The article is interesting as it gives some background and history on the Hotel Drouout and the once monopoly it held on auction in France. The group includes 72 independent houses with 16 display salons and 5,000 visitors per day.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY TimesPARIS — For more than a century, Hôtel Drouot and its collective of auctioneers savored the benefits of a monopoly by French houses on all auctions in France, established by royal decree in 1556. Those were easier times, when deals were struck on hunting grounds with aristocrats unloading old master’s paintings and the family silver.
Drouot’s glory days, however, are gone.
Now this quirky Paris institution, which at 163 years old is among the world’s oldest auction houses, is trying to transform itself into something more relevant in a fiercely competitive art market.
Up against the international monoliths of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Drouot has watched revenues sag 22 percent over the past four years to 375 million euros, about $409 million, a humbling position for an institution in what once was the main international hub for art, antiques and antiquities before the 1960s. Last year alone, Christie’s reported record sales of $7.7 billion, and Sotheby’s announced record sales of $6 billion.
The megarich international buyers who are driving the auction market today are less interested in the prizes of eclectic family estates, like Louis XIV commodes, rubies or taxidermy treasures. They primarily want contemporary and modern art, not the 18th-century French furniture that has long been Drouot’s bread and butter.
But Drouot says it can be fashionable again. It has been making management changes and other efforts to promote and extend its brand, including offering urban art, with a sale of works by Banksy, the British street artist and political activist.
“Now we want to go for the contemporary art market and to change our image,” said Cécile Bernard, Drouot’s new director of development, who is a Christie’s veteran and specialist in old master’s paintings. “We want to be seen as cool.”
Outside its building near Boulevard Haussmann on Saturday, Drouot parked a semitrailer bearing a 1998 Banksy work, “Silent Majority,” which was to be sold for the first time at auction on Monday afternoon. The work is almost 10 meters long and was created in collaboration with the British street artist Inkie. Also on Saturday, eight street artists painted a canvas draped across Drouot’s glass and steel facade.
“Drouot must catch the market where it is,” said Laure de Beauvau-Craon, a former president of Sotheby’s France. “They are right to do this. Eighteenth-century furniture was the specialty of Drouot, but now tastes are changing.”
She added: “Why collect silver if you don’t have someone to polish it? It’s a way of life that has changed.”
It was Ms. Beauvau-Craon who rolled back more than 400 years of protection for French auction houses by mounting a 10-year legal challenge on behalf of Sotheby’s to revoke the royal edict that had restricted sales to licensed French auctioneers. The first Sotheby’s auction in France was held in 2001, and Drouot has felt the effects ever since as some sellers turned to its competitors.
Drouot, founded in 1852, is made up of 72 independent auction companies that are shareholders in the house. Its 16 display salons draw about 5,000 visitors a day, Drouot said, a mix of dealers, collectors, sellers and walk-ins who stream in from the surrounding Right Bank neighborhood of antique, coin and stamp shops.
The house is a bazaar of treasures and cast-offs, a frenzy of activity during auctions, with standing-room crowds as the auctioneers call out prices in French.
The auctioneers are addressed as “master,” though they call themselves “hammers.” For years, the salons seemed like museum sets for a long-ago era, with crimson walls and “criers” circulating among buyers. Most visitors know the unspoken rituals and move counterclockwise around the house to inspect merchandise.
The new management ordered a makeover in 2013 to bring more light into the salons, and a spacious new welcome desk was built, where hostesses now greet customers in French, English and Chinese.
In February, the shareholders replaced their president, Claude Aguttes, 70, with Alexandre Giquello, 44, an auctioneer who has pledged to fashion Drouot into a cultural destination. In April, the house recruited Ms. Bernard, the choice of a woman in itself a signal of change.
The new leadership intends to incorporate night events, concerts and conferences and has opened a high-end restaurant, L’Adjugé (which is what French auctioneers cry when the hammer falls, the equivalent of “Sold!”).
“Today we have to develop our brand of Drouot with new projects,” said Olivier Lange, Drouot’s chief executive, who presided over the development of an Internet platform, Drouot Live, that has been streaming auctions since 2011. The site attracts about a million visits monthly, roughly half of them registered members from abroad, mostly from the United States and Asia. The site allows online customers to bid along with those in the auction room, as do Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
The changes to promote the Drouot brand have not all gone smoothly, however, Mr. Lange said. For example, auctioneers compete for sellers and some insist on their names’ appearing in larger type than Drouot’s in catalogs, despite an agreement to follow a uniform format that gives the brand more prominent display.
Besides ego, the changes threaten culture and traditions, some auctioneers said. Some of them descend from families that have passed down the trade — and their hammers — for generations.
“Auctioneers never like to accept change,” said Brice Pescheteau-Badin, a fourth-generation Drouot auctioneer whose mother, Chantal, became the first woman to pound the hammer there, amid hostility from some male auctioneers.
Fabien Mirabaud, 40, a lawyer turned auctioneer, said that when he holds the hammer these days, he mixes English with French to make it easier for foreign customers to join in. “Parisian auctioneers are now ready for change because the younger generation is gaining power,” he said.
Some buyers think it’s time for auctioneers to act collectively to create bigger, themed auctions instead of holding individual sales from their collections. Drouot is starting to do that. It staged a collective Asian art sale in April and is planning more specialized themes.
“If they want to go fight in a new world, which is the 21st century, they have to promote Drouot,” said Eric Coatalem, who owns a gallery in Paris that specializes in Old Masters. The makeover is an improvement, he said, but added, “I don’t know if it will change the quality of what they can show.”
There is still an audience for the French collections, particularly those that include Asian art, which many French collectors amassed over generations. Last year, Drouot auctioned a blue Chinese porcelain vase for $2.1 million and a Chinese statue of the Buddhist figure Amitayus for $2.7 million.
But Rémy Le Fur, who is considered one of the top auctioneers by his Drouot peers, said he often had to overcome the “snobbery” of some sellers who believed that “it makes a collection more important to sell with an Anglo-Saxon house,” like Christie’s or Sotheby’s.
He nevertheless managed to strike a deal to sell selected works from the Haroué chateau of Princess Minnie de Beauvau-Craon, the step-daughter of the former Sotheby’s president who broke the auction monopoly, on June 15.
Why did she choose Drouot to sell off the family’s sword of the Master of the Horse of Lorraine and the bedchamber of the Countess du Cayla?
“I couldn’t choose between Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where I have great friends, and so I went up memory lane and went back to where I started,” said the princess, who once worked as an intern at Drouot.
Besides, she said, Drouot is “just this incredible world of diversity where you have the best and the worst, the most beautiful next to the ugliest.”
“It only exists in Drouot,” she added.
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