Interview, Fireside Chat
Talks at GS with Charles Stewart, CEO of Sotheby’s
- Sotheby's plans to permanently adopt digital catalogs, engagement, and auction platforms, rendering the previous physical-only selling model obsolete without intention to revert to pre-digital processes.
- Online bidding volumes are projected to continue rising, following a trajectory from approximately 40% in 2019 to 92% in the most recent year.
- The company intends to expand into new categories by establishing markets at the high end and working downward, with specific commitments to sell high-value items such as game-worn sports memorabilia and designer furniture.
- Physical footprint expansion will prioritize locations closer to clients to facilitate interaction with high-value objects that require tactile inspection, complementing the growth of "buy now" sales channels outside traditional auction cycles.
- The secondary market is expected to see enormous growth driven by generational shifts, where younger owners anticipate holding assets for only three to five years and actively reselling them.
- Strategic initiatives include integrating technology to leverage a proprietary data lake of art, objects, and client information to source and place items, alongside blockchain implementation to accelerate record-keeping, provenance storage, and title proofing.
- Blockchain technology is anticipated to reduce fraud and forgery risks by enabling the storage of high-resolution scans and artist authentication on tokens.
- The digital art and NFT sector is expected to cycle through growth phases similar to the early internet, remaining in very early stages of full formation over the next decade.
- Technological creation of digital art is predicted to be transformational over the next 10 years.
- Demand is expected to spike for young living artists driven by new discoveries or cultural moments, with tremendous interest persisting in these emerging markets.
- Art considered truly original and reflective of the current cultural moment is forecast to hold the most value over the next 50 years.
- Identifying specific artists or movements that will hold value in 50 years is described as difficult to predict, with potential leaders potentially found in obscure locations such as Brooklyn studios or galleries in Nigeria.