Guillaume Cerutti | |
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![]() Guillaume Cerutti | |
Born | La Ciotat, France | March 20, 1966
Nationality | French |
Alma mater | Sciences Po Ecole Nationale d'Administration |
Occupation | Business executive |
Employer | Christie's |
Title | Chief Executive Officer |
Guillaume Cerutti (born March 20, 1966, in La Ciotat, France) is a French business executive and former senior civil servant. Currently he serves as Chief Executive Officer of Christie's auction house.
He was managing director of the Centre Georges Pompidou from 1996 and 2001. From 2002 to 2004, he served as chief of staff for the French Minister of Culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon, and afterwards worked in France’s Finance Ministry. [1] Serving as CEO of Sotheby's France from 2007 to 2011 and deputy chairman of Sotheby's Europe until 2015, he has been CEO of Christie's since 2017.
Guillaume Cerutti was born circa 1966 [2] in the south of France. He studied in Paris, attending the Institut d’Études Politiques and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration. Early in his career he held a number of administrative positions. He was the managing director of the Centre Georges Pompidou [3] from 1996 until 2001, overseeing the renovation of the Musée National d'Art Moderne. [4]
From 2002 to 2004, [4] he was the chief of staff for the French Minister of Culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon. After Aillagon's tenure, [3] Cerutti took a role in the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, serving as head of the executive office for consumerism and competition from 2008 until 2011. [4]
Cerutti was named president-director of Sotheby's France in September 2007, [4] after being recommended to the auction house by Jean-Jacques Aillagon. [3] He became vice president for Sotheby's Europe in 2011, and by 2015, he was serving as both deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and CEO of Sotheby’s France. Sotheby's achieved the highest art sales on the French market during his tenure, particularly with the help of several French art collections sold in Paris, London and New York. [4]
In August 2015, Les Echos reported that he would become president of Christie's for London, Continental Europe, the Middle East, India, and Russia [4] (Christie’s EMERI), [5] taking the post in 2016 after a non-compete clause expired. [4] He was subsequently named CEO of Christie's on January 1, 2017, succeeding Patricia Barbizet. [6] Upon becoming CEO, Cerutti implemented a restructuring. [7] One of his first actions was closing Christie's lower-value outlet in South Kensington and scaling back Christie's operations in Amsterdam. He redirected funds to newer facilities in Asia and Los Angeles. [3]
After becoming Christie's CEO, he oversaw a number of auctions for high-profile collections, several of which broke world price records. In 2017, he oversaw the sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at Christie's New York for $450.3 million, [3] [8] breaking the price record for artwork sold at auction. [8] In late 2022, he oversaw Christie's auction of Paul Allen's art collection the Paul G. Allen Collection, [9] which sold for $1.6 billion that November, making it the biggest sale in world auction history. [10] In 2021, Cerutti oversaw the sale of Beeple's Everydays: the First 5000 Days , [11] Christie's first NFT auction. [12] After overseeing the sale of other NFTs through Christie's, including several Cryptopunks, [11] the Wall Street Journal reported in July 2023 that he remained "bullish on NFTs" and their value. [11]
Since 2015, Cerutti has served as Chairman of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (FNAGP). [13] He was on the audit committee of Flamel Technologies, a pharmaceuticals company, as of late 2016. [1] In the past, he has also held the position of Chairman on the boards of several non-profit organizations in the cultural field, including the Accentus Chamber Choir (2007-2012), the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles (2009-2010) and the Institute pour le Financement du Cinéma et des Industries Culturelles (2010-2016).
Cerutti is the author of La politique culturelle, un enjeu du XXIème siècle, 20 propositions, published in October 2016. [14] He has also published articles on cultural politics in publications such as Commentaire , [15] Le Monde , [16] Les Échos , [17] and L'Opinion .
Cerutti resides in London as of 2023. [11]
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold US$8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. On 15 November 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of art works, in most cases in an auction house.
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Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.
Tête de femme is a plaster-modelled, bronze-cast sculpture by Pablo Picasso. Dora Maar, Picasso's lover at the time, was the subject of the work which was originally conceived in 1941. Four copies of the bust were cast in the 1950s, several years after the relationship ended.
Sarah Zucker, born 1985, is an American visual artist and writer based in Hollywood, Los Angeles. She specializes in mixing contemporary digital techniques with older analog approaches as well as the use of VHS. Zucker is considered a pioneer of crypto art, releasing digital editions of her video art as non-fungible tokens since 2019.
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. It cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchain and can be transferred by the owner, allowing NFTs to be sold and traded. Initially pitched as a new class of investment asset, by September 2023, one report claimed that over 95% of NFT collections had zero monetary value.
Adam Lindemann is a New York Based gallerist, art collector and writer who founded Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York City in 2012. As an art collector and gallerist, Lindemann is known for setting multiple world records both at auction and privately, including career records for Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Royère. His personal collection includes work from Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Urs Fischer. Lindemann wrote for The New York Observer from 2009 to 2017, and authored two books about contemporary art.
Leopoldo D'Angelo, better known by the pseudonym "Dangiuz" is an Italian contemporary visual artist, digital artist and art director specializing in sci-fi themes. His work has been featured in art networks, books, TV channels and magazines such as RAI, Arte, Wallpaper*, NVIDIA Studio Standouts, Juxtapoz Magazine, Sohu, Pixiv and Digital Production, and showcased in various museums and galleries worldwide. He also took part in the creation of Rui Hachimura's Cherry Blossom kimono design and Maserati's MC20 concept art.
CryptoPunks is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The project was launched in June 2017 by the Larva Labs studio, a two-person team consisting of Canadian software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The experimental project was inspired by the London punk scenes, the cyberpunk movement, and electronic music artists Daft Punk. The crypto art blockchain project was an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard for NFTs and the modern crypto art movement, which has since become a part of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance ecosystems on multiple blockchains.
Hannibal is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982. The artwork, which features his signature skull and crown motifs, was sold at Sotheby's for $13.1 million in October 2016.
Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. In his art, he uses various media to create comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references. British auction house Christie's has called him "A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs". Beeple was introduced to NFTs in October 2020 and credits Pak for providing his first "primer" on selling NFTs. The NFT associated with Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a collage of images from his "Everydays" series, was sold on March 12, 2021, for $69 million in cryptocurrency to an investor in NFTs. It is the first purely non-fungible token to be sold by Christie's. The auction house had previously sold Block 21, an NFT with accompanying physical painting for approximately $130,000 in October 2020.
Nifty Gateway is a digital art online auction platform for non-fungible token (NFT) art founded by Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster, and has since been acquired by the Winklevoss twins. Nifty Gateway has sold NFTs by Beeple, Pak, Refik Anadol, Sam Spratt, XCOPY, Skygolpe and other widely followed NFT artists.
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