Sotheby's

On November 20, 2024, bidding in Sotheby’s New York saleroom went, in the house’s own press release, “bananas”: seven bidders chased Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian — a banana fastened with duct tape to a wall — past its $1.5 million presale high estimate to a final price of $6.2 million (Sotheby’s). The winning bid was placed by Sotheby’s Deputy Chairman, Asia, bidding on the phone on behalf of Chinese collector and TRON founder Justin Sun (Sotheby’s). The verified detail no leading history of the house mentions: Sun told Bloomberg afterward that he was considering paying in TRX or Bitcoin — the lot was the only one of the night for which Sotheby’s would accept payments in crypto (Moneyweb/Bloomberg). That is the profile’s starting point: the 280-year-old auction house at the intersection of the art market and cryptocurrency, a convergence its own history would have found unrecognizable.

1744: a bookseller’s auction

Sotheby’s calls itself the oldest and largest internationally recognized firm of fine art auctioneers in the world, with a global network of 80 offices and annual worldwide sales turnover in excess of $7 billion (Sotheby’s). Its founder, Samuel Baker, was an entrepreneur, occasional publisher, and successful bookseller who held his first auction under his own name on March 11, 1744: the dispersal of “several Hundred scarce and valuable Books in all branches of Polite Literature” from the library of Sir John Stanley, which fetched a grand total of £826 (Sotheby’s). The first sale took place at Exeter Exchange on London’s Strand — a building that later housed a zoo and other attractions (Sotheby’s).

For more than a century, Baker and his successors handled the great libraries sold at auction, including those of the Earls of Sunderland, Hopetoun, and Pembroke and the Dukes of Devonshire, York, and Buckingham (Sotheby’s). After Napoleon’s death, Sotheby’s sold the books he had taken into exile on St Helena — the final lot was the emperor’s tortoiseshell-and-gold walking stick (Sotheby’s).

From books to art

In 1767 Baker went into partnership with George Leigh, a natural auctioneer with an actor’s sense of timing whose ivory hammer remains on display at Sotheby’s London galleries (Sotheby’s). On Baker’s death in 1778, his estate was divided between Leigh and Baker’s nephew John Sotheby, whose family stayed involved in the business for more than 80 years; during that time the company extended its trade to prints, coins, medals, and antiquities (Sotheby’s). In 1842 the firm’s senior accountant, John Wilkinson, became a partner, and when the last of the Sotheby family died in 1861, Wilkinson took over as head of the business — styling it Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, a name it carried until 1924 (Sotheby’s).

The decisive turn came in the summer of 1917, when the company moved its premises from Wellington Street — off the Strand, the center of the book world — to 34–35 New Bond Street in Mayfair, the hub of the art world (Sotheby’s). During the interwar years Sotheby’s focused on pictures and decorative works of art, staging swift on-site sales of country-house contents so efficiently that its specialist team became known as “The Flying Squad” (Sotheby’s). Postwar chairman Peter Wilson opened an Impressionist and Modern art department in the mid-1950s and invented the black-tie evening sale; his 1958 sale of the Goldschmidt collection of seven Impressionist masterworks created a new world record for a fine art sale (Sotheby’s).

Going global and going public

Having already opened an office in New York, Sotheby’s bought Parke-Bernet, America’s largest fine art auction house, in 1964 (Sotheby’s). That launched a programme of expansion that made it the first international auction house to conduct sales in Hong Kong (1973), Russia (1988), India (1992), and France (2001), and the first to have a presence in China (2012) (Sotheby’s). Its own history claims a long ledger of firsts: the first auction house to open offices in America (1955), the pioneer of the evening sale format (1958), the first to use satellite transmission for simultaneous London–New York bidding (1960s), the first to sell a work for more than $100 million (2004), and an e-commerce pioneer (2000) (Sotheby’s).

The ownership story cycled with the market. The company went public in 1977 with shares oversubscribed 26 times; in the autumn of 1984 Alfred Taubman acquired it and took it back into private hands; and it went public again in 1988, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, opening new flagship salerooms in New York at 1334 York Avenue (Sotheby’s).

Records and landmark sales

The 1980s through the 2000s brought record prices for 20th-century masterpieces at Sotheby’s: Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe for $104.2 million (2004), Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) for $108.4 million (2013), and in London, Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents at £49.5 million (2002), which remains a record for an Old Master painting (Sotheby’s). In 2012 Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold at Sotheby’s New York for $119,922,500 — at the time a new world record for any work of art at auction (Sotheby’s). Earlier records include Warhol’s Orange Marilyn at $17,327,500 in 1998, then the highest price paid for a work by the artist (Sotheby’s). The 2016 Bowie / Collector sale of David Bowie’s private collection was 100% sold, drew more than 55,000 visitors to its pre-sale exhibition, and involved more than 1,750 bidders plus 1,000 online bidders (Sotheby’s).

The Drahi era and the crypto turn

A new chapter opened in 2019, when — 31 years after it became a public company — Sotheby’s was taken private once again in an acquisition by Patrick Drahi, the media and telecom entrepreneur, with Charles F. Stewart named CEO (Sotheby’s). The price was around $3.7 billion, and the deal ended the house’s “decades-long run as the oldest publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange” (The Art Newspaper). The increase in value over the next three years — a rumoured $5 billion valuation on a potential IPO in January 2022 — reflected what The Art Newspaper described as real business momentum: Sotheby’s adapted to the COVID pandemic with hybrid sales models more effectively than rival Christie’s, embraced cryptocurrency and NFTs, saw its luxury and collectibles businesses thrive, and reported a record turnover of more than $7.3 billion in sales in 2021, its biggest year ever (The Art Newspaper). In 2020, with art fairs and traditional auctions cancelled, Sotheby’s was the first auction house to shift successfully to a hybrid digital auction format (Sotheby’s).

Beyond auctions, the company offers a BuyNow marketplace, Sotheby’s Financial Services — which it describes as the world’s only full-service art financing company — and Sotheby’s Advisory (Sotheby’s).

The banana

The November 20, 2024 Comedian sale deserves its own account because it is the queue context — and because the details resist the dismissal. Bidding started at $800,000 and pushed past the high estimate in under 20 seconds, with at least two phone bidders, two online bidders, and three in the room; the hammer came down at $5.2 million, and with auction-house premiums the final price reached $6.24 million (Bloomberg’s figure; Sotheby’s own release rounds it to $6.2 million) (Moneyweb/Bloomberg; Sotheby’s). Sun was buying a certificate of authenticity giving him the right to manifest the piece as an official artwork — Sotheby’s added a banana and a roll of duct tape as a “starter kit,” plus a detailed instruction manual for presentation (Moneyweb/Bloomberg). The work had debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 in the Perrotin gallery’s booth; the crowds grew so thick the gallery took it down for crowd control, and all three editioned works sold then for $120,000–$150,000 (Moneyweb/Bloomberg). Before the 2024 sale, the banana toured nine cities — Dubai, Taipei, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong among them — and drew more than 12,000 visitors in two weeks in New York (Sotheby’s). The sold example is number 2 of an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs; one example is now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Sotheby’s). Sun announced he would personally eat the banana “as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture” (Sotheby’s). Sotheby’s own head of contemporary art, David Galperin, framed the price as the market’s answer to a philosophical question: “how do you value what, for me at least, is one of the most brilliant ideas in the history of conceptual art” (Sotheby’s).

What this profile does not claim

This profile treats the company’s “oldest and largest internationally recognised firm of fine art auctioneers” as its own claim, not an independently verified fact. The Comedian price is reported as each source reports it ($6.2M in Sotheby’s release, $6.24M at Bloomberg) rather than reconciled. Current financials, ownership stakes, and any revived IPO plans are not asserted (search-leads only). The headquarters is described through flagship salerooms rather than a claimed global-HQ address. The crypto-payment detail for the Comedian lot rests on Bloomberg’s post-sale interview with Sun as republished by Moneyweb.