While the major auction houses have shed staff amid a bearish market since the pandemic, a gaggle of “super advisories” has been born, some founded by former top-level auction rainmakers with decades of experience and bulging address books.
Without the vast overheads of auction houses and galleries, the leaner, nimbler, more discreet advisory model chimes with a cautious market. “Many of us advisors have thought, what about a Super Advisory firm: taking five specialists from different departments in the auction houses and putting them to work without the overheads,” says Josh Baer, author of the Baer Faxt trade newsletter and himself an art adviser. “The biggest cost for an art adviser is travel and you can easily stop that. It just makes sense that they could be more efficient and competitive.”
They may not have the expensive glory premises of big galleries, but advising can be big business, with the biggest players akin to portfolio managers. Baer points to “the biggest art advisory event in history”—when Sotheby’s bought Art Agency, Partners (AAP) in 2016 for $85m. The advisory firm had been co-founded by Amy Cappellazzo (former chair of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art department) and the adviser Allan Schwartzman only two years before. “It recognised a demand—Sotheby’s was saying, our clients would like an advisory service,” Baer says. The deal brought AAP’s impressive address book and staff to Sotheby’s, notably Cappellazzo, Schwartzman and their business partner Adam Chinn, who all went on to work for the auction house—and have all since left.
It’s not a coincidence that so many people are leaving [auction houses] to do this
History tends to repeat itself, and when Cappellazzo left Sotheby’s in 2021, she launched another advisory firm, Art Intelligence Global (AIG), along with her former Sotheby’s colleague, Hong Kong-based Yuki Terase. Mike Goss—who was chief financial officer of Sotheby’s until 2019, when Patrick Drahi bought the auction house—now fills the same role at AIG and, in August, the firm hired Matt Bangser, fresh from 16 years at the gallery Blum (formerly Blum & Poe), as a senior director.
They may no longer be on the payroll, but advisers still oil the auction wheels. Baer reckons around 70% of the value of contemporary and Modern sales at the big auction houses run through advisers.
Hong Kong-based Patti Wong was chair of Sotheby’s Asia for 20 years before she left to set up the firm Patti Wong & Associates with Sotheby’s veteran Daryl Wickstrom in 2023. Wong says they have done more than $1bn in deals since then, working with around ten clients (on a retainer or one-off agency basis), at any one time. She finds her newfound independence “refreshing” after 31 years in house.
Patti Wong of advisory firm Patti Wong & Associates is collaborating with New Perspectives Art Partners
Courtesy New Perspectives Art Partners
“It’s not a coincidence that so many people are leaving [auction houses] to do this, because the auction business has evolved, through digitalisation and online sales,” Wong says. “All of us who have worked at auction houses for a long time, we’re used to working with clients and have built long relationships. So it’s natural that one becomes an art adviser if one wants to stay in the art world.” The increasing digitisation and cost cutting of the major houses, with the departure of many senior specialists, has also been a drain on knowledge and personal service. Wong questions “whether the auction houses now can afford to have that very personalised approach to looking after the clients, because the touch points are fewer. Yes, they might be monitoring the client’s activity online and seeing what they’re looking at, but they are not actually there to say, ‘You should buy this’ or ‘You shouldn’t buy that.’”
Stronger together
In June, Wong and her business partner Philip Hoffman—the head of the London-based advisory The Fine Art Group and a former chief financial officer of Christie’s—announced their collaboration with Ed Dolman (the former executive chair of Phillips), Brett Gorvy (a co-founder of Lévy Gorvy gallery and former chair of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s) and Dolman’s son Alex (with whom he runs Dolman Partners) to launch New Perspectives Art Partners (NPAP), a global advisory consortium.
Wong describes NPAP as “a very fluid, round table setup … we have stronger power together than individually”. New York-based Gorvy told The Art Newspaper in June that he estimates the NPAP partners have 350 clients between them, with the capacity to spend up to $30m on an object. All four partners will continue with their existing businesses, but the new venture ensures they have someone on the ground in Europe, the US, Asia and, crucially, the Middle East. With Alex Dolman based in Saudi Arabia, NPAP sees the Gulf Cooperation Council as a major growth opportunity.
Another art advisory that has just announced an expansion into the Middle East is Beaumont Nathan, a London- and New York-based firm founded in 2014 by Hugo Nathan and Wentworth Beaumont. It opens an office in Abu Dhabi this autumn, with Lateefa bin Hamoodah as regional adviser, as part of taking “an even more proactive position” in the region, says the firm’s managing partner, Stephanie Armstrong. A patron of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, cultural strategist and collector in her own right, Bin Hamoodah is, Armstrong says, “a fresh voice, and someone who really understands the landscape there.”
Beaumont adds: “We’ve been working with a small number of clients in the UAE and Qatar for a few years now. I think it’s really exciting what’s happening there. It’s not a mad gold rush, we think there’s potential to develop some really meaningful relationships.”
Is this move in response to rising competition from other multinational art advisories? Armstrong says not: “Beaumont Nathan works in a slightly different way to others, given that we are completely independent and focused exclusively on working with collectors. We are not dealers, nor do we take a principal position in works of art.” The firm works on retainer and on commission with clients, with fees “always disclosed at the outset of every relationship”, Armstrong says.
The rise of family offices
Beaumont Nathan and NPAP both work closely with family offices, a growing market, particularly in tax-friendly Hong Kong, where Deloitte estimated that around 2,700 single-family offices operated by 2023. Deloitte also calculated that around 8,030 single-family offices existed globally in 2024, up from roughly 6,130 in 2019, a figure that is expected to grow to more than 10,720 by 2030. Wong works with several family offices and trusts: “Often art is a sizable part of their portfolio, and they need professional advice, from valuation to insurance to shipping to restoration to collection management, it’s not just the buying and the selling.”
The “Great Wealth Transfer” is adding to this work for advisories, Wong points out. Although there is no inheritance tax in Hong Kong, estate planning still makes up a large part of her work: “In the West, [inheritance] tax is the main driver for these collections to come on the market, but in Hong Kong, the division still needs to be made. Previously, a lot of clients would have left this until after they died but now a lot of the planning comes before.”
Beaumont Nathan has just launched a new family services department, advising on intergenerational planning through a “combination of curatorial and commercial advice”, says Wentworth Beaumont. Kara Popowich, an auction veteran who was most recently global head of client strategic initiatives at Sotheby’s in New York, also joined the firm last month as the director of global client strategy.
Art advisory is an amorphous term, covering all manner of activity, as Beaumont says. “It’s an exciting moment for the advisory industry, in terms of its relevance within the wider art market ecosystem,” Beaumont says. “There’s good advisory, there’s bad advisory, there’s meaningless advisory. I think the real nub of it is if you can add significant value—either in terms of in a deal, in terms of your access, in terms of your advice on the sell side, in terms of telling people what to retain—I think as long as you’re adding value, then there’s an opportunity for excellence in art advisory.”
Beaumont adds: “With the professionalisation of the art advisory business, the reality is that it probably doesn’t work as a lifestyle business. I think there’s space in the market for really good, professional businesses that generate clever ideas and can generate value for their clients. I think those businesses could and should thrive in the next decade.”
Harry Smith, the executive chair of the valuations, advisory and art financing business Gurr Johns, has a long view of the advisory business. He bought Gurr Johns in the mid-1980s when it was based above a shoe shop in Maidenhead, UK. On walking into the unremarkable office, Smith, who had started his career at Christie’s, saw a file marked Cliveden among the client records. He decided at that moment to buy it. “I had been knocking along as a one-man band, and I was trying to build up my client base, which was a very slow process,” he says. “By buying Gurr Johns, I suddenly went from five clients to 6,000.” Gurr Johns now has offices in London, New York and Paris. Valuations are still its bread and butter: “Out of valuations, we built our advisory business as we can advise those clients who come to us discreetly with needs and wants in art transactions,” Smith says.
Clients with needs, wants and problems, and knowing how to fulfil and fix them—that’s the crux of being an art adviser. And crucial to all of this is trust. As Baer says: “In a rising market, everybody’s the genius. But in a falling market, knowledge becomes even more necessary and valuable.”
