Despite being the Etonian chairman of one of the oldest auction houses in the world and married into one of England’s oldest landowning families, Christie’s Orlando Rock has always downplayed his poshness. Partly, this is because 53-year-old Rock, who was appointed chairman in 2015 after beginning his career on the Christie’s front-counter in 1990, is keen to make the art world more accessible.
Emerging from behind his enormous desk wearing an Hermes necktie, Rock – who rarely gives interviews – is preparing for next week’s launch of London Now, a summer season of accessible exhibitions, events and auctions. Among them is the Art of Literature event series, which explores the two forms together. “I have always toyed with the idea of where art and literature meet,” says Rock, “whether it’s the Iliad or Dante.
“It’s important that we get people through the door and not be talking about money all the time,” he continues. He challenges the idea that one must be super-wealthy to collect art, insisting that “you can buy beautiful things inexpensively at your local sale-rooms.” An “undisciplined” collector himself, he is “forever going into our local antiques centre in Stamford”, where Rock lives with his wife Miranda (granddaughter of the sixth Marquess of Exeter) in her 16th-century ancestral home Burghley House. “I’ll see something beautiful and it’ll be for £28.”
But the average Christie’s lot is out of reach for the majority. It’s true, he says, that “Christie’s has focussed towards the expensive end of the market, but most of the things we sell are not at the top end.” The recent Swaythling collection is a case in point, with “things that are [estimated at] £500 and £1,000 – not everything is millions of pounds.”
Good-humouredly, he accepts that the art world, and Christie’s with it, has some way to go in combatting the idea that it’s all for poshos. “That traditional picture of Christie’s is not very accurate now. It’s not just about an English post-colonial view of the world.” Christie’s partnership with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has been “brilliant, a real learning curve for us,” he says, citing the Bold, Black and Beautiful exhibition curated by Aindrea Emelife last year, which celebrated Black art. “We have got to break down this intimidating reputation, and show that we’re a modern business because we are – we have to be.”
These lower budget pieces are unlikely to be NFTs [non-fungible tokens], given the way the market is going; last year, an NFT by the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, sold at Christie’s for $69m. Rock admits that he “may not be the world’s greatest expert on NFTs. They are a new development that I didn’t see coming. I should have done.”
He suspects the genre is more than a trend. “Beeple is a genuine digital artist, not someone who has cynically joined the digital bandwagon later on. I think the more cynical [who are] cashing in on NFTs probably won’t survive the test of time.” There is “something very exciting about NFTs – they provide artists with direct access to the market, and allow them to control how they release things.” Still, he looks a little baffled by the whole idea. “I’m so old-fashioned… I love the physical beauty of an object and it being in front of me. I can’t see that I could get the same enjoyment out of having a digital NFT.”
Talking of foreign shores, what impact is the freezing of Russian assets having on the market? Not much. “Russians have a fantastic tradition of collecting, and they have been a very important part of the market, but their biggest time for us was the years before the 2008 financial crisis.” Since then, they haven’t been as active. “Last year I think one per cent of our overall turnover was related to Russian buyers.” Despite global flux, the market is “quite strong. In times of uncertainty it can be a harbinger of value. When people are faced with inflation they can decide that it’s a good time to buy art for the long term. We have seen it time and time again.”
Rock spent the recent domestic uncertainties, the Covid-19 lockdowns, at Burghley. While this represented “a magical moment to spend time with my family”, financially, it was a disaster. With the house closed, “all of our sources of income disappeared. It was pretty worrying, not just looking after the people who work there, but making sure you can retain the bits of the business that could [in time] be reopened. There was a huge amount of adjustment on an almost daily basis.”
This had the Rocks “running around checking gutters – we were doing everything ourselves.” Burghley’s saving grace was filming, and it was booked by Netflix’s The Crown. “We’re still massively in debt, but it would have been even worse without that,” says Rock. The perception that houses such as Burghley must have huge cash reserves is wrong, he says. “Most houses that are open to the public lose money. It’s the businesses that surround them that provide the income.” For the last 61 years, Burghley’s income has been supplemented by the horse trials each September, but for two years Covid put pay to those too.
Last year, it was suggested that Burghley had links to the transatlantic slave trade, and that in particular an heiress Hannah Sophia Chambers’ money was related to this. “I think that was inaccurate,” says Rock, explaining that her father Thomas Chambers’ money came from copper and property, “as far as we know. We looked at it carefully. It’s important that houses address their past, and I don’t think anyone should make any excuses, but one can’t rewrite history.”
The National Trust, he says, who in 2020 released a report on slave-trade links within their own properties, “was right to address an important topic that people feel very emotively about.” As far as he knows, there is no reason to suspect that William Cecil, the builder of Burghley, was a “problematic” figure, though “I’m sure Mary Queen of Scots [whose execution he convinced Elizabeth I to order] would have something to say about him.”
The Art of Literature events are part of London Now, which runs June 6–July 15. Info: christies.com
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