THE AUCTIONEER TOM BEST

‘There’s a reason why auctions are one of the oldest trading models in history,’ says The Auction Collective founder Tom Best. He’s a fierce advocate of the format, which helped him shift sacks of fruit and veg with his dad in the local village hall as well as multi-millionpound works as a contemporary art specialist at illustrious auction house Christie’s (at 25, Best was its youngest auctioneer in recent record, though he is keen to point out its 250-year history).

After a stint working for a charity in Syria at the peak of the civil war, he returned to London to find friends were starting to become, as he puts it, ‘house proud’. ‘They wanted to create a home with real art and real objects, but that world is such a foreign concept to a lot of people.’ Meanwhile, his network of rising artists was looking for ways to kickstart their careers, and auctions provided a unique platform to test the value of their artwork with the heady thrill of no upper limit.

The first pop-up auctions, in 2017, were a cheerfully unpolished affair: ‘I’d get a group of artists together, invite a bunch of friends, rent a room in Shoreditch, and take an auction standing on a table.’ There were three key ingredients to those early events: an Instagram account to act as a catalogue, a card reader and a gavel. When punters kept badgering him about the next one – ‘people love an experience’, he offers – The Auction Collective was born. With curator Francesca Wilson and art advisor Nick Yau in tow, Best began dismantling the barriers that he felt were impeding transparency in the industry, ditching the complicated onboarding process, incorporating the buyer’s commission, VAT and artist’s resale fee into the price. He also introduced the world’s first downloadable bidding paddle, which is ‘as simple as an online train ticket’. Pre-auction exhibitions, which are scanned with VR technology for online perusal, are ‘costly but essential. People are drawn to pieces as soon as they walk into the room.’

Friends in the traditional art world were convinced – ‘they deal with fine art every day, but it’s got three more zeroes on the end than they can afford’ – as were crowds of curious first-timers, many of whom now return for each seasonal and special sale. Best’s go-to mantra? ‘Buy with your eyes, not your ears,’ he says. ‘If you can’t stop thinking about it, if you have some weird teenage crush on it… you’ve got to go for it. Who cares what anyone else thinks?’ theauctioncollective.com

‘I’D GET A GROUP OF ARTISTS TOGETHER, INVITE FRIENDS, RENT A ROOM AND TAKE AN AUCTION

STANDING ON A TABLE’