellent – rich, faintly sweet, closer to sweetbread than to anything else in the European cooking. What we left went to the village, which is the point of cooking that much.

Afterwards Pir took me to his house in the town, where we sat cross-legged on the floor and more manuscripts came out. A Qu’ran by Princess Zeb-un-Nissa (1638–1702), daughter of the Emperor Aurangzeb, who wrote under the name Makhfi, the Hidden One (a rare manuscript volume of her poetry is to be found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). A jewelled cylinder, probably seventeenth-century Mughal, containing a filigree case, containing a single hair of the Prophet. A water jug pierced through the centre of its base which nonetheless holds water and pours it, by a trick of hydraulics I did not solve and was too proud to ask about.

We walked from there to the mausoleum of the Pirs of Qazi Ahmed, a building late eighteenth or early nineteenth century in date, the interior worked in geometric panels and Qur’anic inscriptions, the coffins under green and gold silk strewn with dried rosebuds. Coming out, we found what appeared to be the entire town drawn up in the street, children seated at the front, then the young, then their elders, waiting in silence for a sight of their spiritual leader. Pir waved. They let us pass.

We ended the day round a fire with cigars and Fortnum’s cheese.

The Indus

The next shoot was on an island in the Indus, which floods for two months every summer and is therefore among the most fertile and least permanent landscapes on earth. We crossed at a shallow point, drove along dirt tracks, and arrived at a newly built lodge – a wall, a courtyard, some very basic rooms – shortly before sunset. Here we met our host, Mr Suhail Abbasi, whose family are of Abbasid descent, and he is a scion of the Kalhora Dynasty, rulers of Sindh under Mughal Empire before the Talpurs domination in these parts in the 19th century. They were once major landowners here up until the land reforms of Pakistan post-partition. Another of Pir’s guests, Mr Asif Sana had generously arranged for a chef to drive down from Peshawar and cook a particular lamb prized for the delicacy of its fat: chunks of the fat were rendered in a cauldron over charcoal, the meat tipped in, salted, covered, and left alone to cook slowly for two hours. It was the best thing I ate in Pakistan, and it had two ingredients.

We shot the island the following morning, reaching it by barge, an engine started with a crank, cushions and textiles laid out on the deck. I had expected the Indus to be crowded with river traffic. One boat passed us. Pakistan roads are choked with traffic: the land-borne vehicle has won decisively.

I was assigned a small team of helpers under a head keeper of advanced years and improbable red hair, who spent the day gesticulating and arguing in Urdu with anyone within range. Two of the boys set about bending down the scrub in front of me to clear my line of sight, an act of faith that was not rewarded: the birds came through like rockets and went away unscathed, to the visible dismay of my entourage. I got my eye in eventually and brought down one or two, which produced delight out of all proportion to the achievement.

Late in the day we came to a farmyard of wattle and stick, half fallen in, and I found myself thinking of Rembrandt’s Landscape with Cottages and a Haybarn of 1641. This is what happens when you send a man who looks at pictures for a living to a chickpea field in Sindh.

We left for Badin at eight in the evening. The roads were solid. A police escort materialised, switched on its lights and siren, and led us through the traffic for the better part of an hour, which I record here without comment except to say that it did nothing whatever to correct my sense of having wandered into the wrong century. We reached Badin at half past two in the morning.

Luari Sharif

The shrine of the Pirs of Luari Sharif sits inside a fortified sanctuary. Until the 1930s the pilgrimage here was the largest annual Muslim pilgrimage after the Hajj, rivalling Mecca itself, until the colonial government put a stop to mass pilgrimage. It has been much restored, most recently after the earthquake of 2014, with bricks copied to the original composition and the painted decoration followed exactly.

Pir Saleh, my host’s younger brother and the mayor of Badin, made his devotions at the threshold, laying his head and each cheek against the doorpost. He showed me the well, the shelters, the kitchens. Behind the mosque, past the ancestral house of the Pirs – derelict, awaiting restoration, its 1920s Belgian coloured glass still in place, as Pir Saleh pointed out with proprietorial gloom – stands a long building open from floor to roof at the centre. This is the ‘generous kitchen’, where the Pirs stored grain and gave bread and rice to pilgrims without charge.

And there, reached through brambles and past architectural fragments left deliberately where they fell so that they may one day be put back, is a millstone of a distinctive pink stone. It was sent by Tipu Sultan, Tiger of Mysore, a follower of the shrine, who had wished to send the Pir a great quantity of gems and treasure. Word came back that the guardian of the shrine could not accept a gift so worldly. Tipu sent the millstone instead – to grind the flour, to bake the bread, to feed the pilgrims, and so to collect the blessings of every one of them. In all my years working with people who collect and give things to institutions, I have never encountered a shrewder piece of philanthropy.

On the way out Pir Saleh presented me with a traditional lunghi worked in gilt thread, the stole given in Sindh to honoured guests. At last my outdated fashion choices suggested something like belonging.

What is actually being built

It would be easy to write all this up as picturesque and leave it there, which would be a lie and give only a partial account. Badin’s local government has largely failed, and the vacuum is being filled by the family whose shrine I had just been shown round.

A derelict school has become an engineering institute, cleaned out and equipped with machinery found through French (Schneider Electric) and other foreign supporters, where three hundred students learn circuitry and take internal combustion engines apart and put them back together. At the Sufi Institute a troop of Scouts in pink and green scarves formed up as we arrived; they had been the local community’s most reliable resource through the pandemic. A teacher took me into a classroom where the children were learning to code – girls on one side of the aisle, boys on the other – and next door two girls addressed me in Mandarin with complete confidence and evident enjoyment. Panels along the hall set out, in plain terms, the religion, language and culture of Persia, the Arab world, Europe and Britain.

Pir’s ambition is to make Badin a centre for technical skills. His argument, which he put to a room of community leaders that morning sitting cross-legged before him, is that with education, electricity, a fast fibre optic connection (already installed, linking Badin to Karachi) and a laptop, a person can build something from anywhere, and that money spent on a child now is repaid many times over by their grandchildren. To confirm this commitment, nearby he has given away the land for the construction of a university - to be built by the Pakistan local government.

Close by, a shell of a building designed in a stylish pared-back 1930s modernist idiom will become a museum to house the manuscripts I had been shown, with two bedrooms for visiting scholars, so that the collection can at last be catalogued, photographed and published - and visited by all.

That, rather than the partridge, is why I had been asked.

Thatta, and a ‘mere collector’

We stopped at Makli on the road back, the necropolis above Thatta, where Pir’s ancestors studied when the town was a centre of Islamic learning. We saw two spectacular Mughal tombs out of hundreds and left; two children were begging at the gate, and Pir emptied his pocket to them as we passed.

In Karachi we called on Mr Hameed Haroon, a renowned collector, who lives in the historic Civil Lines Quarter. I do not think I can adequately describe his house. A nineteenth-century French marble figure of a woman, plausibly Carrier-Belleuse, in the entrance hall. Huge Ancient Greek mythological triptychs painted by Kyriacos Katzoulakis (1944-2021) lining the staircase, one of Medea, one of Alexander at the Indus. A two-storey library with a gallery and books flowing onto the floor, in the middle of which stood a reproduction of Chippendale’s great mahogany library table at Nostell Priory, buried under papers. Then an hour’s circuit: an icon from Mount Athos, a Tibetan thangka, Lahore School pictures, in fact one of the prime collections of 20th century Pakistan paintings 1947-1971, an early Damien Hirst (pre-Freeze), a corridor of murals of imperial battles - he named it ‘the Colonial Corridor’; Jinnah’s carpet, sculpted marble figures recovered from a colonial-period waste site, and relief-carved marble panels bought at a (nameless) London auction house, whose samples an Italian laboratory matched — by crystalline signature — to marble extracted quarries destined for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan's great project, the Taj Mahal. Much of this was all shown beneath painted ceilings copied from those in the famous Renaissance palaces in Ferrara and Mantua.

He was very funny about all of it. The pleasure was plainly in the hunt – the waiting, the auction sat out, the dealer who did not know what he had – and he described his own parsimony with the relish of a man describing a virtue. As we left he apologised for the thinness of the tour, on the grounds that he was a mere collector.

Café Flo

We swapped the Land Cruiser for Pir’s 1968 Cadillac, put the roof down, and drove to the diplomatic quarter, opposite the Japanese embassy, where Café Flo serves steak frites on white linen tablecloths with a degree of courtesy and friendliness never encountered in Paris.

It was, I thought, the correct end to the week: a Sufi guardian, an English art advisor, a French brasserie in Karachi - all behaving correctly. At midnight I was returned to the Sind Club, where I sat up for an hour finishing a column that was due, which is the least romantic sentence in this account, but certainly the most truthful.

July 2026

Rufus Bird is an independent art advisor. He can be reached at rufus@rufusbirdartadvisory.com +44 7815 588181.

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The art market and auction houses have been selling handbags, fashion, sportswear, dinosaurs, Hermes ashtrays, sports cars, expensive watches for decades, and the fashion world has long collaborated with artists. The apparent offence is not only the debasement of a work of art in said video, but the egregious sin of selling these great works of art for gigantic prices. Danaïde sold for $107.5m, Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948 sold for $181m - both from the collection of S. I. Newhouse, the Conde Nast billionaire, auctioned at Christie’s in New York this May. One commentator was disgusted: art, he said, had been reduced to a casino chip, a financial instrument, a placeholder trophy destined for a free port. The auction house has stripped art bare of meaning and placed it ‘naked on the block with only a price to define it’. The auction was, apparently, a séance in which capital applauds itself while the rest of us pretend to witness culture.

But this is precisely backwards. The perfume advertisement vibe borrowed the language of art; Christie’s film was clever in acknowledging that the Brancusi and the perfume bottle occupy the same economy of desire. Both are beautiful things. Both are expensive. Both are coveted. The auction house was being honest about what a sculpture at that level of the market actually is: a luxury object of the highest order, available to a handful of people on earth, marketed accordingly. The pretence that something more elevated was being traded, some sort of scholarly transaction rather than a commercial one, would have been the real dishonesty.

The art market has rarely been only a scholarly endeavour. Properly, the scholarly function belongs to the compiler of the catalogue raisonné, or the museum, perhaps even the theoreticians at the university. The top end of the market is, and has always been, about commerce, luxury, and what sells. This is not a recent development. The pictures Titian painted for Philip II of Spain in the 1550s, the poesie, including Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (London, National Gallery & Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), were luxury commissions on a royal scale, painted to hang in private apartments for the pleasure of one man. The great collections that eventually became public museums : the Wallace, the Frick, the Burrell, the Gardner, the multifarious Rothschild collections, were assembled by very rich people buying beautiful things for their houses, motivated by desire, status, and the pleasure of ownership in roughly equal measure. Nobody at the time felt obliged to dress this up as something else.

The dressing-up came later, following the invention of the institutions that inherited these collections and needed to justify – and explain – their authority over them. The museum required the artwork to be sacred in order for the curator to be its priest. The art market has no such need, and it is precisely that honesty that so discomforts the high-minded commentariat. When Christie’s puts Nicole Kidman in front of Danaïde, it is not lowering the work to the level of commerce. It is honest about its presentation of a desirable work of art.

Louis Vuitton understood this instinctively when it collaborated with Yayoi Kusama, one of the most significant artists alive, to produce a fashion collection, a suite of global installations, and a hardback book by Rizzoli (£290) with essays by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and other curators who have organised major retrospectives of her work. The collaboration was an acknowledgement that Kusama’s art and Louis Vuitton’s bags occupy the same world: the world of beautiful, costly, coveted things.

The mock horror about the exorbitant prices, in the end, is not really about whether these artworks ‘deserve’ such elevated valuations. It is about authority; about who gets to say what art means and under what conditions it may be sold. The auction house’s great offence is to look beyond the museological and curatorial art world constraints of quasi-academic apparatus, and instead to treat a work of art as what it is : a beautiful, costly and desirable object rather than as a didactic exhibit. As it happens, the inspiration for the Kidman-Danaïde face-off was a film shot in 1930 by Man Ray of the Surrealist and photographer Lee Miller unveiling Brancusi’s Princess X1. The eroticism and the smile are present in both films.

This article was published in The Critic, July 2026

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Consider the rostrum for a moment: the previous example was made in mahogany, copying what may have been James Christie’s 18th century rostrum, said to have been designed by Thomas Chippendale.

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The new rostrum is made of oak - a timber identifiably English, but also a humble choice, which gives off something of an egalitarian vibe. Had it been made in mahogany, rosewood - or trendy wengewood, it would reek of grandeur or the esoteric. Perhaps this is intentional. The sleek, aerodynamic lines give the blocky piece of furniture a sense of lightness, suggesting that it might even have been intended to take off and fly through the air. In fact, as it is made from thick oak planks, it is sturdy and very heavy. The essential 18th century design of the original is detectable in the new version. The raised counter is there - on which the auctioneer places the book and beside which the gavel is struck to signal the conclusion of a sale. The incised rounded panels on the front and sides are a faint echo of its predecessor, and the rounded off front panel extends down to rounded off legs. This being the 21st century, and being a focal point of an international business, there are no frivolities: all obvious decorations are eschewed for the sake of projecting a serious face. Adrien Meyer of Christie’s, one of the most assured and brilliant auctioneers anywhere in the world today says “I love it. I find it elegant, polished, stylish and could imagine it well going on to be used by generations to come, ... it “feels” great which proves its brilliance as a design”.

I trained as an auctioneer at Christie’s, took sales at Christie’s in South Kensington saleroom and at King Street so I was intrigued by this renewal : if the rostrum was a car it might be rather like ditching the Bentley and replacing it with a McLaren

In the art world, auctions are necessary, deeply traditional and usually like watching paint dry. It wasn’t always like this: when Getty and Norton Simon were buying in the post-war era, there was certainly a human drama which played out, theatrically, in the saleroom for everyone to see. I remember Charlie Hindlip, Chairman of Christie’s, all of sudden switching into perfect French mid-auction, apparently for the benefit of the telephone bidder. Before he died Charlie told me that the great collector Stavros Niarchos insisted on communicating his bids via telephone to Charlie, which was complicated by the fact that he was also the auctioneer. As this was pre-mobile telephone days, a handset was left on the counter through which Charlie spoke while he auctioned the lot on which Niarchos was bidding.

Is auctioneering another human skill destined for the automation chopping block? Already timed online auctions - successfully mastered by eBay years ago - have, rather found their way into the traditional world of the gavel-wielding auctioneer. But how will the sharp-suited, couture-clad, smooth-syllabled auctioneer maintain their pre-eminence ? Since the arrival of international jet travel in the 1950s, increasingly collectors were prepared to fly across continents to attend sales and return home within days. However, technology has a double-edge, and while some of the international jet-set were delighted to show their faces to bid on a Braque at Sotheby’s, more and more were (and are) coy and opted for secrecy using the telephone to conduct their bidding. The technological innovation of the internet has added another layer of secrecy: no need to rely on your phone signal and a human to relay your bid - only the speed of your internet connection will hold back an online bid.

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Such technological innovations have also made the job of the auctioneer harder: how to keep the watching punters interested ? And make no mistake, the majority of those sitting in the room are watching. Yes, there are a handful who make the effort to come to the room and bid and buy. The so-called ‘action’ takes place behind the telephone.

And so the auctioneer is relegated to a mediator between his or her colleagues on the telephones, occasionally sharing a joke as if no one else is watching. And where the auctioneer used to cajole and charm, pause and speed up, today the auction house staffer has to play that role. Adrien Meyer says that he views his colleagues on the telephone “as my most important clients, and I want them to feel that way during an auction as they represent the end buyer on the phone. They often feel the client’s excitement and convey it to the room which becomes entertaining.” If fine art auctions are actually theatrical and exciting, then there is a chance they will remain conducted by people - if not, in person auctioneering is surely another area where machines will take over.

This article (with different images) was published in The Critic in June 2026.

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Arguably the best known of these en bloc purchases was Charles I’s purchase in 1628 of about 400 pictures from the collection of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua. Others did the same: the duke of Hamilton purchased 240 pictures from the Venetian Bartolomeo delle Nave in 1636 - many of which are now in Vienna1. Charles II, in 1660, bought 72 pictures from the dealer William Frizell.

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A century later in 1762, a young George III with a new German wife in tow and the prospect of a nice suburban house - Buckingham House - to furnish, was advised by Lord Bute to acquire a collection of art. James Adam (fellow architect brother of Robert) was in Rome and managed to spirit away the famous collection of drawings from Cardinal Alessandro Albani, for the price of 14,000 scudi, having enlisted the assistance of the Cardinal’s willing mistress, Contessa Cheroffini, who was paid 500 scudi for the pleasure. Pictures were still needed, so Bute’s younger brother James Stuart Mackenzie bought on behalf of the king for £20,000 from Consul Joseph Smith, the British representative in Venice, his superb library, engraved gems, coins & medals, and some 500 paintings, including 50 canvases by Canaletto and a painting later identified as Vermeer’s Lady at the virginals with a Gentleman.

If George III’s acquisition was motivated in part by furnishing, the Russian empress Catherine the Great’s purchase of the cream of the Walpole collection - 204 pictures were bought from Houghton Hall, Norfolk in 1779 for £40,000 - demonstrated the growing global cultural power and status of Russia. Alexey Musin-Pushkin, the Russian Ambassador, wrote to the Empress ‘[The Collection] is worthy, in the opinion of all connoisseurs, of belonging to one of the greatest sovereigns’. Horace Walpole was not impressed and wrote ‘I should wish [the paintings] were rather sold to the Crown of England than to that of Russia where they will all be burnt in a wooden palace on the first insurrection’.

Our beloved National Gallery was established in 1824 with the government’s purchase of 38 pictures from the late John Julius Angerstein, six pictures originally from the great collection formed in France by the duc d’Orleans. This famous collection was split in two when sold en bloc in 1792: the Italian, French and Spanish pictures, numbering about 300, were bought by the French banker Laborde, and the Dutch and Flemish pictures, numbering about 150, were bought by the English dealer Slade. Laborde later sold his portion (for £40,000) to the leading British dealer Michael Bryan who convinced his wealthy patron, the 3rd duke of Bridgwater to assemble a syndicate (comprising himself, his nephew & his brother-in-law) to buy the group, and to sell them within the syndicate according to pre-agreed % allocation, allowing those with the highest investment the choicest pictures.

A century ago, the new Soviet government in Russia was desperately in need of funds, and turned to the possessions of the former Imperial family, selling off crate loads of Faberge works of art, paintings, drawings, ceramics etc. sold to Marjorie Merriweather Post of Hillwood & Mar-a-Lago; Andrew Mellon, who later donated his collection to form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; and Calouste Gulbenkian whose eponymous museum is in Lisbon.

In recent memory, perhaps the most significant sale of an art collection en bloc was that of the Swiss collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza: 775 pictures were sold to the Spanish state in 1993 for a remarkably reasonable $350m.

Most major art collections, it seems today, head to auction for dispersal, or are broken up by agents and dealers via private sale. Auction sales can sometimes be a fair way to achieve a price, and is usually the quickest. Many collectors, touchingly, like to suggest that by conducting a dispersal sale (by auction or private sale), their treasured possessions will be sent out ‘to find new homes’, and to be loved by a ‘new generation’.

Since about 1900 it has become increasingly fashionable to set up a foundation or build a museum to house one’s collection (e.g The Wallace Collection, Getty Museum). If a collection of art defines a collector, their worldview, or how they wish to be remembered, then buying another collector’s art en bloc may appear to undermine the buying collector’s so-called ‘eye’. Maybe the collector’s ego was less prevalent in previous centuries, or perhaps it was even the quality of the art which drew collectors, or the prestige of buying a known collection. Yet, when collectors are genuinely interested in the integrity of their collection, acknowledging the act of creativity which is to bring works together, rather than seeking a financially or temporally expedient solution, we may see more collections sold en bloc.

This article was published in The Critic in May 2026

Leafing through some old copies of The Connoisseur and Apollo magazine from the 1960s through to the 1990s, I was struck by how many of the titans of the art market have vanished from the scene, and the few that remain from that era. Apollo magazine continues today (owned by The Spectator) as a magazine about art, and collecting art, aimed at the serious collector. The Connoisseur was a wonderful monthly magazine-cum-journal - with a healthy mix of advertisements and scholarly articles, the focus was squarely on the traditional art market. That The Connoisseur and its scholarly article-based approach, has vanished says much about the way art is presented and, dare I say it, ‘consumed’ today. Of course everyone’s attention spans have shrunk, especially for the non-essential world of buying art. Long form writing about, say, a French 18th century cabinet-maker, is restricted to specialist and scholarly journals and the French magazine L’Objet d’art. Perhaps, then, not much has really changed in the niche collecting markets of Asian art, furniture, armour and so on.

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When we get to the really expensive works things do seem to have evolved, and this is partly due to the changing tastes of the super-rich. Consider the sale of the ‘Winter Egg’, a masterpiece by Faberge, and one of the few Imperial easter eggs made for the Russian imperial family in private hands. It had sold at Christie’s twice previously, each time for a world record price, in 1994 and 2002, and returned to the market last November at Christie’s in London, where it sold on its reserve price for £22.9m inc fees. Was the buyer unknown to Christie’s? Did they spot the video on instagram and decide to buy it? Perhaps? Stranger things have happened, as was demonstrated by the sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi - perhaps the greatest piece of art market marketing ever, considering that it took a committee to decide if it was by the hand of Leonardo, even after it had been much restored. Never mind the somersaults of ownership changes, the debate about its inclusion in the Leonardo exhibition in the National Gallery in London in 2011-12, and the legal wrangling that followed the picture as it made its way to the auction block in New York in 2017, where it was included, imaginatively, in a sale of contemporary art, and sold for a staggering $450m, reputedly to Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, until then a buyer not well known at auction. The picture’s pre-sale global tour was magnetic for art lovers and they queued ‘around the block’ to catch a glimpse of the picture. The story is well told in the 2021 documentary film ‘The Lost Leonardo’.

But when to dial up the marketing effort and when not? It seems that success at the top end now relies heavily on marketing, and the power of the auction house executives’ marketing department is such that if objects, or whole swathes of groups of objects fail to make the cut for prime marketing, those works risk being left for dead, at least if and when an owner chooses to sell at auction. Sotheby’s move to the Breuer building is essentially a massive calculated marketing spend. The building is a highly visible trophy venue, a beacon of cultural commerce among the luxury boutiques on Madison Avenue. Perhaps brilliant marketing has even shaped the tastes of a generation of buyers: the power of auction house marketing teams has long exceeded those with real expertise and the specialist knowledge of art on which the auction houses base their reputations for offering world-class works of art backed by the imprimatur of their brand.

And what of the rest of the market - how do dealers and galleries present themselves today? Essentially there are specialist and deeply knowledgeable dealers that present themselves to museums and a small band of collectors that know their stuff, and perhaps their approach has altered little since the 1960s. Then there are the edgy gallerists presenting new, cutting edge contemporary art, looking to uncover the next great name in art, presenting stimulating and interesting (sometimes ‘difficult’) art. And the rest, looking to capture the wider, mainly lower value market, some sell to decorators and clients looking to furnish, others to those starting to buy for interest or personal reasons. Here the attention-economy of social media has been a gift : entire cottage industries of antiques dealers, antiquarian book dealers and students selling old master drawings have sprung up, some with huge followings. Does this translate into sales? Perhaps. Does it draw in new ‘audiences’, certainly, and over the long term, if such audiences and interests can be sustained that must be a good way for the fragmentary and highly specialised areas of the art markets to grow.

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This article appeared in the March 2026 issue of The Critic, available (paid) here.

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Exactly two years ago, I wrote about the continuing ascent of the contemporary art market and the gradual sidelining of what used to be called the traditional sector. And yet, over the past year and more, several notable galleries selling contemporary art have folded. Is the art market, like so many other economic areas, cyclical?

My favoured interpretation of the rise of contemporary art at the expense of the classic overlaps with the triumph of liberal democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although finding a link between collecting art and the prevailing political economy may be a fool’s errand, just as there is rarely a link between the motions of the stock market and the art market (interest rates are another matter, however).

The decades in which contemporary art expanded most dramatically were also those in which a liberal, democratic outlook seemed to dominate the global order. Those same decades were characterised by relatively low interest rates, abundant liquidity and the steady growth of an international class of collectors.

Contemporary art flourished within this environment. It was plentiful and often aligned, at least rhetorically, with the liberal values that defined the age.

Naturally, this general theory is an oversimplification of global art market movements, but it seemed to fit. But what of today’s art market? Are there noticeable shifts following the emergence of post-liberalism, realpolitik and the world of post-rules-based international order? Is it perhaps, then, no coincidence that contemporary art seems gradually to be losing momentum and attraction in the market? Could, possibly, the pendulum of taste be swinging back in the other direction, toward the classic?

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The winter sales of Old Master pictures in London in December and in New York in February showed several signs of a return to desirability, with broad interest, good selling rates and some outstanding prices. Three works in particular are worth noting.

First, the sale of another magnificent painting by Canaletto, following the sale of a superb example last July in London, both celebratory views of Venice on Ascension Day. This painting had sold in London 2005 for £11.4m and now returned to Christie’s New York, selling for $30.5m.

Second, also at Christie’s, Michelangelo’s drawing, a study for a foot of the Libyan Sibyl, sold for a healthy $27.2m, underbid by art advisors Beaumont Nathan; tellingly, their clients are largely buyers of modern art. At Sotheby’s a drawing of a young lion resting, by Rembrandt, sold for a reassuring $17.8m.

But perhaps the strongest indication of how interest has increased were the results of the fascinating sale (at Christie’s New York) of the collection of the late Mrs Irene Roosevelt Aitken. This was a truly historic American collection of European art, with deep roots in the golden age of collecting, the 1950s and 1960s, housed in a Fifth Avenue townhouse apartment right opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Previously married to John Aspinwall Roosevelt, Irene and her second husband, Russell Aitken, were generous benefactors of great New York art institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection and the Morgan Library. Russell Aitken collected superlative examples of 16th, 17th and 18th century weaponry. Between Irene’s and his acquisitions and those of Russell’s first wife, Annie Laurie Crawford, the collection stretched to include great examples of French and English 18th century paintings, furniture, ceramics and other objects.

It bore all the hallmarks of a spectacular Gilded Age collection. Nearly 800 lots were sent to auction, to be sold at Christie’s to benefit those three great aforementioned New York institutions. Bringing such a quantity of “classic” art was certainly something of a test for an area of the market which has experienced challenging times, languishing in the shadow of its upstart siblings, contemporary and modern art.

Three “live” sales and two timed online sales were organised. The results indicate strong interest in this type of art: an astonishing 96 per cent sold by lot and a sold total of $28,869,005, representing an increase of 172 per cent above the low estimate.

Results showing this shift include a pair of Louis XV-period Chinese porcelain vases with gilt-bronze mounts which drew a final price of $698,500; and a masterful pair of portraits, extremely fragile pastels on canvas, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, of the Maréchal and Duc de Belle-Isle and his wife, which reached $889,000.

Art and politics are never far apart, but here, not unlike the Rothschild collection sold in the same rooms just over two years previously, it was likely the brilliance of the collection, rarity of many of the objects, longevity and renown of the collectors and the tenacity with which the collection was presented which resulted in its success.
This article appeared in the April 2026 issue of The Critic available online here

Making multiple prints of that image will help to widen accessibility and availability of the artist’s work at a reduced price. That print market is driven by reasonable rules of supply and demand. Rembrandt and Banksy are probably the artists who best enhanced their “brand”.

The availability of fewer known works by a great artist will, usually, translate into high prices, such as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo. A painting by Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basquiat is as recognisably by those artists as a bureau plat by André-Charles Boulle is familiar, or a piece of Meissen porcelain.

Indeed, the branding of artists’ names has become almost the central theme of the promotion of art to new buyers, which is how the art market grows, or thinks it can grow.

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Much has been written about the so-called Great Wealth Transfer, and the enormous sums due to pass by inheritance in the coming decade to a younger generation. We will see if and how the younger cohort are prepared to pay for Warhol, Basquiat, Boulle and Meissen.

Nevertheless, the number of global billionaires has steadily grown, outpacing inflation, with a greater concentration of the wealthy in places such as the USA, the Middle East and India. That surely represents a potential growth market.

Such a rich and wide demographic is all very promising and provides fertile ground for developing new buyers, but is not the biggest stumbling block to growth. What is actually offered to these new buyers?

I was once told by a librarian friend that there are only two types of book: brown and shiny. The overwhelming majority of worthy editions are brown — the ones which are rare because they are the first edition, or there is a missing digit somewhere on the title page or something marking it out as rare. Brown.

Shiny books, on the other hand, are the minuscule number of books which leap out at you — the incredible skill of the illustrators of illuminated manuscripts, the luxuriously bound editions produced as one-offs for special clients. Beethoven’s manuscript scores for his symphonies. Works which leave familiar concepts behind and take you into another world.

The problem is that although there is greater wealth in more parts of the world than ever before, the quantity of shiny books or works of art is small, and diminishing as so many end up in museum collections.

This is why efforts by dealers, auction houses and writers to promote “yet-to-be-discovered” worlds help to open new buyers’ eyes. The recent jump in collecting dinosaur bones is one example. We are already seeing small pockets of the market take off again. Selected works are back in demand, often inexplicably so.

Museum buying combined with that growing class of buyer of the very best, has contributed to what is often called a “masterpiece market”: a focus on the best of the best. Shiny.

The sale of Leonard Lauder’s three Klimts illustrates this. Six bidders chased the wonderful portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, reaching the massive price of $236m; whilst the two gorgeous landscapes sold at or just above their reserve figures at $86 and $68.3m (no mean feat). These works, and a handful of works by other artists — including the likes of Picasso, Warhol, Monet and Frida Kahlo (the only woman in the dead artists’ super league) are chased by a small group of billionaires. So how shiny does shiny art have to be?

Look to see what is hanging in your billionaire friend’s man cave, and that might be just the stimulus to buy something similar. This is buying for social belonging: to be part of the art collecting class, to be taken seriously and recognised as someone very rich, and maybe even someone with a bit of class.

Billionaire one-upmanship, sprinkled with the chance to “buy history” was how the dealer Joseph Duveen snared America’s robber barons of the Gilded Age. Today the most desired works are great modernist, abstract, symbolist or surrealist works.

Yet Klimt’s work, derived from his fascination with the Austrian landscape and Byzantine mosaics, seems like an anomaly in that club, notwithstanding the art historical value and significance. These three shiny works of art are brightly coloured works which immediately exemplify their “brand”.

Whilst there will always be a bit of hopeful investment, triage and leverage, much of the success or failure of those highly speculative markets is really down to luck. Shiny art will continue to ensure the art market remains in good health.

This article appeared in the February 2026 issue of The Critic, available here

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You may have noticed on your local high street Clarendon Fine Art. This company sells 20th century and contemporary art for less than £1,000 up to £1m in more than 90 locations across the UK (and one in the USA). They describe themselves as offering “exclusive artwork in an inclusive atmosphere, and that is what makes us so different”.

Clarendon Fine Art’s success flies in the face of the recent spate of gallery closures. In 2024 the company turned over £87m (and the year before, £94m). This puts it firmly in the mega gallery league.

The widely respected US gallerist, Tim Blum, announced earlier this year that he was “sunsetting” (i.e. closing) his galleries, although he had worked extremely hard and, to many, had appeared to be making a success of his gallery model.

Blum said, “This is not about the market … This is about the system … It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working.” His gallery, Blum & Poe, like most contemporary art galleries, looked after and promoted living artists, usually by staging solo or small group exhibitions, painstakingly explaining the artist’s aims and providing a platform for their art, often in upmarket or trendy locations.

Clarendon, on the other hand, shows a broad range of modern and contemporary art, some of a type which a fair few art world insiders would disparage.

I visited the Dover Street gallery one damp Friday in November and spotted some pictures which looked rather like paintings by the red-hot American superstar de nos jours Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988. His paintings sell for tens of millions.

Nearby was a spin/butterfly picture by Damien Hirst, for £8,950. On the back wall was a riot of street art and graffiti by an artist calling himself “Mr Brainwash”, a former collaborator of street artist Banksy (asking price £145,000).

In a prominent spot in the centre of the gallery was a painting of a woman standing in a pine forest in a red dress — the upper part of which seemed to have been shredded, her nipples covered by brass plaques (by Mila Alexander: asking price £22,000).

Prints by established artists such as Takashi Murakami, Jackson Pollock and L.S. Lowry were also available. There was no attempt at presenting a coherent narrative of art, there was no presentation of a particular artist or theme, and very little in the way of specialisation.

The gallery was bright, comfortable, welcoming, and the staff unpretentious. In fact all the galleries I visited in and around Dover Street were bright, comfortable and welcoming, with unpretentious staff.

So what is Clarendon’s secret recipe? First, the price point for the vast majority of art is sub-£10k. That is much below some art sold in other Mayfair galleries, but there is also an openness: the works are clearly available for sale, and the price is on the label and the website.

Second, they know their target market and what that buyer is looking for. Works by well-known names, certainly; works by artists that are remarkably similar to works by well-known names (“Is that a Basquiat?” “No.” “Oh … well, it certainly looks like one!”); works which appeal to an uncritical audience who do not necessarily want to live with sometimes difficult, radical-chic conceptual art accompanied by impenetrable text signalling some sort of virtue politics or cleverness.

No, they want something sexy, fun, and perhaps even to cock a snook at the art establishment and its seriousness, its earnestness and faux fun.

There are many buyers for this sort of art. And here’s the rub, this is a gallery brand run solely for the buyer. Indeed, CEO Helen Swaby, said Clarendon galleries were ”a welcoming destination for everyone”.

This ethos runs contrary to the conventional “system” which, through the judicious selectiveness of the gallerist, seeks out brilliant, relevant and vital artists, exhibiting in their galleries what might become tomorrow’s great art. That system functions best if the gallerist is trusted to show artists of real merit.

However, with so many galleries closing, either artists are not making such great art, or (more likely) fewer collectors are genuinely interested in what the galleries are showing.

Clarendon’s model has flipped that on its head by giving buyers what they want. Do we want a contemporary art world where those with years of experience, knowledge, discernment and judgement promote and sell the art of the future, or a Clarendon-type gallery system which exists to service the whim of the buyer?

This article appeared in the December - January 2025 issue of The Critic, available here

For two years now, a chorus of art-world doomsayers has been insisting that the trade is heading Thelma and Louise-style over a cliff. The gallery system no longer works, Britain’s billionaires are fleeing for softer tax regimes, Asian collectors have vanished into the mist and even Sotheby’s is struggling. Mediocre auction results only fuel the despair.

Some of that may even be true. What is also true is that the upper reaches of the market — works above $5 million — are quieter than they have been for a decade. But does weakness at the top trickle down to the rest? Hardly. The “art market” is not a single thing, but a patchwork of sub-markets that occasionally overlap.

The buyer of a Chinese imperial bowl does not necessarily also consider buying an Impressionist landscape. Even within a single artist’s oeuvre, appetite is uneven: late Renoir versus early Monet, Picasso’s Blue versus his eroticised 1960s works.

According to Dr Clare McAndrew’s UBS Art Market Report for 2025, all price points are down — except for the sub-$5,000 tier: “smaller dealers with turnover less than $250,000 reporting annual sales growth of 17 per cent, and fine art auction sales at prices less than $5,000 [are] increasing”.

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Why? Two reasons. First, much of the traditional market is built on cyclical inheritance: every generation sells and rebuys furniture, ceramics and pictures that their parents once owned.

Second, the long decline in prices for traditional works has made fine art from earlier centuries remarkably affordable once more. English and European furniture, Old Master paintings, miniatures, ceramics, tapestries and sculpture — most have fallen by as much as 75 per cent since the millennium. For the few who still care, it is a buyer’s paradise.

When I joined Christie’s in 1997 — an earnest young man with ink-stained fingers and irrepressible enthusiasm — I was placed in the furniture department. It was then one of the firm’s great profit engines, second only to Impressionist and Modern pictures. The Badminton Cabinet, for example, was sold in 2004 to the Prince of Liechtenstein for £19 million.

In those days, great English furniture from legendary 20th century collectors — Percival Griffiths, Samuel Messer, Norman Colville — was sought after with an almost religious zeal. Condition and provenance mattered.

Great English Country House provenance mattered even more. A desk that had once graced a ducal library, and appeared in one of Country Life’s haunting black-and-white photographs of tranquil, empty interiors, carried a near-mystical aura.The peak came in 1999, when a single furniture sale totalled just under £10 million. The direction since has been mostly downhill. But there are signs of life again.

Sales formed from great collections assembled with care over years or decades have always outshone the anonymous “mixed ownership” auctions. Yet the prices have changed dramatically. Objects that sold for £100,000 at the turn of the century now fetch less than half that, sometimes a fifth.

That hurts, but it is also a temptation. Beautiful English furniture is now back within reach, and buyers are creeping back, slowly.

There are, however, new rules. Condition now matters more than ever: a fine commode in perfect order will sell at a price; the same piece with a replaced foot will not. What has changed is that provenance no longer holds its old sway.

Two decades ago, a titled origin was a passport to desirability. Today, it is something of a curiosity. Buyers want pieces from an approved design guru, not relics from generations of family ownership.

Consider the recent “tastemaker” sales at Dreweatts, Britain’s leading and most energetic outside-of-London auction house. In 2023, the Robert Kime sale carried a low estimate of £1.87 million and totalled £9.64 million — five times expectations, with every lot sold.

The sale of the contents of the Pimlico showroom of interior decoration company Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler in February 2025 brought in £650,000 against an estimate of £180,000.

Contrast that with the old-fashioned “attic” clearances from country estates — Adlington Hall, Powderham Castle, Brocklesby Park. Their results were respectable but modest: £870,000, £537,000 — double their estimates perhaps, but nothing like the decorator-driven feeding frenzies.

The shift is clear. The modern buyer cares less for lineage and more for atmosphere. They want pieces with the imprimatur of a renowned designer’s hand. The gilt mirror that once hung in a duke’s bedroom competes now with the painted console from a Mayfair decorator’s flat.

So whilst the billionaires are off chasing tax exile and the top end of the market takes a breather, others are rediscovering the world of the great connoisseurs of the 20th century, where beauty, craftsmanship and history are worth more than fashion, just as long as it’s guided by the hand of a great decorator with an “eye” for something.

If the doom-mongers are right that the art market is hurtling toward the abyss, it’s doing so in a very handsome Georgian armchair.

This article appeared in the November issue of The Critic, available here

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London’s “Frieze week” each October marks the most important time for many contemporary art galleries. The global art market focuses its attention on London for a few glamorous days. Frieze started in 2001 as a fair for contemporary art galleries in a large tent in Regents Park.

Since then, on the back of the enormous growth in appetite for contemporary art over the past three decades, it has added a second tent for exhibitors from more traditional areas of the art market, called Frieze Masters.

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Not all contemporary art galleries today are struggling, but the costs of doing business in this previously booming sector are beginning to bite. Some galleries, even the larger, well-funded ones like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner, are scaling back their operations. In the US, several major galleries have decided to close, including Blum, Venus over Manhattan, and Clearing.

In the UK, things may not be quite as bad, but no one is saying it’s easy. Some galleries are even expanding, such as Ben Hunter, who took over the space at 44 Duke Street originally occupied by Jay Jopling’s White Cube (now in nearby Mason’s Yard).

White Cube was at the forefront of developing the international market for the Young British Artists (YBAs), with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger, Jake and Dinos Chapman at the head. The Sensation exhibition in 1997, often considered the starting point for the growth of the contemporary art market, was the touchpaper that brought the YBA market to a wider audience.

At the time, the leading British contemporary art galleries included Marlborough Fine Art, Karsten Schubert, Flowers, Lisson Gallery and the remarkable Anthony d’Offay.

Of these, d’Offay’s work was arguably the most intriguing, regardless of personal taste. He was a true original, seeking to present substantial works. Perhaps he was the last serious “gatekeeper” of the contemporary art market. Buying from d’Offay carried an air of seriousness and, importantly, validation.

D’Offay had worked with Warhol and Joseph Beuys, and I once met him to discuss the sale of a Victorian oak table, possibly designed by Pugin, which he had bought for his office from Christopher Gibbs. He never smiled: rather intimidatingly on the mantelpiece behind him was a small portrait of Beuys, by Warhol.

Despite his demeanour, I felt as if I was in the presence of a Faustian figure, someone capable of reshaping the trajectory of art history.

In 2001, d’Offay abruptly decided to retire. There was no explanation, no financial pressures; it was simply basta — ”enough”. Perhaps he foresaw the future? Did he envision a world where contemporary art was commodified, and its objects devalued?

Was the gallerist of the future working solely in the service of the buyer’s ultimate financial gain? Was the internet and the small screen transforming how art is sold, consumed, produced? Was the tail beginning to wag the dog?

Just a few years later works by young, so-called “wet paint” artists, such as Oscar Murillo, were sold from a gallery for a fairly modest price and then re-sold or “flipped”, like properties, months later at auction for a huge multiple of that original price, with little real explanation or evidence of a solid collector base seeking to buy those works — other than for profit.

Some artists’ primary market prices derived financial benefit from the huge secondary market increase in sales prices, but today, prices have come back down and the secondary market (for “wet paint” artists) is quiet again.

On the back of these unusually rapid price increases, the notorious fraudster Inigo Philbrick certainly exploited unwitting and often overly optimistic investors, as explained in the recent BBC two-part documentary The Great Art Fraud and in a book by his former friend Orlando Whitfield, All that Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud & Fine Art. He won’t be the last.

There are signs of hope: most dealers working in the primary market (selling art from living artists) are serious about their practice, and work to find and promote talented artists they believe in.

Cork Street — the post-war centre of gravity for London’s contemporary art scene, where Waddington has been located for years (in the 60s, far left) — is seeing a revival, with several major galleries taking space there in recent years, led by the Stephen Friedman gallery.

Hopefully, this year’s Frieze will mark a return to buying art for pleasure and quality, not just for what it might be worth in the future.

This article was published in the October 2025 issue of The Critic - available to read here

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The art market enjoyed decades of growth, seemingly outpacing other sectors, especially in sales of contemporary art. Specific areas turned down, but one of the aspects of the current “correction” is the growth in value at the lower, sub-£20,000 objects market. There has also been something of a revival in Old Master paintings. So, given these mixed outcomes, has the market really dropped?

Well, in overall value terms, yes, but that headline figure is skewed by the large prices achieved for modern and contemporary art in 2020–2022.

That part of the market (which gets the headlines) has dropped for two reasons. First: widespread speculation has been skewered by rising interest rates. Investors have at last realised that the financialisation of art is a risky, short-term bet, not a realistic long-term game. The sums no longer add up for an investor who borrows money to buy art. Second: there are fewer masterpieces being offered.

It’s been said (for about the past two decades) that, outside of modern and contemporary art, we are in a “masterpiece market” — that the big guns only come out to buy great works of art, leading to a polarisation of prices (low prices for “sub-prime” work, then stratospheric prices for the few masterpieces that do emerge).

That occurred in July at Christie’s when the painting, Venice on Ascension Day by Canaletto, sold for £31.9m — an auction record for the artist. There were three bidders, quite good by today’s standards.

Elsewhere, some art fairs like Art Basel are now too big and too expensive. Commercial rents for bricks-and-mortar gallery spaces have increased, and the overheads for starting and maintaining small, up-and-coming galleries that promote interesting art leave many unable to sustain their business model.

The latest attempt to seduce clients sees Sotheby’s leasing the famous Breuer building on Madison Avenue: a brutalist construction designed by Marcel Breuer, which will be their new chi-chi HQ. However, they are also retaining most floors of their old York Avenue premises and it’s hard to see where this gamble will pay off.

Christie’s is sticking to the tried and trusted art sales methods. Orlando Rock, Chairman of Christie’s UK, believes the market is increasingly focused on narratives and storytelling, as it has been in the museum sector for years.

“We’ve seen an increase in Millennial and Gen Z clients who now comprise 31 per cent of our clients,” he notes, and “while the new generation may have different tastes from their parents, they remain motivated by the thrill of discovering something which speaks to them, which is the same motivation for collectors it has always been.”

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The market for great art will revive, as it always does, but what should be done? First: remember why people want to buy art. Buying art is not necessary. It is not exactly like buying a luxury good: a Kelly bag or a Patek Philippe is a status symbol, inasmuch as a painting by a “brand” like Basquiat or Bellotto or Picasso or Rubens can also be. Yet art seems to represent something broader: perhaps suggestive of a particular worldview, a statement on some aspect of humanity, a distinct style or even an intellectual basis for understanding the world, whilst also signalling to others, “this is my world”.

Marina Phelan, of Charles Beddington Ltd, says, “Education is key and newer collectors need to be careful who they listen to — it is our job to work out how to reach them and educate them in our fields.”

Second, buying art should be enjoyable and convenient. Online bidding is certainly convenient — at Christie’s, 80 per cent of bids in the first half of 2025 were placed online, and buying at an art fair can also be enjoyable and convenient. Third, most auctions have lost the element of theatre. The whole point of an auction is to bring bidders together. The major auction houses have made it as easy as it can be not to attend auctions in person.

A rare disruptor in the art market, Loïc Gouzer’s “Fair Warning” auctions take the opposite approach, offering a single work at 5pm local time on Sundays. Only vetted bidders are allowed to join the auction, and, as there is only one work to consider each week, there is plenty of time to view it — if you can get to Montauk.

Finally, buying art has almost always involved a personal connection. People buy art for all sorts of reasons: for decoration; to be a part of a wider conversation and community; to build a legacy, perhaps as a serious collector of great art or to give to a museum or to throw light on a particular form of creativity. The structures that facilitate these impulses need developing. And they should be celebrated.

This article was published in the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic - available to read here.

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Amid the back and forth of debates about the direction of the National Trust and select committee drama, a serene walk through Mottisfont makes the Trust’s strongest argument. The National Trust (NT) has suffered increasing criticism over the past decade for many reasons, including handling the re-presentation of Clandon Park following the devastating fire in 2015 (here; the NT’s proposals can be viewed here) and its ‘dumbed down’ presentation for children at Sudbury. I attended the 2023 National Trust AGM in Swindon, with much passionate discussion about what the NT should or shouldn’t be doing. Therefore, I came to Mottisfont - as it is called by the NT - with an open mind. It was my first visit.

Even before my 16th birthday when I was presented with life membership of the National Trust by my wonderful Berliner godparents I have loved visiting old houses and collections.1 My membership card has been very well used in the intervening thirty-five years. Much to my children’s bemusement, I take every opportunity to visit old houses, churches and other ancient sites, infrequently - happily for them - dragging them along too.

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First impressions. It was busy. The car park was large and was almost entirely full. Perhaps not surprising as it was August and a pleasant summer’s day. I parked and walked to the, very large rather agricultural barn-like visitor centre. Whilst not perfect, this is a well-designed, functional and rather pleasing building, made of wood and steel, with pierced metal which had rusted and weathered (as intended) and gave the building a sort of rustic-functional feel. There are agricultural-barn references blended with an appreciation of nature. Disappointingly - and rather curiously - the NT team thought it necessary to place outside the entrance one of those brightly-coloured bendy flags which can be seen at temporary sporting events or car shows. It spoiled the look of this sharp, but not inelegant, admissions centre, which had obviously been designed with considerable care.

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The team behind the desk were delightful and handed me a map. They pointed out the house and garden and sent me on my way. Over the bridge, below which a branch of the river Test bubbled, and a just past the chestnut trees, a glimpse of the south front of Mottisfont Abbey was discernible.

There were families of all ages everywhere picnicking, little NT buggies (presumably to transport less able visitors) glided up and down the gravel pathways, it all seemed rather delightful. I decided to walk around the house before penetrating its darkened rooms. To the east - between the chalk stream and the house - white-painted metal tables and chairs were set out where lunch and tea were served from the small cafe inside. Children ran up and down the path by the stream, but the swans remained unperturbed.

I chose a spot near the south front to read the modern guidebook. As part of the evolution of the Trust in recent years, much has been made of the loss of information between today’s and earlier editions of country house guidebooks produced by the National Trust. I brought my copy of James Lees-Milne’s guide (revised edition) of 1978, based on his original text of 1967 ‘with only a few revisions and additions’. While James Lees-Milne’s writing is hard to improve upon :

‘Today the Abbey grounds present an aspect of immemorial beauty. The ancient house lies low on green lawns adorned with enormous plane, cedar, chestnut and beech trees.’…,

I found the present-day equivalent to be clear, comprehensive and broader in its scope than its earlier counterpart. Rather than a ‘tour of the house’, the guide covered 800 years of its history:

‘First came the hospitable Augustinians who received pilgrims eager to be blessed at the priory, where the forefinger of St John the Baptist was held as a sacred relic and where Peter de Rivallis (d. 1262), the nephew of the Bishop of Winchester was buried deep within the walls.’

Walking around to the entrance just to the west of the south front, on the higher ground away from the stream, I entered the house: into a rather bland room and was greeted by a characteristically enthusiastic NT volunteer, who offered me some sort of house guide sheet - a themed ‘invitation’. It didn’t seem to make much sense, although I could see what the NT team were trying to do.

The contents - having been sold off in 1932 - are meagre, but there is still a sense of the house and its occupation. Two rooms of note, the Drawing Room, in which paintings from Derek Hill’s collection are hung,

and the Saloon, now called ‘The Whistler Room’, decorated in 1938-39 - Rex Whistler’s last and best trompe l’oeil work, before his tragic death on active service in World War II - truly exceptional and the prime reason to visit Mottisfont Abbey.

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The Drawing Room (where the Derek Hill collection is hung) is rather elegant, and even contains a charming woodcut by Paul Gauguin, recently reacquired.

The walls of the circulation spaces (staircases and corridors) were rather magnificently painted to imitate Siena marble in the early 20th century, and this has been retained. The corridor connecting the principal rooms is also furnished with Regency furniture - an interiors style sometimes called ‘Vogue Regency’ made fashionable in the early 20th century by the likes of Ralph Dutton (1898-1985) at Hinton Ampner, Lord Gerald Wellesley (1885-1972) at Stratfield Saye (both houses in Hampshire) and more purist collectors of Regency furniture such as Edward Knoblock (1874-1945) and his collection of Thomas Hope furniture at the Beach House in Worthing (see here and here).

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As the house contents - with the exception of the foregoing - are rather lacking in quality and interest, the Mottisfont team have tried, valiantly, to generate some other interest in the house and its connections. On my visit I was directed to the first and second floors to be shown a series of rooms with large, text heavy, graphic panels explaining the friendship between the Russells of Mottisfont and Ian Fleming, author and creator of James Bond. Here was a rather jazzy exhibition on his final book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, written for his son Jasper. This was something of a trip down memory lane for me, as I remember as a child reading the book, with its brilliant illustrations by John Burningham, and not long after, listening to the audio tape on family car journeys - a quite brilliant version narrated by Lionel Jefferies, which entered into family legend (and suffered numerous retellings, as my siblings and I imitated the magical voice of Monsieur Bon Bon, the sweet-shop owner, as conjured up by Lionel Jefferies).

And then there are the gardens - extensive and spacious, with lots of lawn for picnicking (but why do the Trust have to put up a brightly coloured plastic pop-up gazebo?); and a large and famous rose garden, which had very few roses left as it was August.

I got back into my car and drove away from Mottisfont Abbey (to visit Romsey Abbey nearby) cogitating on the problem with the National Trust. I enjoyed my visit and left with the impression that, in spite of the furore over a handful of the houses in its care (and this piece not the place to debate that), the National Trust presented Mottisfont Abbey well, all things considered. For all its lack of furnishings, the house and estate satisfies on many levels. First, the house is presented as best it can be, the contents having been sold off in 1932; a few pieces have returned in recent years, but to furnish the interior, the Trust is reliant on donations (such as the Derek Hill collection), loans or facsimiles. It has ventured into facsimile territory with the set of dining chairs (although I suspect it may have been easier and cheaper to buy a set rather than having a set made, copied from an old photo). The ‘Whistler Room’ was in a state of partial undress, as the curtains - as designed by Rex Whistler - were part-way through a restoration project. Rather than remove the curtains to store, the Trust has left them in the room crated up. The crates are fitted with a small inspection panel permitting a view inside of rolled up curtains (not particularly enlightening, other than to verify the contents). Hopefully funding for the restoration of these fragile textiles will be found soon. Second, the invitation idea (a laminated card, printed with the sequence of rooms on the visitor route) fell rather flat, but at least it gave the room layout a little more ‘interest’. Nonetheless, I found it a little confusing as the house was plainly not set up for a party (crated curtains in the Saloon?!). Third, the ‘summer exhibition’ idea is all very well, and gives visitors something else to look at and come away from Mottisfont with another aspect of the house’s history, but I felt that the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang subject matter was only lightly connected to the house proper, and that the subject was chosen principally to entertain children (although this adult enjoyed seeing the brilliant illustrations). Stranger still, there was an attempt to ‘keep children interested’ by putting a small toy car (Chitty?) in each room. This is a personal bugbear of mine and suggests either a lack of imagination on the part of the local team, or a fear of understanding the collections.2

Perhaps previous shows have concentrated more on the varied and interesting historic occupants of the house. Here I could find no references to the slave trade, no rainbow lanyards to be seen, the text panels were succinct and, for the most part (downstairs at least) quite discreet.3 However, the grounds and the setting, it must be said, remain the chief attraction, and they are idyllic. The car park was full, the families were content, the cafe in the stable block was doing a roaring trade, and the house was being visited.

Clearly this is what people want to come and see: a beautiful country house in a wonderful setting with interesting and historic connections to ponder, so long as there is time after the picnic and the children don’t kick up too much of a fuss. The Trust has been doing this brilliantly for years, and I hope it continues to focus on the essential qualities of these marvellous places - qualities in evidence at Mottisfont - : long building and family histories, drawing out their connections with people, places and objects, and providing a delightful visit in remarkable surroundings, both natural and built. For more images - see my instagram @birdrufus.

Prior to my visit, I looked up Mottisfont Abbey in Simon Jenkins’ book on the Thousand Best Houses in England from 2003 - who wrote, rather tartly

“Mottisfont is a pleasant walk by wooded streams to a nationally celebrated rose garden. The house exterior is charming, but the interiors are disappointing except for one room … The Rex Whistler room, however, must not be missed”4

I preferred John Julius Norwich’s write up, from his book on the architecture of Southern England of 1985:

“This is a part of my youth; and of all the country houses of England it is, I think, the one I love the best. It could not be called classically beautiful - no building that began as a monastic foundation in the twelfth century and was subsequently converted, first into a Tudor Mansion and later into a Georgian one, could aspire to be that, but even leaving aside its considerable architectural interest, it radiates a quite extraordinary atmosphere of peace, and of mellow, timeless serenity. Many is the sunlit summer afternoon, with the tea table set out on the east lawn under one of those magnificent trees beside the swiftly flowing Test, on which I have reflected, helping myself to another cucumber sandwich, that at Mottisfont I could happily live and die, and that earth, almost certainly, had not anything to show more fair.”5

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The international art market is enduring a lengthy “correction”. The post-pandemic froth having evaporated, global auction sales — the only reliable and publicly available sales data — are down for the second year in a row. Today, at the top end of the market there are fewer buyers and less competition for the most expensive works. Inevitably, vendors’ and buyers’ price expectations are mismatched.

This was brutally demonstrated when in May, Giacometti’s monumental bronze head Grande tête mince failed to sell at Sotheby’s New York. Priced to sell in excess of $70 million, the work was one of a set of five casts.

Another had sold in 2013 for $50m (exceeding its $35–$50m estimate), and in 2025 Sotheby’s pushed the estimate hard (perhaps to win the business). The vendor was possibly unwilling to recognise a weaker market in 2025. It had come to auction without a guarantee (i.e. pre-sold to a third party).

Meanwhile, the wider context is a contradictory one. According to Bain & Company, the global luxury goods market grew by 8–10 per cent in 2023 but contracted 2 per cent in 2024. The wealthy are still spending — but less and clearly not on art.

The major auction houses have staked much on building a secondary market for luxury — watches, jewellery, wine and handbags — as an entry point for buyers who may later return to buy a Basquiat. They have built expensive premises in the major entrepôts of luxury retail, Paris and Hong Kong.

But to date, buyers of luxury seemingly just stick with buying Louis Vuitton or Patek Philippe, and few go on to buy pictures by say, Lovis Corinth or Philippe de Champaigne.

And behind that ambition is the question about how the major art market players will adapt to the so-called Great Wealth Transfer. This (apparently) $80 trillion shift of assets between generations — already under way in North America and Western Europe — represents the most significant economic event of the next two decades. The wealth generation is potentially massive, but younger, digital-native beneficiaries of this inherited wealth may be sceptical of legacy organisations. By the same token, inheritance usually brings large art collections onto the market, but what if few are willing to spend vast sums buying art?

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Disruption and innovation are badly needed to keep the art market going in these tough times. The conditions that supported two decades of growth to 2022 — globalisation, cheap capital and the unrelenting rise of ultra-high-net-worth individuals — are no longer guaranteed.

To survive, the major players must adjust to buyers who are younger, shrewder, and perhaps less sentimental or loyal to brands and personalities. They also have access to considerably more sale price data than was available to previous generations.

“What do the next generation of buyers actually want?” Hugo Nathan of Beaumont Nathan Art Advisory asked me.

“A generation that, via the tech revolution, has been taught to question almost every societal norm, is potentially unwilling to simply collect along the same patterns as their parents and grandparents.”

Nathan believes the market may need to move away from the dominance of the contemporary sector, which has brought with it the fashion world’s natural obsession with what’s hot and what’s new. Rather than be fuelled by the promise of a quick profit, he thinks that “art needs to be marketed once again as a luxury, a pleasure, even a noble pursuit” and calls for “a much more qualified salesforce to educate and encourage, beyond the lazy trope of art as investment”.

“There are no sacred cows today, and some deep reorganisation of the gallery and auction models may be needed to reinstate the thrill of collecting, as well as making the market profitable again.”

This now widely held sentiment suggests a shift in mechanics and tone is needed. Of course auction houses and dealers want to promote their works of art as if they are the Greatest Of All Time. But almost all major players rely on art advisors who will tell it like it is.

So why not cut back on this breathless over-marketing and the lengthy write-ups intended to add scholarly depth to a work? Promotion is important, but how about less theatre and more substance?

Collectors and the market still want stories, real stories — but how to tell them? In this, the market does have one enduring advantage: great works of art, when properly framed, have the power to arrest, persuade, enchant and endure. The trick is to find the language — and the audience — that recognises these values.

This article was published in The Critic, July 2025, available here

The art world is largely a liberal sort of environment, but certain words and concepts have become almost taboo.

One word which has always fascinated me is connoisseurship, a term capable of conjuring an entire world. For perhaps more than a century, it was the most valued commodity in the art world. Collectors sought out connoisseurs — usually dealers — to help them form collections of note, filled with great and beautiful works of art.

Subject knowledge, judgement of quality and originality or authenticity, perhaps even significance, were essential to “connoisseurship”.

It was with the benefit of this judgement, a sort of human filter of art, that most of the collections to be found in the great museums in the great cities of the world, certainly of Western art, were formed.

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The most famous connoisseur was Bernard Berenson, who advised Isabella Stewart Gardner buying Italian paintings but got into hot water when he became a weapon in the great dealer Duveen’s armoury, convincing American plutocrats to buy his Old Masters.

Possibly the greatest connoisseur of all time was Kenneth Clark. Rich, intelligent, well-connected, at 31, he was the youngest ever director of the National Gallery in London when he took up the post in January 1934.

Charles Saumarez Smith in his excellent history of the National Gallery wrote, “Clark had complete confidence … according to the judgement of his eye, an ability which he felt he had been born with and was conferred by his aesthetic judgement, which he always regarded as at least as important to the understanding and appreciation of works of art as knowledge of their history.”

Clark’s appointment led to a flowering of connoisseurship and scholarship, as he encouraged the careers of John Pope-Hennessy, Philip Pouncey and Denis Mahon, all of whom worked with him. This aesthetic, formal approach to art was the natural evolution of how one looked and appreciated it: there was good art and bad art, and clever people like Clark were there to say what was what.

Fast forward to today, and museums and the art market have evolved into discrete spaces. Perhaps the avant-garde, peppered with living artists and sprinkled with a sense of the new and the possible, has always seen itself as separate from older, established and static collections.

Over the past three decades and more, approaches to art collecting and art history have evolved into a healthy and stimulating pluralistic world.

Some museums have taken a creative, even radical, approach to their collections, thinking hard about how to appeal to visitors. Rather than the linear, aesthetic approach favoured by Clark et al., curators have tended to favour thematic displays, and today none is more important to museum administrators than seeking to redress a perceived imbalance in art history, namely the exclusion of women artists.

A recent example was Tate’s excellent survey of British women artists ‘Now You See Us’, where the exhibition’s premise superseded a qualitative judgement of art. Nonetheless, the standard was very high, and this important exhibition was commendable in its breadth and interest.

Does quality matter today when considering art? As objective standards have been eroded, the art market has fragmented into smaller pools, sometimes connecting but usually insular.

Connoisseurship used to be the ne plus ultra for all categories of art collecting, a broadly agreed aesthetic standard of quality, from which a sort of snobbery emerged if objects did not meet that standard. Fortunately, this has now evaporated, but where does that leave us in trying to understand and appreciate great works of art?

Happily, two recent museum purchases have given me reassurance that connoisseurship is still valued. First, the Getty announced in April that it had bought for an undisclosed price a painting on panel, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1565, by Luis de Morales, known as “El Divino” and a contemporary of El Greco. Described as “sublimely expressive”, it had sold at Nagel auction house in 2021 for €1.1m.

Weeks later, the National Gallery, London announced that it had acquired a mysterious painting from about 1500, titled The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret and Two Angels by an unknown artist for £16.4m: without doubt an important work from the Low Countries, which will join equally important works by unnamed artists such as the “Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece”.

Both purchases rely on deep knowledge of art history and thankfully steer clear of identity politics or thematic approaches to art — trends which have largely dethroned connoisseurship.

This article was published in The Critic, June 2025 issue available here

For most of history, collecting art has been a very personal activity. In recent years, with the squeeze on profits at auction houses and the concomitant rise in the value of some contemporary and modern art beloved by a small cadre of financiers, there has been a tendency to perceive the art market as an investment-grade arena. Judging by the prices asked by some art dealers, it is no surprise that some private collectors wanted in on the same profit margins.

Yet, for most participants, buying and collecting art is not about investment. It is about emotion and personality. It is also about fashion, but mostly it is about personal conviction and passion for the object and the sense of connection the purchaser feels for it.

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As an art advisor I have been asked to value, research and assess the contents of many collections and on occasion have also had the privilege of discussing their genesis and evolution with their owners. Amongst them was Aso A. Tavitian, whose collection was auctioned in New York in February following his early death from cancer. I met him several times when working at Christie’s in the early 2000s, during the glory years of his buying and later when I visited him in New York.

He bought a beautiful English 18th century serpentine chest of drawers, which had belonged to a forebear of mine, James Thursby Pelham, so I felt a personal connection. He placed it in his bedroom. The cream of his collection was made up of superb quality English mahogany furniture, Italian bronzes and Old Master paintings, and 331 of the best paintings and pieces of sculpture were bequeathed to nearby Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, where Tavitian served as a trustee.

He was of Armenian descent and came to the US from Bulgaria with little. As Candace Beinecke put it, “Aso lived the American dream. He came to the US with nothing but intellect, tenacity and a commitment to quality and hard work.” He put himself through Columbia University by working as a New York taxi driver and later founded Syncsort, which became a successful software company. In 2004 he began collecting art.

His approach was to listen to advice and to learn and then to visit a renowned dealer or auction sale “resolved to buy something”. This was not retail therapy but a strategy. As a result, with his deep pockets and also by trusting advice and buying from reputable and experienced dealers and selected auctions, he built a superb art collection, which truly reflected his passions and interests and probably also his personality.

He was, by all accounts, a very generous and delightful man. Peter Holmes, one of his trusted advisors for English furniture, recalled being driven back to New York by Tavitian after he and his wife had been invited to stay at his home in the Berkshires. The experience of being driven through Manhattan by a former New York City taxi driver was apparently unforgettable.

Another friend remembered his generosity when, at the height of personal, very public difficulties, Tavitian called to ask him if he was available on a certain date in May. To his surprise, the invitation was for him and his wife to be his guests at the Met Gala — seating them either side of him at dinner, demonstrably supporting this friend through the depths of his troubles.

But it was when I carried out a simple financial analysis of the ten most expensive pieces of English furniture sold from his collection at Sotheby’s sales in February, that I appreciated his true conviction. That market has dropped significantly, and the prices demonstrated this: he had bought the best pieces at the height of the market which were now sold for half or sometimes a third of what he had paid for them at auction ten or 15 years previously. In discussing Tavitian and his collecting, Peter Holmes claimed, “he bought his furniture like he bought his wine — to be enjoyed.”

It struck me that he did not buy for investment or for profit; he bought for the pleasure of collecting and to own works which gave him and his friends pleasure. He delighted in sharing his collection with those who appreciated his efforts. There was a time when many actors in the art market were blessed with similar gifts and passions. These people could move the art market.

Thankfully, today there are still — just — players like Aso Tavitian, but only rarely does one come across such a deep-seated interest in and passion for art, humanity and philanthropy.

This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic available here

What is happening in the art world in the Arabian Gulf? The completion of museums on a spectacular scale with world-class collections is the clearest demonstration of the region’s cultural investment in recent years, whilst the sheikhs providing the funding are presumed, perhaps unjustly, to be focused on acquiring luxury goods.

This unabashed materialism, dependent on iconology and branding, seems at odds with the idealism, pseudo-intellectualism and iconoclasm of much contemporary art. But how do the two combine within a country that is also the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites and not known for freedom of expression?

Indeed, the large and very expensive museum projects in Qatar and Abu Dhabi may come to be dwarfed by Saudi Arabia’s plans. King Salman’s son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is the mover behind the country’s Vision 2030, which seeks to promote culture as part of a diversified economy. Yet what exactly is the kingdom’s intention?

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An excellent book seeks to explain the country’s past and signpost where it is headed. In Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? (2023), authors Rebecca Anne Proctor and Alia Al-Senussi highlight the dramatic change in direction from the religious conservatism of the years after 1979, until King Abdullah began, slowly, to loosen constraints.

After 2015, when MBS was appointed de facto ruler, the changes have been accelerated. Art and culture are now given a prominence and state investment unthinkable a decade ago, yet there remains the unresolved paradox of promoting artistic freedoms within an autocratic regime. How will this cultural patronage affect the global art market — and is there a Saudi art market to speak of?

The kingdom’s commercial art market is miniscule, with much of the buying done by the state and a few wealthy individuals. But this may be changing. Sotheby’s took the plunge by holding a sale in Riyadh in February of this year.

Titled “Origins”, it comprised a mixture of luxury goods such as handbags, jewellery, watches and international and Arabian modern and contemporary art, including works by Andy Warhol, Banksy and the renowned Saudi artist Mohammed Al Saleem. To the surprise of many, it was Arabian art that attracted the most bidding and generated the highest prices.

However, Sotheby’s auction was a sideshow compared with the enormous Islamic Arts Biennale at the Western Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport (until 25 May). Amin Jaffer, one of the lead curators of this edition of the Biennale spoke of a regional “cultural boom” that brings together “audiences and participants from well beyond the Muslim world”.

Artists admit to self-censorship: dissent toward the regime results in punishment

The spectacular site of the Biennale allows for works to be shown in dramatic and arresting ways. Significantly, there were loans which represented a very wide range of global cultural heritage, signalling the intentions of the kingdom to work on a global scale: “This edition unites institutions from Timbuktu to Yogyakarta, featuring loans from the Vatican Apostolic Library, the V&A, Museo de la Alhambra, and the Hispanic Society Museum and Library,” Amin Jaffer explains. “This cultural convergence embodies the region’s far-reaching ambitions — not only in the arts but in shaping an intellectual and cultural narrative that bridges the region’s rich heritage with its future.”

There are numerous ambitious projects in train, from the Living Museum in AlUla and the country’s impressive archaeological sites; to the complex of new museums in the King Salman cultural district of Riyadh — the Museum of World Cultures, the National Theatre and the Royal Institute of Traditional Arts.

A paradox remains: how to foster a creative art scene within the setting of state control. Artists are no longer subject to the Inquisition-like Mutawa, the morality police charged with enforcing Islamic law, banned in 2016.

But artists admit to self-censorship. Dissent toward the regime results in punishment — and it probably does focus the mind when the most significant patron by far is the Ministry of Culture.

Historic parallels with the level of religious tolerance and state arts patronage of Louis XIV spring to mind; and perhaps also the creation of art during the former GDR, which saw much greater censorship.

It is axiomatic that art is a reflection of its time. As Saudi Arabia emerges from years of closure onto the international stage, the twin concerns of state patronage and artistic self-censorship will surely make for a very particular brand of culture.

This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic available here

Over dinner recently, I was asked by the lady on my left, “What opportunities do you see in the art market today?” I demurred. She pressed, “Where would you have wanted to buy in the marketplace over the past few years?” I felt fairly sure where the question was directed, but wanted to be sure.

“What’s your aim when buying art? What are you looking for in an opportunity?” I countered. Then came the dreaded “i” word: “investment”.

My dinner companion saw buying art in terms of financial return, a rational value-based approach. “Ah. Well, if you are serious about investment, don’t buy art,” I replied.

She was rather disappointed. No doubt she imagined I would reveal some clever Brazilian artist whose art is under-appreciated, affordable and will increase in value over the next few years, as if buying paintings by a certain artist was like buying shares in Apple or Barclays.

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This is the “art investment” opportunity model. Then there is the “Antiques Roadshow” opportunity — someone submits a forgotten or straightforwardly ordinary object for valuation and it turns out to be extremely valuable when sold at auction. However, for a financial return, owning the object depends, mostly, on inheritance and good fortune.

For major financial reward, there is the “sleeper” opportunity model, which is when a work is bought for a fraction of its “true” value, and thus requires one of the parties to the sale to overlook the true quality and value of said work.

But this usually requires decades of highly specialised connoisseurial training. The most famous example is the rediscovery of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, bought in New Orleans in 2005 by two specialists for about $1,000 and later sold to the Swiss agent Yves Bouvier for tens of millions of dollars. It was subsequently re-sold at auction at Christie’s New York in 2017.

In 2020 a large portrait of Louis XIV after Rigaud (catalogued as “French School, 19th century”), of which more than 50 versions are known, sold in France for €55,000. It was cleaned and restored and sold at Christie’s London — catalogued as “Studio of Rigaud” — in July 2023 for £1.9m. Quite a result for a picture not even considered to be by the master.

Finally, there is the “layer cake” model: this is how old-fashioned dealer networks operate, although internet auction sales have largely eroded this time-honoured system.

Dealer A buys a work for £10 and sells to dealer B for £25 who sells to dealer C for £50 and so on until the — usually smart, city-based — shop (often called a gallery) with a good reputation sells to a private owner or institution for a multiple of the purchase price.

I tried to buy a pair of red japanned cabinet-on-stands in Hamburg; so did everyone else

As this system works on pure profit, if the retail shop can find (usually at an online auction) and buy said work for as little as possible, the layers in between are removed, resulting in a greater profit.

The problem with the layer cake model today is that those “diamonds in the rough” are easily discoverable. Prolonged bidding wars are usual. I tried to buy a pair of red japanned cabinet-on-stands which came up for sale in Hamburg. So did everyone else: they ended up selling for over €400,000.

Back to the “art investment” opportunity model. Broadly, there are three methods — the first is to buy a blue-chip work of art at or just below market value, around the £3m mark is fine. Then approach an art finance bureau, who usually offer 50 per cent loan-to-value, and invest £1.5m in equities, bonds or other familiar financial products.

Hold and sell when the time is right. The second approach is to buy the same sort of blue-chip work of art as the previous example, sell shares in it, and then re-sell the work at auction but insist on a guarantee which is higher than the purchase price.

This approach will work only if no one else knows about the work of art before it is consigned to auction. The disgraced art investment agent, Inigo Philbrick, tried this but over-sold the number of shares, and eventually ended up in a US prison (for more on that story see this book).

The third approach is the contemporary collector model: buy a wide mix of art by up-and-coming artists, live with it all, and put into store what you can’t fit in your house. Wait 20 years and then sell — some of it may be valuable.

As with all investments, choosing the right moment to sell is critical. Selecting that moment can be difficult: there are very few buyers at the top end of the market. However, it takes just two buyers to create delight, only one for success and none for failure.

Art market buyers are notoriously fickle, and when they are full up they usually stop. When art is classed as an investment, the motivation to possess or sell a work becomes rational, not emotional.

This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic available here

The last two years have been bumpy rides for the art business. Markets go up and down, and companies come and go, but auction houses have evolved their business model only slightly since the 18th century. Yet, the quantity of sales (and lots) has reduced over the past decade, begging the question, how is the auction business changing?

As 2024 drew to a close, of the two large auction houses, Sotheby’s appeared to have suffered more than Christie’s. The owner of Sotheby’s is the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, whose main holding company Altice is saddled with large amounts of debt — reportedly in excess of $50bn.

At the end of last year, Drahi completed a deal with ADQ, one of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds, raising some $1bn through the sale of stock, which will go to pay down some of Sotheby’s $1.6bn of debt.

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As one half of the great duopoly of global auction houses, Sotheby’s is clearly seeking a fresh approach.

Last year in an attempt to boost revenue and simplify a notoriously complex fee system, Sotheby’s revised its commission structure. This was a deeply unpopular move, and Sotheby’s soon realised it was driving sellers into the arms of its arch-rival Christie’s. So from February 2025 Sotheby’s will revert to a negotiable seller’s commission.

On the plus side, it sold $300m more than Christie’s, its total sales reportedly $6bn versus Christie’s haul of $5.7bn. Both figures represent a drop from 2023 and a major slide from the high of 2022, when Christie’s sales total reached a record $8.4bn.

However, what is interesting is the apparently astonishingly small net profit on those large turnover figures. As privately-owned companies, neither is obliged to publish accounts, and thus release selected data which include annual sold totals, but not net profit.

With such small profits from gigantic total sales, is there financial sense in owning an auction business?

Some have speculated that annual net profit is in the region of just 2 per cent — for 2024 around $100–120m.

With such small profits from gigantic total sales, is there financial sense in owning an auction business? Drahi bought Sotheby’s in 2019 for $3.7bn and in 2018, when it was a public company, reported $108m net profit. Christie’s was bought in 1998 by Francois Pinault for $1.2bn. Annual profits in the 1990s were running at $60m but had jumped to about $200m by 1997 on a turnover of just over $1.6bn. Sotheby’s figures were broadly comparable.

In 1999, Pinault’s fellow Frenchman and rival in business Bernard Arnault, perhaps not wishing to be outdone, bought Phillips for a reported $100m. Phillips was (and remains) the “third” — much leaner — auction house.

Arnault’s strategy was to “buy” market share by offering financial incentives to sell modern pictures through Phillips with a view to bringing it level with Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The strategy did not work, and after losing hundreds of millions in guarantees, he offloaded the auction house in 2003.

Now owned by a Russian investment vehicle The Mercury Group, Phillips specialises in a few, mostly modernist categories: 20th and 21st century pictures, photographs, jewellery, watches and modern prints.

This leaner, more focused model perhaps gives a good indication of what the future of the global duopoly of Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction businesses may look like.

Certainly, the Sotheby’s move to a boutique building on Madison Avenue fits with its desire to be seen as a purveyor of luxury goods. Christie’s, on the other hand, is sitting back and watching. Arguably, Christie’s is in a perfect position, with little or no debt, and the support of the deep-pocketed Pinault family.

Perhaps owing to global instability, wars, elections, the slowing of Asian buying and — in my view, most significant of all — continued high interest rates, the appetite for buying and selling art has slowed in the past two years, and this reluctance to buy was reflected in a lower global auction sale total for 2024 for the big two.

However, their business model now includes private sales — Christie’s refers to itself as an art business, not merely an auction house. In 2024 Christie’s reported a 41 per cent increase from 2023 in private sales, to $1.5bn or 26 per cent of total annual sales.

From a business standpoint, without any of the overhead of cataloguing and marketing, nor giving back a per centage of the buyer’s premium, private sales may be the most profitable route to sale for these large businesses.

Auctions will always have a place in the art market, even though they may not be the most profitable for the biggest sales. Could we see a gradual transformation of the two large auction houses into dealers?

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic available here

Fractional ownership has been around as long as the art trade has existed. A work of art would be purchased by a principal, and shares in that work (or works) would be owned by others: i.e. part-ownership, rather like owning a racehorse’s leg.

What has become a hot topic over the last decade is the sense that art can be tokenised and traded as fractions of a larger whole by non-specialist or retail investors.

Several companies, such as Maecenas, Feral Horses, Look Lateral and Masterworks, were part of this new generation of art investment/fractional ownership, building on the enthusiasm for transacting in cryptocurrencies. Feral Horses even sought investment from Dragons’ Den and was savaged.

Its mission, apparently, was to reshape “art investments, making it accessible to everybody and satisfying a thirst for flexible art enjoyment whilst supporting emerging artists”. They no longer operate.

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The others — and they are by no means the only platforms — have evolved into pure investment vehicles. Most point to worthy aims as part of their company’s mission. Look Lateral, apparently “introduces increased liquidity, accessibility, transparency, and new opportunities to the market. For everyone”.

Maecenas describes itself as a “marketplace that allows anyone to purchase fractional interests in great works of art, using the ease and efficiency of blockchain technology” and “democratising access to Fine Art investment”.

All well and good, but what is democratising access to fine art investment, if not the physical work of art (which stays in a warehouse), actually good for?

So far, the largest player, Masterworks, has been dominating the market. Its website boasts of more than 60,000 investors. It claims its “mission is to make art investable”, and it wants to “transform the art market”.

As is so often said in the art world, it’s easy to buy but much harder to sell

Masterworks may not have transformed the market yet, but it certainly seems to be supporting it. Its data notes a wonderful rise in the value of post-war and contemporary art over the past decade or more.

However, when you become the largest buyer in the market, largely supporting the base of the market, what happens when you come to sell? Most of these new businesses talk warmly of buying art, but rarely of the difficulties of resale. As is so often said in the art world, it’s easy to buy but much harder to sell.

So far, Masterworks has been buying up works and selling shares in the asset, often with delayed payment terms, giving time for the Masterworks team to aggressively sell the shares to retail investors. In 2022 it had reportedly bought up $475m worth of art.

Almost all fractional investments of art vehicles refer to the task of democratising the fine art experience. Which reminded me of the extraordinary moment in the middle of the 17th century, when the Royal Collection was sold off by Cromwell at rock-bottom prices in order to pay the New Model Army. This apparently led to some of these great works now in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle being owned by ordinary men and women up and down the country, at least until Charles II returned and ordered as many paintings as he could back to Whitehall Palace.

Of course, with this type of fractional ownership, it is simply not possible to experience for oneself a part of an indivisible entity, and so the whole concept of access to art in this way is bunkum. It is financialisation (or securitisation) of individual artworks.

Most of these investment platforms promote themselves as daring and unique and venturing into a new world of ownership, profitability and alternative investment. Ben Clark, former President of Mintus, points out “as is true across all “alternative” investments, in tougher economic climates, quality is integral to value and that will continue to be the case in the near future”.

Indeed, Pierre Valentin, one of the most experienced art world lawyers, remarks, “I would want to know that the team behind the offering has the right background and experience.” Wise words indeed.

Ultimately, the best investments will be made based on a deep understanding of the quality of art. Is this a good Picasso or an average Monet, and therefore what is it worth in the current market? Does the condition compromise the resale value? Is it a fake? How can we prove its history?

Fractional investment may provide convenient access to owning a work of art, just as it is possible to buy shares in an investment trust or a listed company (without the dividend), but where is the joy and the reward of owning that work of art? Will there actually be any profits? If the art market continues on its downward slide, fractional investors in art will need to be very patient.

This article was published in The Critic, November 2024 available here