Struggling Sotheby’s is thrown a $200m lifeline — will it work?

Sotheby's is expected to receive a $200m boost from Sydell Miller's art collection. Will the good times return for the auction house?

Sotheby's Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibition Unveiled in London
(Image credit: Michael Bowles/Getty Images for Sotheby's)

The autumn season is an important time for auction houses in the sales calendar. But for Sotheby’s, this autumn is more important than for most. “The art market is grinding through a rough patch… driven in part by China’s economic slowdown, wars and volatile US elections,” says The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

To that list can be added the normalisation of interest rates that makes inherently risky assets, such as collectables, less attractive to investors/collectors when you could earn a decent rate of return by simply sticking your money in the bank. As the WSJ points out, the “sales downturn” could not have come at a worse time for “the auction house’s highly leveraged billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, who is fighting fires amid restructuring in his broader telecom empire, Altice” (Drahi took Sotheby’s private in 2019, delisting it after three decades of being publicly traded).

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Chris Carter
Wealth Editor, MoneyWeek

Chris Carter spent three glorious years reading English literature on the beautiful Welsh coast at Aberystwyth University. Graduating in 2005, he left for the University of York to specialise in Renaissance literature for his MA, before returning to his native Twickenham, in southwest London. He joined a Richmond-based recruitment company, where he worked with several clients, including the Queen’s bank, Coutts, as well as the super luxury, Dorchester-owned Coworth Park country house hotel, near Ascot in Berkshire.

Then, in 2011, Chris joined MoneyWeek. Initially working as part of the website production team, Chris soon rose to the lofty heights of wealth editor, overseeing MoneyWeek’s Spending It lifestyle section. Chris travels the globe in pursuit of his work, soaking up the local culture and sampling the very finest in cuisine, hotels and resorts for the magazine’s discerning readership. He also enjoys writing his fortnightly page on collectables, delving into the fascinating world of auctions and art, classic cars, coins, watches, wine and whisky investing.

You can follow Chris on Instagram.