Galleries West is pleased to present a special six-part showcase of stories and videos that have been selected as finalists for the Alberta Magazine Awards. Winners will be announced Sept. 22 at the annual conference of the the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association. Today’s story, nominated in the Long Feature Writing category, was first published Aug. 9, 2021.
Last June, Heffel, a Vancouver-based art auction house, held its much anticipated spring sale. Two paintings by Emily Carr were expected to be among the highlights. After a brief preamble, Robert Heffel, 56, whose elevated coif calls to mind American filmmaker David Lynch, started the auction. He began in full sales mode – grinning, cajoling, exhorting and acting the booster. Like any good auctioneer, he didn’t let up. The bids, dizzying to the uninitiated, shot up at the wave of a paddle. Works were hammered down in minutes for untold thousands of dollars.
Older brother, David, 58, spelled Robert off at the sleek white podium with a touch more sobriety to his showmanship, though not much. The two alternated every hour or so, and David was at the podium for the first of the two Carr paintings, Tossed by the Wind, a swirling expanse of grass with a few trees, originally bought from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s rental outlet in the 1950s. The painting, an oil on canvas from 1939, described by David as “bright, happy and full of energy … one of the rarest of rare,” was expected to fetch between $1.2 million and $1.6 million. Opening at $925,000, the bidding escalated quickly to $1 million, then continued to climb in $50,000 increments.
Bids bounced back and forth. Some six minutes later, the hammer came down at more than $3.1 million, including the buyer’s premium, the standard fee charged by auction houses, in this case more than half a million dollars. Carr’s other, slightly smaller painting, Swirl, originally a gift from the artist to Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris, also brought an impressive number, selling for more than $2.3 million, again with a hefty buyer’s premium. The two paintings are amongst the four highest-priced Carr works ever to sell at auction.
Left: Emily Carr, “Tossed by the Wind,” 1939, oil on canvas, 32″ x 27″ (sold at Heffel for $3,121,250) Right: Emily Carr, “Swirl,” 1937, oil on canvas, 27″ x 23″ (sold at Heffel for $2,341,250), (images courtesy Heffel)
The sale, both informative and entertaining, offered the kind of excitement you’d expect – except for one element conspicuous by its absence: buyers. That’s right, no actual bidders were in the room. It was a live auction, yes, but it was happening entirely online. Bids made digitally or by phone, were fielded by Heffel staff. The auctioneer was looking out not at a crowd of art collectors but at large screen displays with real-time direct feeds from Heffel’s Toronto and Montreal locations. Bidders, who had to register in advance, watched from home as screens behind the auctioneer flashed up images of each artwork along with updates on the most recent bid. A video of the sale posted on YouTube shows distanced or masked Heffel employees raising their paddles on the instruction of clients who are never identified.
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An auctioneer’s-eye view of Heffel’s spring sale as David Heffel prepares to bring down the hammer. (YouTube)
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Heffel’s spring auction included live feeds from the company’s offices in Toronto and Montreal. (YouTube)
Surprisingly, this futuristic scenario was not due entirely to the pandemic. Technological advances over the last few decades have set the groundwork for a remarkable transition in how art is bought and sold. And Heffel, one of just a handful of Canadian auction houses specializing in art, stands out for its early adoption of digital technologies that, even before the pandemic, routinely saw online bidding, although other clients still came to sales. The pandemic model – with no bidders on the floor – was just the next logical step.
David (left) and Robert Heffel
Heffel, originally an art gallery established four decades ago by Robert and David’s father, Kenneth, started holding live auctions some 25 years ago. It now claims space at a head table once dominated by auction houses in Toronto and Montreal. The story of the company’s rise – and, more broadly, the emergence of a lively art auction marketplace in Western Canada – is not just a history lesson. It also illustrates trends that will continue to inform the art world’s post-pandemic future. Like everything else these days, the art that people are buying – and how and where they do that – is changing – and quickly. Staying ahead of the curve in an intensely competitive marketplace will help determine which businesses thrive. Or even survive.
“In a way, we’re still just hardworking farm boys.” – Robert Heffel
It’s unlikely Robert Heffel was entertaining any grand thoughts about a career in the art industry when he went to cattle auctions with his father, Kenneth, in the 1970s. Kenneth was a man of many passions. One was farming. “We ran a large cattle ranch,” says Robert. “So that was kind of our first introduction to the auction world. I guess you could say that, in a way, we’re still just hardworking farm boys.”
Kenneth is probably worth an article in his own right. The adopted son of a baker, Archibald Heffel, and his wife, Mildred, he grew up in a modest two-storey stucco house in Edmonton. A gifted student, he was also an athlete. Particularly good at baseball, he went on to play two seasons with the Daytona Beach Islanders, a farm team for the Cincinnati Reds. But he had trouble hitting curve balls, and decided to return to Edmonton, marrying his high school sweetheart, Marjorie Thomson.
Kenneth Heffel, a catcher, second from left in the back row, played in the Western Canada Baseball League. (courtesy Heffel)
He went to work in accounting for an Edmonton steel fabrication company, C.W. Currie Ltd. (later Canron) and then, with several partners, founded his own small welding company. It became Great West Steel Industries, expanded across Western Canada and eventually formed a partnership with West Germany’s Krupp Industries to supply equipment to Syncrude’s oil sands plant. Kenneth Heffel, according to his bio, was a millionaire by the time he was 40. In 2014, David told Nuvo, a Vancouver lifestyle magazine, that he didn’t think his father had ever researched his background. “Maybe because he was adopted, he was determined he was going to be somebody,” David told the magazine. “He was driven to be successful.”
Along the way, Kenneth had started buying art. By the 1960s, he’d had enough of prairie winters and moved his office to Vancouver, although the company maintained a manufacturing presence in Edmonton. His art collection included work by artists like Newfoundland’s David Blackwood. By the early 1970s, he had added significant paintings by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. “That’s what David and I grew up with in our home,” says Robert Heffel. “Beautiful paintings hanging on the wall, an A.J. Casson, Emily Carr’s War Canoes, Alert Bay. Some really important paintings.”
Kenneth Heffel (courtesy Heffel)
Kenneth didn’t come to the art world fully formed. He was rough clay that benefited from shaping and moulding by his friend, the art dealer Peter Ohler Sr. Ohler died June 7, aged 80, after suffering from a degenerative condition, possibly due in part to head injuries sustained during a professional football career that included time with the BC Lions in the 1960s. He’s remembered for throwing a critical touchdown pass in the 1964 Grey Cup, helping the Lions seal their victory.
His son, Peter Ohler Jr., an art dealer in Toronto, says his father would visit bookshops and art galleries when he travelled to out-of-town games. “He was an English major in university and was interested in literature and books and he even opened up a little bookstore in Richmond,” says Peter.
“But over time, as a football player, he’d travel to Winnipeg, or Montreal, or Toronto, and he always said that instead of going to the bar, he’d go to the art galleries … though I think he went to the bar, too.” He says his dad knew he wasn’t going to make a living as a poet. “I think that’s why he started buying paintings in the first place. He said to me once: ‘You sell a $2 book, you make 50 cents. You sell a $200 painting, you make $20.’ So, the books went out the door and more paintings arrived.”
Winnipeg art dealer Bill Mayberry knew both Kenneth Heffel and Peter Ohler Sr. The founder of Mayberry Fine Art, he’s also its patriarch – relatives by blood and marriage hold various posts in the company. Mayberry emigrated from Ireland in 1970 and two years later began working for a gallery in Winnipeg as a jack-of-all-trades. Then he went out on his own. “I started off very small,” he recalls. “Just my wife and myself at first.” A mutual friend introduced him to David Loch and for 27 years they were partners in the Loch Mayberry Gallery. By 2000, they both had grown children who wanted to join the business. It made sense to split into two separate galleries, which continue to operate successfully. Mayberry says Kenneth Heffel was essentially a collector who became a dealer. “But it was Peter Ohler Sr. who was completely responsible for mentoring many of us in the industry,” says Mayberry.
“If Ken was alive, I think he’d be modest enough to say that Peter Ohler Sr. was the person who taught him how to see art,” says Mayberry. “He did pretty much the same for me in the early days. I remember sitting down with him and a bottle of wine and him just lecturing me like a school kid about how little I really knew. It had my head spinning. I think that was a good lesson in the early days. And I do believe he did the same for the two Heffel boys. Ken hired Peter Ohler Sr. to give them lessons in art. I don’t think they would have been in the business at all if it wasn’t for him.”
Peter Ohler Sr. in front of Masters Gallery's former location in Calgary around 1980. (courtesy Masters Gallery)
The Heffel brothers concur. “David and I were fortunate enough to learn about the gallery business from one of the best – Peter Ohler Sr.,” says Robert. “Our dad and Peter were best friends, and he hired Peter to share his knowledge of the industry. He taught us a lot about the fundamentals – customer service, salesmanship and what he called the ‘retail detail’ of the art business. Peter was very knowledgeable, and he knew the retail side of the business as well as anyone in Canada at the time.”
Peter Ohler Jr. thinks his dad just loved coaching. “After his playing career ended in football, he coached into his mature years and loved it – the kids, the dialogue, the relationships. And I think a lot of that transferred over to the art business. He was a very gregarious, fun, entertaining guy and people loved him.”
No one seems to know where the elder Ohler developed his famed nose for a good painting. But Mayberry thinks he may have picked up the art bug when he worked in the 1960s with art dealer Torben Kristiansen at his Art Emporium, a longtime fixture in Vancouver. “That was a bit of a love-hate relationship,” says Mayberry. “Everybody thought Torben was a pilot, but he was actually an airline steward and he’d go back and forth to Europe and bring back cheap paintings and sell them in Vancouver.”
By 1976, Ohler had left the Art Emporium. He headed to Calgary, where he opened Masters Gallery, which still operates today. He and Kenneth Heffel were friends by then – they fished, played cards and hit the ponies together. And talked art, of course. Both continued to travel back and forth between Alberta and the West Coast. Ohler Sr. eventually sold Masters in 1986 to Rod Green (his son, Ryan, is now in charge) and returned to Vancouver, where he operated a satellite Masters for a time. Peter Ohler Jr. remembers his dad watching horse races at Exhibition Park in Vancouver. “He liked to go to the ponies with Ken,” he says. “They were great horse fans. I sat with them many times at Exhibition Park. Art was just one of the things they bonded over.”
The Heffel family at their ranch near Camrose, Alta., showing (from left to right) David Heffel, Marjorie Heffel, Kenneth Heffel, an unidentified family friend and Robert Heffel (courtesy Heffel)
But Kenneth Heffel was restless. He moved the family to a farm in Fort Langley, in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, and eventually sold Great West Steel. But he wasn’t satisfied. In the mid-1970s, he decided ranching was in his blood. He sold his art collection and bought a 2,000-acre ranch in Alberta, not far from Camrose, where he bred champion Herefords. He continued to travel back to the coast. “He just couldn’t seem to sit still,” says Robert. “We were always going between Fort Langley and the ranch in Alberta. My mum stayed in Vancouver. Then, for some reason, he decided he’d had enough with ranching and finally decided to follow his passion.”
Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art, at the corner of 7th Ave. and Granville St. in Vancouver, around 1985. (courtesy Heffel)
In 1978, Kenneth bought an old Royal Bank building on Granville Street from Nelson Skalbania, the man who signed Wayne Gretzky to his first pro-hockey contract. The building housed Skalbania’s commercial art gallery, which Kenneth gladly took over. “And just like that he was in the art business,” says Robert. “He changed the name right away, from Galerie Royale to Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art.”
A 1980 article in the Vancouver Sun quotes Heffel, then 44, saying he sold his steel business because he wanted “to do other things.” He had started the company with four partners after borrowing $42,000. Eleven years later, with a reputation as a tough negotiator and annual sales of $75 million, he sold his stock and resigned as president. “I didn’t want something that was labour intensive,” he told the Sun. “I wanted something capital intensive.” But other forces were also at work. “I wanted to own a piece of Canada, a piece of its heritage, a piece of its culture. I was interested in the spiritual, emotional, intellectual side.”
Calgary auctioneer Frank Hall remembers those days well. Hall, then working as a stockbroker, left his native England in 1975, believing the country was being destroyed by excessive taxation. British regulations restricted what he could take with him to Canada. “I was only allowed to bring $10,000 in cash for the first three years,” he recalls. “So, what I did was I brought paintings and prints and put them in a container with antique furniture.”
Frank Hall
Hall, whose mother was an antiques dealer in Devon, had hoped to open a gallery in Calgary focused on wildlife and landscape art. But he soon realized it didn’t stand much chance. “I was actually about 10 years too early on that one,” he says. Instead, he took a job with John Irwin Antiques in Calgary. He enrolled in an auctioneering course in Lacombe, Alta., and, in 1979, established Hall’s Auction Services. Then, in 1986, Hall and two partners took over Hodgins Art Auctions, which was started a few years earlier by Russell Hodgins, a young auctioneer whose family ran a large farm auction company in Melfort, Sask., called Hodgins Auctions. As the youngest son, Russell wanted to strike out with his own business. His first sale in Edmonton and a second, in Calgary, were not that successful, says Hall. Hodgins packed up his unsold art and began the long drive back to Melfort. He never made it. He fell asleep at the wheel, crashed, and was killed. Hall, who knew Russell’s brother, called to express his condolences and asked what would become of Hodgins Art Auctions. Hall ended up buying the business, with partners Doug Maclean and Peter Thielsen.
“We struggled at the start,” says Hall. “We hired a few people who didn’t really work out. But then we found the right guy (Kevin King) and it’s gone from strength to strength, really. That was my introduction to the art world, and for a time, we were a major player. Then, one of the guys I hired as a mentor (Doug Levis) set up his own auction company, Levis Auctions. And then Heffel got going and did a very good job of marketing and became bigger than we were. But we were still fairly influential on the prairies.” Hall sold Hodgins Art Auctions in 2016 to King, who had taken over Halls Auction Services a decade earlier.
Canadian Art Galleries in Calgary in 1995. (courtesy Douglas Maclean)
Maclean, one of Hall’s partners at Hodgins Art Auctions, had trained as an artist at what was then the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, graduating in 1975. But various factors – like needing to eat – prompted him to reconsider his career path. “I was going to be an artist,” says Maclean. “But then I got out of college and thought, okay, where is the money going to come from? I was making some good art and got some attention, but it wasn’t going to amount to what I needed.” He started working for Mira Godard in her eponymous gallery in Toronto, and eventually moved to Gallery Moos. Owner Walter Moos sent Maclean west in 1979 to help run his Calgary gallery. Maclean’s arrival was followed by the bust stage of one of Calgary’s many business cycles. Gallery Moos struggled and Maclean went to work for Godard’s Calgary outlet. Her experiment with the West also ended. But Maclean decided Calgary suited him just fine. In 1983, he started working at Canadian Art Galleries, which painter John Davenall Turner had founded in 1945. The Thielsen family owned the gallery when Maclean joined, and Maclean bought the gallery from Peter Thielsen in 1992. He also kept his “fingers in various other pies,” including Hodgins Art Auctions.
In Vancouver, Kenneth Heffel was something of the new kid on the block, and Peter Ohler Sr. the éminence grise. But Heffel had money, ambition and energy. His gallery held its first major exhibition in 1980. Included were works by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, many pieces secured through his $6-million purchase of some 145 works in the Fannin Hall Collection, originally owned by reclusive B.C. industrialist George Clark. The exhibition put Heffel into the national conversation as the owner of a blue-chip gallery.
In 1981, Heffel made the news again when he acquired a Lawren Harris painting, South Shore, Baffin Island, for $240,000, then a record price, at a Sotheby Canada auction. More shows followed, including some that featured work by the Group of Seven. But then, in 1987, Kenneth died suddenly from a heart attack. He was only 53. Robert and David were in their early 20s. Once the shock had worn off, they renamed the business Heffel Gallery, and began organizing exhibitions featuring A-list Canadian artists such as Alex Colville, E.J. Hughes, B.C. Binning, Guido Molinari and Toni Onley.
An ad in the Vancouver Sun for the first Heffel live auction in 1995. (courtesy Heffel)
As the 1990s unfolded, the Heffel brothers started to realize their future was in the auction business. Many Canadian auction houses sold art, but primarily as part of estate liquidations. “What we really saw,” says Robert, “was that there was an opportunity to expand with fine art into the auction business.” Heffel held its first auction in 1995. The goal was to have a million-dollar sale within the first five years. The brothers, who have kept their business in the same building their father bought from Nelson Skalbania, wanted to make a splash, so they rented the main ballroom at the Wall Centre in Vancouver and brought in an auctioneer from London. When they opened the doors, hundreds of people poured in. That first auction grossed a million dollars. “I don’t quite know how to describe it,” says Robert. “I don’t know that ‘shocking’ would be the right word. But it was validation that our thinking was right.”
In some ways, the Heffel brothers were in the right place at the right time – and had the energy to match. Historically, auctions were mostly for those already in the art business. Insiders, such as gallery owners, would snap up key pieces and later resell them at higher prices. Eventually, the auction houses realized they were leaving money on the table and began selling directly to a range of clients. They undertook sophisticated marketing campaigns that included elegant catalogues aimed at collectors rather than dealers. Heffel.com launched in 1999, but even prior to that, auction catalogues were available online. Heffel also compiled an online search engine for historical sales, taking information at its disposal and digitizing it. The service not only helped clients but attracted new business.
“They did something that was ripe to be done, honestly, but nobody else had the foresight.” – Peter Ohler Jr.
Doug Maclean, still an art dealer operating as Canadian Art Gallery, but now based in Canmore, Alta., after closing the Calgary storefront gallery in 1999, writes about the auction market for Galleries West magazine. He has followed the rise of the Heffel brothers with interest. He believes they were simply the quickest to grasp the impact digital technology would have on auctions. “They were smart in many aspects of the business that other companies missed,” says Maclean. “One of which was the fact that they adapted so well, right from the get-go, with the Internet, bringing everything online. That fact alone left many other art auction companies in Canada behind and playing catch-up.”
Peter Ohler Jr.
Peter Ohler Jr. also gives the Heffel brothers credit for taking the leap into a digital future. “They did something that was ripe to be done, honestly, but nobody else had the foresight,” he says. “I don’t think anybody was young enough, or smart enough, or hungry enough – and saw the future like the Heffels did – in terms of the technology and the Internet. Nothing was broken that needed fixing, they just saw an opportunity to do more with the new technology.”
“It was genius,” says Ohler Jr. “And that’s one of the reasons why they’re now the most successful art auction house in Canada. Let’s be clear, there are plenty of other great people in the business. Cowley Abbott and Waddington’s, along with some really good regional auctions like Kevin King at Hodgins in Calgary. But Heffel made it sexy and glamorous and entertaining.”
Robert Heffel remembers the buzz at the first online auction in 1999. “We tried to recreate the same feeling and excitement in an online auction as you had in the live auction. We could see the huge potential and could see instantly how powerful it was, but it took time to keep building. And then in 2000, we sold an Emily Carr, War Canoes, for a million dollars. At that time, that was only the second painting in Canada to break the million-dollar mark. We were on the map by then, but that really put us on the map.”
Emily Carr, “War Canoes, Alert Bay,” 1912
oil on canvas, 25″ x 31.5″ (sold for $1,018,750 on May 10, 2000 at Heffel), (image courtesy Heffel)
Another smart move in 2002 saw Heffel position itself nationally, with an office in Ottawa and a gallery in Toronto’s exclusive Yorkville district. The first live auction in Toronto came the following year. Heffel’s fall auction in 2004 saw a total of $8.4 million in sales, then a record for the value of artwork sold at a single auction in Canada. In 2005, the expansion continued with an office in Montreal. A timeline on the Heffel website notes a continuing stream of sale highlights and business awards. Perhaps the most remarkable entry is the 2016 sale of Mountain Forms, by Lawren Harris, for $11.2 million. That was more than double the previous record for a work of Canadian art sold at auction, a record that still stands today.
"Mountain Forms," a 1926 painting by Lawren Harris, sold for a record $11.2 million in 2016, the most expensive artwork to sell at a Canadian auction. (courtesy Maclean's, photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)
Over the last two decades, online sales held in conjunction with live auctions have become the norm, not only at Heffel but at other houses, as well. Back in 2011, for instance, Ryan Mayberry, Bill’s son, started consignor.ca, an online auction service. A technology whiz, Ryan, a partner at Mayberry Fine Art, connected with Lydia Abbott and Rob Cowley, to establish Consignor Canadian Fine Art in 2013, and transitioned to in-person auctions. Abbott and Cowley had essentially been acting as the Canadian art department at Waddington’s, a longtime fixture in the Canadian auction market, so it was natural for them to branch out independently. Consignor rebranded as Cowley Abbott in 2019. Ryan remains a vice-president there, and also has his own company, ArtMoi, which makes cataloguing software for the art industry.
“People are comfortable with buying pretty much anything online nowadays.” – Lydia Abbott
Lydia Abbott
“For sure, one of the biggest leaps we’ve seen is the growth of the online auctions, especially now with how the world has changed so much in the past year,” says Abbott. “That really has become the way to buy. And we see that with all the major auction houses internationally. People are comfortable with buying pretty much anything online nowadays – from our groceries, to our furniture, to fine art.” Indeed, Guillaume Cerutti, chief executive of Christie’s, told the New York Times last year that digital tools are “the new normal.” And, earlier last year, The Art Newspaper, based in London and New York City, wondered “is this the year that the 18th-century business model of fine art auction houses, with its 21st-century reputation for high costs and low profits, will finally be transformed by digital technology?”
Meanwhile, other trends in the Canadian art market are creating challenges that didn’t exist to the same degree a generation ago, including the emergence of millennial collectors with different tastes than their elders. And while the market can ebb and flow depending on broader economic forces, Doug Maclean was sensing an overall mood of caution before the pandemic. Some corporations, particularly in Western Canada, are buying less, with some even divesting their collections to free up funds in a leaner and more competitive global environment. Something as simple as the rise of open-concept offices can also have an impact – there are fewer walls to display art. Nor are museums buying art like they used to due to limited acquisition budgets and much higher prices. Still, Maclean sees signs that pre-pandemic caution is easing, with auctions generally experiencing stronger sales over the last 18 months.
“You never see an auction company taking the young artist and building them into something.” – Bill Mayberry
Maclean underlines how important it is for collectors to find a good dealer who can help locate value and quality in a tumultuous market. “Original art is a bit of a risk, but if you try to join the upper echelon of Canadian art, that’s what you do,” he says. “Value gets established in two ways – the retail market, meaning, the galleries, and the secondary market, meaning the auction market.” He sees the auction business as a necessity in that it supports various commercial elements in the art world and gives clients a way to sell assets. It’s more transactional than developmental, he says, but quality still matters. “I mean, sure, there are auction houses who just put art on the wall and couldn’t give a shit and let it rip,” he says. “But the important auction companies across this country, the ones that are noted and successful – Waddington’s, Cowley Abbott, First Arts, Heffel, Hodgins, Levis – I’m sure I’m missing a few – their staff and their directors have a love of what they do. They’re always looking for stuff that they really love and know and want to represent.”
Bill Mayberry
For his part, Bill Mayberry describes the art market as an ecosystem. “We all work together. I think we all need each other. Auctions are good at selling things that the dealer industry and the museum structure make valuable.” Auction houses wouldn’t be interested in high-end art, says Mayberry, if not for the years of hard work and faith that dealers and, secondarily, museums, put into artists’ careers. It’s about relationships – helping to create a name people trust and an artistic vision people come to value. “That’s how you build credibility and value into the art,” he says. “Then come the auctions. You never see an auction company taking the young artist and building them into something. The auction industry are basically just processors.” Mayberry argues that while auction houses have a role to play, a big media profile does not necessarily equate with significance. “The Heffels have put together a team of people and they’re very good at catching news media attention, and news media attention is driven by sensationalism. They’re very good at creating sensationalism. They’ve had a lot of successes. They never talk about their failures. Why would they?”
Auctioneer Frank Hall believes auctions offer an open and competitive way of determining the value of art. “People bid on something to the value that they think it’s worth for them. It’s a pure form of finding the value because it’s the highest offer from a person who is knowledgeable, has no compunction to buy, but who determines what that is worth to them. Most people who buy art because they think this is the art to buy end up not making anything. But the collector who studies art and/or is knowledgeable, might do very well over the long term.”
“The Internet is changing the art world and making it less intimidating.” – Robert Heffel
In decades past, an element of snobbery or even intimidation was attached to fine art auctions – the secondary market was seen almost as a secret club that admitted only a lucky few. But Robert Heffel says the Internet is democratizing auctions and opening them to people outside major cities. “But it still comes down to customer service,” he says. “The Internet is changing the art world and making it less intimidating. We tried to build our online service along the same line of thinking. We want people to have a positive experience.” Buying art need not be complicated, he says. “We’re in the passion sector. We’re selling great works of art. You want to know value, yes, but we’re providing something that you hang on your wall. The bonus, down the road, is sometimes that it would be worth quite a bit more money. But we’re selling a piece of history and culture, and, in some cases, it shouldn’t be about money at all. It’s about enjoyment.”
Despite the shifts the Internet has wrought on auctions, they remain most powerful as shared experiences. That goes some way towards explaining the enduring drama of the live auction. Hearing “Sold!” as the auctioneer drops the hammer is a classic cinema trope, and, somehow, never gets old.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how the actual live auction evolves,” says Heffel. “That already is happening where there’ll be sales with a few people in the room, but a lot of people are Internet bidding and telephone bidding. So, the massive ballroom setting, I think, is going to be rethought quite a bit. We had 500 people in a ballroom for our first auction and 30 of them bid on things, but when you broadcast a live auction, you have people all over the world bidding. Online bidding is only going to increase, partly because of COVID, but not only because of that.”
Peter Ohler Jr. thinks clients will want to come to live events after the pandemic. “People like it. It’s better to be part of it. I guess it’s the difference between watching a hockey game on TV or being there. It’s just a whole different experience.” Lydia Abbott also believes auctions will remain a shared social experience. “I still think everyone will be very pleased to be there in person again. But I think what’s changed is that now we can have an auctioneer and the camera and an event live-streamed to people at home as they’re bidding.” She predicts more changes will come. “It’s hard to know where it’s all going, because five years ago we wouldn’t have known we’d be here. Technology is changing all the time. There are so many interesting things happening now with different types of art, digital art and then a lot of things that maybe we didn’t see in traditional auction houses. There are lots of curve balls coming.”
Who, for instance, would have predicted the multi-million dollar mania over headline-grabbing NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which offer ownership of digital expressions of real-world objects or creations? Or consider British artist Damien Hirst’s prescient 2017 pitch to Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. Carney writes in Value(s): Building a Better World for All, published last spring, that Hirst approached him with an idea: he wanted to create his own money by making 2,000 identical paintings of dots. In essence, Hirst’s scheme was to sell this fake money for real money so that other people could resell the fake money for even more real money. Writes Carney: “Hirst was on to something … his art was at the intersection of modern value and the value of money. The very act of valuing had artistic – and commercial – value.”
The only certainty about the future is that we’re not equipped to predict it. It’s also important to remember that the term “art business” contains two words, only one of which is “art.” Companies exist to make a profit, no matter how much they revere art. The Heffel brothers make no apologies for aggressive marketing, tireless public relations and industrious online development. That drive took their family from bidding on cattle in a drafty community arena to selling revered paintings for millions of dollars.
“Those cattle auctions started us off, for sure,” says Robert Heffel. “But this is such an exciting business. Almost every day, something comes in, and it’s like Christmas or Hanukkah. It’s the best business in the world. I can't think of anything else like it.” ■
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