The art market isn’t broken, exactly, but in the eyes of art market veterans Ed Dolman, Alex Dolman, Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman, and Patti Wong, it doesn’t function the way it used to. The group aims to change that with a new collaborative consultancy, New Perspectives Art Partners (NPAP), announced Thursday.

The consultancy won’t operate like a normal firm: each partner is keeping their day job, and they’ll only assemble when there’s a high-level, specialized problem that needs solving. Think of it like the Avengers, but for the art world.

“We’re not just another advisory,” Gorvy told ARTnews over the phone earlier this week. “This is more like a McKinsey model—a team that comes together to dissect a problem and solve it.”

NPAP isn’t looking to simply broker sales. Instead, it will advise collectors, fiduciaries, and family offices on how to manage, grow, or disperse significant collections with global context and institutional muscle. A major selling point is the group’s deep experience across different segments of the market—from auction houses and top galleries to institutions and high-end advisory—and a geographical footprint that spans Hong Kong to Doha.

Gorvy and Dolman both acknowledged that the current art market is at an inflection point. “We’re not starting this in a boom,” Gorvy said. “We’re starting this in a market that’s becoming complex.”

Dolman pointed to the proliferation of third-party guarantees, declining resale premiums, and regional fragmentation as evidence of a “paradigm shift” in the auction market, with the biggest houses becoming “victims of their own success.”

“What used to be a straightforward business has gotten massively complicated,” Dolman said. “That auction model, once full of surprise and upside, now feels rigid—designed more to manage risk than to serve buyers.”

Gorvy suggested that the market’s fragmentation and increasing complexity have created an opening.

“The tried-and-tested platforms are all showing signs of failure—or at least exhaustion,” Gorvy said. “But that chaos creates opportunity. If you can help clients navigate it, you can add real value.”

NPAP, the partners say, draws strength not just from its flexible structure but from the chemistry behind it. Dolman and Hoffman have known each other since the early 1990s. Gorvy worked closely with Dolman in the early 2000s. And although Patti Wong was a longtime competitor—she led Sotheby’s Asia while Gorvy served as Christie’s chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art—Gorvy always admired her from afar.

“I was jealous of her power in the marketplace,” he said.

Both Gorvy and Dolman stressed that discretion is baked into the consultancy’s model. There’s no brand-building exercise, no junior staff scrambling for consignment quotas.

“Relevancy is what we keep coming back to,” Gorvy said. “What’s relevant to collectors right now? What’s relevant to institutions? To fiduciaries?”

On a recent afternoon, a couple was walking through the latest show by Joel Mesler, at Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side, when Mesler himself stopped them and asked a jarring question. “Have you seen the secret clown room?” the art dealer–turned–artist said. “You really have to see the secret clown room.”

The “secret clown room” is hidden behind a sliding door on the gallery’s first floor and has eight painted portraits of, you guessed it, clowns, who are shown in varying states of joy (or distress). These works are outliers in Mesler’s show, titled “Kitchens are good rooms to cry in,” which is made up of new paintings, sculptures, and installation. They’re kind of an inside joke. “If someone hasn’t seen that room,” Mesler said in an interview, “they probably left too soon. When they do hear about it, maybe they’ll feel they have to come back.”

“More foot traffic,” he said, flashing a wide, toothy grin.

The Lévy Gorvy Dayan show is, in a way, the end of a chapter of Mesler’s life—and also the start of something new. “It really feels like the end of the first act,” the 50-year-old artist said. “After this, I won’t have to tell my story again. I can stop living in the past and start just being in the world, in the present. Maybe I’ll even help other people tell their stories.”

Walking through the show is like stepping gingerly through the molted Technicolor skins that Mesler has sloughed off over the years, from his childhood in Los Angeles, to his time as an booze-addled art dealer in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to his move out the Hamptons in 2016. It was there, out East, that he Twelve Stepped into sobriety. In the basement of his art space Rental Gallery, he began making paintings: brightly colored pictures often adorned with text written in jaunty bubble letters. 

The first room of his current Lévy Gorvy Dayan show is covered in wallpaper that mimics the way summer light dances and slithers across the top of a swimming pool. Mesler co-designed it with the brand Martinique specifically for the show. On small pilasters sit 200-pound beach balls, cast in bronze and painted to match the room. Each is decorated with a different word—“LIFE”, “LOVE”, “MOM”—and painted to look like the metallic helium-filled balloons that are ubiquitous at children’s birthday parties.

The second room downstairs is darker in tone. The bright, six-foot-tall paintings featured here contain phrases like “PLAY THE HITS” and “GO GO” in ’70s-inspired fonts. The words are set above scenic mountain ranges, the snow on top acting as a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine binges and the subsequent come-downs that follow. One picture captures that feeling with the words “ITS FINE”, thick and brown, melting into a murky river below. Rising above it all is a crisp white mountain “slopes” with a rainbow peeking out. A disco ball gleams from the top left, as if it were hung from an unseen cloud. Another has the words “PARTY TIME” cut out in messy lines. The rainbow this time feels menacing behind the shadowy white slopes.

Upstairs is where it gets interesting. In one gallery, among display cases filled with little drawings, tchotchkes, and childhood ephemera, Mesler has placed a desk and a sofa. There are two cozy chairs, a rug, and a table. “It’s an extension of my office, really,” he said. “I call it my office.” Mesler was not joking: he is there every day. He keeps banker’s hours, sitting in the chair behind his desk under a hanging balloon sculpture that spells out the word “JOY.” There’s even a working phone. In one corner, next to a pile of CDs, there’s an easel on which he’ll make portraits of the LGD staff.

“I literally just sit here and wait to see what will happen,” Mesler said. “People peek in and ask if they can come in. I say, ‘Of course!’ Soon, they’re sitting. We start chatting about the art, about whatever. It creates a whole different experience.” 

Art galleries in general can be intimidating, even unwelcoming. Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s space, with its regal staircase and elegant molding, has the air of a venerable institution. It’s definitely not somewhere you’d come to shoot the breeze. But that’s what makes Mesler’s project work. 

While the pictures and sculptures downstairs have sinister undertones—he said the first room was inspired by “those awkward childhood pool parties where the grownups drink too much”—the upstairs is filled with messages of healthy positivity and acceptance. Words like “PRAYER” and “FEELINGS” are painted on tie-dye backgrounds. The office space functions similarly, acting as a symbol of an artist at peace, finally comfortable at middle age.

Mesler’s expansive rolodex has led to a mass of visitors. Over the course of one morning in mid-June, visitors to the office included a gossipy art adviser who used to work at Pace Wildenstein, a lovely older couple from Florida who were visiting their granddaughter, art advisor and podcaster Benjamin Godsill, and Mesler’s friend, the artist Rashid Johnson, who brought sushi. The staff at the gallery’s front desk told me that, on some days, between 80 and 100 people pass though.

If the show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan were the only thing going on for Joel Mesler this summer, he’d be batting 1000. But it’s not. In late May, he threw out the first pitch at Mets Stadium in Queens as part of the two “artist series” giveaways. That Saturday night, the first 15,000 fans through the gate were given a beach tote he designed. Later this month, it’ll be Rashid Johnson behind home plate. 

What can be bigger than throwing the first pitch at a New York City ball game? How about taking over Rockefeller Plaza. On Tuesday, a grand public installation turned 30 Rock’s Ice Rink into a Mesler-designed “pool party.” The wavy, deep blue wallpaper from the first room at Lévy Gorvy Dayan was spread over the ground, making the whole plaza from above look cool enough that your feet felt pleasantly wet. Extra-large versions of his beach-ball sculptures, weighing in at more than 500 pounds, were installed along with giant versions of his balloon letters that spell out “LOVE” and “JOY.” Each of the 193 flags that surround the plaza was replaced with rainbow-colored banners straight out of Mesler’s mind. Massive pool noodles really drive home summer vibes. 

Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home” gently swept through the air and during the ribbon cutting on Tuesday morning. A few tracks later, it was “I Can’t Go For That” by Hall & Oates. It was a real ’80s pool party. 

Kids were decorating actual beach balls on picnic benches, sitting on the pool noodle sculptures and posing pictures while hanging off the letter “L” or hugging the letter “Y.” Pink and white beach balls were floating in the Prometheus statue’s fountain. Art-world heavies like Hank Willis Thomas, Rujeko Hockley, Sarah Harrelson, Hiba Schahbaz, Brett Gorvy, and Glori Cohen mingled with French Canadian tourists slathered in sunscreen and would-be influencers who snapped pics of their dogs for Instagram. Mesler-designed swag, including the Martinique wallpaper, was on sale in the gift shop. Later in the day, ice cream was served.

“Joel stands out for his humor, yes, but also his pathos,” Gorvy told me while standing next to a hefty pink and white beach ball emblazoned with the word “YOU.” “To him, the public is as important as the collector. How many artists today have really touched the public in a way that isn’t ironic or cynical, or filled with false sentiment? Joel’s putting his tremendous positivity out there in the world and it works, because he’s an honest guy, a good guy.”

Every so often, it seems, the good guys do win.

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The Headlines

COMPETITION IN THE MARKET IS INTENSIFYING: Four top-flight dealers—Brett Gorvy, Dominique Lévy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn—are linking up, the New York Times reports, to form “a consortium that will represent artists, organize exhibitions, advise collectors, and broker auction sales.” Its name: LGDR. (Not exactly catchy. Maybe give it time?) They will operate out of the palatial Upper East Side space where Rohatyn’s gallery, Salon 94 , now resides. Lévy and Gorvy, who were already in business together, will shutter their Madison Avenue gallery. (Dayan left her enterprise with Daniella Luxembourg last year.) “We’re a hybrid,” Lévy told the Times. “We’re not a gallery, we’re not an advisory.” Reporter Robin Pogrebin writes that the new venture “aims to be more nimble than most large dealers,” and that it will “move away from the exclusive representation of artists” and eschew participation in American art fairs. Probably not what the leaders of those beleaguered events want to hear right now.

THERE IS NEVER A DULL MOMENT ON THE NFT BEAT. A collector who goes by the name Pranksy shelled out £244,000 ($335,000) in crypto on Monday for what he believed was Banksy’s first-ever NFT, BBC News reports. Alas, it was a fake. Someone had reportedly hacked the pseudonymous street artist’s website so that it appeared to be a genuine offering. Amazingly, there is another twist to this story: Pranksy got most of his money back, with the fraudster apparently returning everything but the £5,000 (about $6,900) transaction fee. “The refund was totally unexpected,” the buyer said. “I think the press coverage of the hack plus the fact that I had found the hacker and followed him on Twitter may have pushed him.” Be careful out there, collectors.

The Digest

The artist Ben Quilty, who was Australia’s official wartime artist in Kabul, helmed a fundraising drive that brought in more than AU$4.6 million (about US$3.37 million) for the United Nations‘ refugee agency to support Afghans. [Ocula]

Fashion photographer Bruce Weber is said to have settled a lawsuit brought against him by a group of male models who alleged that he sexually assaulted them. Weber reportedly did not admit to any wrongdoing; the terms of the agreement are not known. [Page Six]

In its budget for next year, the South Korean government has included ₩5.8 billion (about $5.01 million) to manage and exhibit the 23,000 artworks recently donated by the family of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee. Two Seoul locations are currently being considered for a permanent home for the collection. [Korea Herald]

More evidence that we live in incredible times. United Talent Agency has signed on to represent CryptoPunks, and two other NFT projects from their creator, Larva Labs, in potential deals in film, video games, TV shows, and more. [CoinDesk]

Here’s a look inside the Los Angeles home shared by dealer David Kordansky and his wife, artist Mindy Shapero. “Dave is kind of a Deadhead who’s become one of the pioneering art dealers of his generation, and that’s what the house looks like,” the artist Rashid Johnson said. [W Magazine]

An East Village loft that was once the home and studio of artist William Wegman is on the market. It comes with a bathroom mosaic by the artist and a serious art pedigree: curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders have also owned it at various points. Its price: $2.75 million. [6sqft]

The Kicker

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO ENTICE DONORS: galas, gifts, exclusive invitations, and so forth. Raising money for the renovation of its Jeff Koons Puppy (1992) sculpture via a crowdfunding effort, the Guggenheim Bilbao has taken the unique approach of having the rapper M.C. Gransan record a music video about the towering floral sculpture, Artnet News reports . Its chorus goes: “It’s the P, with the U, with the P, with the P, with the Y. So please don’t kill my vibe.” Great stuff! But you need to hear those words, not just read them. Give it a listen.

Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy announced today that Andreas Rumbler, chairman of Christie’s Switzerland, will join Lévy Gorvy as a partner in November, to serve as the head of a new office in Zürich to be known as Lévy Gorvy and Rumbler. The office will provide advisory and consulting services to collectors and institutions worldwide.

Rumbler has worked at Christie’s for nearly 30 years, having joined the auction house’s print department in London in 1989. Since then, he has nurtured an interest in German Expressionism and helped in strengthening Christie’s position in the German and Austrian art market.  During his tenure at Christie’s, Rumbler’s roles have included deputy chairman of the Impressionist and Modern department, head of the house’s German operation, and, beginning in 2010, chairman of Christie’s Switzerland.

“I’m delighted to be partnering with Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, both such respected experts and leaders in the 20th century art market, to create a new enterprise focused on connoisseurship and the art of collecting,” Rumbler said in a statement. “It has been a tremendous experience to work with the Christie’s team over the past 28 years, and I look forward to carrying that experience forward, continuing to serve the great collectors and patrons in Switzerland, Germany, and the region.”

Like Rumbler and, before him, Gorvy—who left his post as Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary to join Lévy in 2016—Jeremiah Evarts and Sarah Rustin, both formerly of Sotheby’s, recently accepted new positions at galleries.

In May 2015, during a high-profile auction at the peak of the contemporary art market’s stratospheric rise, the bidding on Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) at Christie’s New York salesroom had slowed to a stop. Collectors including the casino magnate Steve Wynn had called in with bids, but after the work, painted in 1955, passed its $140 million estimate, the field of potential buyers had dwindled down to just two, each on the phone with one of Christie’s head reps: specialist Loic Gouzer and, as chairman and global head of the postwar and contemporary department, Brett Gorvy. With the room holding its collective breath, Gorvy offered a bid of $159 million, only to be quickly one-upped by Gouzer. The higher bid of $159.5 million seemed to be the knockout blow—the gavel was up, ready to thwock on the wood.

Perched on the far edge of the rostrum, Gorvy, still on the phone, suddenly jerked up his hand to bid again. A gasp went through the salesroom before a rising silence signaled a milestone in the making: Gorvy, two decades into his career at Christie’s, had reached the art world’s pinnacle with a winning bid, on behalf of a client, for $160 million—anointing the Picasso, priced at $179.4 million with the buyer’s premium, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

Then, a little more than one year later, Gorvy walked away from the game.

“To have that kind of adrenaline rush, to be in the auction room and everyone’s bidding up these works of art—it’s a fantastic experience,” Gorvy told me later, thinking back from a different vantage in March 2017. “You can have it on the outside, but it’s not the same.”

“But I did my 23 years,” he added. “I have the flagellation marks to prove it.”

Gorvy was sitting in his office on the fourth floor of the landmarked Madison Avenue building that now houses Lévy Gorvy, the gallery he started with fellow ex-Christie’s fixture Dominique Lévy after shocking the art world by leaving the auction house this past December. He seemed relaxed. Leading me upstairs past handlers installing the Seung-taek Lee exhibition set to open that night, he tossed out the fact that all but one of the pieces were already sold. He was sipping a Perrier and dressed with a discerning but easy air.

“The big difference between Brett then and now,” Sara Friedlander, head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department in New York, told me, “is ‘Brett before’ was wearing a tie and ‘Brett now’ is wearing a sweater.”

Gorvy left at a time of unease for Christie’s. Signs of distress in the market had been on the rise and, a week following the shake-up at the top of the ranks, Christie’s owner François Pinault announced a CEO swap, with Patricia Barbizet, a veteran executive of Pinault’s holding company Groupe Artémis, out in favor of Guillaume Cerutti, formerly the president of Christie’s Europe, Middle East, Russia, and India operations. A month into the job, Cerutti made a statement acknowledging that sales in 2016 had contracted 22 percent from the previous year, to a total gross of $4.1 billion. (Sales at Sotheby’s, the firm’s chief competitor, were similarly down, a sign of the market’s general trajectory; in March 2017, UBS Group AG and Art Basel released a report that indicates global auction sales declined 26 percent, to $22.1 billion, in 2016.) In line with that trend, Christie’s announced plans to take decisive action: closing its South Kensington salesroom, a hub for auctions of decorative art and furniture since it opened in 1975; ceasing regular sales in Amsterdam; and laying off up to 250 staffers. A few months later, Christie’s announced that it was calling off the annual June auction of postwar and contemporary art at its flagship King Street salesroom.

“The market has changed over the last decade,” Cerutti said in an interview this past March. “Some fields, like the decorative arts, have seen a decline, and we have to take into account that tastes have changed. There’s a shift toward more modern and contemporary, and we have to reflect and adapt. I thought it was better to do that very quickly and focus on the future—very quickly.”

The rise of contemporary art as the art market’s primary bellwether—and the sky-high prices it has achieved—has been the story of the past two decades. In May 2002, Christie’s seized upon the advent of a new crop of collectors and held its first postwar and contemporary evening auction in five years in New York. The result was a $46.9 million haul that bested Sotheby’s contemporary sale by $5 million. By 2006, a surging market aided Christie’s era-defining dominance, with sales that autumn nearly doubling those of Sotheby’s, and significant successes in years to come. In the spring of 2007, Christie’s notched $384 million—the highest-grossing auction in history at the time—compared to Sotheby’s $315.9 million. During that time, Christie’s is understood to have been well-capitalized, and the contemporary department was helmed by a hard-charging duo: Gorvy and his co-department head Amy Cappellazzo.

The trend continued through downtimes during the recession and then again on the upswing: by the market’s peak, in May 2015—even after Cappellazzo’s departure to start an art advisory firm—Christie’s pulled in $1.7 billion in five days of sales, while Sotheby’s managed $890 million.

But then Sotheby’s started catching up. Since that time, Christie’s has come up against increased competition from its rival—for whom Cappellazzo now works—which came close to matching Christie’s in the all-important evening sale face-off last November. Sotheby’s was off by just $410,000, a scant number in a billion-dollar auction week. And a robust day sale soon after managed to give Sotheby’s the overall edge. During the London auctions in March, the Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale topped the one at Christie’s by $26 million, a figure all the more formidable for a sale with two fewer lots.

All the roiling activity set up a showdown for this year’s New York contemporary sales in May, arguably the most important live auction bazaar of the year. In one corner: a resurgent operation at Sotheby’s; in the other: a rebooted Christie’s team made up of relatively young auction-world personalities angling to capture big lots during a time when many potential consignors have clammed up in a down market—and just months after their imposing leader’s departure.

“One of my colleagues at Christie’s has been saying, ‘You don’t want the May sales to be strong—you want to look good!’ ” Gorvy told me. “But it’s quite the opposite. You build your legacy, [and] the last thing you want is to leave and find that everything falls apart.”

The annual June sales in London tend to be indicators of the market’s status after the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, before the doldrums of late summer, and in June 2016 the signs were none too promising. Collectors seemed hesitant to put works on the auction block in an uncertain market. Then, over the summer, word began to spread of a major estate that was being shopped around during what were exceedingly trying times—catnip for consignment-deprived specialists. It was the collection of Steven and Anne Ames—assembled with the bounties of high-finance and lineage in the Annenberg family—and within it was a prime pair of abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, both of which could be $20 million lots.

After appeals from both houses, the collection went to Sotheby’s. It was, according to sources, the first big estate Christie’s had lost in years, apart from that of the former Sotheby’s chairman, Alfred Taubman. But by putting up a $100 million guarantee—a show of muscle-flexing that came with considerable risk—Sotheby’s gained an edge in a weak sales season.

“This outstanding collection is exactly what the market is currently looking for,” Grégoire Billault, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, told me at the time, “and as such we are very comfortable with the level of our guarantee.” The guarantee paid off a few months later, when “The Triumph of Painting: The Steven & Anne Ames Collection” brought in $131.3 million.

Given the state of the market during the summer of 2016, Sotheby’s beating Christie’s to such a collection marked a shift of balance. The warring houses had for years intensified their contentious duopoly—with another auction house, Phillips, traditionally a distant third-place finisher—and both spent increasing sums to beat their respective archrival on consignments. Eventually, the playground bullying pushed the realm of prices past what buyers were willing to pay. “From the outside, the auction houses were still being very aggressive with clients, and there were certain prices that were not real,” said Pilar Ordovas, a dealer with galleries in London and New York who worked at Christie’s from 1996 until 2009, most of that time as international director and deputy chairman in contemporary. “They were losing money and creating prices that were not reflective of reality.”

The downturn had started to have visible effects just months after Gorvy’s bidder paid the $179.4 million for Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), when Christie’s staged a themed auction under Gouzer’s direction in New York in November 2015. The second sale, titled “The Artist’s Muse,” couldn’t match the dazzle of the previous masterpiece-loaded event, itself also a themed sale with the title “Looking Forward to the Past.” The November auction barely squeaked past its low estimate, collecting $491.4 million, with nearly a third of the lots failing to find buyers. The casualties included Willem de Kooning’s Woman (circa 1952–53)—a work whose pre-promised guarantee forced Christie’s to buy the painting valued between $14 million and $18 million—and Lucian Freud’s Naked Portrait on a Red Sofa (1989–91).

“The ability to bring to market top-value pieces—that type of buying wasn’t happening as much anymore,” Gorvy said. “We came out of the ‘Muse’ sale understanding that, while it was feasible with the May sale, by the time we got to the end of the year, it was difficult getting material. It was difficult getting it to the right price, and the buying pool was less. We needed time for it to grow back.”

One of the paintings in “The Artist’s Muse” sale was Roy Lichtenstein’s Nurse (1964), which had been consigned by Boston collector Barbara Lee, with a low estimate of $80 million. She had purchased the work over the phone at a Sotheby’s sale in May 1995 during a down period for contemporary art, at a price of $1.7 million. (The seller then was Peter Brant, chairman of the parent company of ARTnews.) Before the sale, Christie’s announced that Nurse had been guaranteed by a third-party backer, contrary to what was printed in the catalogue.

When Christie’s Global President Jussi Pylkkänen started the bidding, not a single hand in the room went up. There was a sole bidder on the phone with Laura Paulson, chairman and international director of the postwar and contemporary department for the Americas. After a few minutes of waiting in vain for a second bidder, the work went to that unknown voice on the phone for $95.4 million, well over the high estimate, setting a worldwide auction record for Lichtenstein. In the decades between its appearances at auction, the value of Nurse had increased by more than 5,500 percent.

But who actually bought it? After the sale, Gorvy posted to Instagram a photo of himself and collector Kemal Has Cingillioglu, who consigned Andy Warhol’s Four Marilyns (1962), the lot that led the postwar and contemporary evening sale the night after “The Artist’s Muse.”

“Congratulations to the new buyer of Roy Lichtenstein’s Nurse,” Gorvy wrote on Instagram, on which he has more than 68,000 followers. “I look forward to visiting her often.”

Seeing the post, some observers assumed Cingillioglu was the buyer, but Gorvy firmly denied that claim in a follow-up Instagram post. According to multiple sources—including former Christie’s employees and dealers who work closely with the auction house—the buyer on the other end of the phone was, in fact, Christie’s owner François Pinault, who had placed an irrevocable bid on the lot as a third-party guarantor, mitigating the risk of the in-house guarantee. And thus, when the lot failed to find a buyer, Pinault purchased the work in a sequence of events that caused those with knowledge of the transaction to surmise that it was an effort to help Christie’s save face on a high-profile lot for which no other bidders had stepped up.

“They got stuck with a $95 million painting on the books,” said a source familiar with the transaction. “They thought they would find a third party later.”

When I asked whether Pinault had purchased Nurse, Gorvy said, “Not that I’m aware of.” A Christie’s spokeswoman, asked the same, said, “Per policy, Christie’s does not comment on buyers or financial arrangements.” Attempts to solicit comment from Pinault through other means proved unsuccessful.

After the sales in November 2015, Christie’s, along with the other houses, tried to navigate a rocky market. Then deputy chairman Loic Gouzer—who had become known for putting together the curated sales—trolled market speculators in May 2016 with “Bound to Fail,” a disappointment-themed auction. After the sale, Gouzer told me he had wanted to comment on the state of the market by purposefully picking work by artists who don’t sell well at auction. “We had artists who weren’t market darlings,” he said. “When something was too easy, or a definite winner, we said, ‘No, no, no.’ ”

The sale proved a surprise success, with all but one of 39 lots sold—and only eleven guaranteed by a third party—for a net total of $78.1 million, well over a low estimate of $59.4 million. But it was not enough to stave off a shake-up in the months to come. Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman of the Americas, resigned and announced he would take a job at Sotheby’s. Robert Manley, a deputy chairman in the postwar department, left for Phillips, and Jonathan Laib, a specialist, left for David Zwirner gallery. In November, Sara Friedlander, a young and well-liked former head of the evening sale known for winning performances as an auctioneer at charity galas, was named head of the department. Christie’s did make a major hire, in June 2016, poaching Alex Rotter from Sotheby’s and making him chairman of the department—but, as per the noncompetition agreements that both houses have their employees sign, he could not start until March of this year.

The competing houses also saw turnover. Uncertainty at Sotheby’s under the taboo-busting outsider stewardship of president and CEO Tad Smith led to voluntary layoffs and high-profile departures. Phillips—making a play for more prominence—went on a hiring spree.

“Some of the old ties of loyalty to management teams have been broken in many respects, and that has resulted in this huge turnover in staff,” said Ed Dolman, chairman and CEO of Phillips and, before a three-year stint at Qatar Museums Authority, formerly CEO, and then chairman, at Christie’s during a 27-year tenure. “Not long ago, it was rare for someone to leave one of the houses and go to the other, and now it’s become de rigueur. Everybody’s moving around. It’s quite difficult for me to remember where an old colleague of mine is now working, at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.”

All the while, Gorvy, the main face of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department and its amiable ambassador, had been mulling a move. For the previous five years, he had maintained a standing offer from Dominique Lévy to join her gallery as a partner. The deal-making began when she first went off on her own after splitting with her former partner, Robert Mnuchin. Gorvy had known Lévy for years: she worked as the head of private sales at Christie’s from 1999 to 2003, and, from 2010 to 2011, Gorvy’s wife, Amy Gold, worked as a senior director at L & M Arts, Lévy’s gallery with Mnuchin.

In the summer of 2016, Gorvy had a five-year contract up for renegotiation, but he had Christie’s table it until after the fall sales. During a visit with Lévy in Italy, they made a handshake deal. “It was about building something together,” Gorvy told me later, recalling the episode from his new position on the outside. “I didn’t want to leave at a time when the market was in a downward spin.”

After the November sales, on Thanksgiving Day, Gorvy told Christie’s he was leaving. The industry went apoplectic.

“The biggest issue is, when you have someone who has been there for a long time,” said Ordovas, who worked with Gorvy for more than a decade at Christie’s, “you’re losing a lot of history and a lot of connections.”

After a year of down sales, Patricia Barbizet, who had served as the first-ever female CEO of Christie’s since her appointment in 2014, was out. She selected her own successor and was named vice chair of Christie’s board—and she continues to work for Pinault as CEO of Artémis—but in interviews after her departure was announced in December 2016, former and current Christie’s employees characterized her to me as removed and hard to communicate with. (Unlike the publicly held Sotheby’s, which must divulge information to shareholders, Christie’s is privately held and thus has no such obligation—making for a more secretive culture in which sources often request anonymity for fear of retribution.)

Other sources said her slow nature and indecisive manner lost business for the company, and that clients would simply move on if she took too long to figure out what to do. Even Gorvy acknowledged that those who worked directly with Barbizet would comment on the lack of decision making and go their own way.

To many on the outside, however, the speed of the revolving door suggested a lack of focus at the house. “Quite unusual, I would say,” was Dolman’s response to the fact that three CEOs have now succeeded him since he left Christie’s in 2011.

But Cerutti, Barbizet’s replacement, strikes most of the sources I spoke with as right for the job. He’s a people person, by all accounts. Of the nearly dozen current and former Christie’s staffers I talked to, almost all of them described him as “hands-on.” Many mentioned that he would fly from Christie’s global headquarters in London to New York at the drop of a hat to help secure a deal.

“He wants to be the front line, going back to the marching orders,” Rotter said of his new boss. “He’s not the colonel who will sit in his tent while he lets his other people die—he’ll be on the front line.”

An auction-house CEO is not typically involved in the workaday aspects of cherry picking artworks from collections and shoehorning them into other collections. During her reign, Barbizet always went through Gorvy and Pylkkänen, and Steven P. Murphy, her predecessor, was more focused on expanding into Asian markets than on inserting himself on the granular level.

Then there are others like Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith, who, upon being appointed, had no background in the art world and, sources say, does not involve himself directly in consignments or with specialists much at all.

For Cerutti, however, it would seem to be part of the job. Some of the consignments in the May 2017 sale were secured because Cerutti parachuted in to save the day in pitch meetings, impressing potential consignors with the presence of the boss in the room.

“I really like it,” Cerutti told me on the phone from his office in London. “This is about art and clients. My conception of my role is: I have to dedicate part of my time, most of my time, working with the core of our team and, of course, deal with clients myself.”

When he assumed his new position at the beginning of this year, he hit the ground running. A few weeks into the job, he announced the cutbacks, including the layoffs and the cancellation of sales, as well as the closing of Christie’s South Kensington salesroom. The layoffs would eliminate 12 percent of the global Christie’s workforce—they constitute the most widespread cutbacks for Christie’s since the art market collapsed in 2009, in the wake of a general financial meltdown.

Among the primary challenges for any auction house of late has been securing lots, and, as 2017 began, it was time for Christie’s to play tug-of-war with Sotheby’s and Phillips over consignments for the May sales. Members of Christie’s contemporary department in New York, in tandem with their colleagues in London, work together to get these consignments from collectors with varying levels of desire to sell. Laura Paulson, the team’s ranking member, has brought in several key estates over the years, including those of Victor and Sally Ganz in 1997, novelist Michael Crichton in 2010, and David Pincus in 2012. Barrett White and Andrew Massad work on new clients, and Koji Inoue focuses on getting Japanese collectors to sell and buy work in New York. Sara Friedlander, as head of the contemporary evening sale in New York, also ropes in collectors and gets them to agree to offer up works to be sold in the salesroom.

Then there is Loic Gouzer, who joined in 2011 and has become known for aggressively going after work even if a collector has no intention to sell. He has also been known to be notoriously hard to find. Gouzer’s Instagram bio reads “Christie’s Auction House (sometimes),” and from the looks of pictures in his feed, he has always appeared as likely to be in Rwanda as in Rockefeller Center.

“He turns up to work when he wants to work,” Gorvy told me, “and spends half his life basically surfing.”

For six months at the end of 2016, Gouzer had been sidelined by a knee injury incurred while playing soccer. Related surgeries and a heavily medicated recuperation period caused him to miss the fall 2016 sales in New York—and Gorvy’s departure. “When Brett announced he was leaving,” Gouzer told me, “I was high as a kite on 30 mg of oxycodone. You could tell me the world had come to an end, you could shoot a bullet in my other knee, and I would not feel it.”

Gouzer and I spoke in one of Christie’s skyboxes above the main salesroom in New York; he was back in his main station after several months away. He had just had surgery related to another injury, this one to his upper arm as a result of an old spearfishing mishap. “The gods of Sotheby’s are trying to keep me in the hospital,” Gouzer said, shrugging with his one working shoulder. He was wearing a sling, but still fidgeted with his e-cigarette, occasionally puffing as he spoke about his frustration with being gone for so long.

He was not the only one frustrated. Many members of the postwar team described Gouzer’s absence to me as a distraction, especially since, when not laid up with an injury, he tends to be off heli-skiing, sailing, or Instagramming his close friend Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar statuette.

“I was sidelined for a while, and I was hearing, ‘Yeah, Loic’s not going to be able to put sales together without daddy,’ ” Gouzer said—“daddy” being Gorvy. “That’s the type of thing that motivates me. I had time to think when I was on oxycodone, and it gave me lots of inspiration.”

Gouzer’s hardened competitive streak is no secret. In January, he posted on Instagram this blunt message to his followers, scribbled in Sharpie on a sheet of yellow paper:

You have a masterpiece?
We have cash $$!
CALL US (TOLL FREE)
212 636 2248

The caption read: “Christie’s reloaded May 2017 first come first served.”

Many auction specialists use Instagram to promote works that are coming up for sale, but Gouzer’s approach is quite different—and a marked break from activities suited to rules of old auction-house decorum. He has 15,000 followers, and it’s safe to presume that when he posts something, a healthy portion of the world’s collectors who buy and sell at auction will see it.

While fishing for consignments in the run-up to his “Bound to Fail” sale, Gouzer posted a picture of Martin Kippenberger’s Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (1992) and said, “Would kill ?? to have in #boundtofail auction and ready to offer significant ??? for it any ideas?” In the comments section, art adviser Eleanor Cayre responded by promising that if the work were found, she would guarantee it. This kind of direct contact, with the quest for consignments played out in the open, is a drastic departure from the past sale-building protocol of hush-hush conversations and backroom handshake deals.

A frequent presence in the orbit of Loic Gouzer is Alex Rotter, who has known him since they were interns together at Sotheby’s; as of late April 2017, both are chairmen of the postwar and contemporary department. “For 16 years, I’ve walked into these galleries as the different alliance, so it was very strange to walk in here and be part of the team,” Rotter told me at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in March, days after starting the job.

The Austrian, still looking youthful in his early forties, had on a crisp three-piece suit and spoke in a Yankee-inflected Teutonic twang. “Everyone in this department, we have something to prove, and we’re excited about it,” he said. “We’re going to go like a front—as individuals, in one line, we march.” (“Without being too military about it,” he noted—“with an Austrian accent, that’s always a little tricky.”)

Rotter is especially close with Gouzer. When I mentioned his old friend, Rotter lit up and then futzed two-handedly at the inseams of his tailored suit jacket. He had two iPhones, one inside each of his pockets. He found the right phone and showed me a picture: a snapshot of the two old mates when Rotter was 23 and Gouzer, 19, with Rotter putting Gouzer into a playful headlock.

When Gouzer and I spoke a week later, he offered to show me the same picture, without prompting. “We’re bros, basically,” Gouzer said, before recalling how they met at Sotheby’s in London. “My internship consisted of cutting and pasting catalogues on cardboard files. That was supposed to be my job, but most of the time, I would just sniff the glue.”

When Rotter left England for New York, the Swiss-born Gouzer followed, only to get pushed out after clashing with Sotheby’s main macher, Tobias Meyer. Now, with years between, they have reunited. “I don’t know if you can find two people more different than us,” Gouzer said. “I can’t sit still for two minutes in my office—I’m not a master of focus—but he has a lot of structure. I use 95 percent gut and 5 percent brain. He uses more of his brain.”

Rotter left Sotheby’s during a contentious time. In early 2016, the decision to bring in Amy Cappellazzo through the purchase of her advisory firm Art Agency, Partners, caused many staffers to leave that rival house. To detractors, the notion of giving the keys to Sotheby’s to an art advisory firm was nothing less than a complete disavowal of sacred auction-house rules.

Rotter, a rainmaker in the contemporary department, took a deal to defect that had been on offer for years. “I was not happy with the direction that the company was going,” Rotter said. “It came to a point where nothing was what I wanted it to be.”

He was not the only one. At the time, Sotheby’s was experiencing a historic run of departures, essentially gutting the auction house of its storied history.

Though it might have displeased auction-world traditionalists, the current Sotheby’s model has shown signs of an upturn since the spate of defections in early 2016. During the fourth quarter of 2016, Sotheby’s posted a profit of $65.5 million, beating expectations.

Part of the turnaround owes to what can be characterized as a reboot of the concept of an auction house. In recent months, Sotheby’s has been turning itself into a microcosm of the art market at large, a one-stop-shop for all possible picture-buying needs guided by technocratic leanings at odds with the formerly genteel, mannered tenor of the auction circuit.

After confounding prognosticators by paying $50 million, with the addition of $35 million more if certain targets are met, for Art Agency, Partners, Sotheby’s made a series of notable hires and looked to grow its business with offerings such as an analytics index. A potential problem with expansion, though, is the price tag.

“Sotheby’s is throwing money at the problem in an attempt to improve their auction quality and market share,” said Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group. “Sotheby’s wants to become the equivalent of a Walmart in the art market. Christie’s wants to primarily focus on being a bespoke auction house.”

Levin suggested that, given the amount Sotheby’s has been paying for guarantees—$100 million for the Ames estate, for instance—and all its acquisitions, Sotheby’s may not be as successful as it seems. Money delegated for guarantees can entertain considerable risk, since, if a guaranteed work fails to sell, the house has to absorb the cost and try to sell it privately.

Friedlander, head of the contemporary department at Christie’s, is skeptical of the Sotheby’s one-stop-shop approach, which now includes a position under the Art Agency, Partners umbrella for former Robert Rauschenberg Foundation CEO Christy MacLear as an expert on artist estates and foundations. “Do we talk to artists’ estates and foundations and experts and conservators? Yes,” Friedlander said. “But we don’t do it in-house, because the truth of the matter is, our clients like to have a very neutral, unbiased approach to things. We’re able to get all those different viewpoints—we’re just not hiring them to work here.”

Between the May 2017 sales and the ones in November, a clearer picture should emerge of a post-Gorvy contemporary department at Christie’s. While some may see a certain amount of disarray, the newly assembled Christie’s team at Rockefeller Center—Friedlander, Rotter, Paulson, Gouzer, Inoue, White, Massad, Martha Baer, and the specialists—has been earning high marks for working together to build sales under trying circumstances. “There has been big turnover,” said David Nash, a powerhouse at Sotheby’s for decades who still attends sales in his capacity as owner of the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, “but the power and reputation of [an] auction house is more important than the individual expert or department over the long term. Christie’s lost Brett Gorvy but still has Alex Rotter, Loic Gouzer, and Laura Paulson, all very successful and experienced experts, to gather works for the next sales.”

Gorvy’s former minions, who once clashed with colleagues to earn his affection, are confident they will thrive without their former leader.

“We were lucky to have Brett as long as we did,” Inoue told me. “He was a great coach and mentor to all of us—but that’s exactly it, he taught us a lot. There are new ways to approach things, too. It’s a younger generation.”

Asked later for elaboration, Inoue fixed on the makeup of the team and how the lineup works together. “To me, this group feels like a new generation,” he said. “Although few of us are actually new, it is a fresh configuration. We all have different strengths, which makes for an efficient team dynamic. Working together, we operate as a unit.”

Christie’s London sales this past March were a somewhat unexpected hit, especially its postwar and contemporary evening sale, with a $117.8 million total nearly eclipsing the high estimate and rising 37 percent above the take from a year ago. Potential clients who had been holding back suddenly seemed to think it might be a good time to sell—good news for the May auctions. The economy remained strong despite political uncertainty. And, perhaps most important by certain art-world measures, the market was ripe for an upswing. As many advisers and auction specialists noted, the market tends to work in cycles, with down markets lasting a year and a half to two years—meaning better fortune should come around the time of the May sales. Speaking with me in her office in March, holding up a ringing phone—one of her multiple phones—Friedlander told me, “Literally, right now, as I’m sitting here with you, I’m closing.”

January had already seen a couple major consignments for Christie’s May evening sale: Andy Warhol’s Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable), from 1962, was consigned by the Cingillioglu Family Collection and estimated to go for between $25 million and $35 million, and Roy Lichtenstein’s gigantic Red and White Brushstroke (1965), with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.

But there were bigger lots to come for what would become a sale whose high estimate approached half a billion dollars. In February, after careful prodding on the part of a team initially led by Gorvy and Gouzer, Christie’s secured Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for George Dyer (1963), beating out competition from Sotheby’s. The consignor, Francis Lombrail, is a Frenchman who just bought a theater and thought the Bacon—which he bought 25 years ago at a Paris art fair and once belonged to the author Roald Dahl—could help pay off the purchase. It is estimated to sell for $50 million to $70 million.

“Of the small triptychs, it’s always been known as the best,” Gouzer said. “We all have our own imaginary museum in the brain when you start being an auction specialist, and I’ve known about the painting as long as I’ve done this job. I learned later who the guy was, and over time I got to know him. I built a relationship with him—we speak the same language, you know?”

It was also a lot for which Cerutti airdropped in to join the meetings. Friedlander called Cerutti “a CEO who really understands what I call ‘The Specialist Struggle.’ ” About the Bacon get, she said, “It’s a conversation that started with Loic and Brett, and then Brett left.” Luckily, she said, “our CEO came in and had a relationship with the client.”

When Gouzer triumphantly posted to Instagram an image of the work’s abstracted heads installed at Christie’s New York headquarters, Dan Loeb, a forceful Sotheby’s shareholder who wields considerable influence on its board, took once again to the comments section. “Aka Three Faces of [Loic] After a Hard Night Out With Leo,” Loeb wrote, landing a gibe about Gouzer’s dalliances with DiCaprio.

Gouzer responded, turning his aim on Sotheby’s peers who had been beaten: “Each panel is the face of Amy / Adam / and Alan [sic] when they woke up to the news they lost the painting,” he wrote, referring to Sotheby’s two fine-art division heads and its chief operating officer.

The eight-figure consignments kept on coming. Gouzer persuaded French dealer Patrick Seguin to part with Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14), 2011, which was hanging in his living room in Paris before garnering an estimate to sell for $16 million. Christie’s also secured the estate of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, a collection the house guaranteed for $100 million. The May sale will include 26 works from that collection, including two estimated at $20 million: Sigmar Polke’s Frau mit Butterbrot (1964) and Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1988), an iconic work that screams in black-on-white text “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.” In mid-April, Christie’s announced that it would also offer Rudolf Stingel’s large photorealist self-portrait Untitled (After Sam), 2006, that is the only one of four editions not already snapped up by an institution. A dealer at a gallery that has staged Stingel shows told me the rarity of the work could push its price well above $30 million.

But it was a work locked up in late February that could be the evening’s biggest hit. It had never before been offered to the market—and had gone mostly unseen for decades in a collection in Osaka, Japan.

Christie’s had been after it for years, and now, even without Brett Gorvy, they had a team that could pull off a complicated drop-in mission and extract the work: Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan (1962), a sister painting to one in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To make a play for it, Gouzer, Inoue, and Rotter suited up and hopped flights to the other side of the world.

“There’s a collector in Japan, and Koji got the call,” Loic said.

“We’ve been working on that painting for a number of years,” Inoue said.

Rotter joined when brand-new to the job, on his first day after his garden leave. “I was flying, not employed,” he said, “but touched down employed.”
“We did a ninja mission in Japan to get the painting,” Gouzer said.

After a trip to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan—Gouzer, like his pal DiCaprio, is passionate about marine conservation—the squad settled in for a four-hour dinner with the potential consignor (whose name was tactfully withheld from me) to once again go over the entreaty for their business in detail. The menu featured several local delicacies, including the elusive and potentially poisonous puffer fish, fugu.

The specialists had navigated intricate Japanese ceremonies before and, as they got closer to the end of an endurance test, moved into a carefully calibrated dance to convince the collector that Christie’s would be the house that handled the work best.

“I’m not the biggest master of zen,” Gouzer said. “If you put me in a meeting in four hours, I like to say, ‘Take the check, gimme the painting!’ According to Koji, during those four hours I broke 19 rules of Japanese etiquette in one go.”

By the time they left Japan, the Christie’s trio had secured the Twombly to go to auction on May 17, with a high estimate of $55 million.

“We knew this was a painting we had to have, especially as a young, new department,” Gouzer told me in the Christie’s skybox. Leda and the Swan had already arrived in town, and was behind lock and key in a private viewing room. He led me downstairs, moving with his busted shoulder through the corridors, and then opened a door. There it was, just installed, on display outside Japan for the first time in decades.

Gouzer threw his custom-tailored jacket on a chair, handed his phone to a colleague, and asked her to take a picture for his Instagram. She suggested that he take off his sling, but Gouzer shook his head. He already had a caption in mind, and he needed to look beat-up.

“I want it to say, ‘A Twombly worth fighting for,’ ” he said.

Update, 5:35 p.m.: Details about Patricia Barbizet’s continuing relationship with Christie’s after her departure as CEO have been clarified.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 106 under the title “Christie’s Reloads.”

There was little fanfare when bidders arrived at Sotheby’s headquarters at 1334 York Avenue May 9 for the auction house’s Impressionist and modern evening sale. Reporters murmured about the catalogue’s bloat and lack of buzzy eight-figure works, as did the few specialists who, before working the sale, stopped by a pub a block away from Sotheby’s, called, appropriately, Murphy’s Law.

After some introductory gavel-rapping from Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s cochairman of Europe and the evening’s auctioneer, there came a strong opening salvo: Maurice de Vlaminck’s Sous-Bois (1905) sold for $16.4 million and Paul Signac’s Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez (1892) for $10.7 million, solidly within their pre-sale estimates. But when Barker opened the bidding for André Derain’s Les Voiles rouges (1906), the proceedings stalled at $12.5 million, well below the work’s $15 million low estimate. The auctioneer implored the room full of wealthy collectors to throw him—and Sotheby’s—some mercy. He hung on to the figure, repeating “twelve-point-five-million,” sometimes softly and sometimes loud, his intonations getting graver, and scanned the room, pulling out all the stops as he wrenched his body forward in a pique of desperation. After almost a full two minutes, he proclaimed it a pass.

Watching the rest of the sale was cringe-inducing, and as one lot after another was left out to dry, collectors streamed out of the room. Barker’s serene British lilt betrayed concern, if not anger. The atmosphere in the room turned sour, and bidding slowed. After every other lot, Barker repeated, like an incantation, “It’s a pass, it’s a pass, it’s a pass.”

In the end, the sale netted only $144.5 million, a full $20 million under the low end of its estimate. More than 20 lots were left unsold, a considerable amount of debris for a May evening sale in New York—and a dismal sell-through rate of 66 percent. It would have been a bad sale for any auction house, but for a beleaguered one, especially, it was a blow to morale, and if there was no rebound during the post-war and contemporary sale two days later, it could strike another blow—to the company’s share price. These were dire times for Sotheby’s.

A few months earlier, Sotheby’s had put a record $515 million guarantee on a sale of the estate of the company’s former chairman A. Alfred Taubman (the guarantee was later brought down to $509 million after the estate removed a few lots). The sale flopped. Shortly afterward came voluntary buyouts and the exit of 80 core employees. (Sotheby’s has said the sale’s failure and the buyouts were unrelated; art market insiders claim otherwise.) Some of them left for archrival Christie’s; others just left. This situation especially stung for Tad Smith, Sotheby’s CEO, who had been on the job less than a year at the time of the Taubman sale. His arrival was the result of dubious corporate restructuring: A botched “poison pill” failed to prevent activist investor Dan Loeb from becoming the majority shareholder in Sotheby’s stock and shoehorning three of his people onto the board—the deal went through only when he insisted he’d stop meddling in the firm’s internal goings-on. Specifically, he agreed to stop writing public letters demanding the firing of much-loved CEO and chairman Bill Ruprecht. Loeb and Ruprecht even did a few joint interviews, as if they were buds. They were not buds. In November 2014, Ruprecht was out, and a few months later, the board looked to Smith, the CEO of Madison Square Garden, a man with zero art-world experience.

This past January, with the Taubman debacle still an open wound, Smith announced that he’d spent $85 million on a two-year-old advisory firm founded by Amy Cappellazzo—former head of contemporary art at Christie’s—and Allan Schwartzman, a seasoned adviser and onetime journalist. Cappellazzo and Schwartzman were made heads of the fine art division, giving them authority over all the chairmen worldwide. What would happen? An auction house buying an outside firm and effectively handing them the keys to the castle was unprecedented. With new leadership across the board, enormous monetary losses, and the auction house trying to figure out how to continue competing with the lately dominant Christie’s, Sotheby’s looked to be in the middle of one of the most cataclysmic upheavals in its nearly 300-year history.

The battle for the year’s big consignment was Smith’s first real test at Sotheby’s, and it came just a few weeks after his hiring. On April 17, 2015, Taubman, a Midwestern shopping mall tycoon, died of a heart attack at his mansion in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, at the age of 91. As chairman of Sotheby’s, Taubman had helped orchestrate a price-fixing scheme with Christie’s that roiled the art market and landed Taubman in jail in August 2002. He was sentenced to a year and a day, served nine and a half months at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, and wrote a memoir once he was out that was feted with a party at the Four Seasons in 2007, attended by, among others, his pals Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump.

Whatever Taubman’s dealings, the family had a formidable estate—hundreds of works, from Impressionist and modern icons to stellar contemporary paintings, blanketing the walls of houses in Michigan, New York City, Southampton, London, and Palm Beach. Sotheby’s and Christie’s vied for it for months. According to some Sotheby’s employees, the Taubman heirs were playing one bidder against the other just to gin up the price (a tactic familiar to auctioneers trying to hit a record price in the saleroom). If they were indeed playing both sides, it worked: Sotheby’s secured the estate of its former leader only after it offered to guarantee it for $515 million.

Sotheby’s was always going to go one higher. Sources inside Sotheby’s said that to lose the estate to Christie’s would cause irreparable damage to the house’s dignity and status—especially if Christie’s sold the Taubman lots for headline-grabbing prices. Sotheby’s was not about to lose the estate of the man who bought and revived the company in the ’80s (he made it public in 1988) and, drawing on his retail savvy, ushered in a golden age of sky-high sales.

“Sotheby’s couldn’t have lost that sale for Sotheby’s as a brand,” Amy Cappellazzo told me during an interview in her eighth-floor office at the York Avenue headquarters. Since she came on board, the Sotheby’s brass has trotted her out in front of potential clients around the world. She’s become, to a certain extent, the face of the new Sotheby’s.

“They had their back to the wall, and you feel like, if anyone ever has a gun to their head, it’s at this time,” Cappellazzo said of the Taubman consignment. “It was a sort of a necessary—I’m not gonna say necessary evil—but it’s sort of something you have to do.”

(She was quick to add that she wasn’t at Sotheby’s at the time—though negotiations with Art Agency, Partners took place in the summer of 2015, right before the estate was landed—and was looking at the situation as an outsider.)

Though Taubman ended up incarcerated for how he did business as chairman, many at Sotheby’s remain loyal to him, calling him the fall guy who had to take the punishment when his counterparts at Christie’s escaped—CEO Christopher Davidge landed immunity by cooperating with the Justice Department, and then absconded to India with a young specialist in the Southeast Asian department; Anthony Tennant, the Guinness chairman who swapped price tags with Taubman over posh London breakfasts and was indicted in the United States, fled to England, where price-fixing is not a crime, so he could avoid extradition.

Beyond the enormous risk of guaranteeing any sale for more than $500 million, Sotheby’s was taking a gamble in assuming that Taubman’s Imp-mod classics, most of which had been hanging for years in Taubman’s various mansions, would have buyers flocking.

“We took a position that the Taubman guarantee was a risk, but it was something that, given our relationship with him, we were happy to do,” said Simon Shaw, cohead of the Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern department. With his team, Shaw had to sort through the large amount of work on auction and quickly assemble a cohesive, balanced sale. Because there would be a regular Impressionist and modern evening sale the same week as the Taubman auction, he was effectively tasking his team with doing twice the work.

“It was in addition to our day jobs, as there was so much property,” Shaw went on. “It doubled the amount of Imp-mod on the market—it was maybe the most on the market ever.”

In addition to the hefty guarantee, Sotheby’s increased its revolving line of credit in June 2015 by $485 million, bringing its borrowing base to $1.335 billion. Smith assured the shareholders in the November 9 public earnings report that Sotheby’s was keeping their investment in mind, and were beholden to the stock price, not the heirs of their former chairman. (Smith did not agree to be interviewed for this story.)

“In the interest of clarity for all our shareholders, I thought it made sense to repeat what I said in the first earnings call about this policy and then speak specifically on the Taubman guarantee,” Smith said on the earnings call, which a publicly traded company such as Sotheby’s must hold each quarter.

(Christie’s is wholly owned by French billionaire François Pinault and is not required to report earnings to the public.)

“Here is what I said on the call: ‘We will not roll dice in the auction room with shareholders’ money,’ ” Smith went on. “At the same time, guarantees on high-profile trophy lots can be important marketing investments and potentially generate positive momentum and product scope within our categories. Strategy, opportunity, judgment, and sensible risk management will guide our use of these guarantees.”

The first sale of works from the Taubman collection was set for November 4, 2015. 1334 York Avenue was plastered with images of its star lots—Modigliani’s Paulette Jourdain (1919) and Frank Stella’s Delaware Crossing (1961)—as paddle wielders entered the building clad in tuxedos. The sale’s dress code was black tie, a flashy display of hubris. There was even a pre-party, a lavish cocktail ceremony with champagne, caviar, and foie gras canapés. The billionaires in bowties bumped into each other, looking like off-balance penguins in the crowded anteroom.

“I don’t have a comment, but you can get a drink,” Smith told me before the sale, as he stood with Sotheby’s chairman Domenico De Sole and Alfred Taubman’s son, William.

“And caviar!” Taubman chimed in.

The bubbly proved premature. Though the aforementioned Modigliani passed its presale estimate of $35 million, selling for $42.8 million, and the Stella set a record for the artist by going for $13.7 million, the sale was not the bonanza that Sotheby’s specialists—and shareholders—were hoping for. It barely scooted by its low estimate, pulling in $377 million. There was a sense that the house had grossly overvalued Taubman’s holdings and had been mistaken in imagining that the artworks would sync with the tastes of today’s collectors.

“I think that they perhaps pushed the boat out a little too far, which means you have to have high estimates,” David Nash told me after the sale. Nash, one of the founders of the New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash, headed the international Impressionist and modern division at Sotheby’s in the 1990s, while it was owned by Taubman.

“The estimates had to catch up with the guarantee, and perhaps this intimidated a lot of people,” Nash went on. “There was little opportunity to buy anything, in the sense that the estimates were already so strong.”

Or, as collector and dealer David Mugrabi could be seen mouthing to his family after the sale: “Embarrassing.”

“I think it was traumatic for this organization,” Cappellazzo told me this past June. “The fallout of what happened—well, I wasn’t here, I don’t know exactly, but I knew there was trauma. The good thing is, it’s over. And it’ll never happen again. It’s safe to say that, right?”

The Taubman estate ended up totaling $462 million after another sale of the collector’s Old Masters in late January.

“Are we disappointed that it didn’t go better? Of course,” Shaw said. “Could it have gone worse? Much, much worse.”

In November and December, more than 80 employees took a buyout, such a high number of volunteers that mandatory layoffs were not necessary. By mid-February, the stock price of the company had fallen to $18.86, down from a high of $46.71 in June 2015, right after a successful spate of London sales. Sotheby’s would later post a loss of $11 million in the fourth quarter of 2015 and another of $25.9 million in the first quarter of 2016. The first quarter of 2015, by comparison, had yielded a $5.2 million net income.

Still, Sotheby’s maintained that the Taubman consignment would eventually make it to $509 million through private sales of works that were passed over during the live auctions. In an earnings call on February 26, Smith said the projected loss on the guarantee would be just $3 million.

“The sense of loss through that deal has been grossly exaggerated,” Schwartzman told me, looking at it as a long game, as an adviser would. “It was a risk, but the art market always involved faith and daring, so I don’t think risk is a dirty word. It’s about the intelligence of risk.”

But the narrative that was harder to control was the hemorrhaging of the world’s best auction veterans from the house’s ranks. Each week seemed to bring a new slew of high-profile departures from the company.

Among those who left Sotheby’s in a period of just a few weeks were: Anthony Grant, vice chairman of the Americas and international senior specialist in contemporary art; Cheyenne Westphal, worldwide head of contemporary art; Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe; Alex Rotter, global cohead of contemporary art; David Norman, vice chairman of Sotheby’s Americas; and Melanie Clore, European chairman and worldwide cochairman of Impressionist and modern art.

“Yes, we lost a lot of people, and yes, it was very difficult,” said Grégoire Billault. The current head of contemporary at Sotheby’s, and a former director at the Sotheby’s offices in Paris, Billault exudes a loose, off-beat charm; during our interview at 1334 York Avenue, he had on Japanese kabuki mask cufflinks. “It’s just, it’s Sotheby’s—it [was] created in 1744, so if you think you’re going to bring down that institution in a few months . . . ?” He trailed off and shook his head. I asked whether people really told him they thought Sotheby’s was going under.

“Bring down Sotheby’s? I heard it so many times,” he said.

Something had to be done to stanch the bleeding, and to rebuild the departments in time to pull off a string of miracle sales in New York in May, and in London in June. Consignments were scarce amid wobbly global markets in January, and when they appeared, no one was there to claim them—some key specialists who had spent decades developing the old boys’ club–style relationships with collectors had departed. It was time for a Hail Mary.

Enter Art Agency, Partners, the art advisory firm that Cappellazzo and Schwartzman founded with attorney and investment banker Adam Chinn in early 2014. Multiple people at Sotheby’s referred to these three as the Triumvirate. Cappellazzo is a behind-the-scenes operator in a niche corporate enterprise who was nonetheless profiled in Vogue. She held the position of director of the Rubell family collection starting at age 30 in 1998, but her career really took off once she started working alongside Sam Keller to establish the colossally successful art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. She then settled in for 13 years at Christie’s, where she spearheaded online sales and was a rainmaker with private deals, snagged a seat on the New York State Council of the Arts, and ran the postwar and contemporary department with her now rival, Brett Gorvy.

Schwartzman has no such built-in house-against-house rivalry. He began his career as a founding staff member of the New Museum before he had even graduated from Vassar. From there he became director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Schwartzman then moved into reporting, contributing to the New Yorker and the New York Times before Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky, impressed by his writing, asked him for help selecting the objects from his formidable collection to put in a house he would bequeath to the Dallas Museum of Art. Schwartzman went on to advise some of the world’s top collectors, including the Brazilian Bernardo Paz. He teamed up with Cappellazzo in 2014, and now he works alongside all the suits he spent his life avoiding.

The third partner, Chinn, is an Oxford-educated attorney who left his partnership at a blue-chip law firm to start a boutique investment firm that advised Capital One on its $9 billion acquisition of ING Direct, among other ten-figure deals. Prior to joining Art Agency, Partners, his art-world experience was exactly zero. He’s now executive vice president of worldwide transaction support at Sotheby’s, which means he’s an unlikely person to be on the floor bidding, but there he is.

It makes sense that Sotheby’s, a grand machine of different art-market gears all working together but independently, would have an advisory component as well, perhaps even in a powerful position. Schwartzman noted, as did Cappellazzo, that it’s a fairly common arrangement on Wall Street.

“Now we’re just a big transactional organization that has an advisory division, kind of like Goldman Sachs and UBS and all those guys,” Cappellazzo said.

She continued this line of thinking, saying that the wave of banking regulation following the Stock Market Crash in 1929 could point to how an art market flush with capital might have to operate in the future, under more market scrutiny and government pressure: phasing out the Old World handshake-agreement aspect, in favor of a more efficient, business-oriented model.

“In the ’30s the stock market was like the Wild West, and that’s what the art market was—with Larry, with Acquavella,” she said, referring to Larry Gagosian and William Acquavella, two of the world’s most powerful and successful dealers. “But markets always become smarter over time. So now a lot of people make money on the information arbitrage. That’s been the nature of the business for so long, that it was opaque. But markets never stay inefficient.”

And the new fluidity of market roles, in which the rigid boundaries of the past have eroded—where an attorney can become a Hollywood power agent who represents visual artists as if they were movie stars; where auction houses work in private secondary and even primary market sales—has created a revolving door that spins players between jobs in museums, at auctions, in galleries, in private advisories.

“The [Art Agency, Partners] acquisition proves the valuable role that private advisers play in the contemporary market—providing truly independent expertise as it relates to issues of curatorial and financial value for new and established collectors,” said Benjamin Godsill, who is now director of the advisory firm Darrow Contemporary and previously worked at Phillips auction house and, before that, at the New Museum. “I know from my own experience that I am able to forge more meaningful connections on behalf of my clients with gallerists, museums, auction houses, and artists than I was able to as part of a large bureaucracy with its own agenda.”

And yet the apprehension over Sotheby’s paying that much money—$50 million in cash, plus another $35 million in to-be-received bonuses—may have caused, or at least coincided with, another spate of defections, especially in the contemporary department. One current Sotheby’s employee referred to Cappellazzo’s hiring as “not very gentle.” Shortly after joining, she visited Sotheby’s London salerooms and irked some of her brand-new British colleagues by marching in front of them and saying that, in effect, she’d be the best boss they’d ever have.

Cappellazzo said she understood that some people would be compelled to leave after such an unprecedented acquisition on the part of Sotheby’s, and the uncertainty of the sales ahead.

“There was a lot of turbulence in the spring, and we went through a battle together,” she said. “We’re the new kids on the block, so there was probably a bit of animosity. . . . And I knew people would be uncertain about what the future would hold, that there would be this whole new way of working. I fully expected that.”

“You can never have a quiet revolution,” she added.

But despite the unorthodox arrangement—though it’s one that is common in Dan Loeb’s finance environs—Cappellazzo maintained that she and her fellow conquistadors knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t come there to blow up the place.

“We’re not like ISIS or something,” Cappellazzo said. “You can say a lot of things about us, but not that we’re stupid.”

How the Triumvirate operates within Sotheby’s is complicated, as the principals essentially have two different jobs, a separation defined by the maintenance of two different offices: one on the eighth floor of Sotheby’s headquarters at 1334 York Avenue, and the other in the old Art Agency, Partners space, on West 25th Street. These two jobs are quite similar. Cappellazzo and Schwartzman head up the fine art division at Sotheby’s, which also dabbles in private sales and art investment through guarantees, third-party or otherwise, and maintains an advisory service through its specialist-collector relationships. Cappellazzo and Schwartzman are also the operators of Art Agency, Partners, an advisory service that does essentially what Sotheby’s does, just on a much smaller scale, more discreetly, and without the live auction component. The amount of overlap is still being figured out. (During the June sales in London, Adam Chinn, phone in hand, secured Picasso’s Femme assise (1909) for an Art Agency, Partners client to the tune of $63.7 million, a record for a Cubist work at auction. The underbidder was Cappellazzo’s, also by phone.)

The separate operations means that, on occasion, the Triumvirate will buy a work for a client from Christie’s, even if that sale directly benefits the Sotheby’s nemesis. Schwartzman confirmed that the company was bidding on lots at the rival house in May, and that that was kosher with the brass.

Brett Gorvy—Cappellazzo’s former colleague at Christie’s, the primary architect of that house’s current success, and, one might surmise, the person Sotheby’s hired Cappellazzo to destroy—declined to comment for this story. A communications rep cited “Christie’s policy not to comment on the competition.” But Gorvy’s Instagram, which has an improbably high 40,000 followers, is a constant source of veiled and not-so-veiled digs at Sotheby’s, as well as shade thrown at his former colleague, with whom he used to appear on power lists and host sales preview brunches. This past May, he posted a picture to his Instagram with a caption that boasted of securing the Basquiat consignment for Christie’s that had broken that artist’s record at auction when it sold for $57.3 million on May 10. In the caption, he wrote, after a passing reference to Sotheby’s 66-percent-sold Imp-mod sale the night before, “We spent much of the day making sure collectors were not put off bidding by the perceived weakness of the market, as well as catching hand grenades thrown at art works by a few irresponsible members of our competition as they desperately tried to dissuade buyers from participating. Who said the art world was a cosy [sic] collective?” Could there be any doubt that “few irresponsible members of our competition” referred to the team at Sotheby’s?

This rivalry gets more complicated when certain conflicts of interest come into play. One of Cappellazzo’s closest clients during her Christie’s days was none other than Dan Loeb. Curiously, Cappellazzo said Loeb was uninvolved with the Art Agency, Partners acquisition, but she said they still work together—meaning if Loeb wants a piece that’s on auction at Christie’s, Cappellazzo could buy it from Christie’s. (Loeb would not comment for this story.)

“We buy things through auctions,” Schwartzman said, matter of factly. “We go where the art is.”

The Triumvirate was tasked with organizing Sotheby’s May sales, almost singlehandedly, and with an enormous amount of pressure placed on them—the auction house was banking on a string of successful evening sales to ratchet up its plummeting stock. Working with a limited staff, the sales, the fine art heads explained to me, would have to be leaner and more streamlined, as collectors were acting conservatively in the bleak economy of January and February. But this tactic is also a diversion: if they couldn’t get the high-price fireworks that can distract from the ways in which the overall sale was actually a failure, they would have to try to calibrate an auction with a high sell-through rate.

“There was a deliberate position to say we only want to take in property we have confidence we can sell,” Schwartzman said. “I think it was very clear shortly after we entered Sotheby’s that everyone understood that it was more important to have successful sales than to have high numbers, and that the fight for winning property at any cost was not the approach. This is a business—this is a public business that has shareholders that we have a responsibility to. As a goal, we have to make money for the company.”

Two days after Sotheby’s disastrous Impressionist and modern flop in May, the scene on York Avenue for the contemporary and modern sale was innocuous enough. The three heads of the Mugrabi family—Jose, David, and Tico—rolled up to the revolving doors together, prompting the doorman to proclaim “Mugrabi!” and give them high fives. Leonardo DiCaprio and his entourage shuffled up to the skyboxes. Tad Smith settled into his perch near Cappellazzo, who would be, for the first time since joining Sotheby’s, truly on the job, as nearly all her clients focus on contemporary. She smiled at Smith, and then, moments later, the gavel smacked the wood.

Then something strange happened: people started bidding. A lot of people started bidding. There was bidding from the phones, bidding from the room, a flurry of bids that shot up like Whac-a-Moles for Barker, the auctioneer, to swat away. The first lot was Adrian Ghenie’s Self-Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh (2012), and there were still a dozen hands in play when the bidding flew past the high estimate of $300,000; by the time it was all over, the painting hammered at an astounding $2.6 million.

The hits kept coming. A Calder mobile went for $8.3 million, more than double the high estimate. A Francis Bacon diptych, Two Studies for a Self Portrait (1970), sparked an extended back-and-forth between Sotheby’s specialist Alex Branczik and a man in a velvet smoking jacket and Mohawk, who was later revealed to be Glenn Fuller, who works for London gallery Gladwell & Patterson. Fuller couldn’t quite outwit the auction house: after Branczik and Fuller wrested the lead away from each other, the Sotheby’s specialist bought it on behalf of a client on the phone for a $31 million hammer price, $35 million with buyer’s premium. One Cy Twombly went for $36.7 million, another for $15.4 million.

Sam Francis’s Summer #1 (1957) came onto the block, and after a little more than a minute, all but two of the bidders dropped out: Simon Shaw and megacollector Eli Broad. Broad kept bidding beyond what he had intended to pay—he would shake his head each time Shaw’s bidder raised the price $100,000, and then after a few seconds mouth the words “one more.” Finally Shaw threw in the towel and Broad bought the piece for $11.8 million. A Sotheby’s staffer told me the bidding match—a wheelchair-bound, L.A.-based Broad coming to New York to bid at a sale himself, in the room, and going over the self-imposed high limit—was, for Broad, almost unheard of.

By the time bidding ended, the sale had raked in $242.2 million, clearing its low estimate of $201.4 million, and securing a sell-through rate of 95 percent. “All the rumors of the demise of the market were premature!” dealer David Zwirner told me after the sale wrapped. “I was very impressed by the energy here tonight.”

At the news conference, the specialists in charge of the sale could hardly contain their glee, having convinced enough collectors that these works, at this beleaguered auction house, were worth all those millions of dollars.

“We saw a fundamentally different room than we did in the last few months,” said Billault, the head of contemporary art, beaming.

And then, after some coaxing, Cappellazzo came to the microphone, adjusting it down from the height her male colleagues had used (she was wearing flats). She cleared her throat, but no one could hear her amid the clapping and popping of champagne corks that echoed through the halls of Sotheby’s.

“By the time we walked in here,” she said, looking at Smith, “we knew what was going to happen.”

The Sotheby’s comeback was made official during the June sales in London. Suddenly, the auction house that some thought was on the verge of collapse was looking like the industry bellwether. The week after the record-breaking Picasso at the Imp-mod auction, Sotheby’s totaled $67.8 million at its contemporary sale, solidly over its high estimate despite the panicked markets in the days following Brexit. More good news came when the house announced that Eric Shiner, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, would be joining Sotheby’s. “Warhol is like Apple stock—if you wanted one leading point in how the market is doing, Warhol is one you’d glance at,” Cappellazzo told me. “And Eric knows where the Warhols are.”

Even as the art world entered the doldrums of late summer, Sotheby’s continued to reshape itself. In addition to beating out Christie’s to secure the Steven and Ann Ames collection (albeit to the tune of a $100 million guarantee), Sotheby’s announced in July that Taikang Life Insurance, whose biggest shareholder is the auction house China Guardian, would acquire 13.5 percent of the company’s shares—more than those held by the previous largest shareholder, Dan Loeb. Market mouthpieces chattered about the potential reasons behind the blockbuster deal. Could it lead to a decisive win in China Guardian’s very Sotheby’s-versus-Christie’s-style competition with archrival Poly Auction? Was it a need to place Chinese assets in an industry more reliable than banking and real estate? A desire to tank the stock price in order to acquire the whole company? What’s clear is that such a move will alter the way an auction house operates in today’s breakneck-speed globalized painting bazaar. (The hiring of Shiner happened to coincide roughly with an exodus of top staff at Christie’s, with several top executives departing at the end of July.)

Then, on August 8, Tad Smith announced in his quarterly earnings call that, even though net auction sales are down 16 percent compared to the second quarter of 2015, Sotheby’s pulled in a net income of $89 million, well over the net total of $67.6 million brought in over the same period last year.

And Sotheby’s also had a major presence at Art Basel in Switzerland this past June, despite not having any sanctioned sales or events. On the fair’s opening day, I was writing a story at the bar of the Ramada hotel when I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was Cappellazzo.

“You want a scoop?” she asked.

One of the most talked-about works at the fair, Paul McCarthy’s Tomato Head (Red), 1994, had sold for $4.75 million just minutes into the opening. How did she know? Because it was bought by Amy Cappellazzo.

But which Amy Cappellazzo? Was it bought for a Sotheby’s client? An Art Agency, Partners client? None of the above? All of the above? Or, given that now-famous payday, did she buy it herself? When I asked for the identity of the buyer, she stepped away to make a phone call and told me the following, which may indicate how Sotheby’s will be buying and selling works—at auctions, at fairs, and elsewhere—for years to come.

“You can say it was bought for an American collection,” she said. “On behalf of Art Agency, Partners.”

Nate Freeman is senior staff writer at ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 92 under the title “House Arrest.”

As part of the Annual Guide to Galleries, Museums and Artists (A.i.A.’s August issue), we preview the 2016-17 season of museum exhibitions worldwide. In addition to offering their own top picks, our editors asked select artists, curators and collectors to identify the shows they are looking forward to. Here, Brett Gorvy talks about Bruce Conner.

“I’m not only a Bruce Conner fan but also a collector of his work; I’m lending about twenty works to the exhibition. I came across Conner in 1999 through his last retrospective, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I didn’t know Conner’s work despite my background in art history and the auction business—I was first taken by his photography, then by his intricate drawings, and then by the extraordinary video and film works for which he is probably best known today. He approached film as a collage artist: it looked like a leapfrog backward to early twentieth-century Russian filmmaking, even though he’s celebrated as the godfather of MTV and music videos. This traveling exhibition tries to show the full spectrum of his career: drawings, assemblages, photographs, videos, and films. Every time Conner succeeded in one vein, he pulled away and developed another.

“Conner has relevance for younger artists because he developed his own vision without being swayed by distractions from the marketplace and other artists. Yet, working in San Francisco in the 1950s and ’60s, he also plugged into the Beat scene and later the drug culture. He was into punk early on.

“The premise for the retrospective came out of SFMOMA, but MoMA has a great collection of Conner’s work. MoMA has moved away from the blockbuster mentality, and a lot of its recent shows like the Yoko Ono and Marcel Broodthaers surveys suggest an effort to make multidisciplinary art and Conceptual art available to the public. This exhibition is part of an institutional break with the commercialization of the art world. Conner hated the business aspect of art, and the fact that MoMA is focusing on his work now projects a great message.”

“Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Oct. 2, 2016; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oct. 29, 2016–Jan. 22, 2017; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Feb. 21–May 22, 2017.

 

Brett Gorvy is chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s.

Kenny Schachter is a London-based art dealer, curator, and writer. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Could we be in for a rough ride this fall in the high-flying, gravity-defying top end of the contemporary art market?

That was the billion-dollar question on the lips of the summer art crowd from St. Tropez to the Hamptons. August brought Sotheby’s second-quarter results, declared by new CEO Tad Smith as “rather bumpy,” which in translation means weaker than expected by Wall Street analysts, with profits off 7% and revenues down 1.1%.

At the time of this writing, Sotheby’s shares have been under another kind of hammer—down more than 25% since the third week of June from just shy of $47 to $34 on the close of business before Labor Day; and with slimmer and slimmer margins I can’t see how that will change anytime soon.

But the sky isn’t about to fall…not yet anyway…

Summer

Before I break out my crystal ball, let me tell you—as the kids do on the first day of class—what I did this summer: I personally experienced the seismic shift afoot in the art business.

Usually July and August are sleepy months, but this year they were transformed into an out-and-out cage match of hard-fought art transactions. Ground zero for this type of thing, improbably enough, was St. Tropez, notorious for burglaries where gangs spray gas through air-conditioning vents to dope and rob inhabitants—denied by authorities, it’s no secret to vacationers. Perhaps similar methods are employed to extract cash at the Riviera’s rash of charity galas, most prominent among them the bash hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio, he who inevitably rolls into town on a larger-than-yours, supermodel-infested mega yacht (so much for saving the environment). But it’s not all as altruistic as it appears at first blush. I heard—my old friend and secret source Deep Pockets loves to summer in the Riviera—that in at least one instance a major artwork in the annual charity auction had zero artist or dealer involvement, and in fact a guarantee had been negotiated with the owner. Call it a new trading platform for the boldfaced VVIP spec-u-lector set.

I experienced an epic instance of deceit when I sold a Rudolf Stingel to an end user in Los Angeles via two gallery intermediaries, one representing the famous TV personality who ultimately purchased the work and the other, my contact, a New York–based dealer who frequently sells to the chat show host. After terms were agreed and the invoice issued, I was informed that the sale was rescinded. A quick call to Deep Pockets revealed the astonishing fact—unbeknownst to the New York dealer—that the L.A. rep of the buyer (a reputable gallerist) had been adding chunky premiums on top of all the business he’d consummated with the client for years. In dealing, information is as valuable as the underlying asset.

But we dealers aren’t known to let a little moral turpitude get in the way of making money, so we picked up the pieces, lowered our respective asking prices, and closed. In art, like in real estate, it’s the old line from Glengarry Glen Ross: A-B-C (always be closing).

Then there’s the new art fraud with the same old set-up; I call it the Rembrandt-to-Renoir ruse. A portfolio is offered, typically at around €140 million to €150 million, with a range of works from Old Masters to Impressionists and a smattering of Picassos and a Rothko or two thrown in for good measure. The portfolio must be sold, quickly and quietly, as a whole—as if they’d ignore the Qataris or any of the other obvious players most likely to step up and pay the big bucks for individual works. Translation: the art market must really have hit the big time to be the subject of such obvious organized criminality.

In yet more instances of the scam over the last weeks, I was pitched a heretofore unknown blue period Picasso masterwork (and we know how many of those there are) along with the invariable Rembrandt, Renoir, etc. by a former judge on an entrepreneurial TV show. Judging by the flimsy nature of the ludicrously fake material, I should have replied, “You’re fired, stick to your day job”—granted he is a successful serial business buyer. A friend and former Goldman Sachs partner was audibly angered on the phone when I shot down the portfolio he was offered after asking for assistance in disposing of it, hungry for some summer deal flow and quick-fix profits from any sector. No one is exempt and you’ve all been warned.

Who will be the next to dip their toes into the ever-more seductive art trade? Already we have Kanye on record stating that he’d trade two of his Grammys to “be able to be in an art context.” What would I trade to be in a Kanye context? The last time I heard something like that was about 20 years ago, when artist Mark Kostabi asked me what it would take to insert him into the avant-garde. I replied, “About 20 grand.”

I sold some emerging art this summer at the day sale of a major auction house, commending myself for getting out of that market just in time. One piece of particularly shaky quality (who hasn’t made a mistake?) was knocked down at a surprisingly high price, which seemed too good to be true. And it was. When payment was due 35 days later, a week went by, then another, then another, until it was revealed that the buyer did a runner and reneged. (When I change my mind I call it a Kenege—when you’ve been in the business for a quarter century, it happens.)

The shock in this case, for me anyway, was that there is little or no recourse for the auction house or the seller against a balking buyer. It is not a pretty picture. I don’t intend to undermine confidence in the system in which we all work, but it is worth asking: if you let anyone with buyer’s remorse walk from a consummated sale, what is the glue that holds it all together? When pressed, the house revealed that, rather than pursuing a legal remedy, they simply issue the deadbeat a ban for life—which is amazing because, meanwhile, everyone else in the art world is suing each other!

Here was the not-very-confidence-inspiring response to my pleas to be made whole:

“I understand your frustration; for both yourself and for [REDACTED] this is far from the desired outcome. Yesterday we issued a legal letter to the buyer, which gives us the authority to terminate the sale on the 9th of September. At this point we will have the Artnet and Artprice records of the sale removed. Should we reach the 9th without having heard back from the buyer we can offer the work to one of the under bidders from June, or reoffer the work into the February day sale. We of course understand your concern regarding the price which will be achieved through reoffering, and we will absolutely work to try to achieve the same level of offer, as we do not wish you to suffer as a result of this. I am truly sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you, and hope that we can find a resolution which will be satisfactory.”

There you have it. It’s not just the Chinese that notoriously don’t pay for works they’ve won at auction. And as for that so-called lifetime ban, I was told by an auction insider that it would be readily lifted if the transgressor rang up to express that they really, really wanted to buy something again but were serious this time around.

Maybe I will show up at the major fall auctions wearing that T-shirt I got from the new online secondary-market selling platform ArtList.co, the one that says “Fuck Sotheby’s and Christie’s.” It’s sweet of ArtList not to want to fuck Phillips, too, but I suppose Phillips does a pretty thorough job of doing it to themselves.

The New Season

Which brings us to early fall. The sales that launch the season (or end it, depending on your horizon or accounting methods) never elicit much excitement or business for that matter, but there will be no shortage of auctions and fairs in New York, London, and Paris in September and October. Phillips’s “New Now” sale, which replaces its “Under the Influence” series of emerging-art sales (maybe it wasn’t, after all, such a good idea to reference illicit drugs and addiction, from a marketing standpoint?), will be followed by Christie’s First Open. Collectively, it will be a bloodbath. Forget Zombie Formalism, a term coined by artist/writer Walter Robinson to connote soulless, formulaic abstraction; we will be left simply with the walking dead of careers past. Next year they might try “Not Now.”

Over the past few months, the flip art market—turning around emerging art quickly at auction—has been slipping and sliding away as people begin to discern between the wheat and chaff, the good art and the instant money. We will soon hear its death knell. And it won’t be just the emerging market taking the hit; the middling-quality segment of established contemporary, from Richter to Ruscha, is also going to face a tighter and tighter squeeze. The biggest change wrought by the constriction of flip art is the swiftly closing arbitrage window between the primary and secondary markets. Watch out that you don’t get your fingers caught.

The Lawsuits

Post post-Internet art, lawsuits are the latest movement in contemporary, with knuckle-dusting battles erupting in the courthouses rather than the salesrooms. Artists, dealers, and collectors alike have been impacted. Here is a smattering from the docket:

You have Danh Vō vs. Bert Kreuk, a perennial pseudo-collecting flipper who has alleged that Vō refused to deliver on what Kreuk says was a commission agreement. After victory by the investor in a court in the Netherlands, the artist tried to make good (or bad) by offering a wall painting comprised of the text “SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS, YOU FAGGOT,” rather than the room-size installation initially contemplated in their alleged deal. I can’t imagine why an appeal is pending, or why the artist lost a dealer and lawyer in the process. It was certainly a creative approach—you must hand it to Danh. Maybe I should step in to take Kreuk out of his predicament; the piece has a nice ring to it, and I can always shove it into the next “New Now” sale.

No new digital ink need be spilled on the Simcho vs. Ibrahim Mohammed Mahama suit, a surprising first foray into the courts for the face of flip, though Saatchi was the progenitor of this short-term sell strategy way back in the 1970’s. Simcho’s business model is combusting before his good eye. Reading though the action should confirm the suspicions of all: that this market is not so much the emperor’s new clothes as the emperor’s new had-it-made coal sack. Artist and dealer come off as equally complicit in a bald-faced scheme of laziness and greed, hoisted on their own petard.

Then there were the zillionaire collectors who sued their long-term advisor. They were under the impression he had been working for free for ten years, in it merely for the glow of the association and spillover of contacts and introductions. Again, I know and respect both parties (hence the anonymity here, which shouldn’t be too hard to decipher) and believe they were both right and wrong; the dealer should not have been surreptitiously getting backhanders by the galleries he patronized, nor should the collectors begrudge him for pocketing $1 million over the course of ten years for his efforts. In any event, a court was not the forum for such a dispute, in my humble estimation.

In addition, the courts have been playing an ever-increasing role as art-dealing middlemen, stepping into multiple belly-up bankruptcies, from Helge Achenbach to Perry Rubenstein, and becoming responsible for flogging more art than many mid-level galleries. Look for this phenomenon to grow in our ever-more-litigious times.

The Financial Markets 

Following stock-market gyrations is like tracking your biorhythm—an indicator of volatility, psychological and economic, it becomes a rationale for the way people subsequently behave, and no one is exempt. Is it a tempest in a teapot or a full-blown, smashed-to-pieces Ai Weiwei vase? Who could have foreseen the crazy low price of oil and the extent of the clobbering commodities suffered? And then there was the breadth and depth of the stock market’s near collapse. Trillions were lopped off portfolios, private and public—poof!—in a matter of days. And so is the whipsawing world of financial markets today.

On the other hand, such relentless volatility, at least in short term, renders art and classic Ferraris and Porsches even more attractive and stable by comparison. Hopefully the summer of uncertainty won’t turn into full-blown unrest. And besides, art lags financials by a year or two, so let’s see.

November in New York 

Auction superstars Brett Gorvy at Christie’s and Cheyenne Westphal at Sotheby’s are bound to astound as they’ve done in the recent past. Brett’s success has been greater, and will continue to be, for the time being. We’ll see some staggering sums and some spectacular fails. Maybe Phillips will even pull a rabbit out of its hat.

So far we know there will be a $100 million Modigliani at Christie’s and the $500 million sale of Alfred Taubman’s estate at Sotheby’s—the only astonishment there is the song and dance (and whopping guarantee) Sotheby’s had to engage in to win the collection of its former owner and long-term chairman. It’s indicative of a cutthroat environment that the once fabled house almost lost out to arch rival Christie’s. Look for people to hunker down with the things and people they know, buying obvious art by obvious artists from obvious art dealers and auction houses.

And Beyond…

A recent survey of contemporary art galleries found that fully 30% of 8,000 polled operate at a loss, further affirming my belief that all of us in the art world are at least a little bit crazy to continue doing what we do. But we are lifers—we can’t help it. If I made $10 per year I’d spend $12 of it on art. Thankfully I am far from alone. The art world thrives on people selling what they don’t want to sell to buy what they don’t want to buy, much of which they simply can’t afford. Having no money never got in a dedicated collector’s way.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m no starry-eyed optimist. There is more turmoil, flux, change, upheaval—whatever you want to call it—than ever in today’s art market. From inside the storm, it’s tough to say exactly what is going on. Sure, you can chart and graph the flip art, thanks to all the activity, but it will be a while before there will be anything resembling a stock-take on the trading floor that is Brett Gorvy’s Christie’s contemporary art sales. Here’s what we can say: the prematurely high-priced emerging-art shakeout has been a good thing, and the market, for now at least, is still in rude health.

Despite, or maybe because of, all the drama, I had a pretty good summer. Let’s see what November brings. Watch this space.

Update, September 10, 2015: An earlier version of this article stated that Bert Kreuk’s alleged commission with Danh Vo had been paid in full, which was not correct. The legal proceedings between them are ongoing.

Over the past few years Christie’s Senior Vice President Loic Gouzer has carved out a prominent spot for himself at the house, but in May it was a viral video, easily the auction world’s first, that brought him to the attention of the wider world.

Gouzer commissioned the YouTube video to promote his auction, “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday,” which was named for a Richard Prince joke painting in the sale. In it a skateboarder grinds and kickflips through Christie’s galleries and back rooms, which most people have never seen, this and its lighting consistent with the press materials’ promise to showcase “the gritty, underbelly-esque side of contemporary art.” The skater tumbles just after he passes a Martin Kippenberger self-portrait in one of the galleries—one that would go on to sell for an artist’s record-making $18.6 million at the sale—just as the electronica-rock soundtrack fades away.

Ad Week praised Christie’s for making “an ad that doesn’t smell 250 years old” (a reference to Christie’s establishment in 1766). “Pretty slick,” said NPR. The stuffier executives at Christie’s weren’t pleased, because they thought it portrayed the auction house and its works in an unserious light, though this was never Gouzer’s intention.

“It’s actually just my favorite part of any sale,” Gouzer said behind the wheel of his pickup truck in Montauk at the end of the summer. “When you call the admin and you say, ‘I need this piece, it’s being shown in Tokyo right now, but I need it in New York tomorrow,’ and then they send it and you uncrate it. And it just looks so good. It’s my favorite way to see art.”

But the video, like the sale, represented something new for the company, something that Gouzer, a specialist in the contemporary art department, seems to embrace and personify. “If I Live” raised $134.6 million across 35 works of art, and another Gouzer staged with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013 raised $38.8 million for environmental causes with 33 lots. Christie’s currently seems to be ahead in the race to dominate the contemporary auction market, and their success is thanks to people like Gouzer.

Gouzer, and those who work with him, credit him with helping to changing the market for certain artists with high-selling, high-profile lots, which, the conventional wisdom has it, raise the prices for work by the artist across the board. Among his higher figures were the Kippenberger, Yves Klein’s FC1 (1962), which sold for $36.5 million in 2012, Alexander Calder’s $18.6 million Lily of Force (1945) (also in that sale), and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads (1982), which currently holds the record for that artist at auction, $48.8 million from a 2013 sale. At the time the Klein and Calder were record-breakers too. Works by all those artists had always traded high on the private market, but never at public auction, and rarely for that much.

Off the clock Gouzer, 34, likes to spearfish, which is why he tries to spend as much time as possible in Montauk. The Gouzer family hails from Brittany originally, and the day I’d met him in Montauk he, his brother Marc, and two friends had been out at 4 a.m. to visit a weather buoy on Gouzer’s boat—which has a massive ice coffin in the center for the day’s haul. The Gouzers are cagey about the location of their weather beacon, which has lights that draw untold numbers of tuna, rays, and sharks, because he’s worried that a commercial trawler will hear about it and “sweep everything away.”

“It’s a little ironic,” Marc said, “that Loic loves fish and goes spearfishing but if you know about the ocean, the real threat is commercial fishermen.”

“The one thing I think about 10 times a day, if it’s not a beautiful girl, it’s about what’s happening to our planet,” Gouzer said over lunch, between puffs of an e-cigarette (a habit he said he gained from DiCaprio, adding that he can still hold his breath for three and a half minutes underwater). He’s appalled by lack of coverage given to the horrors of commercial fishing and said he can’t believe that The New York Times writes a report for every single auction. “I guess once the prices go down nobody’s going to care anymore,” he sighed.

Much of Gouzer’s career has been tied up in guarantees, a system the houses have used more and more to ensure that doesn’t happen. The Kippenberger, Klein, Calder, and Basquiat all carried guarantees, as did 15 of the 35 lots of his “If I Live” sale.

Developed at Sotheby’s in 1974, auction guarantees were at first a tactic simply to make sure an artwork came to auction at all. Guarantees, in essence, promise that if a work should fail to meet a certain minimum price, the house will pay the guaranteed amount for it.

“In 1974, when we founded this guarantee scheme we felt that there was a real need in the market for a guaranteed result,” said David Nash, who was part of the team that first implemented guarantees at Sotheby’s. “People who were uncertain about whether to sell something at public auction or whether to take the risk could be reassured by the fact that the auction house would give them a guaranteed minimum, and it was a very straightforward system.”

As auctions became more in fashion, guarantees became more a tactic for making sure a work went to Christie’s over Sotheby’s and vice-versa, which led to deal sweeteners like sellers no longer having to pay a higher commission on guaranteed works, and then, in the 1990s, the development of the third-party guarantee. Third-party guarantees are what they sound like, guarantees where the work is backed by a third party rather than the house, often a collector who might receive a percentage of the amount the work goes over its guarantee.

Nash said guarantees tend to proliferate during boom times but now seems to be a time of particular expansion, with Sotheby’s refinancing this past August so that it could increase its “maximum permissible amount of net outstanding auction guarantees” from $300 million to $600 million, according to an SEC filing.

Nash, it should be said, no longer endorses guarantees and what they’ve become. He said he wasn’t sure that new collectors necessarily understand the system, and that it distorts perceptions of artists’ markets.

“Did you realize if you were sitting in the sales room and you were bidding against the guarantor, that if he wins it he’s going to be paying quite a lot less than you would?” Nash said. And, he said, “It is sort of the same as insider trading, because the guarantor, the auction gallery have given them as much information as they can to induce him to be the guarantor.”

Gouzer thinks worries about high prices are unjustified.

“In many ways, I think that if you pay the highest price, you’re getting the best deal,” he said, after he’d picked up his surfboard from a repair shop after lunch, and then drove to his house, complaining about a need to refuel his pickup. The house is an open, two-story place not far from Julian Schnabel’s. Wetsuits were draped over the balcony and in the garage a rack of spear guns hangs like they are themselves trophies. (The fish itself goes in the freezer—like most spearfishers, Gouzer likes to eat what he shoots.)

The record-breaking pieces are now famous in their own right for breaking records, he said, and moreover, a new record theoretically raises the price of all works by the artist. “People rolled their eyes at the Kippenberger selling for $20 million but I guarantee the next time a Kippenberger of that quality comes up at auction it’s going to go for $20 million and people won’t bat an eye.” (Christie’s actually does have a similar one coming up this Wednesday, estimated to sell for $15 million to $20 million.)

“Guaranteed art allows people to do business,” he shrugged. And if now he says he has 15 people he can call who will guarantee almost anything for him because they trust him so much, “we’re never looking for guarantors. We have more people willing to jump with us than we have works of art.”

Gouzer’s attitude about guarantees came about by necessity as much as by design.

“When I first came to New York,” in 2007 from Sotheby’s London office, he said, “I used to ask people for a cigarette on the street, just so I could talk to them.” He felt on the outside of things and Sotheby’s frustrated him in its reliance on “the three Ds,” death, debt and divorce. “It was a very passive, friendly relationship,” with sellers, he said. He saw older specialists going from “gala to gala,” in the hopes that lots would land on his lap. For a guy like him with “no pedigree, no background,” who’d much rather be playing soccer or hanging out downtown, it seemed as though he had no hope of competing, even if he’d tried to become chummy with the heads of estates.

With the growth of the market he saw the business becoming more of a business anyway. “The collectors changed with the prices going up, and if they have a $50 million estate they’re not just going to give it to a friend,” he said.

So instead, he would cold call potential sellers promising large, guaranteed sums for their works, calling or texting many times until he heard back, often with success. Guarantors need not even be close friends, since any Basquiat collector has a natural interest in making sure Basquiats sell for high amounts in public, so Gouzer could count on numbers rather than personal relationships there too.

Frank Moore, a collector who has been aggressively courted by Gouzer (and is now friendly with him), said that he was impressed at how high he had gone with his guaranteed offer for a work he was trying to get him to sell.

“Some people come up with an idea of what they think is high but it’s ridiculous because they don’t know the market,” Moore said. “Loic knows the market and he knows that there’s a certain market for an artist and a certain market for certain works by that artist and that those two markets are separate.”

Gouzer saw himself at the moment of a “changing of the guard.” Not everyone felt the same way and his aggressive guarantee-oriented style, along with a few other personnel issues—among them having a falling out with the company’s chief auctioneer Tobias Meyer, who declined to comment for this article—led to his being pushed out of the contemporary department and leaving Sotheby’s in December 2010.

But Christie’s bid high on that which Sotheby’s had sold at a loss. Gouzer was in talks to join an art consultancy over the holidays when that following January Brett Gorvy—Christie’s international head of contemporary art—took a five-hour train ride from Lucerne, where he was spending the holidays with his family, to Verbier, where Loic was spending his. The two had a long lunch as Gorvy tried to sell Gouzer on Christie’s. The two got on well (in their interviews both men, with typical auction house hyperbole, independently described the other as a “genius”), and Gouzer seemed sold by the time Gorvy hopped on the train back to Lucerne.

Gorvy said he knew he wanted Gouzer because his energy and aggression would be useful in the new market that was developing. He’d heard stories about Gouzer’s clashes with Sotheby’s, how others in his department balked at his 2010 decision to guarantee an abstract Gerhard Richter painting from 1992 for $5 million despite the fact that it had sold for just $1.2 million five years prior at Christie’s. After market downturns, like the one in 2008, auction houses have to buy-in more works and tend to be more hesitant about guarantees, but this one was third-party and the work sold to a phone bidder for a whopping $11.3 million, over an estimate of $5.5 million to $7.5 million. This vindicated Gouzer, Gorvy said, and helped lift the Richter abstract market to its current height.

Plus, Gorvy said, “I liked the idea that he’d been kicked out of Sotheby’s and that he’d fought with Tobias Meyer, who’s been my nemesis for most of my career.”

The collector Adam Lindemann, over the phone, also said he liked Gouzer’s aggressive prices. “I first met him through Christoph Van de Weghe and I found him young and energetic and cocky. I didn’t really bother with him.” The two became friends, though, after Gouzer’s name came up when Lindemann was looking for someone to accompany him on a high-octane ski trip to Alaska. He soon came to admire his business sense too. Gouzer’s role in an $18.6-million guaranteed Calder sale, he said, paved the way for the new Calder record achieved this past spring, $25.9 million.

“There’s no reason why if you’ve got a $100 million [Alberto] Giacometti you can’t have a $50 million Calder,” Lindemann said. “So I think he’s got a good radar for these things.”

The dealer Philippe Ségalot, when asked to compare “If I Live,” Gouzer’s personally curated sale, with his own for Phillips de Pury in 2010, or any of his own when he ran the contemporary department at Christie’s before that, said his own were much more of a “self-portrait” rather than being market-driven and that Gouzer’s was more “willing to take risks with guarantees” (though he emphasized that he was sure Gouzer liked all the work in the sale). He also said he strove to keep his estimates low, but again attributed this to the market.

Ségalot also said he wouldn’t have necessarily included younger artists like Louis Eisner and Alex Israel in his own sales but that in this market “if you wait too long you’re going to turn around” and see them making six figures, which means then it’s too late to invest.

At his house in Montauk, Gouzer said this was why he’d included some younger artists in his sale and that he’d never meant to infringe on the territory of Phillips (which dropped “de Pury” after the departure of its chairman and auctioneer Simon de Pury in 2012), the smallest of the three auction houses and the traditional place younger art trades publicly.

Gouzer’s one-off “If I Live” was also initially scheduled for Monday, one hour before Phillips’, but this too, he said, was not an attempt to move in on Phillips’ territory, and blamed an error in the calendar shared by all the houses. (Phillips then moved theirs to Thursday, after Gouzer’s, Christie’s $745 million proper contemporary sale—the highest ever single auction total—and Sotheby’s. Phillips took in $114.1 million, below its all-sale low estimate of $124 million. After the sale then-CEO Michael McGinnis, obliquely referencing Christie’s scheduling, said the move wasn’t “fair to our consignors.”)

More importantly, he said, there wasn’t that much young art in his sale. He isn’t interested in it. “There’s a whole structure in place to keep bad art or mediocre art in place,” he said of supposed young art speculators like the collector Stefan Simchowitz. “It’s a house of cards.”

Shortly after this Gouzer paused to answer his Blackberry. “Hi AAaaaaadam,” he said playfully, as he had when Lindemann, who happens to have a place in Montauk, called him in the car earlier. They’d planned to go surfing together, a hobby Lindemann introduced him to a few years ago and the collector was asking him to come over and check out the waves.

At Lindemann’s Gouzer and his friends trudged with him over to the bluffs and watched the waves in silence for a while, standing between the Franz West and Urs Fischer at either end of the spacious back yard. Dan Loeb—the activist hedge fund investor and new Sotheby’s board member following his calls for that public company to lower its overhead—also stopped by to scope the waves. Everyone besides Loeb decided the waves might be better near Montauk’s famous lighthouse and formed a caravan over to the beach at its base, Gouzer fretting about his nearly empty gas tank. They grabbed their boards from the truck bed and mingled with some beach bum types in the parking lot.

“It’s good that you’re here,” Gouzer said to me as he walked with his board down to the beach, “So you can know what goes through my head all day while I’m at the office.” Finding lots to sell is not so different from surfing, where the goal is to find the right point at which one joins the wave. Nor is it so different from spearfishing. “It’s about efficiency, it’s about knowing your environment, but there’s more to it. We call it ‘being fishy,’ it’s where you swim like a fish so they don’t notice you, get up close to them—”

“Then you fuck ’em up!” said one of the beach bums, who’d been walking nearby. (That’s putting it mildly: later back at the house we’d watch some slow-motion spearfishing videos on a laptop. Tuna can rarely be taken down with a single bolt, and after the shot a spearfisher usually has to reel in the fish and stab it many times in the brain.)

At some point it was decided that it would not be best for me to join them in the water since I have no surfing experience. Instead I sat on the rocky beach with Pablo, a burly man who works for Lindemann and handles his boards, something of a caddy. Pablo and I both spent a lot of time on our phones, as it was hard to perceive who among the wet-suited dots far out where the waves were breaking, was our crew. Gouzer stayed out longer than anyone, and floated far down the beach, in the end just paddling as his friends dried off on the shore.

“Our business is in such an infancy that even a failure is a success,” Gouzer said as he drove back from the beach. He referred to the risk he took with his semi-controversial skateboarding video, though he also meant with his sale itself. The surfboards outnumbered the trucks passengers as they rested in the bed—his friends and brother had returned in a separate car to get ready for an evening reggae concert. The car slowed and Gouzer pulled over to the shoulder. He shut off the car then tried to start it again but the engine failed to turn over. He was completely out of gas.

Gouzer tried calling his brother, who said he’d come, but shortly after a car stopped on the road to the left. It was Pablo. “You need gas?” he asked. “I’ll get you five liters.”

Talk turned to the art market as we waited in the cab. Earlier he’d been evasive on the topic of people like Wade Guyton who, at the time of “If I Live,” implied Gouzer’s sale artificially inflated the market (“Do you know Guyton? I’d like to have a coffee with him sometime”), but, as often that day, the metaphors were irritatingly present. I asked if he ever worried that he was contributing to the kind of house of cards he described Simchowitz and other young art speculators as building, only at a higher level. What if the next Kippenberger doesn’t sell for $20 million? “You know, Wade Guyton,” I said, referencing the Instagram account, might be worried about “the whole thing running out of gas.”

Gouzer thought for a minute. “The only thing we can do,” he said, “is we’re gonna smell the wind or whatever. If something is gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. If the wave is gonna come, you might as well take it. And that’s the way I wanted to do it. Those prices would happen with us,” or without he meant, presumably, “that price is gonna happen. Our job is to make it happen as smooth as possible.

“I understand for artists it’s different. DiCaprio, his career was made overnight by Titanic, but other actors they do a bad movie and their career is ruined,” he said. “So I understand. I understand there’s a reality check for all artists but the art world needs to catch up.”

Klein, Calder, and Basquiat, for example, he said, people couldn’t believe those prices until they happened, then they did. “The good thing is we’re not playing with lives,” he said. “We’re not playing with the economies of other countries, we’re not playing with mortgage packages. At the end of the day we’re playing with art.” He paused. “But it is amazing, the effect you can have.”

Gouzer’s methodology comes with drawbacks: it’s not as though every Basquiat now sells for a record amount and if, as Nash speculated, the new buyers in places like Asia don’t necessarily understand the auction house machinery they’ll soon learn it. Then there’s the fact that guarantees cut into the bottom line, since an auction house has to either split its profits with a guarantor or buy a work itself. (There’s no telling what Christie’s, which unlike Sotheby’s is a private company owned by the billionaire Francois Pinault, spends on guarantees, or on other deals. Peter Brant recently told The New York Times that he paid no commission on the $58.4 million sale of his Jeff Koons balloon dog last year.)

Gorvy said Christie’s was happy with Gouzer’s sale, even if they won’t be doing it again. They may do some other one-off, he said, just not with Gouzer. And even if there were many guarantees in “If I Live,” Gorvy said many lots went so far beyond them that the house had a good night. The Kippenberger that sold for $18.6 million, he said, went for double its third-party guarantee. Plus there were many other lots without guarantees.

“Ultimately people see the success that he brings,” Gorvy said of Gouzer. “Everyone wants to be with a winner. If you’ve got a guy who has predicted the future for art as well and consistently as Loic—he’s like a Steve Cohen in the vein of art because, you know, everyone wanted to get into Steve Cohen’s fund when it opened because of all its returns. So I see him very much a Steve Cohen figure.”

Minus the insider trading, I said. “Exactly, exactly,” said Gorvy.

Back at the house Gouzer made sashimi out of some mahi mahi he’d shot the day before. “All everybody wants to talk about is art,” he said. He wanted to talk conservation.

When the guarantee came in for Yves Klein’s FC1 (1962), the one that would set the record at $36.5 million, the well-off seller apparently told Gouzer that it was for so much money that he didn’t know what to do with it. Gouzer suggested that one or two of those millions go to Oceana, a conservation nonprofit he discovered for that purpose, where he now sits on the board. A cynic would say that the partnership, well advertised in the lot’s catalogue listing, helped the price go up since people are looser with their charity dollars, but it’s hard to doubt Gouzer’s passion for the environment if you’ve ever spent time with him around the ocean.

He believes that portioning off parts of the world so that they cannot be fished, hunted, or otherwise developed is key to the protection of the Earth, one of the things he found he had in common with DiCaprio, whom he says he met through mutual friends. DiCaprio has an affinity for tigers, as does Gouzer for sharks. Both subscribe to the apex predator theory. “Apex predators are a sign of health,” Gouzer said. “By protecting the sharks, you protect the environment, you protect what’s under them.”

Of the $38.8 million raised by the DiCaprio auction, Gouzer said $3 million has gone to Oceana, $3 million to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which works with a variety of conservation efforts, and $3 million has gone to the World Wildlife Fund. The rest he’s not certain, but said that there’s a committee at Christie’s that was established to handle the dispensation of the rest of the funds.

Even if he says that’s where his real passion lies (“My office at Christie’s looks like I’m about to move out in five minutes”), Gouzer said a career change to full-time philanthropy is unlikely for the near future. “I want to continue raising money,” for his cause through auctions, he said. “I know how to raise money, how to convince people how to spend money, or give money. It’s pretty similar.”

He says he talks to his clients about the environment frequently. “I talk about it not only because it’s what I’m most interested in but because maybe I can use art as a Trojan Horse to get to know every billionaire in the world,” he said. “And once I do maybe I can do a mass conversion and say, ‘Okay, you’ve spent enough on art. Now it’s time to spend on conservation.'”

Led by an $84.2-million Barnett Newman, Christie’s New York pulled off another record auction last night, selling $744.9 million in contemporary art over a two-and-a-half-hour sale in a jam-packed salesroom. The tally was the highest auction total ever, beating the house’s previous high of $691 million, set in November.

“That’s $83,000 a second,” noted Todd Levin, director of New York’s Levin Art Group, after the sale.

Two works sold for north of $80 million, four for better than $50 million, and 12 for upwards of $20 million.

In addition to setting a record for Newman, the sale saw auction highs for Alexander Calder ($25.9 million), Joseph Cornell ($7.8 million), Robert Gober ($4.2 million), Robert Mangold ($965,000), Joan Mitchell ($11.9 million), Martin Puryear ($1.8 million), Lucas Samaras ($281,000), Salvatore Scarpitta ($1.4 million) and Frank Stella ($6.7 million). The price fetched by the Joan Mitchell canvas was also the highest amount at auction for any work by a female artist.

With 72 works, the sale was expected to bring in the region of half a billion dollars, the same amount the house sold last May—when it achieved what was at the time the highest total in auction history. Only four works failed to sell. A third of buyers were new to Christie’s, according to the house.

“It doesn’t get better than that,” New York dealer Alberto Mugrabi told A.i.A. after the sale.

“Amazing,” said New York dealer Philippe Ségalot. “A fantastic sale. The best sale ever. Amazing. Amazing. That’s the only word I can say.”

“We are riding the crest of a wave,” New York dealer Nicholas Maclean told A.i.A. on his way out of the salesroom partway through the evening.

“Wow!” said Miami collector Mera Rubell. “Floating millions!”

The house was fresh off a successful sale of contemporary art the previous night, organized by in-house specialist Loic Gouzer and focusing on younger artists and buyers. Estimated at up to $124 million, that sale achieved $134.6 million and set records for a dozen artists, from Joe Bradley to Thomas Schütte.

Last night’s top lot, estimated in the region of $50 million, was Newman’s Black Fire I (1961), a 9½-foot-high work in black pigment on canvas. It nearly doubled his previous auction high of $43.8 million, fetched by Onement VI (1953) at Sotheby’s New York in May 2013. Black Fire I had been on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for nearly 30 years, and went to an anonymous phone bidder after a five-minute contest.

Fetching $80.8 million from an Asian bidder via Christie’s Hong Kong-based specialist Xin Li, after less than two minutes of bidding, was the evening’s second-priciest lot, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984). The artist’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) rang up at $142.4 million at Christie’s in November 2013, becoming the most expensive work of art sold at auction. The Edwards work is “one of the portraits that I’ve done that has really rather worked,” Bacon said, according to the catalogue. The three-canvas painting shows an East London bar manager who was the painter’s closest companion in his last years. It went for just $4.5 million at Christie’s London in 2001. The New York Times has reported that the piece was sold by the Taiwanese entrepreneur and collector Pierre Chen.

Several of the evening’s top lots are bound for new homes in Asia. Xin Li, at times wielding three phones, also conveyed the winning bids on four other works in the sale’s top 10: a $66.2-million Rothko abstraction, a $33.8-million Koons sculpture, a $29.3-million Richter abstraction, and the record-setting Calder mobile, which dangled above bidders’ heads in the Rockefeller Center salesroom.

“And Asia is not just China,” Christie’s Brett Gorvy told A.i.A. after the sale. “Tonight we had clients from Malaysia, Hong Kong-based Taiwanese, and Indonesian bidders participating at the highest levels.”

Larry Gagosian, bidding from the sales floor, brought home two of the evening’s top 10 lots: Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (1964), for $62.9 million, and Christopher Wool’s If You (1992), for $23.7 million.

Race Riot, a 5½-foot-wide four-panel work in acrylic and ink on linen, repeats in red, white and blue an image published in Life magazine showing police dogs lunging at a black man during a 1963 demonstration in Birmingham, Ala. The same work brought $627,000 at Christie’s New York in November 1992.

“We love Warhol as the master of Pop, with his Marilyns and Campbell’s Soup cans, but Warhol was really about the underbelly of American society,” Christie’s specialist Sara Friedlander told A.i.A. before the sale. “Nothing is more illustrative of that than Race Riot.”

Wool’s 8-foot-high enamel-on-aluminum painting, offered by an unnamed European collection, reads “If you can’t take a joke you can get the fuck out of my house” in the artist’s trademark black block letters. The work’s high estimate was $30 million. Wool had a 2013-14 solo show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

“This is not a frothy market,” Gorvy said at a post-sale press conference. “We are in the middle of a fantastic moment, rising with great foundation stones.”

One New York dealer sounded a more pessimistic note.

“The speculators have finally succeeded in commodifying art,” Frances Beatty, of Richard Feigen & Co., told A.i.A. after the sale, “which is a triumph for them and a disaster for the artists and for the culture, because it has made the speculators the leaders rather than the artists.”

The postwar and contemporary art sales continue tonight at Sotheby’s New York, which is estimated to ring up as much as $450 million, and Phillips New York Thursday, estimated to tally up to $185 million.