Christie’s appoints Sara Friedlander chairman of postwar and contemporary art in the Americas
The cliché about taste in the auction world is that taste follows money. Sara Friedlander wants to flip the script. “Do you want to know about my hierarchy?” she asks me as we stand within arm’s reach of the second “Nurse” painting by Richard Prince, just a few feet away from Warhol’s fiery yellow work. last supperall part of Edlis | The Neeson Collection will be the centerpiece of Christie’s 21st Century Auctions. “The client comes first. The art comes second. The market…is a distant third.”
That’s not what one would expect from someone who has just been appointed chairman of postwar and contemporary art in the Americas at Christie’s.
She brought to auction a large private collection that included works by Barney Ebsworth, Gerald Fineberg, the Eppler family, the Kawamura DIC Museum of Art and, of course, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. She set world records for artists such as Ernie Barnes and Joan Mitchell. But ask her what she’s most proud of, and she’ll tell you it’s the long-term relationship, not the fireworks.
Auction houses have thrived over the past decade on a boom in “wet paint” sales – where auction prices for unproven artists soar 500% overnight, then plummet at the same rate. Friedlander was unimpressed.
“I’ve never been happier for a young artist to break a record,” she said. “The only people who benefited were the sellers. Artists didn’t sleep that night. Galleries went into panic. The market started eating itself.”
Instead, she saw the benefits of adjusting. “Thankfully, some air is coming out of the speculative market. Maybe now more people will come back to galleries — not because they think they’ll be flipping anything for profit next month, but because they want art to change their world.” She believes this is the only way for the ecosystem to survive: “If there are no galleries, there are no artists, and there is no art.”
Friedlander found herself saying things like this—words that might sound like they were coming from a campaigner, but she meant them. “The idea that you just collect a bunch of work and throw it into an evening auction … that playbook is gone,” she said. “We’re not here to follow the market. We’re here to succeed.”
Part of the approach, she said, is to show people how to live with art again; how to make it part of the living room rather than just a replaceable wall that retains its 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 wider 20/21 category. The leadership trio is less a commando force to disrupt markets than an attempt to build an old-school core around something that increasingly looks like finance.
“I guess I’ve been thinking about the long-term strategy rather than the immediacy of the deal,” she said. “When you’re selling on the auction market, sometimes it’s a difficult thing to do. But it’s always the right decision.”
