The autumn season is an important time for auction houses in the sales calendar. But for Sotheby’s, this autumn is more important than for most. “The art market is grinding through a rough patch… driven in part by China’s economic slowdown, wars and volatile US elections,” says The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

To that list can be added the normalisation of interest rates that makes inherently risky assets, such as collectables, less attractive to investors/collectors when you could earn a decent rate of return by simply sticking your money in the bank. As the WSJ points out, the “sales downturn” could not have come at a worse time for “the auction house’s highly leveraged billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, who is fighting fires amid restructuring in his broader telecom empire, Altice” (Drahi took Sotheby’s private in 2019, delisting it after three decades of being publicly traded).