25. How to Sell £200 Million of Art in a Week (with Katharine Arnold)

You say you've been doing this for 16 years, and I'd be really interested to know what changes you've seen over that period, both the sort of works of art that you offer, the sort of clients that you offer, the motivations.

Talk to us a little bit about, give us a longer view.

So if I think back to when I began at Christie's, I had actually, my first job out of my master's degree in university was on a trading floor in an investment bank.

So if I start back then, because I remember vividly being on the trading floor at Merrill Lynch during September the 15th, 08, which was of course the same night that Damien Hirst had his sale.

beautiful inside my head forever, which was a pretty landmark moment for the art market.

And it meant something totally different to me at that time.

And I left the bank shortly afterwards, went to the Courtauld and then began at Christie's.

And over that period of time, what was so interesting is that the market had a correction and then quantitative easing and very low interest rates, which was sustained for a very long time, actually helped to very rapidly fuel the art market.

And when I look back at the sales that we did Around 2011, 2012, there was incredibly good quality art and we did see very strong prices begin to sort of be generated for those great things.

Like, for example, in October of 2011, we sold an extraordinary candle painting by Gerhard Richter.

I think it was priced

at

£6 million and it made £11 million.

Painting like that today would of course be worth much more, probably in the region of $40 million.

But what was interesting, I actually did an exercise when I went back and looked at everything that was sold in that period and looking at the best quality works of art.

And it's really fascinating because There are no accidents in a way.

All the best quality things all the way through that period always sold to very good collectors.

There was no sort of aberration where someone just stumbled across something great.

People tended to know what they were looking at.

I would say that for the things that have evolved over that period, there were collectors who came into the market, again, collector with a small C, who were definitely speculating.

They were speculating because of such low interest rates.

And those individuals are much less present in the market today than they were.

The great collectors remain, but some of those speculators that changed certain aspects of the market have disappeared.

So, I think the other thing that has changed also, when I look at certain works of art that performed incredibly well at that time in 2011, 2012, some of the people who are bidding on those works are no longer active in the market.

They are just the generation that is no longer active.