Welcome back to Wall Power, I’m Marion Maneker.

The global auction calendar, while seemingly a dry subject, actually has massive implications for how this multibillion-dollar fine art business functions. And the small changes announced in the Financial Times on Thursday—including demoting London’s June sales—have much bigger stakes than most have recognized. I got a text from a dealer who expressed surprise that there wasn’t more reaction to the news. In response, I pointed out that Christie’s had carefully placed the item with no other press contact.

On Tuesday, I’ll explain how the auction calendar shake-up is connected to the expansion of Hong Kong and recognition that London’s previous role in the art market is now split with Paris (and, to some extent, New York). Tonight, I’ll focus on giving some fresh context on the news that Sotheby’s Brooke Lampley will be joining Gagosian gallery as a senior director at the end of the year.

But first…

• There’s always a bull market somewhere: The New York auctions might have struggled under too-ambitious estimates, but a week later in Toronto, the Canadian auction house Heffel was able to hold three sales in one evening that exceeded expectations. With a hammer ratio of 1.25 and a total sale of $22.6 million Canadian ($16.5 million U.S.), Heffel’s Thursday night sale was small in value but very strong against the estimates. The art of Jean-Paul Riopelle, Canadian abstract expressionist and former partner of Joan Mitchell, accounted for more than a quarter of the final sale value. Ten of his works made $6 million. Internationally recognized Canadian artists like Emily Carr, Thom Thomson, and Lawren Harris sold exceptionally well because Heffel was holding the single-owner sale of Danish-Canadian art dealer Torben Kristiansen. A NATO pilot who became an airline purser traveling frequently between Europe and Canada, Kristiansen discovered an arbitrage in art he could buy cheap in Europe and sell dear in Canada. The success of that venture led him to buy a Vancouver gallery and help build some important Canadian collections in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
• Independent by the numbers: True to their word, the Independent art fair has published some informative post-fair statistics. There were 280 sales reported, which is about a third of the reported works brought by galleries, and nearly half of those works went to new clients of the galleries (good news for the art fairs, since it offloads some of their costs). Before the fair, Independent showed that dealers were bringing works mostly priced between $20,000 and $50,000. Post-fair, those numbers skew to the left a little, with 43 percent of sales taking place in the $10,000-$20,000 range and another 21 percent clocking in at $20,000-$50,000. Since the galleries are self-reporting, we’ll assume the buyers found it easier to pull the trigger on works in the lower range, not that the galleries were discounting works priced higher to get their sales.

Nevertheless, there’s a sense that the gallery needs someone else dealing in the high-value secondary market. In that regard, the Lampley announcement was not terribly surprising. Lampley has long been a high-wattage figure in the auction world, first at Christie’s, in the Impressionist and Modern department, and then at Sotheby’s, where she inherited Amy Cappellazzo’s role as head of the fine art division. She also has strong media appeal: Lampley became meme-able in 2021 by bidding for Ken Griffin on a copy of the U.S. Constitution; her opponents were so smitten with her image on the webcast that they mistakenly assumed she was bidding for them.

That sort of star power didn’t entirely serve her at Sotheby’s. In the auction business, individual deal-makers have been largely eclipsed by the whole house landing large estates, making charismatic specialists less essential to success. That said, the kind of private dealing she’s going to be doing at Gagosian doesn’t really rely on star power, per se. Far more important to Lampley’s success at Gagosian will be the clients—like Griffin and other masters of the universe—that she can bring with her, and the new ones she will undoubtedly cultivate once she arrives.

In those days, private sales at the auction houses were much smaller. These days, specialists at all levels are compensated for the private sales they do. The commissions can be a substantial portion of their income and tend to rise with the specialist’s position. Although Sotheby’s has reined in compensation across the board, the more senior specialists and client development people are able to make good commissions doing private sales. Brooke Lampley was, until Wednesday evening, the most senior specialist at the company.

That’s important, because what used to be her side hustle will now be her entire job at Gagosian. And selling art privately is quite different from selling art at auction, where there is a large audience. With private sales, the trick is to create what should seem to the buyer (or seller) like a spontaneous moment of opportunity. (Of course, no one is better at creating spontaneous moments of opportunity than Larry Gagosian.)

The Gagosian gallery, like its founder, has internalized an unapologetically aggressive sales strategy. A dozen years ago, in the course of some litigation, an email came out that one of Gagosian’s salespeople had coaxed a reluctant buyer, in the depths of the financial crisis, by proposing, “Care to make a cruel and offensive offer?” The Gagosian employee explained that the seller was in terrible financial straits and needed the cash. To move the buyer off his reluctance, she cooed, “Come on, want to try?”

Here’s the joke of it: The salesperson hustled the buyer into an incredible deal. He paid $2 million for the Roy Lichtenstein enamel Girl With a Mirror, a work that the artist made in multiples. Another edition sold two years later for nearly $7 million.

Lampley certainly isn’t above the hard sell, but the advantage most auction house people have is the organization’s large wingspan. Sourcing works is the hardest part of art dealing. (Okay, finding a buyer is hard too.) But working at an auction house generates a lot more deal flow than trying to deal privately on your own.

Few people know this as well as Gagosian. One of his great advantages after 50 years of selling art at the highest level is that he knows where 50 years of art inventory lies. Gagosian’s collectors may think they own the art, but they’re really just paying for the storage until he can come back and take if off their hands.

Although Gagosian has used art history luminaries like John Richardson and John Elderfield as curators for his shows, he hasn’t had an experienced Modern secondary dealer on staff. So that’s the opportunity for Lampley. It’s likely that many of her best clients overlap with Gagosian’s in some markets, but she has good contacts where he might want coverage. He’s famous for having memorized who owned what before he ever got a chance to sell those works.

The big question is whether this hire is about succession. A man who lives to sell art doesn’t think much about what he wants to do after he stops selling art, or about his own mortality. And Leo Castelli, his mentor in the gallery business, was putting on shows into his late 80s. If I had to guess, this is more about Gagosian wanting to stay relevant and take some of the sales pressure off himself than it is about selling the company or retiring. Though hiring Lampley is one of many steps he ought to have taken a while ago to put the company in shape to do either.