6 F THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020It’s no surprise that art auctions aren’t what
they were before March.
What’s unexpected, though, is the pace
and scope of the pandemic transformation,
in terms not only of how sales are conducted
but also in every facet of the process — and
how technology has enabled these changes.
“It’s been an opportunity to transform the
industry,” said Bruno Vinciguerra, the chief
executive of Bonhams auction house. “It
was bound to happen over years, and it only
took a few months.”
He added: “Never let a good crisis go to
waste.”
Online auctions have been a growing part
of the business for years, and potential buy-
ers have long been able to send in a bid on-
line or by phone, but in-person live sales
had remained de rigueur for the most valu-
able items. A live event held in front of a
crowd had an element of theatricality.
“Our business model is very particular,”
said Guillaume Cerutti, the chief executive
of Christie’s. “It’s based on unique objects
and a strong component of face-to-face in-
teractions with our clients.”
Major sales now have a whole new look,
thanks in part to the impact of technology.
When it became clear in the spring that peo-
ple couldn’t safely gather in a room, the
houses settled on a hybrid model that em-
ployed livestreaming to create the feeling of
being there.
At Sotheby’s in June, during an auction
on contemporary, modern and Impression-
ist artworks, the auctioneer Oliver Barker
was alone in a control room in London field-
ing online bids and watching screens on
which staff members in different locations
relayed bids received over the phone.
The total after almost five hours was just
over $362 million, with a Francis Bacon trip-
tych garnering $84.6 million from a phone
bid and a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing
selling for $15.2 million, in what Sotheby’s
said was the highest successful online bid in
its history.
“We were pleasantly surprised,” said Ste-
fan Pepe, the chief technology and product
officer for Sotheby’s. “Clients had comfort
to bid at that level.”
At Christie’s in July, a similar livestream
effort brought in $420 million. That auction
— which replaced sales that would have oc-
curred separately — featured smaller-than-
normal audiences of bidders and onlookers
gathered in person in both Hong Kong and
Paris, as local health guidelines allowed.
Total sales for the livestream auction
were lower than what the separate events
would usually have brought, but level of en-
gagement was high: Christie’s had 100,000
online viewers.
Earlier this month, the house held a live-
streamed auction of 20th-century material
— with a pregame show and color commen-
tary — from its Rockefeller Center auction
room. The sales totaled $341 million and the
online audience increased to 280,000 view-
ers.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s weren’t the only
ones trying a hybrid model.
“In the past we concentrated on the tradi-
tional auction room, and now we concen-
trate on the virtual auction room,” said
Jean-Paul Engelen, the deputy chairman of
Phillips.
“The future looks like a hybrid between
the two,” Mr. Engelen added. “We’re asking,
‘Do you need 400 people in a room when
only a fraction of them bid?’ ”
Bonhams has been focusing much of its
tech development on reducing “bidding la-
tency”: the time it takes for an online bid to
be registered by auction house employees,
as opposed to a live auctioneer spotting a
raised hand.
“It’s critical to make it very, very low,” Mr.
Vinciguerra explained. “It’s less than a sec-
ond now.”And it’s not just the actual sales that have
changed. Many of the technological im-
provements are focused on the front end of
the process: getting people interested
enough to bid in the first place.
Phillips announced an exclusive partner-
ship with Articker, an online tool that aggre-
gates open-source data on artists and art-
works, including articles and exhibitions,
and provides clients with information and
context that could guide their bidding and
buying.
The hefty, glossy catalogs that auction
houses have traditionally relied on are still
being distributed, but they are being supple-
mented by more extensive online offerings
that are “arguably richer,” said Mr. Pepe of
Sotheby’s.
When clients who have a relationship with
Sotheby’s log into the house’s online portal,
they may now get personalized suggestions,
which the house has been testing, Mr. Pepe
said. A recommendation algorithm high-
lights lots that might interest certain bid-
ders based on their previous activity.
For high-value lots, serious potential bid-
ders would traditionally have gone to see the
merchandise in person. Now, At Christie’s,
augmented reality is offering an alternative.
A buyer could see on a phone screen how
that Matisse might look in her living room
simply by pointing the camera at a blank
wall.
Christie’s already offered the tool on somelots, but relied on it more when the pan-
demic hit. And so did clients.
“The average user is using it for nine min-
utes, which is an incredibly long time if you
think about it,” said Matthew Rubinger, the
head of corporate and digital marketing for
Christie’s.
A new innovation this year is “super
zoom” technology that allows anyone to ex-
amine a work in minute detail — every
crack in an old painting and the patinated
sheen on a bronze sculpture. “They can
zoom in far beyond the naked eye,” Mr. Rub-
inger said.
But, he added, it was not meant to replace
being in the room with a work. “We don’t
want to recreate that experience, we want
to enhance it,” Mr. Rubinger said. “Now our
clients do both.”
Auctions need sellers as well as buyers,
and houses have made it easier to consign
artworks, too.
At Christie’s, an enhanced online portal
helps sellers deal with contracts, track bids
and see lot status, and provides three years’
worth of consignment information. Sothe-
by’s upgraded its online consignment tool,
introduced in 2017, to make it easier to add
information.
All the auction houses thought that their
more tech savvy patrons would embrace
the pandemic-era changes, but they have
also attracted first-time buyers.
“New clients have been coming to us too,”
said Mr. Cerutti of Christie’s. About 35 per-
cent of all buyers so far this year were new
to purchasing at the house, with much of the
growth coming from online sales.
Mr. Cerutti also predicted that all-online
sales eventually could comprise around
half of the house’s sales; before this year,
they were less than 10 percent.
Houses have also been unsure whether
some of their older, more traditional clients
would sign on to the brave new auction
world.
“People haven’t adapted reluctantly,
they’ve given us really positive feedback,”
said Mr. Pepe of Sotheby’s.
At Christie’s, some traditional auction
buyers made their first online auction pur-
chases this summer, picking up Laurence
Stephen Lowry’s oil “Coming from the
Match” (1959) for $2.56 million and Tyeb
Mehta’s oil “Untitled (Falling Figure)”
(1965) for $975,000.
Next up for auction houses is the busy
November season, traditionally packed
with sales across categories. In the longer
term, they must decide what the process
will look like if a coronavirus vaccine is in-
troduced.
“When it’s possible to have clients in a
room we will do it,” Mr. Cerutti said. “It’s
where we belong.”
But the new technological advancements
likely won’t recede when that happens.
“The digital tools we’re able to share pre-
sale, like super zoom, augmented reality
and online galleries, they will stay around in
the future,” he added. “They are now the
new normal.”By TED LOOSAt Sotheby’s in June, bids were
taken during a livestream
auction. The works for sale
included, at rear, “Triptych
Inspired by the Oresteia of
Aeschylus” by Francis Bacon.An Upgrade for Art Auctions
New tools, born of necessity,
may be part of a lasting change.
THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON/DACS, LONDON/ARS, NY; SOTHEBY’SCHRISTIE’SThe auctioneer Tash Perrin
of Christie’s on Oct. 6
during a livestream auction
of 20th-century works.“When it’s possible to
have clients in a room
we will do it. It’s where
we belong.”When Michelle Yun and Boon Hui Tan, the
curatorial team behind the first-ever Asia
Society Triennial, began assembling their
exhibition five years ago, they imagined a
city-spanning arts event that would give the
Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s
Triennial a run for their money.
“We wanted it to be part of the city,” Mr.
Tan said. The exhibition as they envisioned
it could not be confined to the walls of the
Asia Society. “It had to be bigger.”
What they did not envision was a pan-
demic that would throw their plans into up-
heaval — while also making the show’s mis-
sion even more imperative. After being
postponed from its June opening because of
Covid-19, the reimagined triennial will open
next week at venues across New York City.
Ms. Yun and Mr. Tan have adapted the
schedule, scale and format of the exhibition.
“There were some difficult moments,”
Ms. Yun said, adding that they are grateful
and “so happy to move forward... albeit in
a different structure.”
The inaugural triennial is aptly titled,
“We Do Not Dream Alone,”after a line from
Yoko Ono’s 1964 art book “Grapefruit” — “A
dream you dream alone may be a dream,
but a dream two people dream together is a
reality.”
The triennial is meant to showcase “new
work by artists who have not had major pre-
sentations” in museums or the bigger gal-
leries, Mr. Tan said, and those who have
blossoming careers elsewhere but a “less
robust presence in United States,” Ms. Yun
added, like the collaborative Japanese art-
ists Ken and Julia Yonetani, who have ex-
hibited in Europe, Singapore and Australia.
But some of the featured artists will be fa-
miliar to New York audiences, as a number
of them live and work in New York or are
represented by galleries with a strong pres-
ence in the city. These include the Chinese
artist Sun Xun; Shahzia Sikander, an artist
born in Pakistan who now lives in New
York, and the Palestinian-American artist
Jordan Nassar.
Part one of the triennial will run from Oct.
27 through Feb. 7, 2021, with much of the
programming at the Asia Society Museum
on the Upper East Side. Other venues in-
clude the Park Avenue Malls at 70th Street,
Times Square and the New-York Historical
Society on the Upper West Side.
If pandemic conditions permit, the sec-
ond phase, from March 16 through June 27,
2021, will include performances with live
audiences at venues such as David Geffen
Hall at Lincoln Center.
The triennial, which is free to the public,
was already a glint in the eye of Mr. Tan
when he became director of the Asia Society
Museum in 2015, after serving as director of
the Singapore Art Museum in his native
country.
When he moved to New York, he was dis-
appointed to discover that the city he’d
thought of as a global art capital was discon-
nected from the cultural cross-pollination
that was happening around the world, espe-
cially in Asia.
In New York, he found “the representa-
tion of non-Western, non-European, non-
American art — Asia in particular — is so
narrow,” he said. “I was very stunned that
many of the incredible and exciting works I
was seeing at biennials and museums in
London, in Paris, in Berlin, in Beijing, in
Shanghai, in Singapore was not here.”
Galvanized, Mr. Tan began developing
the idea of a citywide art event. He teamed
with Ms. Yun, the museum’s senior curator
of contemporary art.
“I did a snapshot of Asian art exhibitions,
both traditional and contemporary, com-
pared to the larger field,” Ms. Yun said. She
found that fewer than 10 percent of museum
and major gallery exhibitions in New York
City were devoted to art by Asians or the
Asian diaspora, living or dead.
For five years, Ms. Yun and Mr. Tan criss-
crossed the globe to find and commission
work from and about Asia and its diasporas,
assembling a slate representing more than
40 artists and art collectives from 21 coun-
tries. (The Asia Society considers Asia to
comprise roughly 30 countries in the Asia-
Pacific region).
By the time Covid-19 brought New York to
a standstill in March, “the question had al-
ready been sort of bubbling” as to whether
or when the show could go on “because
China and other parts of Asia was starting
to be affected,” Mr. Tan said.
The pandemic created enormous logisti-
cal challenges. The postponement was
problematic for many of the artists, espe-
cially those with projects meant for Gover-
nors Island, which had been a key venue for
the triennial, and which is typically open
May through October.
Some of the artists “had spent over a year
or a couple of years working with us to cre-
ate immersive site-specific installations
that then were not able to be translated to
the Asia Society space,” Ms. Yun said, “To
say there was not some heartache would
not be true.”
And the nearly global halt to travel has
meant artists, many of whom would have
been making their first visit to the city or to
the United States, have been unable to in-
stall their work (some installations have in-stead been coordinated via FaceTime) nor
introduce it to the public.
Not having artists on hand to contextu-
alize their commissions led the team “to
bump up dramatically” the online program-
ming, both video and other interviews with
participating artists, before and during the
triennial, Mr. Tan said.
He and Ms. Yun were determined to push
forward with the event this fall rather than
cancel it, as so many other cultural organi-
zations have done. One reason was a sense
of responsibility to the city and to the arts
community at large.
Gonzalo Casals, who was named New
York’s commissioner of cultural affairs inMarch just as Covid-19 was gripping the
city, said he considered the triennial a “big
milestone to look forward to in terms of
bringing our community back from the
darkest days of the pandemic.”
Importantly for the curators, those dark
days included an explosion of anti-Asian
rhetoric and xenophobia in America. A
study from the Pew Research Center in July
found that, since the pandemic began,
Asians and Asian-American adults have
been more likely than other ethnic or racial
groups to report being subjected to racial
and ethnic slurs or jokes.
There has also been an increase in re-
ports of physical attacks, including being
coughed at or spit on.
These events “spurred the intent and the
passion to make sure” the triennial wouldn’t
be canceled, Ms. Yun said.
“I grew up as an Asian-American” in
Michigan, she explained, where she was
born after her parents immigrated from
China. “There were not a lot of other Asian-
Americans or other minorities, for that mat-
ter,” which made her keenly aware of a cer-
tain cultural invisibility, as well as of “how
Asian-Americans have been used as scape-
goats at certain moments,” she said.
Mr. Tan, in his curatorial statement, gave
further context.
The triennial, he said, is “a testament to
the power of art to resist the isolation and
closing of our minds in these uncertain
times when governments and public insti-
tutions seem to fail us.”By LAURA van STRAATENTop, a detail from “July
Coming Soon” by the
Chinese artist Sun Xun.
Above, the curators of the
Asia Society Triennial,
Boon Hui Tan, left, and
Michelle Yun.A First for Asian Art in New York
After 5 Years of planning, the Asia
Society Triennial regroups.
VIA NATIONAL HERITAGE BOARDSUN XUN AND SHANGHART GALLERY; ALEX WANGEDWARD MAPPLETHORPE.