Rumors that Gagosian Gallery’s John Good, who resigned last week, is going to work at Christie’s in their private sales division, headed by Amy Cappellazzo, remind us that new CEO Steven Murphy has put private sales at the center of his strategy for the future of the company. But one question nags. Can an auction house, which is ultimately an agent for the seller, find within itself the culture and drive of a sales organization?

As anyone who has worked in sales will tell you, truly effective sales organizations are different animals from almost any other type of enterprise. Think Glengarry Glenn Ross.

Here’s the Observer’s GalleristNY on the move:

“This shows that Christie’s is ambitious about private sales,” said one collector familiar with Mr. Good’s new position. “It will bring in a large number of relationships.”

Before joining Gagosian, Mr. Good had his own gallery, which closed in the early 1990s after the market crash. At Gagosian, he worked with a number of artists and estates, including the estate of sculptor David Smith. He was instrumental in bringing the estate of Alberto Giacometti to the gallery.

John Good Leaves Gagosian, Reportedly For Christie’s Private Sales (GalleristNY)

The New York Times continues to stoke the Knoedler fraud story today by giving a number of prominent art world figures the opportunity to step back farther from the simmering troubles surrounding a group of works sold by the gallery. This time the Diebenkorn estate, John Elderfield and former Knoedler director Lawrence Rubin all claim they were opposed to the sale of two drawings that did not seem right when viewed by Diebenkorn’s heirs:

While the gallery and Ms. Freedman deny the accusations, the art scholar who accompanied the Diebenkorn family that day in 1993 said he could confirm the family’s account. “This was a long time ago, but I can remember standing in the room at Knoedler, particularly Phyllis and I looking at them,” said the scholar, John Elderfield, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art who still assists the family in reviewing artworks. “We did express doubt.”

The drawings in question were two of five sold by Knoedler as Diebenkorns that came from a man who would not say where he had gotten them, Mr. Grant said. The family also disputes the authenticity of another five drawings that Knoedler sold in the 1990s as part of the Ocean Park series and were said to have come from a second source, a Madrid gallery called Vijande, now shuttered. [...]

The records also show, he said, that one of the two drawings the family reviewed was sold, not by Ms. Freedman but by her predecessor at Knoedler, Lawrence Rubin.

Mr. Rubin, who remains close to the Diebenkorns, said in an interview that he does not remember being involved in such a sale, and that he never thought the drawings were authentic. “I told Phyllis Diebenkorn that I thought they were not right,” he said. “ I never believed in those drawings.”

And yet the gallery sold them.

Michael Findlay is a New York art dealer whose career spans the range of the art market from Madison Avenue to Soho in the late 60s and early 70s to Christie’s at the height of the Japanese art boom to the depths of 1990s art recession and, finally, more than a decade at Acquavella Galleries as the super dealers have come to dominate the top end of the market and host museum quality shows to rival their academic cousins.

He has just published a remarkable book called The Value of Art in which he attempts to explain to the initiated and the un-initiated why and how paintings come by their prices. We sat down a week or so ago with Mr. Findlay to talk about his career and the art market.

One thing we wanted to know was how Findlay, who dropped out of university after two semesters, came by his art education. The answer we got was cryptic but still illuminating:

Having established that the best way to learn about a work of art was to look at it, we still wondered how a young man interested in Contemporary art should eventully  come to head Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department. The answer, again, lay in the market itself:

The Value of Art by Michael Findlay

Michael Findlay is a New York art dealer whose career spans the range of the art market from Madison Avenue to Soho in the late 60s and early 70s to Christie’s at the height of the Japanese art boom to the depths of 1990s art recession and, finally, more than a decade at Acquavella Galleries as the super dealers have come to dominate the top end of the market and host museum quality shows to rival their academic cousins.

He has just published a remarkable book called The Value of Art in which he attempts to explain to the initiated and the un-initiated why and how paintings come by their prices. We sat down a week or so ago with Mr. Findlay to talk about his career and the art market.

In this clip, he explains how he came to be in New York from Britain and the accidental path he took into the art world:

I spent two semesters at York University in Toronto in 1962-63 on a scholarship from a traditional English boarding school. I found out that Toronto in the early 1960s was much like Manchester in the Dickensian era. It was very bleak. I returned my scholarship . . . with thanks.

Let’s let Michael pick it up from there:

Findlay may not have had luck anywhere else on Madison Avenue but he only needed one break and he got that with Richard Feigen:

The Value of Art by Michael Findlay