Interview with Rajeev, part 2 of 5.

Here’s the continuation of yesterday’s post. After getting his masters at Christie’s, Rajeev worked at Saffron Art, an Indian auction house, based in Mumbai, with an office in New York. I asked him to talk about the world of auction houses:

An auction house is a big player in the ecosystem that is the art world. In the art world you have all these different players that have their roles, and they all interact. So you have the artists, obviously making the work; galleries that represent the artist to sell the work; collectors who enjoy the work and own them. Then you have some of the big institutions, the museum, which is supposed to maintain an art collection for the public good, so it’s “in trust” for the people or for the nation. It could even be a private museum, which is a very big collector who has such a big collection that he can open a museum just to show the works that he owns. Then you have the auction house, which is, in a very abstract way, you could say, the means by which artwork changes hands. Because art is a funny thing, it’s a cultural object, it talks a lot about what the artist is or where the society that makes that artwork is, but it also has value, we pay obscene amounts of money for some of these artworks. Auction houses help artwork by driving up the price and collectors to rotate their collection so that they’re always making more money to buy more art, or raise capital to do other things. Usually, an artwork comes to auction through what they call the 3Ds. One is Death: so a collector dies, the rest of the family goes, “We have all these Picassos, we don’t like art, let’s sell them and get the millions and live well, great.” Then you have Divorce: the husband and wife, they fight over who owns the Picassos and get the money. Third, which is also very common, is Debt: a once very wealthy family has run out of money in the stock market but they still have this huge collection and the banks want the money so they have to liquidate their collection.

What happens is they agree to put the works up for auction, the auction houses then do all the marketing and the groundwork, so that when the work comes up for auction it can go for the highest price possible.

It’s a fascinating world to be a specialist in an auction house, you do many different things, you have to know the market, you have to know the client, you have to know the art obviously, so it’s a good blend of a lot of different things, it’s very fast paced.

How NOT to bid at auction
(I googled, there is such a thing as "bidding off the wall," imagine that!)