The Race to Find New Art Collectors

A quarter of all auction sales were made to first-time art buyers this year. An inside look at Sotheby's and Christie's global quest to identify and recruit more.

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In early May, Christie's invited a group of 18 new collectors from China to visit New York. The auction house escorted the guests on guided tours through the Museum of Modern Art, arranged VIP tickets to a local art fair and threw a lavish dinner in the Rockefeller Center ballroom of Christie's. Auctioneers also reserved two discreet skyboxes overlooking the house's saleroom so the group could watch its major spring sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art.

Christie's efforts paid off: During its May 13 contemporary art sale, members of the group placed bids on at least half the top 10 priciest pieces in what became an historic, $745 million auction. The group, mostly women, used telephones in their skybox to call a Christie's specialist standing in the saleroom, Xin Li, a former actress and model in China. She often had to toggle three telephones at a time in order to field their overlapping bids. By sale's end, members of the group bid on or won a gallery's worth of masterpieces—including a $66.2 million Mark Rothko abstract, a $33.7 million Jeff Koons sculpture of a train, a $29.2 million Gerhard Richter squeegee abstract and a $26 million Alexander Calder sculpture of a "Fish," a Chinese symbol of prosperity.

Christie's CEO Steven Murphy watched the action from the sidelines, stunned. "We didn't know anyone from that group a year ago," he said. His staff in Shanghai and Hong Kong had been alerted to their interest by other, established Chinese collectors, and specialists had been courting them for months through visits and leisurely conversations about art.

If you're even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there's a good chance the world's biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. Gone are the days when auctioneers simply mailed sale catalogs to strangers after reading reports of their newfound fortunes. Today, climbing art values and an influx of new international collectors have thrownSotheby's BID -0.98% and Christie's into a global frenzy of research and genuflection. They've dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.

A third of Sotheby's 1,550 employees are assigned to look after at least 9,000 top collectors, a job that entails everything from researching bidders' financial standing to digging through catalogs for objects that might intrigue them.

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