This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Leafing through some old copies of The Connoisseur and Apollo magazine from the 1960s through to the 1990s, I was struck by how many titans of the art market have vanished from the scene, and how few remain from that era.
Apollo continues today as a magazine about art, aimed at the serious collector. The Connoisseur was a wonderful monthly magazine-cum-journal — with a healthy mix of advertisements and scholarly articles, the focus was squarely on the traditional art market.
The fact that it and its scholarly article-based approach has vanished says much about the way art is presented and — dare I say it — “consumed” today.
Of course everyone’s attention span has shrunk, especially for the non-essential world of buying art. Long-form writing about, say, a French 18th century cabinetmaker, is restricted to specialist and scholarly journals and the French magazine L’Objet d’Art. Perhaps, then, not much has really changed in the niche collecting markets of Asian art, furniture, armour and so on.
When we get to the really expensive works things do seem to have evolved, and this is partly due to the changing tastes of the super-rich. Consider the sale of the “Winter Egg”, a masterpiece by Fabergé, and one of the few Imperial Easter eggs made for the Russian imperial family in private hands.
It had sold at Christie’s twice previously, each time for a world-record price, in 1994 and 2002, and returned to the market last November at Christie’s in London, where it sold on its reserve price for £22.9m (inc. fees). Was the buyer unknown to Christie’s? Did they spot the video on Instagram and decide to buy it?
Stranger things have happened, as was demonstrated by the sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi — perhaps the greatest piece of art market marketing ever, considering that it took a committee to decide if it was by the hand of Leonardo, even after it had been much restored.
Never mind the somersaults of ownership changes, the debate about its inclusion in the Leonardo exhibition in the National Gallery in London in 2011–12, and the legal wrangling that followed the picture as it made its way to the auction block in New York in 2017 — where it was included, imaginatively, in a sale of contemporary art, and sold for a staggering $450m, reputedly to Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia who was until then a buyer not well known at auction.
The picture’s pre-sale global tour was an absolute magnet for art lovers; they queued around the block just to catch a glimpse of the picture. It is a story that is well told in the 2021 documentary film The Lost Leonardo.
But when to dial up the marketing effort and when not? It seems that success at the top end now relies heavily on marketing, and the power of the auction house executives’ marketing department is such that if objects, or whole swathes of groups of objects fail to make the cut for prime marketing, then those works risk being left for dead, at least if and when an owner chooses to sell at auction.
Sotheby’s move to the Breuer building is essentially a massive calculated marketing spend. The building is a highly visible trophy venue, a beacon of cultural commerce amongst the luxury boutiques on Madison Avenue.
Perhaps brilliant marketing has even shaped the tastes of a generation of buyers: the power of auction house marketing teams has long exceeded those with real expertise and the specialist knowledge of art on which the auction houses base their reputations for offering world-class works of art backed by the imprimatur of their brand.
And what of the rest of the market — how do dealers and galleries present themselves today?
Essentially there are specialist and knowledgeable dealers that present themselves to museums and a small band of collectors who know their stuff, and perhaps their approach has altered little since the 1960s. Then there are the edgy gallerists presenting new, cutting-edge contemporary art, looking to uncover the next great name.
Of the rest, looking to capture the wider, mainly lower-value market, some sell to decorators and clients looking to furnish, others to those starting to buy for interest or personal reasons.
Here the attention economy of social media has been a gift: entire cottage industries of antiques dealers, antiquarian book dealers and students selling old master drawings have sprung up, some with huge followings.
Does this translate into sales? Perhaps. Does it draw in new “audiences”? Certainly, and over the long term, if such audiences and interests can be sustained, that must be a good way for the fragmentary and highly specialised areas of the art markets to grow.
