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, […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2008, staring at a catalog for a mid-career landscape painter, trying to explain to a very confused, very polite collector why the auction house’s figure looked nothing like the artist’s studio price. There is this pervasive, almost sacred myth that how estimates are set is some sort […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded auction room in London, watching a woman—a lovely, sharp-witted collector I’d known for years—get caught in the rhythmic, hypnotic trance of the auctioneer’s gavel. She wasn’t bidding on the work; she was bidding against the person sitting three rows ahead of her, driven by a sudden, […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded auction room in Gloucestershire, watching a collector’s face go from pure triumph to absolute horror in the span of thirty seconds. He had just won a lovely oil on canvas—12 x 12 inches, 1994—for what he thought was a bargain, only to realize the final invoice […]