Christmas is almost here, which means Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti did his best to bring festive cheer by crunching the auction house’s 2024’s numbers during his end-of-year press conference Tuesday. Cerutti said the house’s projected sales for this year total $5.7 billion across both art and luxury, around an 8 percent drop from last year’s total $6.2 billion.
During Tuesday’s Zoom presser, Cerutti rehashed the rhetoric he used in July, when he described the market landscape as continually “challenging.” “Despite a challenging environment for the art market, this year has been a productive one for Christie’s,” he said Tuesday. “We look ahead to 2025 with confidence.” Cerutti argued that, despite the lowered total, underlying performance indicators were showed strong fundamentals. “Our key performance indicators of overall sell through rate of 86 percent, hammer vs. low estimate index at 112 percent, and bidders per lot of 3.7 showed growth year-over-year,” he said.
Christie’s fortunes have improved as the year has progressed, in line with the encouraging results at Frieze London and Art Paris Basel in October. The house brought in $486 million from its 20th century evening auction during its marquee New York sales in November. That included the sale of this year’s most valuable work sold at auction—René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954) for $121 million. In fact, it was the only work to top $100 million over the last 12 months. The same evening, Ed Ruscha’s 1964 Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, sold for more than $68 million, a new auction record for the artist. (Artnet‘s Kenny Schacher reported that the buyer was none other than Amazon founder and spaceman Jeff Bezos.)
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Christie’s didn’t only sell the most expensive painting of the year, it also sold 2024’s most valuable jewel, Cerutti said proudly. The Eden Rose, a 10.2-carat pink diamond, went for $13.4 million in New York in June—that Magnificent Jewels sale achieved a total of $44.4 million, with 90 percent of the 144 lots sold. Following on from this, the December luxury sales in New York were led by another Magnificent Jewels auction totaling $49.2 million with 97 percent of lots sold.
It was no surprise that Cerutti’s focus was on the tail end of 2024; in July, Christie’s reported that it generated $2.1 billion in live and online auction sales in the first half of 2024, a 22 percent drop from the same period last year. In the first half of 2023, Christie’s brought in $2.7 billion in live and online auction sales. That figure was already down 23 percent from the $3.5 billion generated during the same period in 2022.
Despite not releasing its private sales figures in July, Christie’s CEO reported on Tuesday that they have grown by 41 percent to $1.5 billion over the last year, contributing 27 percent to the house’s overall sales. (Last year’s private sales total was $1.2 billion.)
The Americas contributed 42 percent to global auction sales, with new buyer numbers up 18 percent for 20th/21st century art. Not only this, but more than a quarter of Christie’s buyers and bidders in the region are millennials or younger. This is perhaps no surprise, given 30 percent of the house’s clients are now 43 or younger. The shifting demographics might be why 81 percent of 2024’s bids were placed online.
Cerutti also noted that in London, the number of bidders and buyers rose by 15 percent, with new buyers up 29 percent. This despite Christie’s wiping its June evening sale in London off the calendar.