I once spent a frantic Tuesday afternoon in a client’s basement, staring at a stack of oil on canvas that looked less like a curated investment and more like a slow-motion disaster. They had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on works by artists they loved, only to tuck them away in a space that […]
I remember sitting in the back office of my gallery in 2008, watching a collector stare at a spreadsheet provided by a “specialist” that looked more like a work of fiction than a financial document. He was convinced his dusty assemblage of mid-century abstracts was a gold mine, but the numbers were inflated by nothing […]
I remember a Tuesday in 2014, standing in a client’s hallway, watching a professional mover tilt a heavy, framed landscape just a fraction too far. There was no crash, just a sickening, dull thud against the doorframe that made my stomach drop. That client had spent years meticulously curating their home, yet they had absolutely […]
I remember a Tuesday afternoon in my old gallery, sitting across from a woman who had just inherited a collection of mid-century abstracts. She was terrified, clutching her handbag, convinced that if she didn’t find a “specialist” with a velvet-lined office, she was being swindled. She’d been told that understanding how dealers buy from private […]
I remember a young painter—talented, earnest, and utterly terrified—standing in my gallery ten years ago, clutching a canvas she’d made during a period of intense personal struggle. She wasn’t looking to show it; she was looking to liquidate it because her rent was due. She asked me, with a voice trembling like a leaf, about […]
I remember a man in my gallery back in the late nineties—a lovely, well-meaning gentleman who had just dropped sixty thousand pounds on a series of large-scale abstract oils. He came back to me six months later, looking slightly frantic, asking if he could “rebalance his portfolio” by offloading the pieces to fund a new […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2008, watching a collector stare at a beautifully textured oil on canvas—30 x 40 inches, 2004—and ask me, with total sincerity, if he could write it off as a hedge against the volatility of the FTSE 100. It’s the great, shimmering lie of the industry: the idea […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in 2014, watching a young painter stare at a glossy auction report with a look of pure, unadulterated hope. He thought those rising numbers meant he was finally “arriving,” but I knew better. He was looking at a spreadsheet of blue-chip titans that had absolutely nothing to do […]
Stop treating an auction catalogue like it’s a holy text. I spent twenty-six years watching collectors—and far too many artists—stare at a hammer price as if it were an objective truth, when in reality, it’s often just a snapshot of a very specific, very loud moment in a room full of people trying to outbid […]
I remember sitting in a cramped back office in 1998, staring at a contract for a mid-career painter who was about to walk into an auction house with nothing but hope and a very expensive set of oil canvases. The broker was using all the right buzzwords—risk mitigation, liquidity, market stability—to explain a deal that, […]