Spear’s Review

As principal auctioneer at Sotheby’s and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, it was Oliver Barker’s gavel that fell on some of the most famous lots of recent art history.

When Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Inside My Head Forever two-day sale set its record for the most valuable sale by a single living artist (£111 million) a day after the Lehman Bros collapse, Barker was there, and it was his declaration of ‘sold’ that triggered the shredding of Banksy’s Love is in the Bin, which then sold again three years later in its half-destroyed state for 18 times the original price.

He’s insistent that Sotheby’s is a collaborative endeavour: ‘It takes a village to do all that we do,’ he says. That now includes international exhibitions of valuable lots prior to award-winning livestream hybrid auctions.