Under a new law passed in France by the country’s economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, bailiffs will have the power to carry out auctions ordered by the court. Until now, only specialist judicial auctioneers (commissaires-priseurs judiciaires) with art history training handled legal sales: for example, those that arise from a contested inheritance. In France, bailiffs (huissiers) have law degrees or the equivalent.
The move has prompted protests from some auctioneers. “The problem is that bailiffs do not have the same training as judicial auctioneers. They might know how much a television or washing machine is worth, but they do not know the value of a painting or an 18th-century piece of furniture,” says Cécile Bernard, the director of development at the Drouot auction house in Paris. “Judicial auctioneers offer a guarantee that the person who has carried out the appraisal is an expert in the field.”
Under the old rules, judicial auctioneers evaluated the contents of a property, prepared an inventory and auctioned the items, including works of art. According to the new law, bailiffs might also be entitled to manage the entire process, Bernard says. However, she also notes the way that Macron’s law—which covers a range of liberalising reforms—will be applied is still the subject of discussion, as it passed by decree in February.
The aim of the new law is to deregulate legal professions and increase competition. There are currently 450 judicial auctioneers in France and more than 3,000 bailiffs; Drouot works with 80 judicial auctioneers.
Cutting red tape
Macron’s law is also intended to reduce bureaucracy. As part of the new measures, shops—and galleries—will be able to increase the number of Sundays they open per year from five to 12. However, French dealers say this is unlikely to affect the art market as this is mainly aimed at department stores that employ many people.
Sandrine Djerouet, a director of Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in Paris, says it will take a long time to change the mindset of the French. “For many years, Saturdays were seen as the selling day and Sundays were seen as the museum day,” she says. Djerouet also notes that owners already open their galleries by appointment on Sundays anyway.
What is more, says the Paris dealer Farideh Cadot, galleries are no longer where dealers do most business. “The number of art fairs every year has completely changed the way dealers work,” she says. “They have crates of work at the ready and they go from one fair to the next. Galleries will not open on Sundays just because of this law.”
