On Thursday night, as Christie’s was getting ready to sell more than $800 million of art over the course of a week, the august auction house’s website went down. “Site Under Maintenance,” said the mysterious note on a temporary Amazon CloudFront page to which visitors had been redirected. “Our site is undergoing maintenance and will be back shortly.”
It’s not unusual for an auction website to malfunction, or occasionally go down during moments of high usage. But the timing was, to put it mildly, inconvenient. Much of the action of an auction is orchestrated ahead of time, with guarantees placed to ensure work will sell, and advisers working with clients to strategically plan their bidding. And because auction houses have pretty much stopped distributing the old doorstop print catalogs in the last decade, much of this happens by texting links to lots on an auction house’s website.
The site is also integral during the sale. The pandemic forced the last old Luddite holdouts to embrace online bidding, and many out-of-towners prefer that to traveling to New York—some locals prefer it to putting on a suit and schlepping to Christie’s at Rockefeller Center or York Avenue, home of Sotheby’s. Last year Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said that 80% of all bids across sales at the house were placed online, up from 45% in 2019.
Days before the sale, Christie’s was staring down the prospect of holding auctions without an auction house website—surely the first time one of the major houses has attempted a sale without a web presence since the dial-up days of the ’90s. By Friday, with the site still down, a spokesperson told The New York Times, in vague terms, that a “security issue had affected some of the company’s systems, including its website.” After maintaining a holding screen all day Saturday that said “We’ll be right back,” the brass changed the text to something a bit more dire.
“Important information: We apologise that Christie’s is currently offline. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience,” it read.
Many sources wondered aloud if the house would have to cancel the sales—a drastic measure that did not happen in the months after September 11, 2001, or in the days after the COVID lockdowns in 2020. On Sunday, with the site still down, Cerutti emailed clients with his decision: The sales would proceed as planned, website or no website, in the Rockefeller Center salesroom, and through that old-fashioned technology, the telephone.
“I want to assure you that we are managing this incident according to our well-established protocols and practices, with the support of additional experts,” Cerutti said. “This included among other things the proactive protection of our main website by taking it offline.”
The tech team had succeeded in accessing the bones of Christie’s Live, a digital platform that allows registered bidders to remotely raise a paddle that will then be tallied in the salesroom. A temporary holding site had the catalogs available to peruse in PDF form. But as specialists spent the weekend following up with clients planning to bid, many of those clients indicated that they would rather avoid whatever was happening with Christie’s on the internet and just talk to a human being.
“There’s always an important in-person element to our sales,” Bonnie Brennan, president of Christie’s Americas, said Wednesday. “People had already been in the exhibitions, people had already been sent all the condition reports and catalogs. And the in-person is so important to it. Yes, digital has grown our audience, but we’ve been doing this for 250 years.”
Christie’s declined to comment on the nature of its tech woes.
“Generally speaking, it’s possible to recover quite quickly from most types of cyberattacks—except for ransomware,” says Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. “So the delay in Christie’s recovery in this case would imply that this could well be a ransomware attack.”
Such breaches usually come in two parts, he says. “Firstly, the attackers, after gaining access to the network, extract a copy of the data, and they then encrypt or lock the computers from which that data was extracted.”
Then they demand a ransom to get it back.
In 2023, ransomware payments hit an all-time high as $1 billion was paid out globally to the hackers who succeeded in data breaches, according to the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. Ransomware group LockBit, allegedly headed by the notorious Russian cyber-pirate Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, has extorted over $500 million from victims, and recently hit Boeing with a $200 million ransom demand after scooping up its assets and blasting it online. Boeing refused to pay, so LockBit released all the data. Khoroshev has been charged with 26 counts related to conspiracy to commit fraud, intentional damage to a computer, and extortion, and is currently a fugitive.
Something similar could happen to Christie’s, which not only knows who bought and sold every work of art that’s come through the auction house doors—it also has plenty of pertinent information on each of those clients, including their addresses and banking details.
“In cyberattacks, the hackers often extract very large quantities of information, and sometimes that information is extremely sensitive,” Callow says.
Callow says there’s no chatter in the hacker-friendly forums he follows about which criminal cadres (or which oppositional nation-states) might be behind the attack.
But we do know that as of Thursday the website was still down. One rumor circulating in art world circles this week indicated that the price being demanded is around $20 million. Christie’s owner François Pinault’s net worth, as of Thursday, is $27.6 billion.
On Monday, the string of evening sales began in New York with an auction at Sotheby’s and a bit of shade. After an online collector underbid a Christopher Wool that would eventually hammer at $1.86 million, auctioneer Oliver Barker said to the room, “The power of online bidding.”
And on Tuesday in the early evening, Phillips auctioneer Henry Highley gaveled to open its modern and contemporary sale, with several lots flying off the rack to online bidders. Derek Fordjour’s Numbers sold to an internet bidder in Greece for a $700,000 hammer price, while an online buyer in Turkey won a painting by Michaela Yearwood-Dan.
And then just before 7 p.m. at Rockefeller Center, a few dealers downed their cocktails at Lodi and shuffled nervously over to Christie’s, where Cerutti made sure to personally greet each attendee before he walked up to the salesroom and pumped up the specialists who would be taking the phone bids on behalf of the clients.
“It’s great to see so many people in the room,” the auctioneer Georgina Hilton said dryly.
There were two sales set for the evening. The first was a single-collection sale of work owned by the Miami-based collector Rosa de la Cruz, who died this year after decades of maintaining a museum for her and her husband’s collection in the Magic City’s design district. The tens of thousands of art-adjacent rubberneckers all had access to some of these works while they were on view in the museum—but the frothy mix of advisers, gallery directors, and private dealers who can secure seats at a Christie’s auction house had probably also been to the de la Cruz mansion in Key Biscayne, where Rosa and her husband Carlos hosted a famously invite-only—and boozy—brunch during Art Basel Miami Beach each year.
With Rosa’s death, that’s all over, and the generation of artists they collected now find themselves on the block at Christie’s during extremely uncertain circumstances. The bidding in the room created a heady atmosphere that’s been somewhat phased out in the era of remote art sales. Bidders yelled out offers from their seats, while the specialists standing on the balustrade tried to best their colleagues. Gagosian Art Advisory’s Bernie Lagrange, sitting on the aisle with wired headphones dangling from his ears, snagged the first lot, a work by Ana Mendieta that hammered at more than three times its high estimate, at $220,000. Christie’s resident rainmaker Sara Friedlander had to beat out dealer Dominique Lévy, in the room, to win Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Paris, Last Time, 1989) for a client on her phone for a $400,000 hammer.
The biggest lot in the first sale was another González-Torres, one of his iconic string-bulb sculptures, a work that would be familiar to anyone who went to de la Cruz’s space in Miami—and it had an aggressive $8 million to $12 million estimate, remarkably higher than any work by the artist that had ever come to auction. Christie’s had placed an in-house guarantee on the work, ensuring it would sell, and it had only found a third-party guarantor days before the sales, thus avoiding getting stuck owning the work if it had sold to a single inside-job bid. Despite those concerns, the work had multiple phone bidders, with Christie’s international director of Japanese and Korean art Katsura Yamaguchi ending up the winner with a $11.5 million lob that came remarkably close to the high estimate. It was later revealed that the buyer on the phone with Yamaguchi was the Pola Museum of Art in Japan, which houses the collection of the former head of the eponymous cosmetics company.
And in the second sale, the Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale, things kicked off with a new record for an Ernst Yohji Jaeger, followed by a Takako Yamaguchi that went for $460,000 in the room, snapped up by Salon 94 gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who helped Jay-Z and Alex Rodriguez build their collections. A few lots later, specialist Julian Ehrlich extended the bidding on a Lynette Yiadom-Boakye by several long minutes as his client kept issuing $50,000 increases, until the work finally hammered at $2.25 million, well above the high estimate.
“The sale performed pretty well, and you’d be hard-pressed to make the argument that any softness was due to the tech inconveniences—if anything there was more excitement in the sale because of it,” says Alex Glauber, the founder of AWG Art Advisory, who serves as the president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. “Though the tech has allowed them to reach a larger audience, it undermines the drama in the room, so seeing it play out in an old-school manner was refreshing.”
Christie’s brass seemed at least relieved that they were able to find new homes for the works in Rosa de la Cruz’s collection, at prices that were in line with what they had hoped for well before the tech problems.
“The team was in real overdrive to ensure that this was a success, to really pay tribute to her legacy,” Brennan says. “When the challenges came up last week, the legacy of Rosa was such a priority that the team really went so beyond to make sure that she was properly celebrated.”
The evening, while solid given the tech-trouble circumstances, still saw its star lot, a painting by Brice Marden estimated to sell for between $30 million and $50 million, withdrawn before the sale. The work was guaranteed by the house, meaning its owner is currently Mr. Pinault. And a Mark Tansey, fawned over by Tansey heads as perhaps his best-ever work to come to market, couldn’t find a buyer. The sale’s $114.7 million total was less than half the night’s haul at Sotheby’s, which grossed $267.3 million. And the overall downturn in the market—due to political uncertainty, interest rates, and two geopolitics-shaking wars—means that the totals are a fraction of what they were two years ago.
There’s also the slight issue that Christie’s website is still down—and there’s an evening sale still to come Thursday night, followed by a pair of day sales Friday. Brennan said that she’s not expecting to have the full site back by then.
“We, of course, are working to resolve every matter,” she says. “But it’s sort of like, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Perhaps the best of the massive, big-tent fundraisers that dot the springtime New York calendar is Dia’s, which technically takes place not in Gotham but upriver in Beacon, at the former Nabisco factory that houses the foundation’s temple to minimalism in all its glorious forms. For one thing, it’s a lunch. The midday light spills into the building, and it brings basically everyone in the art world you’d hope to see—600 guests this year. It was also a celebration of Dia’s 50th anniversary, and appropriately, cofounder Fariha Fatima al-Jerrahi was in attendance. The wine was from the Alsatian vineyards estate that was founded centuries ago by the Schlumberger family: al-Jerrahi’s parents were the pioneering collectors John and Dominique de Menil, and Dominique was an heiress of the Schlumberger fortune.
…Notable guests at Dia: NFL commish Roger Goodell, as his wife Jane Skinner Goodell—the former Fox News host and contemporary art collector—is on the board. Frances McDormand was there, as was Julianne Moore, who was overheard telling folks that it was her first time ever coming to Dia Beacon. To be fair, it’s a long trek from Montauk. I’ve done it!
…Lisson Gallery now represents the great artist Josh Kline, who had a big solo show at The Whitney last year and will open a new opus at MOCA LA later in 2024. He will still be represented in collaboration with his other galleries: 47 Canal and the London gallery that is called, simply, Modern Art.
…One notable show opening of this most busy week was not at a gallery but instead at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the marvelously slim Midtown glass-and-aluminum building that you’ve undoubtedly gawked at while walking to La Grenouille, down the block. There, the photographer Elfie Semotan and the fashion designer Nina Hollein paired photos with some of Hollein’s more noteworthy gowns, bringing her sculptural and architectural sensibility to the iconic interior of the space. Guests at the vernissage included Hollein’s husband, Met director Max Hollein; artists such as George Condo, Sarah Sze, and Jeff Koons; art dealers Almine Rech and Friedrich Petzel; and Condé Nast global editorial director Anna Wintour.
…I was hearing all week about a secret Gagosian show stuffed full of masterpieces, admission strictly invite-only, with a checklist circulating sans prices—indicating they’d be divulged on a need-to-know basis. It’s called “Icons From Half a Century of Art,” and while it is listed on the gallery website and therefore not totally a secret, it’s hard even for insiders to secure a view. You can’t get in unless you could ostensibly buy the icons, or you represent someone who can buy the icons. There’s a Twombly and a Richter, and all sorts of great things, but the most impressive work might be a staggeringly big Warhol Mao, nearly 15 feet tall—the biggest of the 200 Warhol made, as big as the one at the Art Institute of Chicago. The gallery won’t share the price, but almost a decade ago Steve Cohen sold a Mao at Sotheby’s for $47.5 million. The Cohen Mao was only seven feet tall. Shall we do the math?
And that’s a wrap on this edition of True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected].
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