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Another wave of cost-cutting has come to Sotheby's.
Talk of layoffs at the storied auction house has been spreading like wildfire this week among current and former employees, according to people familiar with the situation. No official announcement has been made internally, several current employees said. The cuts appear to include back-office workers, junior staffers, as well as top-level specialists in key departments, though their full scale is not yet clear.
"It's absolute panic over there," a former executive who spoke with several ex-colleagues told me.
Sotheby's didn't immediately respond to a request to comment.
Amid a contraction in global auction sales, the house is reviewing its global footprint, regional staffing, and even auction categories, according to a person familiar with the situation. Sotheby's marquee sales of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art in November in New York generated $533.1 million, less than half of the $1.2 billion tally a year ago.
The cuts have been anticipated for months and follow the reduction of about 50 jobs in Sotheby's London operations earlier this year. They come on the heels of an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund taking a minority stake in Sotheby's in a deal valued at $1 billion. The house's majority owner, Patrick Drahi, currently has companies facing down a $60 billion mountain of debt, with some loans coming due as soon as 2027.
On October 30, Sotheby's trumpeted the agreement between ADQ and Drahi to invest in the company. While the house did not disclose details of the arrangement, it is understood that ADQ made most of the investment by acquiring newly issued shares of Sotheby's.
The latest staff cuts come even as Drahi continues to invest globally in real estate tied in with Sotheby's. This year, Sotheby's opened new headquarters in Paris and Hong Kong. On November 1, just two days after the ADQ deal announcement, the purchase of the Breuer building in New York, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art on Madison Avenue, was finally completed for $100 million, according to the New York City Department of Finance.
The building was acquired by 945 Madison Avenue LLC, which took out a $35 million mortgage from Barclays and rented the building back to Sotheby's for 15 years, according to those documents. The lease is set to expire on October 31, 2039.
While the full scale of the cuts is unclear, it's believed to be "big," according to one former executive, who added, "They have to do radical cutting. And that's what they are doing."