A 46-year-old dynamo named Amy Cappellazzo was walking me through the main exhibition rooms at Christie’s New York headquarters one afternoon last year. Dark-haired and superfit in a pair of burgundy Vince jeans and a white Malia Mills top, she kept pausing to exchange breaking news with colleagues and clients. Her comments were lively and hilarious, her smile all-conquering. We stopped in front of Bea Arthur Naked, a 1991 painting by John Currin. “Do you remember her, from the TV show Maude?” she asked. “This is an important picture, but not necessarily a commercial picture. Why? Because she’s naked and she has lopsided breasts, and she’s not what men idealize. When it comes to nudity or to anything with a flaccid penis, it’s often very hard to sell.”

Lopsided breasts aside, record-shattering auction prices for contemporary art have repeatedly defied logic in the last few years: The latest high is the $142.4 million for Francis Bacon’s 1969 three-part portrait of Lucian Freud at Christie’s in November. (The evening sale total, $691 million, was the largest ever recorded.) The auction game is like a professional sport. In this carnival-like arena, Cappellazzo, Christie’s chairman for postwar and contemporary development, has played a key role in the firm’s domination of late over its archrival, Sotheby’s. “It’s match point, every day, all the time,” said Amy, an avid skier and tennis player, who works out three times a week with her CrossFit trainer (in her home gym) and sits on a fitness ball in her office. At the big evening sales she’s been a fixture at the front of the room, in her black Saint Laurent tuxedo dress and spiky “gladiator” shoes by Valentino, talking on one or two phones with clients she’s bidding for.

“I try to make them feel at ease,” she told me, “and I also try to squeeze them when I feel they need to step up and bid. I say, ‘Listen, it’s like you saw the most beautiful woman in the world at a bar, and you didn’t ask her for a drink. What a loser!’ Or, ‘Dude, you’ve been waiting ten years for this, and it’s an A-plus example of what you’ve been looking for. You’ll never miss the money, you’ll miss the piece.’ ”

Amy took a call on her mobile. “Definitely 25 to 35, and who’s to stop it from going to 40? . . . . Tons of interest, tons of interest.” I knew not to ask whom she was talking to—Discretion is the fourth “D” in auction lore, along with Death, Debt, and Divorce—but I did ask how many clients she was working with directly, and the answer, unbelievably, was 666 (the mark of the Devil). “Christie’s let me add myself to the list, so it can be 667.” Those clients, from Dan Loeb and Dakis Joannou to Marc Jacobs and Jeff Koons, can count on her instinctive feel for, and pinpoint knowledge of, the market for more than a hundred different artists.

In her thirteen years at the job, Cappellazzo’s infectious energy and unconventional thinking have changed the game and made her the public face of Christie’s contemporary throughout the global art world. But at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, rumors that she was about to quit Christie’s began spreading like wildfire. The rumors turned out to be true: She is leaving to create a new future for herself in a role that deploys her skills in inventive new combinations, a move that has fascinating implications for how, going forward, art will be nurtured, bought, and sold. “Amy doesn’t want to sell her soul anymore,” a leading artist tells me when he hears the news, “and that’s a good thing.”

Coming on the heels of the departure of Tobias Meyer, her Sotheby’s counterpart, Cappellazzo’s exit, right after the February sales in London, is another indication that major changes are afoot in the overheated contemporary-art auction market. Art collecting, once an elite passion for the few, has become a fiercely competitive occupation for a whole new class of buyers—hedge-fund managers, oligarchs in Russia, oil-rich sheiks and sheikas in Doha and Abu Dhabi, freewheeling capitalists in post-Mao China. Since the recession, a lot of these recent collectors have decided that their money is safer in art than in stocks, and they treat it the same way, as a major asset class—connoisseurship giving way to speculation. “The art world is in a rapid revolution,” Amy tells me on the phone from Art Basel Miami Beach. “There has to be a reconsideration of its structure in every single way.”

She is hell-bent on inventing a new model, casting herself as a kind of superagent to the art world at large, someone who will offer full-service expertise across the board to buyers and sellers, dealers and auction houses, museums and artists. Nothing like this exists under one roof, and Amy is supremely confident that, with her experience in bridging art and commerce, she is uniquely positioned to provide it. “I want to build my own empire,” she says.

“Amy is a very radical thinker,” says Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, who hired her in 2001. “She looks outside the hermetically sealed auction house into the larger commercial world. She was interested in the digital world, electronic commerce, and globalization very early. She changed the paradigm.” In the last few years, the major auction houses have taken over so much of the art dealer’s traditional domain that you have to be a megadealer, like Gagosian, or an extremely powerful gallerist, like Marian Goodman, Paula Cooper, or Barbara Gladstone, to compete with them. The race for business between Christie’s and Sotheby’s in contemporary art, by far the most lucrative and glamorous area of the market today, is unrelenting. In order to get superstar works for the major evening sales, both houses often have to give up so much of their commission to the seller that their profit margin becomes razor-thin. This is why they are being forced to find other streams of revenue, and it’s also why Amy Cappellazzo was such an invaluable property at Christie’s.

Her life in the past decade has been one of constant travel, meeting with clients, assessing artworks, speaking on panels and at seminars, attending art fairs, and bringing in business from London to São Paulo, Los Angeles to Hong Kong. (She gets her bespoke suits from William Cheng & Son in Hong Kong.) “I’m a superresponsible corporate citizen,” she says, “but I’m always going to break the rules.” Her friend Gavin Brown, the dealer and artist, says, “She’s an anarchist. She doesn’t hold much sacred, which I appreciate.” She’s out­spoken, impulsive, and totally comfortable with who she is. “My instincts are right a lot more than they’re wrong,” she says.

The contemporary-art market came through the 2008 recession virtually unscathed, and since then the new buyers have driven prices to sometimes obscene heights. Do Amy’s instincts tell her that the market is being pushed too far?

“Not yet, but in parts it’s getting toppy,” Cappellazzo tells me. “The great thing about the market is, there are places where it still has room to grow.”

I’ve read that Picasso and Warhol are “slow-growth” right now. “Picasso, agreed,” she says, “and Warhol only if you’re talking about the Disaster painting that sold recently for a hundred million. Nineteen seventies Warhols still feel cheap to me—the hammer-and-sickles and the Maos. Another opportunity is [Sigmar] Polke, who is still a fraction of what [Gerhard] Richter costs. You can expect Polke’s market to grow.” (His upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—it travels to the Tate Modern—certainly won’t hurt.)

Asked who else she feels has growth prospects, she cites Robert Rauschenberg and David Hockney. “In the business world, you’d say Rauschenberg is an arbitrage buy right now, because the prices are so much lower than the potential value. His record at auction is about $14.5 million. Isn’t that scandalous?” For a young collector just starting out, she advises looking at American Minimal artists: Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin—“and 1970s Brice Marden.”

Growing up in Buffalo, where she was born in 1967, Amy spoke Italian at home with her Treviso-born father. She spoke English with her Italian mother, who was born in Canada, and with her three older brothers. Their father was a builder, a general contractor, who did a lot of historic-preservation work. “When I was twelve, I said I wanted to be an art critic,” she says. “I was one of those crazy, obnoxious, precocious children who had purpose. . . . My goal early in life was to be a sovereign nation. My borders are pretty protected.”

Highlights of her childhood included visits to the Albright-Knox, one of the best small museums in the country, and Hallwalls, an early alternative space for contemporary art, and she was very involved with Buffalo’s lively punk-rock music scene. She was always a good student, but never at the top of her class. “I could have been a superb student if I’d spent more time with it,” she says, matter-of-factly. “But I did a little cost-benefit analysis and realized it wasn’t worth spending the extra time because it would take away from my other kinds of development.”

We’re in my favorite Italian restaurant, where she enchants all the waiters with her fluency in their language. I’m trying to get a little more biographical information, but her other worlds keep intruding. Her office calls, then a collector. Her answers are brief and succinct. Now it’s Joanne Rosen, whom she’s lived with for eighteen years—they married in 2009. Joanne is an architect and civil engineer who works as a real estate developer and consultant. They live in a West Side town house that used to be a nunnery, and have two teenage children (a boy and a girl) and two Shih Tzu–bichons (a boy and a girl). When Amy is not traveling, she’s home every night for dinner with the kids before going out to art-world events.
 
Joanne and Amy met in 1995 in Miami. Amy moved there after graduating from New York University in 1989 with a degree in fine arts, and doing graduate work in architecture at Pratt, to become a curator at the Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design. Multitasking being her default mode, she also taught, wrote art criticism, and became an art adviser. Within a few years, she was a highly visible presence on the Miami art scene, helping Donald and Mera Rubell set up their private art foundation and playing an important role in starting Art Basel Miami Beach.

Christie’s Marc Porter met her in the late nineties, when she gave him a tour of the Rubell foundation. He was impressed by her confidence, art-historical knowledge, and ability to talk about difficult artworks in ways that brought them to life. After several attempts, he succeeded in 2001 in recruiting her to Christie’s, where she and Brett Gorvy ran the worldwide Postwar and Contemporary Art Department for the next ten years. The art market was becoming much more global, fueled by increasing demand and by the Internet, which gave new collectors access to all sorts of formerly privileged information. Contemporary art and artists became the darlings of a culture of celebrity, and auction prices soared higher and higher. The Christie’s team was remarkably effective in taking full advantage of the expanding market—not only through auctions but through private sales, aggressive marketing tactics, and increasingly close relationships with major collectors. In a 2006 interview, Amy’s somewhat tactless remark that “we’re the big-box retailer putting the mom-and-pops out of business” went viral and infuriated a lot of art dealers, but in retrospect it sounds increasingly prophetic.

Two years ago, Amy changed her status at Christie’s. She withdrew from comanaging the 40-member department with Gorvy, freeing herself to develop new sources of revenue. She continued to work on auctions, but for the next sixteen months, her primary focus was on what became Christie’s major coup in 2012, beating out Sotheby’s and Gagosian to partner with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts on a series of Warhol sales. This was a big game-changer in the industry. “We basically said, ‘We’re now representing artists’ estates,’ ” she says. The real development here is that most of the Warhol sales are happening online—because Amy insisted on it. Thousands of minor works, priced at less than $100,000 each—Polaroids, photo-booth strips, prints, T-shirts with Andy’s self-portrait in a fright wig—are being made available through e-commerce and promoted through social media. There is enough material to keep going for the next five years. As far as Amy is concerned, this is just the beginning of the e-commerce revolution for auctions. Christie’s put a section of its day sale online in November, “at my crazy, foot-stomping insistence, and it outperformed the low estimate by a good margin. Whole auctions will be going online soon, but that won’t happen with the big evening sales for a very long time—if ever.”

At Christie’s, Amy was an agent of change. In her new venture as superagent, she will be an active catalyst in the larger art-world revolution, where all the old distinctions and boundaries—between artistic disciplines, artists and dealers, museums and galleries, connoisseurs and speculators, fashion and art—have become blurred. “Amy goes in one direction only, which is forward,” says Joanne Rosen. If she stayed at Christie’s, “she would be stuck in neutral.”

Amy and I meet in the deserted bar at the Mark hotel on a mid-morning in late December, just before she leaves for a one-week South American Christmas vacation in Cartagena with Joanne and the kids. (Last Christmas, they went to Chile.) Speculation is rife about her move, and she’s promised to tell me more about her motives. “I wanted to know who I was without Christie’s,” she says, “and I’m really good at pushing myself off cliffs. I would hate it if I became one of those fat cats who didn’t test her mettle.

“Auction houses can never fully represent a collector’s interests,” she continues, “and I feel there’s much more opportunity outside the auction house than inside. What I want to do is build the best possible full-service business—not just one that makes the most money but one that can look after you the way Bessemer Trust or Guaranty Trust looked after your family. There’s an incredible need for expert, long-term advice, about the works of art themselves and also about managing this immense new asset class.”

Art collecting is now way beyond being a private passion because the stakes have become so big. What Amy plans to be is an adviser who can tell you how to weed and grow your collection, identifying and selling what’s not essential so you can afford to buy the irresistible. “Let’s say you own a collection that you put together for $25 million over the past quarter century, and now it’s worth between $125 million and $250 million—more than your business, more than your houses, more than a substantial part of your estate—if you bought right. But the collection can’t grow unless you sell something, because the prices now are so high.”

The news that Amy is leaving to start her own business has spurred a few high rollers to offer her vast sums of money up front to buy for them, but managing and building collections is only one of many departments in her new empire. “I’m also going to be advising artists.” Established artists, she means—not to represent them, but to offer the market-savvy expertise she’s acquired over the years. Dealers won’t like this, but Amy has a lot of artist friends, and just about everyone she’s ever worked with wants to work with her again.

Just ask Christie’s Marc Porter. “If you can convince her to come back,” he says, “let me know.”

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