In a market rocked by scandal and upended by succession, Jiménez sees an appetite for integrated cross-discipline expertise.
The rapid globalization of the art industry in the past few decades, along with several boom and bust cycles, has made art lawyers and fiduciaries not just relevant but essential — especially in high-stakes transactions and estate matters involving high-net-worth individuals buying and selling art across borders. Art law, in particular, offers the critical regulatory framework and practical toolkit for an industry that, for too long, ran on instinct, handshakes and loosely defined ethical codes — especially on the advisory and intermediary side, where regulation is still more of a dealer association suggestion than an enforceable formal standard.
Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
See all of our newsletters
But when the market tightens, the cracks begin to show. Lured by the prospect of a casual quarter-million-dollar commission, new, inexperienced advisors enter the fray without a firm grasp of global tax and business rules and the financial literacy required to responsibly manage vast sums on behalf of clients. In just the past few years, multiple scandals have landed dealers and advisors behind bars for defrauding wealthy clients — Inigo Philbrick and Lisa Schiff among them. More recently, the legal battle between Spear’s “Outstanding Art Advisor” Barbara Guggenheim and her longtime partner Abigail Asher — whose client list included heirs, financiers, mega corporations like Coca-Cola and Hollywood royalty like Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise — offered yet another glimpse into the murky waters of art advisory. After nearly 37 years in business together, each is accusing the other of fraud, exploitation and profoundly unethical conduct, including abusive behavior, psychological manipulation and sexual coercion. Guggenheim filed a suit alleging Asher siphoned off more than $20 million in company revenue through commissions and side payments; Asher countered with claims that Guggenheim pressured her to use sex as a business tactic, encouraging her to dress provocatively and sleep with clients to close deals.
Art advising continues to be a business built on personal relationships versus legal infrastructure — perhaps because it demands compromise, rewards vanity and tolerates a certain degree of well-dressed deceit. But that kind of late-20th-century era approach to business only works when the money is flowing. When the flow dries up — when risk-averse buyers tighten the purse strings — charm and charisma must give way to true expertise.
At the end of a busy auction season, industry veteran and former Sotheby’s chairman Mari-Claudia Jiménez made headlines when she joined global law firm Withers, bringing her art law credentials and broader advisory experience into the firm’s multisector legal structure. More than just an interesting industry move, it felt like a direct response to growing demand from high-net-worth clients looking for top-tier, conflict-free advice delivered via multi-service, self-regulating entities operating above board.
“There are very few formal rules governing how advisors operate,” Jiménez tells Observer as we discuss her move from Sotheby’s to Withers in light of broader industry shifts and recent shocks. “There’s not much transparency around how they conduct business — who they’re really working for, who’s paying them or where their allegiances lie. That lack of clarity is becoming increasingly problematic.”
Jiménez should know, given her top-level experience working at the intersection of the art market and art law. Before joining Sotheby’s — where she rose through the ranks to become head of global business development, president of the Americas and ultimately chairman — she was a respected art lawyer and a partner in the Art Law Group at Herrick, Feinstein LLP.
The benefits of multidisciplinary expertise
The Withers approach was “born from something very specific: the combination of these two experiences,” she explains. During her time at Sotheby’s, she was the only person in the aforementioned roles with her background. On the other side of the table, few — if any — can match that arc: nearly a decade at the executive level of a major auction house, followed by a return to legal and advisory practice. “There are great lawyers in the art world, and there are seasoned former auction house executives now working as advisors. But the blend of both — that’s what’s truly rare and can’t be easily replicated.”
At Sotheby’s, Jiménez played an integral role in some of the most high-profile sales of recent years, including the collection of legendary philanthropist and art patron Emily Fisher Landau, the $922 million Macklowe Collection, the estate of music producer Mo Ostin, and celebrity collections such as those of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, and Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. In February 2025, she left the auction house to launch her own legal and art advisory practice, which has since been integrated into Withers.
“What’s unique about this model is that, as a lawyer, I operate under a very different set of standards. Legal professionals have clearly defined duties to their clients. Confidentiality is non-negotiable, and there are rigorous internal checks,” she says, adding that before taking on a client, she must run a firm-wide check to ensure there’s no existing or potential conflicts of interest. “Those safeguards create a structure and a level of accountability that’s largely missing in the broader art advisory landscape.”
Her legal training and practice as an art lawyer come into play in every aspect of her advisory work. “I’m not just thinking about strategy and market positioning — I’m also assessing legal risks, negotiating with risk mitigation in mind. There’s a constant interplay between those two skill sets,” she explains.
In her legal career, Jiménez was involved in some of the most headline-grabbing deals in the art world. She represented the buyer in the sale of Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I to the Neue Galerie — then the most expensive painting ever sold. She also oversaw the restitution and sale of five Kazimir Malevich masterpieces, collectively worth hundreds of millions, navigating both private transactions and auctions in one of the most legally and politically complex artist markets, rife with forgery concerns and complications tied to trade with Russia. In 2017, Jiménez also played a key role in the sale of Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust — at the time the most expensive painting ever sold at auction — part of the $300 million estate of Frances Lasker Brody.
The sale is often the most critical and complex part of art changing hands — especially in cases involving estates or major collections with multiple moving parts. “There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into the disposition of a half-billion-dollar art collection,” she says. “When you see these mega-sales — whether they’re estate liquidations or high-profile divorces like the Macklowe case, involving hundreds of works and hundreds of millions of dollars — you’re looking at an incredibly intricate legal landscape. That’s where you need to account for a wide range of variables.” It’s in these moments that both sides of Jiménez’s expertise, legal and market, come into play.
Traditionally, law firms have outsourced art advisory functions, often partnering with auction houses for appraisals and transactions, relying on the alleged neutrality of the “public market” offering. But that model tends to compromise objectivity — particularly when the parties involved have a financial stake in the outcome. “I’ve been on the other side; I was that biased party trying to steer a client toward a particular outcome. So I know exactly where the pressure points are. I know, so to speak, where the bodies are buried,” Jiménez quips.
While she continues to collaborate with auction houses and outside advisors, she acts as something of a counterweight to the industry’s built-in biases by offering discreet, sophisticated and fully integrated advice across legal and market domains. That level of fiduciary care — free from conflicts of interest and grounded in legal obligation — can only come from a law firm with no financial interest in the property itself.
HNWIs have increasingly complex needs
“There’s often a surface-level alignment of interests between the client and the auction house or gallery, as they all want to maximize value,” she explains. “But beneath that, there are real points of divergence. The key is understanding where those alignments break down, and making sure the client is protected, whether through smart negotiation, clear precautions or simply knowing when to push back.”
Withers is widely recognized for serving high-net-worth private clients. Its integrated, multijurisdictional structure allows it to advise across a range of areas — from legal counsel and tax structuring to trusts and estates, wealth planning and art law — and the firm has a reputation for guiding international families, collectors and fiduciaries through complex cross-border matters involving personal assets, inheritance, succession, philanthropy and increasingly, art and cultural property. “They’re particularly experienced in advising family offices and navigating the complex tax and structuring issues that come with significant wealth,” says Jiménez. “These are global citizens with cross-border assets, estates and obligations, rarely tied to just one country or system.”
Jiménez’s combined fluency in the art market and art law complements the firm’s strengths, and in her new role, she brings a legal and advisory framework equipped to address the full spectrum of client needs — across borders, across disciplines and often in a single meeting.
As Observer pointed out in a recent article on New Perspectives Art Partners, collectors today tend to be more informed and more risk-averse. In this changing landscape, advisors with decades of experience and a global network are poised to play a central role — especially when negotiating strategic consignments and managing the sale of significant collections and estates. As Jiménez points out, these sales almost always pass through a lawyer or an advisor, simply because executors often don’t know where to begin. Even if a collector had a close relationship with someone at an auction house during their lifetime, that relationship doesn’t survive them.
“Auction house specialists often assume that they will get the collection when the time comes just because they’re close friends with the client, but it doesn’t work that way,” Jiménez says frankly. “Most of the time, there’s a fiduciary — an executor or trustee — standing between the auction house and the collection. And that fiduciary has legal obligations.” If the estate’s beneficiaries believe the collection was undersold, she adds, they can, and frequently do, sue the executor for failing to maximize value. “It gets very complicated. That’s why these sales require not just market knowledge but legal and fiduciary expertise.”
Younger collectors are driving notable market shifts
“The Great Wealth Transfer is making this moment in the market largely about selling — about the disposition of major collections,” Jiménez confirms, noting that many prolific collectors in their 80s and 90s are beginning to pass away, and their estates are fueling the sales cycle. As we’ve seen with the collections of Paul Allen, Emily Fisher Landau, Adele Miller and Len Riggio, this is only the beginning. “We’re entering a sustained period where collections from the Baby Boomer and Silent Generation — the dominant collecting generations of the last half-century — will continue to hit the market.”
At the same time, Jiménez observes a major shift in taste that has accelerated over the past four or five years, especially in the wake of COVID. “The younger generations simply don’t want what their parents and grandparents collected,” she notes. “The grandparents bought Old Masters and brown furniture. Their children turned to Impressionism and Contemporary. But today’s rising collectors, those under 40, are buying NFTs, sports memorabilia, cars, dinosaurs, wine and things that speak directly to their lived experience.”
With nearly half the market now shaped by an emerging generation of buyers, staying attuned to their tastes and preferences is critical, Jiménez notes. According to Artnet, Millennials and Gen Z accounted for 25-33 percent of buyers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in 2024 — up from around 15 percent just five years ago. It’s a significant and fast-growing audience that brings optimism for the market’s future but also demands a more tailored, adaptive approach.
Consequently, the auction houses have begun to evolve. “They’ve expanded their focus to include sneakers, sports jerseys, handbags — all categories the traditional art world once sneered at as ‘not art,'” Jiménez says. Today, she argues, the business is focused not only on art but also on luxury. “It’s about what ultra-high-net-worth individuals want to live with. That’s what the auction houses sell, and it’s always shifted with time. In the 1930s and 40s, it was books, silver and porcelain. Today, those categories barely register.”
So when these great legacy collections come to market, it raises a pressing question: who will buy the Giacomettis, the Picassos, the Rembrandts? “It may not be the next generation of wealthy buyers,” she posits. “That’s not to say the market for these works will vanish, but it will evolve, and that evolution will define the next decade.”
Jiménez sees the changes we’re witnessing not only as a diversification of taste but also as a democratization of the market itself. The dominance of a narrow group of artists and categories is giving way to broader participation across more sectors, at more varied price points. A dinosaur skeleton might sell for $30 million, but unlike a Rothko or a Richter, it’s part of a category where collectors can still enter at far lower levels. “The barrier to entry is lower now,” she explains, “which means a broader, more varied pool of collectors. I think that is where we’re headed — a more pluralistic, diversified market that reflects changing tastes as well as a changing idea of value itself.”
More Arts interviews RoseLee Goldberg On 20 Years of Performa and Why Performance Art Still Matters Michael Govan On Building a Museum for the 21st Century MacDowell’s Chiwoniso Kaitano Explains Why America Can’t Afford to Underfund the Arts Meet Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo, One of the Patrons Shaping the Future of Art in the UAE How New Perspectives Art Partners Plans to Reshape the High-End Art Market
