Dark Mode: Inside the Art Market’s Private Auction Playbook

This article is part of the Artnet Intelligence Report: Year Ahead 2026. Drawing on in-depth analysis of the past year’s market performance, the latest edition offers a data-driven snapshot of the art world today—from recent auction results to the artists shaping the global conversation.

The Christie’s evening sale of 20th-century art was in full swing on November 19 when the art advisor Jussi Pylkkänen grabbed his belongings and hurried out of the Rockefeller Center salesroom. Several people followed, exchanging knowing smiles as they stepped into the night.

Where were they going? Those who knew, knew.

Soon the Pylkkänen cohort arrived at their destination: a secret auction at Clemente Bar, the art-industry boîte above Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park restaurant.

It had been organized by Fair Warning, a trendsetting online art-sales platform, and aimed to auction off just one work: Andy Warhol’s resplendent 1974 portrait of Brigitte Bardot, estimated at $8 million to $12 million.

Andy Warhol’s Brigitte Bardot (1974) fetched $16.7 million at Fair Warning’s private auction on November 19, 2025. Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

While the public sales of Leonard Lauder’s collection at Sotheby’s stole the show during New York’s bellwether week, Fair Warning’s private auction produced the big buzz among market insiders. Hand-picked guests, Artnet’s Annie Armstrong later reported, included Greek shipping magnate George Economou; David Mugrabi, whose family has the largest Warhol collection in private hands; and artist-dealer Tony Shafrazi.

Pylkkänen, Christie’s former chief auctioneer, presided, gavel in hand. Brigitte Bardot made $16.7 million, becoming the most expensive Warhol of the auction season.

“Some people want to have the benefit of the auction and the private sale,” Fair Warning’s founder, Loic Gouzer, said of his event. “It’s a hybrid.”

The State of the Game

I first learned about secret auctions in 2024, in the Canvas newsletter, when its author, Jeremy Hodkin, revealed the sale at Christie’s of Dmitry Rybolovlev’s Rothko for $195 million, just as the Russian billionaire was testifying in his fraud suit against Sotheby’s in New York court. (The court ruled for the auction house.)

Since then, market chatter has intensified as more of these sales have come to light, and more people have tried their hand at conducting them. The off-grid, off-season auctions signal a change in the trade, driven by a desire for secrecy— and for masterpieces. The art market’s contraction since 2022 is another factor, as is the outflow of auction veterans into the private sector.

Sotheby’s auction of Leonard Lauder’s collection in November reset the market. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.

The top of the market rebounded last year. After registering the second-lowest tally in a decade in 2024, fine-art auction sales jumped 13.3 percent, to $11.7 billion, in 2025, according to the Artnet Price Database. That number was down from the recent peak of $16.6 billion in 2021, but the descending trajectory has at least been reversed. London auctions in March were up about 17 percent from a year ago.

The total proceeds from works selling for $10 million or more also climbed in 2025, by 36.1 percent, to $2.3 billion, the biggest year-on-year increase among the five price brackets tracked by Artnet.

“The market has come back down to earth,” Philip Hoffman, CEO of the Fine Art Group, said. “Unless it’s that unique, really rare, Blue Period Picasso, or the perfect Klimt, or the best of Rothko, or a fantastic Twombly, or a great Lichtenstein, or a Monet water lilies of the right proportions. Everybody’s going to come out for that. People will pay $40 million for a fabulous Canaletto, but a second-rate Canaletto is going to struggle at $3 million or $4 million.”

And so the chase is on for masterpieces and clients who can afford them. How many whales are swimming out there in international waters? Auction houses will tell you the number is 30 people, max. Private advisors are more conservative: just 10 to 20 at any given time. But even those may be generous estimates.

“At the very top level, you’re not talking about many,” said Brett Gorvy, a former Christie’s rainmaker and now a partner in Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery, which organized a private auction in 2024. “If you go back to the 2000s and the introductions of the hedge funds, or the big beginning of Asia, or the beginning of the Middle East, in each season you don’t see more than four or five of these top buys, at best.”

Art Basel Qatar in February of this year. Courtesy of Art Basel.

Right now, hedge funder Ken Griffin is considered the biggest whale, dealers and auction houses say. He has dropped more than $200 million on individual artworks multiple times. Taiwanese mogul Pierre Chen is known to consistently back and buy top works at auction. Tech titans Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have been active sporadically. Until the war with Iran, the market looked to the Middle East to replace China as a source of high-value transactions. (If market chatter is true and Klimt’s 1914–16 Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was bought by Abu Dhabi, two of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction now reside in the region.)

Some major art will hit the block during the next big auction week, in New York in May. Christie’s won three works from the late philanthropist Agnes Gund’s estate, among them an $80 million Rothko, and it’s offering its fourth tranche of material from publisher S.I. Newhouse’s holdings, including $100 million pieces by Pollock and Brancusi.

Meanwhile, Sotheby’s landed $130 million of postwar treasures from the late collector-dealer Robert Mnuchin’s collection. The estates of fashion legend Valentino Garavani and Fiat SpA founder Giovanni Agnelli are also expected to deliver big-ticket items soon.

One private art dealer told me he keeps a list of dozens of people, aged 85 to 95, whose art troves will have to be sold in the next five years. “There’s going to be a crush,” he said.

A Private Language

For at least two decades, the art market has moved toward greater regulation, transparency, and mainstream attention, experts say. However, at the highest levels, the tide is now changing in some remarkable ways.

Private auctions are on the rise, as houses try to improve their bottom lines and find ways to sell trophies 365 days a year, rather than during just a few prescheduled weeks.

There’s also an appetite for greater secrecy, exclusivity, and discretion in this rarefied realm.

“People don’t want to be seen buying or selling very expensive art publicly in an environment where there’s such a disparity between the haves and have-nots,” London-based art advisor Hugo Nathan said.
Christie’s has had success hosting private auctions for handpicked billionaire clients, who have chased artworks past $100 million. Sotheby’s has leaned into sealed-bid auctions for multimillion-dollar vintage automobiles and is expanding the model to luxury goods and fine art.

Well-connected figures who previously worked at top auction houses are testing novel ways of selling art by tapping into their networks and staging pop-up auctions.

Talking, sometimes on condition of anonymity, with a variety of people who have been involved in these events, I’ve been able to get a sense of how they work. Let’s take a tour.

Christie’s: Secret Agents

Market mavens have been whispering for years about Christie’s mysterious, invite-only record-smashing private auctions, which have been reported on by Artnet columnist Kenny Schachter and the Canvas’s Jeremy Hodgkin. They include:

– Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrot (1941), which went for more than $150 million.

– Mark Rothko, No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) (1951), going for about $195 million.

– Vincent van Gogh, The Zouave (1888), selling for about $200 million.

Adrien Meyer, the house’s global head of private sales and cochairman of Impressionist and Modern art, declined to comment on the specific works and prices but was willing to provide other details about the process.

Christie’s launched the format in 2021 and has conducted “a good handful” of the secret events, Meyer said.

They offer “the comfort of selling confidentially while benefitting from the competitive environment of the auction,” he added. “That’s what has led these auctions to such great success. They provide the best of both worlds that the seller and buyer benefit from.”
Unlike the results of regular auctions, those of private auctions are not reported publicly (or shared with Artnet’s Price Database). And while particulars sometimes leak, they are difficult to confirm.

“Precisely because the market doesn’t know those details, it provides added value for the transaction,” Meyer said. “Clients enjoy the confidential nature of the event, the fact that the work of art will change hands without the rest of the market knowing it.”

Only certain pieces qualify for such treatment.

While developing its secret auctions, Christie’s sold Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) for $195 million in 2022 at a public sale in New York. Photo: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images.

“We are carefully handpicking those works that are suited for the sales,” Meyer said. “We want to ensure that the specific and rare nature of these events remains that way. You don’t want to have 10 private auctions a year. They are meant to serve only exceptional works of art.”

Most prices have exceeded $100 million or set new records, Meyer said, and while Christie’s has sold only art, it plans to test other categories.

This is how it works: Clients are invited to participate by phone or via a unique, nontransferable video link.

“You can’t share it with your best friend,” Meyer said.

The auction takes place behind closed doors in the main salesroom at the Christie’s New York headquarters.

Clients don’t know who the other bidders are, but they can see the auctioneer and the Christie’s staffers bidding on behalf of other clients. There’s a catalog for each work, promotional videos, and opportunities for private viewings.

“It’s very much all the bells and whistles that come with the handling of a masterpiece,” Meyer said.

Invited participants commit to bid.

“That sets the tone quite nicely,” he said. So far, there have been four to nine participants in each sale.

Pros: The private nature of the auction reduces the exposure risk for the work if it doesn’t sell. (At a public auction, the unsold work is considered “burnt,” meaning it’s difficult to reoffer soon after.)

Cons: You don’t capture unexpected bidders who occasionally show up at public auctions out of nowhere and stun everyone in the room with their big moves.

Sotheby’s: All Sealed Up

You may recall that, in the fall of 2020, Sotheby’s offered businessman Ron Perelman’s monumental Alberto Giacometti sculpture in a sealed-bid private sale. The nine-foot-tall Grande Femme I (1960) had
a a minimum bid of $90 million. Clients could submit bids over several days, which were reviewed by Sotheby’s general counsel and an outside auditor. The winning bid wasn’t disclosed.

In March 2022, the house began offering exceedingly rare vintage cars using a similar process, dubbed Sotheby’s Sealed.

One client had a 1958 Mercedes Benz 300 SL Roadster, a gift from the automaker to the Argentine racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio, “el Maestro,” a five-time Formula One World Drivers’ Champion. The car remained in his family’s possession until 2022.

Executives at RM Sotheby’s, a partnership for the house’s car auctions, didn’t know how to value the unusual provenance of the car, which on its own wasn’t very rare.

1958 Mercedes Benz 300 SL Roadster. Photo: Tim Scott Fluid Images/ Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s.

“By using the Sealed platform, we essentially said, ‘Incredible car, incredible history. You tell us what it’s worth,’” Peter Haynes, an RM Sotheby’s director for marketing and business development, told me.

It sold, but the price remains a secret. Which is the whole point.

“There are people out there with great cars, who are keen to realize the best value without putting it into a public auction,” Haynes said.

Cars have exceeded $20 million in such sales, and RM Sotheby’s is now looking at offering less expensive models to attract more buyers.

In its first year, Sotheby’s Sealed had four to six cars a year. “Now we are doing monthly sealed auctions,” Haynes said.

Sotheby’s has deployed a similar strategy for art, though not as successfully, and jewelry, which has done well. A painting by Yoshitomo Nara offered in Hong Kong in 2025 failed to sell, dealers said. A spokesperson for Sotheby’s said, “Given that Sealed sales are private, we aren’t able to confirm whether a work has been sold.”

How it works: These sales are only online. Anybody can participate, but you have to pass a screening to determine that you can pay. They have drawn between four and 20 people, according to the house. People can up their bids, but they see their position only if their bids are in the top three.

“All you know is where you are in the rankings,” Haynes said. “If you are not the winning bidder, you’d have no visibility into who the winning bidder was.”

Pros: In theory, this type of auction protects the work from overexposure. If it doesn’t sell, did it even happen? But Sotheby’s promotes the works on its website, so a digital footprint exists for those determined to find it.

Cons: Limited visibility into bidding. “It’s like a black box,” an ex-Sotheby’s staffer said. “You don’t know what the level is. You just know if you are winning or not. It’s like you are competing against yourself. You don’t have the satisfaction of knowing where the other bid was.”

New Perspectives

More firms are entering the private-auctions game. Hoffman, the Fine Art Group CEO, has brought together Gorvy, former Christie’s and Phillips CEO Ed Dolman, and quondam Sotheby’s chairperson Patti Wong to create a powerful advisory, New Perspectives Art Partners, which is planning private auctions for works starting at $10 million.

He envisions these as in-person events with a restricted number of invitees. “It’s not publicized, it’s kept under wraps,” Hoffman said. “No one will know what the work made or if it was sold.”

Like his competitors, he sees the private-auction model as an extra tool to maximize value for clients. “It’s only worth it with the mega pictures,” he said.

Gorvy conducted a private auction in 2024 for a 1966 Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Talking. The seller was restaurateur, collector, and artist Michael Chow.

The Financial Times broke the news almost a year later. It took place “in a specially mocked-up sale room, in the gallery’s New York space,” with six telephone bidders, including Israeli shipping magnate Eyal Ofer, the newspaper recounted.

New Perspectives Art Partners: Brett Gorvy, left, Philip Hoffman, Ed Dolman, Patti Wong, and Alex Dolman. Courtesy of New Perspectives Art Partners.

Pylkkänen, the former Christie’s auctioneer, conducted the sale. Bidding started at $55 million, but the final price remains a mystery to the general public.

The work had appeared at auction three times before, always at Christie’s, fetching $1.87 million in 1987, $6.6 million in 2000, and $70.2 million in 2014. Each time, it became either the most- or the second-most-expensive single-panel painting by the Irish painter.

“The most important aspect of all of this is you’re thinking about these mega buyers,” Gorvy said. “How do you activate them? How do you excite them, when many of them feel that they are already being overplenished?”

Fair Warning

Gouzer, another former Christie’s staffer, started Fair Warning in 2020, early in the pandemic, as a members-only digital platform conducting live auctions for one work at a time. Approved users log in and can hear the auctioneer while swiping to bid.

Artnet’s database lists 42 lots sold by Fair Warning, mostly for $1 million or less, with Warhol’s $16.7 million Brigitte Bardot on top. Users can see past auction results.

Gouzer added in-person, invitation-only private auctions last year, at the request of a client, he said, “and we built the tech to do it.” He also sees them as yet another tool in the toolbox.

The first sale—of a 1971 Picasso work on paper—took place last May “at the fancy private dining club Coco’s at Colette in New York’s GM Building,” Artnet reported. Gouzer brought in Pylkkänen to be the auctioneer, and it fetched $7.49 million.

Pylkkänen returned six months later to sell Warhol’s Brigitte Bardot. As Christie’s auction was concluding that November night, Fair Warning’s event was just getting started, with trays of cocktails being passed around the room. “It’s an auction and a party at the same time,” Gouzer told me.

The company’s next private auction may happen in May, but that is not certain. “I am still looking for a masterpiece,” Gouzer said.

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