Lighting up the old habit of auction extremes
The obituary of a Sotheby's legend proves the trade has been bolder—and weirder—for longer than you think.
Multiple views of a circa 1971 pack of Sotheby’s Special Reserve cigarettes, featuring the company’s logo and the facade of its New Bond Street building in London, from an online sale catalog of Thomas Heneage Fine Art Books
The past is the art world’s least effective ghost: constantly hovering, rarely acknowledged. Whether we’re talking about concepts, techniques, and aesthetics in art-making, or strategies, initiatives, and gambits in the art business, too many stealth retreads get credulously framed as innovative—even taboo-breaking—while earlier examples float just out of view. By and large, we are an industry too trusting, disinterested, or just plain busy to bother investigating the odd chill in the room before we buy into whatever’s being pitched right in our faces.
The good news is that recency bias isn’t putting anybody in the art industry in grave danger. It’s a Scooby Doo situation, not The Amityville Horror. But the bad news is that negligence of the past can distort our perceptions of the present enough to make us look dopey, if not cost us serious time, effort, and money. And if avoiding those down sides isn’t sufficient motivation to dig into the archives a little, I promise you the past often has the added bonus of being way, way wilder than you expect.
I’m thinking about all of this because of the recent death of Sotheby’s legend John Marion. If you’re not familiar with Marion’s game, his story is worth a few minutes of your time. Tobias Meyer, formerly the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and now an apex-level private dealer, made a rare appearance on the record to call Marion “the god of auctioneers in America” in his New York Times obituary. After starting as a trainee at the New York auction house Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1960—four years before it was acquired by Sotheby’s and rebranded as Sotheby Parke Bernet—Marion became the firm’s chairman and chief auctioneer within 15 years.1 He remained a giant there until his retirement in 1994.
But more than his prowess at the rostrum, the details and context of Marion’s career (particularly in the 1970s) make the 21st century art and collectibles market feel less like a crass break from the past than an inevitable revival of it—and maybe even a tamer, more family-friendly version.
The most telling example concerns a favorite alleged sacrilege of present-day art purists: branded merch. For example, you may remember last year when Sotheby’s launched a capsule collection with the high-end basics designer Frame. The collab featured everything from $128 cable-knit socks to $1,298 cashmere sweaters emblazoned with the auction house’s logo. The whole line took its fair share of incoming fire at the time, including from former Wet Paint columnist and longtime friend of TGM Annie Armstrong.2 But a year later, as we live through the cognitive dissonance of Palantir chore coats and Claude-branded “thinking” caps at Anthropic café pop-ups, I’ll say this much in the collection’s defense: at least Sotheby’s was collaborating on clothes while also being in the actual business of taste.
More importantly, the concept of auction-house merch had around 50 years of precedent on Sotheby’s x Frame. The Times obit of Marion noted that his employer “built its brand” partly in “conventional ways, with merchandise like Sotheby Parke Bernet T-shirts and tote bags that were a status symbol dangling from elegant elbows on Madison Avenue.”3 Although “purists sneered” at the initiative, the obit continues, Marion was a fan; the accessibly priced gear aligned with his belief that art should be “for everybody.”
But disco-era tees and totes are just one mundane reminder of the historic art merch that time forgot. Friends, allow me to excavate the wonders of this post’s featured image: Sotheby’s Special Reserve King Size Filter Cigarettes.
This amygdala-broiling relic was an indirect result of the art market contraction in 1969-70, according to Frank Herrman’s book Sotheby’s: Portrait of an Auction House. As the market for art and collectibles was tanking, it turns out, the market for smokes was booming. W.D. & H.O. Wills, a subsidiary of the UK’s Imperial Tobacco Company, “was looking for a new brand name, already familiar to the public, and willing to pay well for it,” Herrman writes. A market research outfit suggested two possibilities for a partnership that checked those boxes: the upper-crust department store Fortnum & Mason, and Sotheby’s.
Yet the proposal called for more than just licensing. “It also involved a long campaign of free advertising linking the new cigarette brand name with the activities of the company after which it had been named,” Herrman writes. “The auction room seemed to offer an ideal setting.”
With Sotheby’s London headquarters facing a cash crunch from the recent decline in sales, the tobacco deal—worth £100,000—was ultimately too good to turn down. Still, the house’s board tore itself apart over the decision. Herrman relays that “a number of London directors resigned” after their New York counterparts voted to make Sotheby’s Special Reserve a reality.
The cigs hit the market in England in October 1971. (A 20-pack cost 30p, per a contemporaneous Financial Times item.) They failed colossally. Thomas Heneage Art Books (whose online catalog included the cigarette pack images at the top of the post) claims that Wills had so much unsold inventory after a few years that the company eventually handed it over to British customs to get a refund for the excise tax.
But Herrman contends that “the cigarette affair” forced Sotheby’s to rethink its priorities (and its leadership) in ways that made it a stronger, wiser company in the long run.4 Score one for branded merch deep in the annals of art-market history, it seems.
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Nothing else hits the lungs quite like Sotheby’s Special Reserve, but Marion’s obituary nevertheless includes other decades-old forebears for what are typically considered contemporary auction-sector excesses.
Take art finance. Although Green implies that lending cash to clients only became a Sotheby’s strategy after the American mall and root beer impresario A. Alfred Taubman acquired a controlling stake in the house in 1983, a Sotheby’s spokesperson told me that the company “had long offered financing to clients—primarily through advances to consignors and, at times, loans to buyers—before establishing Sotheby’s Financial Services as a dedicated subsidiary in 1988.”
What about globalization? By 1977, Sotheby Parke Bernet already spanned 18 locations worldwide. They ranged from obvious hubs like London, New York, and Paris, to early bets on Hong Kong and Los Angeles, and even included the 21st century impossibility of a Tehran outpost.5
Then, maybe most importantly, there was the collision of categories. Over the course of his career, Marion auctioned objects of all types: major Impressionist and Modern paintings, a nearly 70-carat diamond, even Andy Warhol’s collection of 175 cookie jars—which made almost $250,000 in a dedicated sale at Sotheby’s New York in 1987. Three years later, however, he lamented to the Times that the auction business had “matured” enough to make “generalists” like himself extinct, adding: “I would probably not exist today.”
The 36 years since suggest that Marion was wrong on that last point. See: Oliver Barker—Sotheby’s chairman in Europe, an international specialist in contemporary art, and the house’s chief auctioneer—presiding over the $51.7m sale of a rare 1962 Ferrari GTO in 2023. Or Gemma Sudlow, then the head of private & iconic collections and decorative arts at Christie’s New York, auctioning Beeple’s phygital spaceman work HUMAN ONE (2021) in an evening sale of 21st century art in November 2021. Or Henry Highley, the head of private sales in Europe and principal auctioneer at Phillips, captaining the sale of a juvenile Triceratops skeleton last fall.
The auctioneers above weren’t alone in selling these trophy objects outside their nominal categories of expertise. Each of the houses they worked for undoubtedly had more robust infrastructure behind them than Marion did in his day. But the point is that cross-category transacting, the 21st century name for an approach often (mistakenly) treated as if it only emerged within the past 15 years, dates not just to Marion’s time but arguably all the way back to the Enlightenment. What’s (supposedly) new is old once again.
This post obviously isn’t going to prevent every prisoner of the moment from popping off about how it’s really only the past five, ten, or 25 years that have twisted art’s pristine historical roots into some kind of reckless capitalist boondoggle. No written argument probably could. If only I could take each of them out back for a friendly chat over a couple of Sotheby’s Special Reserves. Maybe then they could see things differently.
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Sotheby’s, founded in England in 1744, gained a foothold in New York by acquiring Parke-Bernet in 1964. The merged company was known as Sotheby Parke Bernet until it was sold again and rebranded back to Sotheby’s in 1983.
For those missing her work, Annie is now writing about the collision between art and food at the newsletter startup Caper.
I reached out to Sotheby’s to try to identify the precise year that the tees and totes were produced, as well as to see if there were any archival images. Sadly, they couldn’t find either by newsletter time. My best guess is the early 70s.
Case in point: Herrman recounts that “when six years later the Sotheby’s board had another proposal put to them to the effect that an enormously powerful firm in the consumer field wanted to use Sotheby’s name linked to their advertising, the board turned them down without even bothering to ask the identity of the other party concerned.”
The others were Buenos Aires, Brussels, Toronto, Munich, Amsterdam, Florence, Milan, Monaco, Stockholm, Johannesburg, Madrid, and Zurich.