Gross sales at Sotheby’s dropped by 23% in 2024, the public sale home introduced Thursday (23 January), after a turbulent yr for one of many largest artwork sellers on the earth in a difficult world market.
Public sale gross sales fell by 28% final yr, representing $4.6bn. The toughest-hit section of the public sale home was fine-art gross sales, which made $3.8bn, 31% lower than in 2023, Sotheby’s says. Luxurious fared higher, dropping by solely 4%, making $2.3bn, the second-consecutive yr the division exceeded $2bn.
Sotheby’s says that final yr’s 85% sell-through charge throughout all classes was an auction-house file, and that demand remained robust throughout a number of all worth ranges. Works priced at greater than $15m acquired extra bidders per lot in 2024 than in 2023.
Sotheby’s narrowly outperformed rival Christie’s, which final month reported an estimated $5.7bn in gross sales for 2024. Sotheby’s outcomes over the previous few years “demonstrates our success by totally different market situations and cycles”, chief govt Charles Stewart mentioned on Thursday.
Personal gross sales bloom in troublesome market
A uncommon level of progress within the down market was Sotheby’s private-sales division, which noticed gross sales improve by 17% from 2023 to $1.4bn, the second highest within the firm’s historical past.
“It is a reminder that in occasions of market uncertainty, shoppers usually favour the discretion, the value management and versatile timing that personal transactions supply,” says Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America.
Of final yr’s non-public gross sales, 20% of worth got here from works priced at greater than $20m, and the preferred artists have been Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alberto Giacometti, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol—not not like at public sale, Dennison notes.
Whereas 2024’s worth fell for single-owner gross sales—which have lengthy been seen as a lifeline for public sale homes—they nonetheless accounted for 25% of whole heaps offered, and can stay a key a part of Sotheby’s technique shifting ahead, the public sale home says.
Layoffs, purchaser’s charges and new investments
Final yr was a tumultuous one for the public sale home. In early 2024, Sotheby’s launched a brand new purchaser’s-fee construction that it went on to reverse simply 10 months later after the choices “proved much less enticing to potential sellers”, Stewart informed The Artwork Newspaper final month. The corporate additionally weathered a number of rounds of layoffs in its New York and London places of work. And Sotheby’s core earnings had fallen by a staggering 88% through the first half of the yr, in response to a report from the Monetary Instances, which cited a doc despatched to traders shortly earlier than the announcement that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-wealth fund had taken a $1bn stake within the public sale home.
Like different main public sale homes, Sotheby’s is working to develop its world attain in hopes of reaching new buyer bases. New areas in Hong Kong and Paris have helped double foot visitors to Sotheby’s places, a development the public sale home expects will proceed with the New York headquarters’ relocation to the Breuer Constructing, which is scheduled for later this yr. In 2024, Sotheby’s counted a file variety of patrons within the Center East, and subsequent month it’s going to maintain Saudi Arabia’s first main public sale, regardless of criticism over the dominion’s file of human-rights abuses and censorship of free speech (A Sotheby’s spokesperson informed The Artwork Newspaper in November that the nation has “undergone a sustained interval of unprecedented and constructive change” over the previous ten years).
Going into 2025, Sotheby’s executives challenge a way of optimism.
“We’re seeing a renewed sense of collector confidence, fueled partly, after all, by the falling interest-rate atmosphere we’re in and larger readability following the latest presidential elections in the US,” says Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe.
Stewart says the corporate had roughly $800m “in [the] pipeline” for the primary few months of 2025, which might make the primary quarter one of many largest in Sotheby’s historical past.
