Moments from Christie’s Auction

James Christie held his first sale in London in 1766, and the house he founded has spent the two and a half centuries since turning the sale of art into something between a business transaction and a piece of theater. Modern evening sales, the ones that make headlines, are staged almost like performances: an auctioneer working a packed room against a bank of phone bidders and online paddles, a giant screen ticking through currency conversions as the price climbs, the whole thing designed to build tension toward a single hammer strike. Christie's now runs major sale rooms in London, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris, alongside online-only sales that have become a much larger share of the business in recent years.

The detail most visitors don't realize is that you don't need to be a bidder, or even remotely wealthy, to attend: the pre-sale viewing exhibitions, where lots are displayed publicly in the days before an auction, are free and open to anyone who walks in, and they're often one of the only chances the general public gets to stand a foot away from major paintings that are about to disappear into private collections for years or decades. Check the schedule for whichever Christie's location is nearest you and go to a viewing even if you have no intention of bidding, it's a genuinely different way to look at art than a museum wall, unframed by curatorial narrative and priced, quite literally, right there on the label.