“Why does something have value?” muses Charles Stewart. We’re talking bananas — specifically one that was duct-taped to a wall and sold by Sotheby’s for $6.2mn. The fruit “was a symbol”, the auction house chief executive says of the piece, from artist Maurizio Cattelan, which generated worldwide astonishment and much hand-wringing over the meaning (or otherwise) of art. “What is the value of that symbol?” Stewart asks. “And what is the symbolism of the value?”
What, indeed. Sometimes, though, a banana is just a banana, as the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun proved when he bought the piece and promptly ate it. It wasn’t even the first banana to be stuck to the wall: Stewart reveals it had to be replaced every few days before the sale to avoid it turning too brown.
Multimillion-dollar bananas one day, Andy Warhols, Old Masters and Freddie Mercury’s moustache comb (on the block with an estimated price of £500; sold for an unreal £152,400) the next: such is the life of Sotheby’s American boss. Outside there is war in Ukraine and the Middle East; Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked global markets; Brexit has dented the UK economy. But inside his office on London’s New Bond Street, the walls covered with dozens of Damien Hirst butterflies, the world looks rather different. A sale the night before our meeting included pieces by Yoshitomo Nara and Lisa Brice and generated £62.5mn, with 90 per cent of listings sold. It was, Stewart says, “a real affirmation of London as a global centre for art and culture. We just felt it in the room.”
The cracks and fissures in a formerly globalised world may have actually been good for the industry’s power centres, he suggests. At least in terms of their identity. Before Brexit and Trump “there were no barriers to anything and travel was inexpensive, shipping was inexpensive, everyone was everywhere”. The art market lacked regional differentiation and had become “global” and “samey”. “You would see the same things in Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris.”
Fast forward to 2025 and Stewart sees “a trend towards regionalisation and even nationalisation” in the market for art and high-end collectibles — wine, watches, cars — that Sotheby’s sells. “I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing.”
Still, there is no doubt events of the past few years have shaken up the art market. “New York has been the biggest beneficiary over the last five years of Brexit,” he says. “The biggest collections are generally being sold in New York these days. It isn’t to say that London and Paris aren’t important.”
And tariffs? “They seem to be targeted at boutique segments that are intended to send more of a signal than have a truly disruptive economic impact.” In previous trade disputes Bordeaux wine was hit with tariffs. “You saw prices tick up immediately. The tariffs [then] fell away, but the prices didn’t necessarily go back down.” More ructions are to be expected at auctions, he adds. “If someone has a 25 per cent disadvantage, it’s going to have an effect on those bidders.”
Stewart is the outsider at the British-founded business — an American financier who formerly worked on big media deals, advising the likes of Comcast. Today he is wearing a crisp blue suit and tie, looking every inch the Morgan Stanley banker he once was. He joined Sotheby’s in 2019, hired by Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli billionaire, who paid $3.7bn for the auction house that year and who pitched him the job on a two-hour walk around Hyde Park. “We talked about life and philosophy and family, principles of business . . . lots of things. I got excited about it . . . It’s rare that you have someone who is applying entrepreneurial principles to established incumbent businesses.”
Drahi bought Sotheby’s personally — rather than through his Altice group, where Stewart worked after his banking days. As borrowing costs rose, Drahi had to partly unwind a debt-fuelled spending spree through which Altice amassed an empire of cable and media assets by, for example, selling its stake in BT. Sotheby’s own debt was trimmed recently via a $1bn investment from the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and Drahi himself, in return for a stake in the business of 25-30 per cent.
Stewart often runs into old colleagues from his years in finance. “It’s a global, high-end, professional services business based on expertise,” he says of the auction world and the overlap with banking. “You’re servicing the same client base.”
He admits to not being an art expert, at least when he joined the company. “I feel like I’ve gotten a doctorate in art history,” he says, describing what he’s learnt about the auction market as “a gift in my life”. “You can be the most prominent Renaissance art scholar, you’re going to know very little about Ferraris, or moon jars in Korea, or Meissen porcelain. It starts with having an intellectual curiosity and an openness to it.”
The art world is not exactly known for its openness to outsiders and I wonder if he was made to feel welcome. “Well . . . ” he says, trailing off. Has he experienced any snootiness? “Oh there’s been plenty of that. The art world is nothing if not judgey.”
Sotheby’s has not published audited annual financial results since it was taken private but last year the Financial Times reported that it had been hit by a steep fall in its core earnings and a decline in auction sales. Sotheby’s says the figures only covered its main auction business and did not include its financial services division or reflect big investments, such as its purchase of the Marcel Breuer-designed building in New York, the former home of the Whitney Museum. The brutalist masterpiece is the company’s new global headquarters.
Stewart says market trends are moving in the company’s direction, pointing to an imminent “unprecedented generational wealth transfer” from baby boomers to their descendants. “The ageing of the boomer generation and the associated wealth transfer is a tsunami,” he says. The result is a vast number of art collections that could, potentially, be coming to market: there are “hundreds and hundreds” of collections worth $25mn-$100mn owned by relatively elderly people and that could be poised to change hands. “That was not the case 10 years ago.”
He mentions the “circular economy” and “re-commerce”: today’s generation does not hold on to valuable art or other highly prized possessions as long as its predecessors. “So you’ve got that wealth transfer, and then you’ve got the rise of the circular economy, where people today think of things in much more mercantile or trading terms. There’s just a different approach to collecting today, which is much more buying and selling, and less permanent attachment to things.”
Of course, Sotheby’s needs buyers as well as willing sellers. Recent swings in the value of cryptocurrencies are helping. “The number of crypto billionaires is extraordinary.” One bought the $6.2mn banana, after all. In recent years, other records have been broken, such as the $145mn sale of a 1955 Uhlenhaut Coupé Mercedes.
The pandemic had a big impact on how buyers participate in auctions. Before Covid, “about 40 per cent of our bidding across all of our auctions was online. Today, that number’s over 90 per cent.” However, Stewart says there is still an untapped market of buyers who may have never considered attending an auction or bidding for a piece of art. “How many people have been into our galleries, have looked at something, have bid, bought or sold? It’s a very, very small proportion, certainly relative to the massive brand awareness that we have. So how do we break through that?”
He has made other moves to drag the 281-year-old company into the 21st century, such as putting auction catalogues online and introducing more digital aspects to the sales process. “You can use an augmented reality tool to put the work on the wall and see if it fits over your mantle.”
Stewart’s years with Morgan Stanley included opening the bank’s first office in Brazil, where he met his wife. London has been home for several years but he and his family continue to spend time at their place in the Hamptons. I am disappointed to learn he doesn’t sing as much as he used to: as a student at Yale, Stewart was part of an a capella group. “Oh God,” he says, when I bring this up. What was the group called? “The Yale Whiffenpoofs.” He colours slightly when I ask him to make sure I get the spelling right. “I thought that what happens at university stays at university.” The group was started 116 years ago; Stewart reveals that in his years as a member, a fellow singer was London Stock Exchange Group chief executive David Schwimmer.
Sadly, an expat singing club is not on the agenda, at least for now. Steering the auction house through choppy economic waters is enough to keep him busy. “It’s the power of storytelling,” he says, sounding less and less like a former banker. “This is what’s so interesting about auctions . . . It’s the intersection of symbols and stories and value and markets.”
