Why Rebecca Wei quit prestige Christie’s Asia job – ‘I just became a super-salesperson. I wasn’t creating’ – and her new role at Lévy Gorvy gallery
- Rebecca Wei joins gallery Lévy Gorvy as its Asia partner next month amid uncertain times for the region’s art market
- She thinks Christie’s reacted slowly to the pandemic, and that rival Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart was right to immediately cut staff, ‘brutal’ as that was
Like auction houses, Lévy Gorvy, a New York-headquartered gallery co-founded by Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy in 2016, mainly deals in the secondary market, where the trend in recent years is more art changing hands in the discreet back rooms of private dealers, away from the limelight of public auctions.
However, nobody is selling a lot of art these days because of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the Art Basel and UBS art market survey published earlier this month, galleries sold 36 per cent less in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2019. Those in Greater China were suffering the most, with sales down 55 per cent.
Wei is adamant that she left the auctions business at just the right time. “Many collectors have to cash in artworks to pump money back into their businesses, and they certainly don’t want the world to know their businesses are out of money,” she says.
Given that Lévy Gorvy mainly deals in works that sell for more than a million US dollars, it only needs a small handful of very wealthy people to keep buying to do well, Wei says. “This is a niche market. We are not like the auction houses. They need mass.”