The auction world has long been dominated by Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s—aka the “big three.” But now there's another house challenging for a spot in the fine art ring.

Last week, Bonhams opened its splashy new headquarters in New York. After years on Madison Avenue, the 233-year-old auction house is now located in Steinway Hall, a landmark building on Manhattan’s 57th street that once housed the show rooms and concert halls of Steinway & Sons pianos.

The move is both small and huge. While the Steinway building is just a couple of blocks from Bonham’s old home, it’s also a world apart, sitting smack dab in the middle of Billionaires’ Row, a three-block stretch of ultra-luxury skyscrapers thought to be home to one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the world.

This location is no doubt part of the auction house’s new strategic play—if you want to woo the 1%, locating the company a few doors down is a good start. But you can also bet that Bonhams is banking on the relocation to help refashion its brand in the image of nearby neighbors like Carnegie Hall and MoMA. (Sotheby’s did something similar with its move to the old location of the Whitney Museum last year.) No longer is this a subaltern auction house; now it's a cultural hub of historic import.

That’s what Bonhams hopes at least, and it appears committed to the bit. Inside the building are three huge, museum-quality galleries, two auction rooms, and an 80-foot glass atrium that casts the whole space in natural light. The company is inaugurating its new home not with a marquee sale, but a pair of stately exhibitions.

Whether this move will put Bonhams in league with the “big three” remains to be seen. For now, you have to credit the company for taking a swing.

The number of years that Christie's has operated a salesroom in New York. The auction house, founded in London in 1766, touched down in New York in 1977 with a lease on space in Midtown’s now-defunct Hotel Delmonico.

Christie’s was beaten to the Empire City by its chief rival, Sotheby’s—but not by long relative to each house’s history. Despite being established in London in 1744, Sotheby’s only opened a salesroom in New York in 1964, when it acquired the long-running Manhattan-based auction house Parke-Bernet.

Why should you care? Well, as much as the major auction houses lean on tradition and longevity, their Big Apple introductions show that the landscape of the sector as we know it now really hasn’t been in place for very long.

New York has only been the market’s center for a few decades. Phillips, the third of the “big three” houses, didn’t start selling fine art until the 1970s. In the past half century, all three companies have changed ownership, expanded to (and retreated from) other regions, launched many new initiatives, and sunset others.

In short, the biggest fish in the auction sector may be old, but their evolution has been fluid and continual. So whatever they’re up to this year, consider this fair warning that they could look and feel very different by the 2030s.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

Timur ASKed: Platforms like Artnet were supposed to democratize price data, but recently, these platforms have been taken private by capital groups. Do you believe there is a legislative appetite to classify art market data as a protected asset class? Could we see a future where the acquisition of these transparency engines is blocked on antitrust grounds, just as we regulate the ownership of financial market infrastructure?

Josh Baer for NoReserve: While Artnet went private after the investment firm Beowolff Capital acquired a majority stake in it last year, accessibility to the company’s database didn’t change—just as it didn’t when the site went public in 1999.

It’s true that fine art is not subject to the same regulations that govern other markets. Sales are private; insider knowledge is legal as long as it’s in good form. But it’s a myth that the art market is wholly unregulated. It is beholden to Uniform Commercial Code, as well as trust and contract laws. The SEC regulates the sale of NFTs, if they are legally deemed to be a security, and artworks that are co-owned in shares, such as those offered through the Masterworks platform. Even if anti-money laundering laws were expanded to include fine art, criminals would work to get around them. That's why they're criminals.

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