Written by Elisa Cosentino

When I first started my MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute in London, I was already looking forward to the opportunity to do a work placement. My previous professional experience had been exclusively in contemporary art galleries, so I actively sought to explore a part of the sector that felt quite distant to me.

I ended up completing a two-month internship within the Post-War and Contemporary Art department of one of the world’s leading auction houses, which turned out to be an invaluable experience in a corner of the art world whose inner workings I knew almost nothing about.

Projects and Responsibilities

A major part of my job was writing catalog essays, profiling works heading to sale for the London, Paris, and New York offices of the department. Each one needed to introduce the artist, place the piece in context, and make a case for its significance, usually landing at around 700 words, which meant every sentence had to earn its place.

Producing something short but persuasive takes sharpness and a knack for balancing commercial appeal with critical relevance, plus a lot of research carefully condensed into something convincing. Playing with words like that can be great fun.

Alongside the research that fed into the essays themselves, there was a whole other kind of digging to do: this time for provenance.

While supporting the June online sale, as well as other auctions run by the New York and Paris offices of the department, I ended up spending at least a day a week at the Tate Library, working through catalogues raisonnés and old exhibition catalogs to track down provenance and exhibition history.

It sounds like the kind of task that could get tedious fast, but I found it genuinely fascinating. Piecing together where a work had been shown and who had owned it made for absorbing research, and it gave me the chance to come across artworks I had never encountered before.

Another part of the job was writing condition reports, which means examining a work for every crease, chip, or repair and producing a written assessment of its physical state before it goes to sale. It sounds technical, but spending that much time studying the surface of a piece taught me to slow down and really sit with it.

You write differently about a work once you’ve spent real time looking at it. I owe a lot of that to the senior cataloger I worked with, whose patience and care in teaching me the craft made all the difference.

Key Lessons Learned

I also grew a lot more confident, fast. The first time I was asked to write a condition report entirely on my own, the terminology didn’t come easily, and I kept checking back through my notes. Two weeks later, doing the same task for a couple of other works, it felt straightforward. Nothing had changed except practice: you get better because you keep doing it.

One of the best parts of the placement was sitting in on pricing sessions. Watching a team determine what a work should be estimated at, weighing comparable sales, condition, provenance, and current market appetite, was captivating.

The London department was small, and I ended up working closely with two specialists and a senior cataloger, who had each spent years mastering their corner of the market. They were generous with their time and expertise, and that kind of teaching made me feel part of the team rather than someone just passing through.

These relationships are ones I expect to carry with me well beyond the placement itself. Beyond my own department, a couple of other students from Sotheby’s Institute were placed elsewhere in the house at the same time, which gave me a small window into how differently each part of the business operates.

Shaping My Future in the Art World

The eight-week internship gave me a sharper sense of how closely research, connoisseurship, and market knowledge are bound together in the art world. Pricing a work well depends on the same close looking and rigorous research that underpin any strong catalog essay or curatorial text, just applied toward a different end. Understanding that connection has changed how I think about where my skills as a researcher and writer can be put to use.

These two months gave me real clarity on what I do best and enjoy most: looking closely, writing tightly, and understanding how value is built and communicated. That is a strong foundation to carry forward.