Welcome back to Wall Power, your twice-weekly report on the art market. I’m Marion Maneker.

The slow-simmering Sotheby’s story has suddenly begun to boil. The Wall Street Journal’s prominent piece last week alluded to a cash crunch at the auction house—with surprisingly little to back up the claim. Of course, that moved the company’s dwindling cash position from an offstage saga to a starring role. Now, consignors, creditors, and employees, both current and former, are on high alert. Will Sotheby’s get its essential cash infusion in time to save the all-important November sales? What’s going on with the much-touted—but now oft-second-guessed—acquisition of the Breuer building? If the Emiratis can’t or won’t close, would a bridge financing be necessary? If so, who might step up?

I’ll give you my thoughts on all of that, below.

But first…

• Christie’s Post-War to Present results: Christie’s posted a weak $30.5 million sale for its mid-season opener. The hammer ratio was .85 and the sell-through rate a low 74 percent. Much of the property was held over from larger estates sold in previous years. Even so, there were strong performances for Lois Dodd, Augustín Cárdenas, Ruth Asawa, Louise Nevelson, Claire Tabouret, Bisa Butler, Cynthia Hawkins, Lynne Mapp Drexler, Robert Motherwell, Ed Ruscha, and Bob Thompson, among others.

• The Hammer Museum’s new director: There has been a lot of fretting, especially in The New York Times, about the spate of long-tenured directors that have retired recently, and who might fill all their shoes. But Marcy Carsey, the chairman of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, didn’t seem to have a problem convincing Zoë Ryan, currently the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at UPenn, to replace Ann Philbin, the museum’s director for the past 25 years.

  Indeed, few museums are as closely associated with their directors as the Hammer was with Philbin. She took a museum originally intended as a showcase for an industrialist’s treasures and turned it into a place to spotlight contemporary art and emerging talent. Ryan, who told the Times her goal is to “build upon” Philbin’s work, will take over in January.

The other day, I bumped into an executive at the house’s Contemporary Curated sale who was understandably outraged by the latter piece, and in particular the remarkable claim that Sotheby’s executives had expressed, at a meeting in September, “worries about whether the company would be able to keep paying its employees on time.” (The quote was attributed to a person familiar with the discussion, but the Journal acknowledged that Sotheby’s disputed that any such meeting had taken place.) Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Sotheby’s would run down its cash position and face the kinds of legal and financial consequences of missing payroll rather than exercise, among other options, its credit revolver.

One of the important points missed in the leaked bond report is that Sotheby’s earnings were greatly affected by their investment in opening new spaces in Hong Kong this summer and Paris later this month. Overall revenue is down at Sotheby’s, but their investment in new facilities is also taking a toll on their cash flow. The company also believes that it has broadened Sotheby’s revenue base in a way that will make it more profitable over the long run.

Two days after the Journal story, many current and former Sotheby’s employees gathered in the house’s seventh-floor auction room for a memorial service in honor of David Redden, the company’s longest-serving auctioneer, who died from A.L.S. in May. The mood, according to one person there, was appropriately somber—about Redden’s passing, of course, but also Sotheby’s future. “The demise of our former employer was all the legions of older, ex-Sotheby’s staff was able to talk about,” one attendee told me, with some melodrama. The conversation, this person continued, coalesced around how owner Patrick Drahi “has diminished this storied brand.”

A 280-year-old company can withstand a lot more than a bad media narrative, but it’s undeniably been a rough couple of months for Sotheby’s. There’s some indication that at least one consignor got spooked by the Journal story and withdrew. And I haven’t seen any effort by Sotheby’s to reassure the art market or the bond markets that everything is under control. That silence—and the continued wait for Abu Dhabi to cut that check—has created a vacuum too easily filled with speculation and rumor mongering, even at funerals.

Last week, as I previously noted, the New York mid-season sales were pretty much comparable between Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Sotheby’s sold $33 million worth of art in New York; Christie’s sold $29.9 million today. Though Sotheby’s did have a much better hammer ratio for their sales, which could validate their pitch for the new fees even though, as I was reminded by a longtime auction watcher, much of the property in those sales had been held over from previous auctions. They were the smaller lots from the bigger estate sales that had nowhere else to be sold.

The catalogs for the Frieze sales in London next week tell a different story. Sotheby’s has £34 million in presale value in its London evening sale; Christie’s has £73 million, more than twice as much. In the contemporary day sales, it’s £4 million at Sotheby’s and £11 million at Christie’s, an even greater disparity.

Is this a sign that the new fee structure is holding back consignments? Truthfully, there are many factors that could explain the disparity, including the decline of the London market and Sotheby’s previous decision to move more resources to Paris. But, alas, those figures don’t combat the impression among art advisors and rival houses—not to mention current and former employees—that Sotheby’s is in the middle of a skid.

Speculation surrounds the C-suite, too. The news last month that Sotheby’s C.F.O. Jean-Luc Berrebi, one of Drahi’s most trusted executives, would be stepping down set off speculation about the fate of C.E.O. Charlie Stewart. (Many Drahi watchers point out that he likes to move his executives around.) But Stewart has been the face of Sotheby’s for some time now, and he is intimately associated with the new fee structure and the company’s investments, especially in real estate. He also collaborated on a long profile with ARTnews that was recently published in its Top 200 Collectors issue. That’s hardly the sign of an executive getting ready for a move.

Finally, of course, there is the much-discussed fate of the Breuer building. Sotheby’s maintains the deal on the building was always slated to close some time this fall. But the longer it takes, the more people start wondering whether Larry Gagosian—who has to move out of his flagship gallery location nearby—will somehow swoop in and buy the building out from under Drahi. The Breuer, home of the Whitney Museum from 1966 to 2014, lacks a loading dock, which is kind of a problem for anyone putting on a high volume of shows. As a piece of commercial real estate, though, it’s not really valuable to anyone but Drahi or Gagosian. (For some, Gagosian would be in a better position to utilize the space throughout the year.)

I may have been watching way too much of HBO’s Industry, but the Machiavellian part of my brain sometimes half wonders if the Emiratis are not playing out some melodramatic plot where they push Sotheby’s to the brink by delaying the payment only to swoop in and buy it all on the cheap. If I were writing this for Industry, I’d contemplate someone like Alexander Klabin, the former hedge fund manager lurking quietly on Sotheby’s cap table with a small ownership stake, also putting in a bid. And, of course, there are the former suitors who lost out to Drahi that might reemerge to make a run at the trophy property.

But as much as I think it would greatly help Sotheby’s for the Emiratis or Drahi to do something definitive to rebuild confidence, like close on the Breuer building or announce some sort of bridge loan until the deal closes, I suspect everything will continue to muddle through until the players turn over their final cards.

Hammons, famously, has no gallery, rarely gives interviews, and generally eschews the interactions that would leave a record of an artist’s career. As fate would have it, T Magazine provided this useful supplementary guide. In that story, Nicole Acheampong pointed out that although Hammons often makes conceptual performance works, he always had them documented by talented photographers. The story is worth a long look.

I’ll be back in touch on Sunday before my flight.
M