After nearly 300 years of doing business in old-fashioned ways, the venerable auction house rewrote its playbook during the pandemic—and kept going, going...
the fall of 2020, a young staffer in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art department made a bold pitch to explore a new asset class, hoping to score points with Charles Stewart, the company’s new CEO. Stewart hadn’t heard of NFTs—nonfungible tokens, now famous for birthing Bored Apes and CryptoPunks—but he was intrigued. Maybe there was something in it for the venerable auction house founded in 1744.
Dual forces have pushed Sotheby’s to modernize: the pandemic and fresh ownership. In 2019, French telecom magnate Patrick Drahi took the house private in a $3.7 billion deal. The transaction concluded a two-decade period in which Sotheby’s stock dropped over 40% from June 2018 to June 2019 , revenue fell 4% in its final year as a public company and a price-fixing scandal sent its chairman, Alfred Taubman, to prison in 2002.
and an energetic CNN broadcast. Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, Olly Barker, was fitted with a newscaster’s earpiece to ensure the production booth could relay the latest bids to him. The set featured six flat-screens showing rooms in New York, Hong Kong and London fielding bids over the phone, the telecast switching back and forth from Barker and the phone rooms as a news anchor might with reporters in the field.
Much of Sotheby’s revamped business is less conventional, though. Last October, it sold a pair of Michael Jordan–worn Nikes for $1.5 million . Two months later, it moved more than $1 million worth of rare tea in Hong Kong, its first such auction and one of several concerted efforts to cater to Asia’s increasingly moneyed clientele.
Now Sotheby’s is planning a third iteration of what it calls its Natively Digital sales, a name meant to recall the industry’s stately, semiannual evening sales.
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