Sotheby’s has announced further downsizing, including cuts in the number of sales in London and Amsterdam, with the concomitant decrease in staff, and its desire to limit consignments to those items with a minimum valuation exceeding USD$5,000. Nothing really surprising here, with the salesroom ostensibly returning to its former (profitable) business model. The fact is, none of the major houses has ever really been equipped to sell primarily decorative material. Face it, it takes as much time and effort to consign, catalog, and market a $1,000 item as it does a $10,000 item, with the better item, at least for the auction house, far more remunerative. Sotheby’s has for several years now sought to get out of the retail auction business, and one wonders if Christie’s, faced with the same high overhead as Sotheby’s, won’t, finally, follow suit. Christie’s still offers its ‘Interiors’ sales at its South Kensington, Rockefeller Plaza, and Paris locations, but the frequency of sales, and the exotic magazine format catalogs, must surely dig deeply into the +/- 30% buyer’s commission the house charges on most of the lots on offer. Bonhams? With expansion in New York and maintenance of so many smaller regional houses in England, it cannot help but feel a pinch.
Times being the way they are, it is easy to conclude that sales activity has been insufficiently brisk to justify operating at the levels to which the auction houses have expanded in the last several years. No doubt, everyone at all levels of the antiques and fine art trade has felt some considerable contraction. With all that, one also has to realize that, in the auction field there has been a considerable rush to the center and the lower end of the trade, too, with an increasing number of players offering online auction or auction-like platforms. The first and largest of these has made money, although a bit less now than they were, but some of the other newcomers, whose revenue is derived mostly from those in the antiques trade who are obliged to compensate the platform whether they sell anything or not, are doubtless seeing their revenues shrink as their participating dealers go out of business. Even so, we see online platforms introduced nearly weekly. Virtual sites are cheap to establish- and can disappear, along with those responsible for the establishment and operation of the site, without a trace.
Although the actual amount of antique and fine art material available on the market at any given point in time, I’d venture to say, is fairly constant, overexposure on the worldwide web makes it seem as though there exists something of a glut. As serious collectors and surviving dealers of English antiques can tell you, there is if anything a dearth of fine quality material coming up in the auctions that are a traditional run-up to Grosvenor House and Olympia. An expression we hear in England, ‘spoiled for choice’, is appropriate to quote here, as it appears that downsizing in the auction business has possibly as much to do with competition amongst sales platforms than it does with general economic malaise.