{"id":1870888,"date":"2026-04-06T18:25:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T15:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1870888"},"modified":"2026-04-06T18:25:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T15:25:17","slug":"fair-warning-expands-with-saara-pritchard-doubling-down-on-conviction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1870888","title":{"rendered":"Fair Warning Expands with Saara Pritchard, Doubling Down on Conviction"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tIn 2020, as the art market scrambled to move online, Lo\u00efc Gouzer tried something smaller. After years staging blockbuster evening sales at Christie\u2019s as chairman of post-war and contemporary art, he launched the app Fair Warning. Its premise was simple: sell one work at time to a tightly screened group of collectors.<\/p>\n

\n\tFive years on, that constraint defines the company. Fair Warning has sold roughly $81.9 million worth of art not through volume, but through a steady cadence of tightly edited offerings. Its results suggest that the model can work. Last November, an Andy Warhol\u00a0portrait of Brigitte Bardot\u00a0from 1974 sold for $16.7 million, the highest publicly reported price for the artist that year. A year prior, a Fair Warning sale set a new record for Elizabeth Peyton at just over $4 million. Before that, the app sold a 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat work on paper for $10.8 million.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe platform\u2019s next test comes on Thursday, when it will offer a 1960 painting by Dorothea Tanning, estimated at $700,000 to $1.2 million. Now Fair Warning is expanding. Saara Pritchard, a former specialist at Christie\u2019s and Sotheby\u2019s known for identifying undervalued artists and building markets around them, is joining as a partner. The company has also taken on new investment from a technology backer, with plans to build out its platform and develop new ways of selling art.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat follows is a conversation with Gouzer and Pritchard about a market that, in their view, has grown far too comfortable \u201cbuying with its ears,\u201d as Pritchard would put it.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.<\/em><\/p>\n

ARTnews: Lo\u00efc, you\u2019ve said the market needs editing. What do you mean specifically?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lo\u00efc Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0There\u2019s just too much. The amount of art being produced and pushed keeps growing, and not everything can be good. People deal with that in different ways. Some stop buying because it becomes overwhelming. Others rely on advisers to go through everything. What we do is edit.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe show between one and five percent of what we\u2019re offered\u2014not because the rest is bad, but because we set a higher bar. At a traditional auction house, if the estimate works, the work can come in. For us, that\u2019s not enough. We need to believe in it. We need to feel that it brings something\u2014historically, visually, or emotionally. And once you have that, you can have conviction.<\/p>\n

What are you filtering out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0A lot of what is easy to sell. Over the past few years, artists were producing as long as the market demanded it. Collectors thought they were buying something rare, but often they weren\u2019t. Now people are coming back to basic questions: Is it good? How many exist? Where are the best works? Who owns them? We try to ask those questions every time.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve described Fair Warning as somewhere between an auction house and an adviser.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019re an auction house and a noise-canceling device at the same time. If something appears on Fair Warning, it\u2019s because we would want to own it ourselves. That\u2019s the baseline.<\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>
On November 22, 2024, this Elizabeth Peyton work, Blue Liam<\/em> (1995) sold for $4.07 million on an estimate of $1.8 million\u2013$2.5 million. It\u2019s record for the artist at auction.
<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Saara, you\u2019re known for spotting artists early. What do you look for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Saara Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s less about seeing something others don\u2019t look for and more about how I learned to look. Most of what I know comes from collectors. My father was a collector, and he approached things very simply: do I want to live with this, and is it worth stretching for? That stayed with me. So when I started working in auctions, I found myself looking at works that felt strong and asking why the market didn\u2019t reflect that yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy is a woman artist selling for one price when a comparable male artist is at a completely different level? Why are certain artists sitting in the middle of the market? It wasn\u2019t political. It was instinct about quality.<\/p>\n

Then what does Fair Warning allow you to do that you couldn\u2019t before?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0It lets me act on that instinct without compromise. At an auction house, you\u2019re part of a larger system. There\u2019s volume, expectations, and competing priorities. At a gallery, you\u2019re tied to a program. Here, I can be focused. I can say no. And I can spend time on the things I really believe in.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe best results come from that kind of alignment. Ideally, everything we sell is something we would want to live with ourselves.<\/p>\n

You both keep using the word \u201cconviction\u201d like it\u2019s a mantra.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0If people ask what Fair Warning is, I say it\u2019s a conviction-based auction house. A lot of people follow what\u2019s hot or easy. That\u2019s understandable, but it\u2019s not conviction. Conviction is having a view before the market confirms it\u2014and standing by it.<\/p>\n

Do you agree on everything?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0Not at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Give me an example.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer: <\/strong>We completely disagree on Frankenthaler. I\u2019ve never understood the work, even when it was less expensive. I always thought it was already too high.<\/p>\n

Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0And I\u2019ve always felt the opposite\u2014that it was undervalued relative to its importance.<\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s the point. I don\u2019t need agreement. I need conviction. That\u2019s how you sharpen your eye.<\/p>\n

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On November 15, 2025, this Andy Warhol picture, Brigitte Bardot<\/em> (1974), sold for $16.7 million on an estimate of between $8 million\u2013$12 million. It was the top auction price achieved for the artist in 2025.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

You\u2019re both critical of how people are buying right now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0A lot of people are buying with their ears. They\u2019re following what other collectors are doing, what advisors are saying, what institutions are validating. It makes sense\u2014it\u2019s expensive and can feel risky. But the result is that collections start to look the same.<\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019re not selling ear art. We\u2019re selling eye art. There\u2019s that story about Joshua Bell playing in a concert hall and then in the subway. Same musician, completely different response. Sometimes it feels like that. The people who really look understand immediately. Others are following something else.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve taken on new investment. What\u2019s the plan?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0First, to build the team. Then to build technology. We\u2019re rethinking how live auctions work on a platform\u2014how to recreate that moment online. We\u2019re also working on new ways of selling art. It\u2019s still early, but it will become clearer soon. The investor comes from tech, so that\u2019s a big part of it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Is this a niche model, or can it scale?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0Our bet is that what looks like a niche today becomes broader over time. Right now, it\u2019s a smaller group that understands what we\u2019re doing. But if we\u2019re right about the work, that group will grow. And I think some people who bought the wrong things in recent years are already feeling it.<\/p>\n

What does the next generation of collectors look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0More focused. In a world where it\u2019s easy to be distracted, the people who succeed are the ones who can concentrate. And those are the people starting to collect. They want to understand. They want to do the work.<\/p>\n

Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0I see that too. More collectors want to visit studios, meet artists, and engage with museums\u2026not just acquire things, but build something. It feels closer to an older model of collecting, where engagement mattered as much as acquisition.<\/p>\n

Ten years from now, what happens to Fair Warning? Do you want to sell it to a tech company or an auction house?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gouzer:<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019re going to auction Fair Warning on Fair Warning.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t have hoped for a better answer.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/newsmakers-banner_9047d2.jpg?w=1024″] In 2020, as the art market scrambled to move online, Lo\u00efc Gouzer tried something smaller. After years staging blockbuster evening sales at Christie\u2019s as chairman of post-war and contemporary art, he launched the app Fair Warning. Its premise was simple: sell one work at time to a tightly screened group of collectors. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1870888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1870888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1870888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1870888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1870888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}