The auction world’s cliché about taste is that it follows the money. Sara Friedlander would like to flip the script. “You want to know my hierarchy?” she asked me as we stood in arms reach of the second “nurse” painting Richard Prince ever made and just a few feet away from a blazing yellow Warhol Last Supper, both part of the Edlis | Neeson Collection that will anchor Christie’s 21st Century Sale. “Client first. Art second. Market…distant third.”
That’s not the kind of line one would expect from someone who was just named chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art for the Americas at Christie’s.
She’s brought a staggering parade of private collections to auction—Barney Ebsworth, Gerald Fineberg, the Eppler family, the Kawamura DIC Museum of Art, and, of course, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. She’s set world records for artists from Ernie Barnes to Joan Mitchell. But ask her what she’s most proud of and she’ll tell you it’s the long-term relationships, not the fireworks.
Auction houses have thrived in the past decade on turbocharged “wet paint” sales—unproven artists whose auction prices rocket 500 percent overnight and then nosedive just as fast. Friedlander’s not impressed.
“I never feel good breaking records for young artists,” she said. “The only person who benefits is the seller. The artist doesn’t sleep that night. The gallery panics. And the market starts eating itself.”
Instead, she sees upside in the correction. “Some of the air is coming out of the speculative market, and thank god. Maybe now more people will go back to galleries—not because they think they’re flipping anything for a profit next month, but because they want the art to change their world.” That, she argues, is the only way the eco-system survives: “If there are no galleries, there are no artists, and then there’s no art.”
Friedlander catches herself saying things like this—sentences that might sound contrarian coming from a rainmaker—but she means it. “The idea that you just scoop up a bunch of work and throw it into an evening sale…that playbook is gone,” she said. “We’re not here to follow the market. We’re here to make it.”
Part of that approach, she said, is showing people how to live with art again; how to make it part of a living room, not just an exchangeable wall that holds value for 18 months.
Friedlander’s promotion coincides with Alex Rotter’s new role as global president and Max Carter’s appointment as chairman of the broader 20/21 category. The leadership trio doesn’t read as a market-busting strike team so much as an attempt to build an old-fashioned core around something that increasingly looks like finance.
“I think I have always been thinking about long term strategies over the immediacy of a transaction,” she said. “which is sometimes a hard thing to do when you’re building a sale in an auction market. But it’s always the right decision.”
