May 22, 2026

A very warm welcome to the Sotheby’s Institute of Art class of 2026, and friends, family, and loved ones, and also to members of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art governing body, faculty, and staff. I am honored to be asked to speak on this very joyous occasion and am truly grateful to all of you for your warm welcome.

Academic graduations are unique to cherish; they are not only the culmination of an intense period of study, self-examination, challenge, and creativity. They are also a unique opportunity to wear an outfit that has barely changed since medieval times and is particular to the academic world!

More seriously, huge congratulations to all of you on achieving your MA—and also for choosing a subject that will take you into what we sometimes refer to as the “art world,” one of the most unique industries (if I may use that term) that it is possible to work in. I say unique because there are two particular aspects of the arts that I cherish that are completely different from the rest of society. Maybe this is why we say the “art world” and, for me, are the reasons I transitioned from a career in healthcare.

These two aspects are about “truth” and “value.”

Let’s start with truth. When I worked in the health service, I was very aware that the notion of truth that dominates medicine is a scientific one, which is to say, we can prove the existence of something by virtue of how many times it occurs, how we can observe it, and/or whether it is repeatable by experiment. Clinical trials and experimentation underpin decision-making in modern medicine.

They define clinical truths, shape guidelines, and dictate the flow of billions of dollars in healthcare investment. Behind this aura of objectivity, design choices and selective interpretations can subtly transform uncertainty into certainty, and even dogma.

But there is a saying: the truth is one, but the paths are many.

However, in the arts, truth works in a completely different way. The testimony of one artist or artwork can constitute a type of truth with which we can all identify. Think of an artwork like Picasso’s 1937 Guernica. The painting speaks without words across cultures about the horrors of war, even though it was made by one artist in response to a particular conflict, the Spanish Civil War.

There is a tapestry version of Guernica outside the UN Security Council chamber in New York. On February 5, 2003, the then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a speech in front of the artwork arguing for the invasion of Iraq. Knowing the power of this iconic painting, UN officials covered the tapestry with a blue curtain because of its unmistakable condemnation of the military action that was being proposed.

This is how audiences, collectors, and institutions can deeply value an individual artist’s truth. When artists create work based on their unique inner sensibilities rather than market trends, it can become a universal revelation—effectively, a truth.

Perhaps what we call “great art” is a type of creativity that achieves this universalizing ambition that can be timelessly appreciated. So this is why I love the job I do and why I so highly recommend a career in the arts.

The other unique aspect of the arts that is perhaps linked to the notion of universal truth is the idea of value. The concept of value in art is fundamentally different from other industries. While most commercial products are valued by the amount and type of raw materials they use, their production time, labor, and functional utility, art is almost entirely subjective.

Why would anyone want to pay $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat or $450 million for a Leonardo? It’s because art exists in a unique non-fungible market, where value is driven by perception, cultural significance, storytelling, and the emotional resonance it creates with the viewer. It is, of course, not all pure, and value can be tainted by notions of ownership, investment, and profit.

So there are winners and losers within this system. Some people describe the art world as a gift economy, comprising an ecosystem of mutual aid, reciprocity, and shared resources that sustains creative communities outside of commercial markets.

It is often driven by unpaid labor and degrees of social capital, contrasting with the high-stakes financial glamour of the global commercial art market. It was this unpredictability of the art world that led me to work in the health service in the first place.

You see, in my working-class family background, it was understood all too well that the art world is a gift economy, and my parents wanted me to be a doctor, an architect, or something like that, where a high salary was guaranteed after graduation.

In spite of these challenges, I was still drawn to the sheer excitement and anticipation of the possibility that the creation of truth and value creates, and perhaps are, the engines that drive the arts and why I chose to make the transition from healthcare to art.

I truly did think the arts have the potential to create greater well-being, or even a better world, that is more achievable than what I was doing in the NHS. But when I graduated from Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art, I was not sure what part of the arts ecosystem I wanted to work in, and it took a while for me to find my place.

So, for many of you, there will be a period of discovery, exploration, and experimentation—even uncertainty to find your niche, and it may not be a straightforward journey. For me, it took a while, working in a variety of non-art settings before finding my place. There was even a time when I was working for the Crown Prosecution Service, hunting down people who had not paid their fines, while I completed my studies at the Slade School of Fine Art.

So it can sometimes feel as if one is going backward, but, as Steve Jobs said in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005:

“Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. [But] don’t lose faith.”

It was during this precarious period that I worked on the curation of a new cross-arts program that led to my first senior role. I decided that the publicly funded arts sector of galleries and museums was where I wanted to be, and the organization I now run, Culture&, is devoted to trying to make the arts a more level playing field for more people in our society, as workers or audience members.

But this does not exclude collaborations with the commercial art world, and so it has been a source of great pride that we have been working with Sotheby’s Institute of Art for the past three years on the Cultural Leaders Programme to offer scholarships and studentships in Contemporary Art, Art Business, and Historic Art and Design to people from underrepresented backgrounds, so they can have the opportunity to study at this world-class institution and navigate this gift economy.

So I want to congratulate the scholars who have graduated from that program this year and wish them all the very best for their future journey. I have talked a lot about art, and I realize some of you have graduated with an MA in Luxury Business. But art has a role to play even in that field, too, in collaborations like Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami or BMW x Jeff Koons, where artists add to the prestige, scarcity, and exclusive experience that we associate with these brands.

One of our Cultural Leaders Programme contemporary art scholars landed a brilliant commission with De Beers, and we are very excited about her success.

The Cultural Leaders Programme is an example, and a reminder, that the arts can be a force for good and can be an agent of social change. Modernism, for example, was not only defined by a radical rejection of historical traditions; it was also a movement of unwavering optimism for the future.

Sparked by fast-paced industrialization and the traumatic aftermath of global conflicts, like World War I and World War II, the movement sought to fundamentally rethink the future. So I think we are living in similarly challenging and unstable times, marked by industrial developments such as robotics and AI, and there are dangerous global polarizations and conflicts.

I am proud to work for an arts organization that is engaging with this contemporary and historical world, however difficult. We have demonstrated this by curating programs tackling the current crisis in the Middle East, as well as the ongoing legacy of empire.

So I encourage you, as graduates, in whatever pathway you choose, to use the incredible power of the arts to help us understand and change the world in which we live now, and what it can be in the future.

To conclude, may I leave you with another tip from Steve Jobs, Stanford University, 2005:

“Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

Finally, here are some words from Oprah Winfrey, in her 2020 Facebook Commencement Speech, that should pair nicely with our medieval outfits:

“The word graduate comes from the Latin gradus, meaning ‘a step toward something’. In the early 15th century, “graduation” was a term used in alchemy to mean ‘a tempering or refining’. Every one of us is now being called to graduate, to step toward something—even though we don’t know what!

Every one of us is likewise now being called to temper the parts of ourselves that must fall away, to refine who we are, how we define success, and what is genuinely meaningful. And you, the real graduates on this day: you will lead us.”

Thank you very much.

Photography by Kat Forsyth