Strauss & co - Review 2020

Lessons from the May sale informed the follow-on June sale. As before, this virtual sale was live-streamed from Strauss & Co’s offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town to an international audience and attracted a large cohort of online and telephone bidders. “Our intensive digital migration since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the art market into the sitting room,” noted Susie Goodman, an executive director at Strauss & Co.“At one point over a thousand people viewed the auction. All this interest translated into new business.” The July sale earned R69.3 million with a very satisfying lot sell-through rate of 81.5%. For all its strengths, virtual selling is not frictionless. The virtual format is prone to lag, requiring patience and skill from auctioneers. Sophie-Louise Fröhlich and Alastair Meredith offered a masterclass in live-streamed auctioneering at the culminating November marquee sale, NORTH/SOUTH. Drawing on the lessons of the past two virtual sales, this dual-city auction combined the traditional year-end Cape Town and Johannesburg live sales into a single multi-day event. “This past year has been a time of change, adaptation and innovation at Strauss & Co,”wrote Frank Kilbourn in an open letter to clients explaining the format of NORTH/SOUTH. “In response to the Covid-19 pandemic we had to rethink our traditional auction formats and quickly pivoted to a hybrid model of live- virtual trading. One of the big lessons of 2020 for us is that the geographical location of an auction is no longer relevant, and is indeed quite limiting.” NORTH/SOUTH was concurrently held in two locations, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and allowed for telephone and online bidding – established elements of the newly established virtual format – as well as in-person bidding from the floor. Even in this transformed situation, familiar auction-room activities persisted. Elite buyers frequently opted to place bids telephonically instead of logging them digitally. Three telephone bidders vied for Alexis Preller’s late-period abstraction, Thrones of Heaven , offered in the November sale, but were beaten by an online bidder who entered the fray at the last minute to clinch the work for R2.8 million. Strauss & Co’s three virtual sales earned a combined income of R255.25 million. The lot sell-through rate for these three sales was 78.7% and value sell-through rate 72.8%, credible averages in a turbulent business year. Two earlier live sales held in February – one a specialist contemporary art sale, the other a one-off liquidation sale of a luxury Johannesburg hotel’s art collection – brought in an additional R15.5 million. Market commentators have noted that the global auction market’s adoption of a bricks-and-clicks strategy – i.e. combining physical and online presence – during the viral pandemic should continue in the medium term as Covid-19 continues to thwart live and in-person gatherings and travel. Irma Stern Zanzibar Arab Sold R11 380 000 Our intensive digital migration since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the art market into the sitting room. 16