One of the world’s chief auction houses has put the pandemic behind it, thanks mainly to millennials who splurged on everything from designer watches to digital artworks.
After suffering double-digit sales losses two years ago, Sotheby’s said Wednesday it sold $7.3 billion in art in 2021, a new high bar for the 277-year-old company. That figure breaks down to $6 billion in auction sales in 2021, up 71% from the year before, and $1.3 billion in privately brokered art sales, up nearly a third from the year before.
Rivals Christie’s and Phillips said they intend to release their year-end sales figures later this week or early next.
Sotheby’s Chief Executive Charles Stewart said 44% of the auction house’s bidders this past year were first-timers, including younger collectors who started buying luxury items such as handbags, jewelry and wine online during the pandemic. They stuck around after the house started gradually conducting more sales in person this year, lifting Sotheby’s sales of luxury goods to over $1 billion. That is the first time any luxury category has crossed that mark at the house.
“Younger collectors are playing at a high level we’ve never seen before,” Mr. Stewart said. “Luxury has become their on-ramp to collect considerably more.”
In a key move, these millennials are already starting to migrate to a broader array of collecting categories including rare books, antiquities and vintage cars, he said. This shift marks a departure from past market cycles, where new bidders tended to focus primarily on contemporary art while largely ignoring less-trendy categories.
The house’s $4.3 billion in sales of modern and contemporary art still represent a new high for the house, but prices soared across the board for objects with youthful appeal, from a $9.6 million Patek Philippe wristwatch to a $1.5 million pair of Michael Jordan sneakers in the past year.
Overall, the house sold 57 pieces valued above $15 million, with a $92.2 million Botticelli portrait ranking as its top sale of the year.
Sandro Botticelli’s ‘Young Man Holding a Roundel’
Photo: Sotheby’s
Sales were also strong in books and manuscripts (see that $43.2 million copy of the U.S. Constitution) and Latin American art (that $35 million Frida Kahlo). The house auctioned $242 million worth of old masters, its highest total since 2011.
Like the rest of the art world, Sotheby’s also hustled this year to make room for the mainstream arrival of digital art. They invited tech-savvy bidders to pay for art with cryptocurrency for the first time and fielded live bids for a few pieces this fall in ether, a cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. The house said it sold nearly $100 million in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens on the blockchain often attached to images that exist only online. Sotheby’s sold the source code for the World Wide Web as an NFT for $5.4 million.
“Markets are clearly strong across the board, but collectors felt like it was smart to focus on art,” Mr. Stewart said.
Sotheby’s owner, French telecom tycoon Patrick Drahi, could be considering an initial public offering of the auction house two years after he bought Sotheby’s and took it private, according to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday. The report cited anonymous potential advisers. Sotheby’s, reached afterward, declined to comment.
Write to Kelly Crow at [email protected]
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