How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s
But the time of the acquisition of Drahi de Sotheby’s was regrettable. Six months after the conclusion of the agreement, the coronavirus pandemic closed the art market. The main auctions, led by Sotheby’s, rushed to take their business online, but public sales have dropped by about a third. Then, for a while, the good times were ruled. But now the art market has become a stressed and anxious area, enduring its first prolonged contraction in a generation.
During the same period, the broader commercial empire of Drahi experienced the worst crisis in his career. After having amassed sixty billion dollars of debts, Altice was struck by the rise in interest rates while seeing performance indifferent by his marks on both sides of the Atlantic. During the summer of 2023, one of the closest trade partners of Drahi was arrested following an investigation into corruption. Altice USA shares are currently negotiating around $ 2.50, less than a tenth of their prize in 2019.
During all this time, Sotheby’s assumed a new unstable identity: like the indulgence of a billionaire and the subject of his last corporate experience. During a hearing in the French Senate in 2022, Drahi said he had not bought Sotheby’s for power or influence. Instead, he intended to triple the value of his investment. “It is always the objective of the entrepreneur,” he said.
For those who were taken in experience, he was scorching to the extreme. Since 2019, hundreds of employees have left Sotheby – up to a quarter of the workforce, according to certain estimates, including dozens of specialists who provide essential shipments with the results of the company. (Sotheby’s challenges this.) Last year, sales fell by twenty-three percent. As the auction house has reduced costs and staff, its portfolio company, controlled by Drahi, has extracted more than a billion dollars from company dividends – to manage its debt charge.
Last fall, after a series of layoffs, Drahi sold a minority participation in Sotheby’s – a third of the company – in Adq, the Sovereign Heritage Fund for Abu Dhabi, for about a billion dollars. This decision has given rise to speculations that he could sell the company. But people close to Drahi insist that he is more likely to give up his telecommunications assets, at least in Europe, than to let go of Sotheby’s. “It’s for his grandchildren,” said the partner.
The question is what he will leave behind. Drahi and his team would not be the first or the last business titans to trip and trip in the whims of the art market. “It’s niche,” said an artistic advisor from New York. “And if you don’t understand, that’s what’s going on. These are not art people. And maybe they can never be art people.” But the other version is that Drahi deliberately hollows out one of the major auction houses in the world, transforming it of an institution of taste and knowledge into something much closer to a generic platform which fixes a price for things that have no price, taking a drop along the way. To make Sotheby is more like everything else, in other words. “I think that if he could automate this business, just put it online, to withdraw all people … This is his goal,” said a former director. “It’s just pure money.” But was it ever something else?
The word “auction” comes from Latin AUCIOWhich means “increase”. But it has always been a little more complicated than that. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus described the Babylonian custom to sell girls for marriage. The most attractive were sold first, with ascending offers; Then, the process was turned on his head, with “The Naim them” won by the pretender who would accept the smallest dowry. Auctions can be as varied as human desire. There are whispered auctions in Italy and auction of simultaneous origin in Japan. For years, the COD has been sold on the Hull fish market, in northern England, by decreasing offers (the Dutch method) before going to English or ascendant, the offers later during the day. Seventeen miles downstream, in Grimsby, fish auctions worked in the other direction.
In 193, this, the Roman Empire was sold to the most offender, a Marcus Didius Julianus, giving birth to a memorable case of the buyer’s remorse. “He spent a sleepless night; very probably turning his own reckless madness in his mind,” said Edward Gibbon. (Emperor Julianus was murdered two months later.) The auctions are built on a symmetry of illusory hope. Buyers feel a good deal, the sellers hope for a war. What you want is validated because someone else wants it too. Everyone believes in their own ability to master the situation. In 1662, Samuel Pepys, The London Diarist, looked at three ships sold at auction “by the candle” (the time it took a candle of an inch to melt) and noticed that a tenderer was particularly successful: “He told me that just like the flame was coming out, smoke descends, which is something that I have never observed before, and he knew about it before, of the last. “
The auctioneer’s task is to dramatize the possibilities of the sale while trying to control them at the same time. “To obtain the public’s confidence immediately, and after that to dominate it – as pleasant as possible,” said in 1966 Peter Wilson, a former British intelligence officer, led the company’s extension to the American market and introduced the first evening sales – with ball dresses and television cameras – to American neighborhoods and introduced the first sales of the evening – with ball and television cameras – to American districts. Even today, when people complain that a large part of the excitement of live auction has disappeared, the sales rooms for large auctions retain a singular atmosphere of politeness and extortion. Money is present as sin in church: sometimes its presence is not said; Sometimes it’s the only thing that says.
One Tuesday at the beginning of March, I stopped by the modern and contemporary auction of Sotheby in London. The equivalent sale in 2023 reported more than two hundred million dollars and was led by a Wassily Kandinsky landscape which sold for forty-five million. This year, the best batch was a great hypnotic study of a girl, “Cosmic Eyes (in the milky lake)”, by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, with an estimate of less than a quarter of this. The atmosphere was brittle and uncertain. Earlier in the day, the prices imposed by President Donald Trump had annoyed the world markets.
A few minutes before the start of the auction, the walls were bordered by Sotheby specialists, suddenly arranged by phones, while cashmere and expensive anoraks were infiltrated. Oliver Barker, the star commissioner of the company of the last decade, has slipped into his shirt. Barker always looks the happiest when the auctions are in “a new place”, which means that a new competitor has entered the fray. The rest of the time, he looks more like a concerned but firm personal trainer, asking for another representative. “Give me six, please, Alex,” he said, not really asking Alex Branczik, president of modern and contemporary art, who was arguing Nara’s tenderer by phone. Barker wanted over a hundred thousand pounds. “This is six million five hundred thousand,” said Barker. “Do you want to give me six?” Branczik gave him six.
There were epidemics of what auction houses like to call “determined” or even “passionate” auctions. “After Embah” by Lisa Brice, a daring reddish staging with a silhouette by Nicki Minaj, sold for 4.4 million pounds Sterling, a record for the artist. A dark Alberto Burri, “Sacco E Nero 3”, from 1955, pulled by his estimate raised to four million pounds. But most of the competitions were thin and fast. A drawing by Van Gogh formerly belonging to Taubman (“very loved by Sotheby’s here,” said Barker) sold on a single offer for less than his estimate. “Give me an offer, sir,” argued Barker, dropping the increments of submission while he was trying to move a large woolen canvas by Christopher Grise on the wall on his right. Again, Barker extracted a single offer, and still below the estimate. Wool was sold in fifty and a second. In total, the evening sale – the first major Sotheby auction of 2025 – made just over sixty million pounds, including costs, about forty percent less than the previous year.
Even people intimately involved in large auctions cannot determine whether they are large companies or terrible these days. Since Sotheby’s invoices a “buyer bonus” – essentially a commission – of twenty -seven percent on all lots up to a million dollars, and often selling costs in addition, the margins should be enormous. “It is never profitable,” insisted the longtime employee. It’s just that the benefits are so much more difficult to find. At the height of the 80s boom art, Sotheby’s made an annual profit of one hundred and thirteen million dollars. Twenty-five years later, in 2014, at the top of the next wave, the auction house won only twenty-nine million dollars more-the price of a mid-range basquiat.
Part of the problem is the expense to keep the show on the road. Sotheby’s and Christie’s feel fanciful because they are. Sotheby’s has premises in forty countries. At the time of the acquisition of Drahi, he employed more than fifteen hundred people. The cost of the parties, marketing, shipping, insurance and the administration decorbloods nearly five hundred sales per year is only drifted in a direction. “You mainly achieve profit in December,” said an artistic advisor based in Paris who worked for one of the two greats told me. “Until November, you pay the company’s fixed cost.”
A large auction has many rooms. “Sotheby’s is really three companies, which had been managed as one company,” said a former employee who joined Tad Smith. Since the end of the 1980s, Sotheby’s has offered loans and other financial products, guaranteed against art (in fact, all that the auction house will sell) as guaranteed. When Drahi acquired the company, Sotheby’s Financial Services lent about eight hundred million dollars a year.
