BY NICOLE LAPORTE5 MINUTE READ
Sarah Wendell Sherrill is ticking off major art sales, including one that took place less than 24 hours before our phone chat. Flora Yukhnovich, an emerging abstract artist out of London, just sold her 2020 painting, I’ll Have What She’s Having, for $3 million at auction at Sotheby’s, 40 times more than its estimated sale.
The news has the art world chattering. And it has Sherrill—who started her career at Christie’s before cofounding the artists’ equity-management platform Lobus—shaking her head. The Yukhnovich sale, she explains, took place in a secondary market, meaning that Yukhnovich will see very little of that $3 million. (As a U.K. artist she receives a .25 percent royalty rate; contracts are different in some European countries.) As the art world currently exists—and always has—artists and galleries split a sale fee 50-50. But that’s just for the initial sale of the work. When the piece is resold at auction, or through private art dealers or collectors, the artist generally receives nothing.