Christie’s Sales Slump 22 Percent in First Half of 2024

Blue-chip auction house Christie’s on July 16 reported $2.1 billion in live and online auction sales during the first half of 2024. The figure represents a 22 percent decline from the same period in 2023, when the house took in $2.7 billion, and a 40 percent drop from the first half of 2022, when sales of the collections of Thomas and Doris Ammann, Anne Bass, and Hubert de Givenchy helped drive the figure to $3.5 billion.

Christie’s did not offer information regarding private sales figures for the year’s first half, as it had done in previous years: As a privately held company, it is under no obligation to do so. A spokesperson affirmed that “private sales remain at a high level and continue to make an important contribution to the business.”News of the sales dip arrives as the artmarketis roiled by factors including the continued war in Ukraine and the newer sustained conflict in the Middle East, high interest rates, and the upcoming US election. As well, Christie’s in May suffered a cyberattack ahead of its hotly anticipated New York spring sales that took it offline and led to a class action suit filed the following month by clients who accused the house of failing to “properly secure and safeguard sensitive information of its customers.”

Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti remained positive about the house’s future. “Despite a decline in our total auction sales, resilience is the key word to chararcterize Christie’s results for the first half of the year,” he said. “In a challenging macroeconomic environment, we have maintained or improved on all the other key metrics by which we measure our performance.”

Particularly encouraging for Christie’s is its ability to attract and maintain younger buyers. Twenty-nine percent of its clients are millennials or Gen Z, consistent with 2023.