Oliver Barker

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 sale set its record for the most valuable sale by a single living artist (£111.5 million) a day after the Lehmann 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 said. That now includes international exhibitions of valuable lots prior to auctions that are streamed online with careful management of electronic bidding to account for satellite delays.