{"id":276630,"date":"2025-11-07T05:29:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T05:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/276630\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T05:29:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T05:29:13","slug":"christies-named-sara-friedlander-chairman-of-post-war-contemporary-art-for-the-americas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/276630\/","title":{"rendered":"Christie\u2019s Named Sara Friedlander Chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art for the Americas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe auction world\u2019s clich\u00e9 about taste is that it follows the money. Sara Friedlander would like to flip the script. \u201cYou want to know my hierarchy?\u201d she asked me as we stood in arms reach of the second \u201cnurse\u201d painting Richard Prince ever made and just a few feet away from a blazing yellow Warhol\u00a0Last Supper, both part of the Edlis | Neeson Collection that will anchor Christie\u2019s 21st Century Sale<\/a>. \u201cClient first. Art second. Market\u2026distant third.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s not the kind of line one would expect from someone who was just named chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art for the Americas at Christie\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s brought a staggering parade of private collections to auction\u2014Barney Ebsworth, Gerald Fineberg, the Eppler family, the Kawamura DIC Museum of Art, and, of course, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. She\u2019s set world records for artists from Ernie Barnes to Joan Mitchell. But ask her what she\u2019s most proud of and she\u2019ll tell you it\u2019s the long-term relationships, not the fireworks.<\/p>\n

\n\tAuction houses have thrived in the past decade on turbocharged \u201cwet paint\u201d sales\u2014unproven artists whose auction prices rocket 500 percent overnight and then nosedive just as fast. Friedlander\u2019s not impressed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI never feel good breaking records for young artists,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only person who benefits is the seller. The artist doesn\u2019t sleep that night. The gallery panics. And the market starts eating itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead, she sees upside in the correction. \u201cSome of the air is coming out of the speculative market, and thank god. Maybe now more people will go back to galleries\u2014not because they think they\u2019re flipping anything for a profit next month, but because they want the art to change their world.\u201d That, she argues, is the only way the eco-system survives: \u201cIf there are no galleries, there are no artists, and then there\u2019s no art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFriedlander catches herself saying things like this\u2014sentences that might sound contrarian coming from a rainmaker\u2014but she means it. \u201cThe idea that you just scoop up a bunch of work and throw it into an evening sale\u2026that playbook is gone,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to follow the market. We\u2019re here to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPart of that approach, she said, is showing\u00a0people how to live with art again; how to make it part of a living room, not just an exchangeable wall that holds value for 18 months.<\/p>\n

\n\tFriedlander\u2019s promotion coincides with Alex Rotter\u2019s new role as global president and Max Carter\u2019s\u00a0appointment as chairman<\/a>\u00a0of the broader 20\/21 category. The leadership trio doesn\u2019t read as a market-busting strike team so much as an attempt to build an old-fashioned core around something that increasingly looks like finance.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think I have always been thinking about long term strategies over the immediacy of a transaction,\u201d she said. \u201cwhich is sometimes a hard thing to do when you\u2019re building a sale in an auction market. But it\u2019s always the right decision.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The auction world\u2019s clich\u00e9 about taste is that it follows the money. Sara Friedlander would like to flip…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,11957,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-276630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-christies","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}