How to Sell $1 Billion Worth of Art
How to Sell $1 Billion Worth of Art
(Bloomberg View) -- Brooke Lampley doesn’t just advise art collectors, although she does plenty of that. Over the past decade, she has also helped them make purchase decisions: previously as vice president of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, and now as vice chairwoman of the fine art division at Sotheby’s. Lampley has moved paintings and sculptures that have collectively sold for more than $1 billion.
Not too shabby for someone who once thought she would end up in a sleepy museum doing curation.
There are surprising parallels between fine art sales and investing. The key question is always about valuation: How can we determine market prices for individual items that might not be especially liquid and come to market once every few decades? Auction processes can help set prices, as can buyers who specialize in specific art assets.
There are objective issues that affect the price of each item: rarity, authenticity and provenance, certainly. But other issues of valuation are clearly subjective: how sensuous, romantic, beautiful, lush or vivid a work might be. Such opinions often determine why one painting by an artist might sell for $750,000, while another from the same artist can sell for $7 million -- or even $70 million.
Some of her favorite books are referenced here. Our conversation transcript is here.
You can stream/download the full conversation, including the podcast extras, on Bloomberg, iTunes, Overcast and Soundcloud. Our earlier podcasts can all be found on iTunes, Soundcloud, Overcast and Bloomberg.
Next week, we speak with Ed Mendel, co-founder of Ned Davis Research and a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Barry Ritholtz is a Bloomberg View columnist. He founded Ritholtz Wealth Management and was chief executive and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He blogs at the Big Picture and is the author of “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy.”
To contact the author of this story: Barry Ritholtz at britholtz3@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.