From left: Jerry Saltz, de Pury, China Chow, and Bill Powers, judges and mentors on Bravo’s Work of Art.
Among his latest roles is that of mentor to aspiring artists on Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which just returned for a second season after drawing 1.4 million weekly viewers last year. His stint on the show has raised eyebrows, of course, and not just those of his colleagues, many of whom claim never to have seen it—“On a reality show is exactly where he belongs,” sniffed one prominent Berlin dealer—but also those of his costars. Fellow judge Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic, called the choice of him as mentor “misguided,” and added, “I love the guy, but the head of a swanky auction house—which is about making money—shouldn’t advise young artists about anything, ever.”
The criticism doesn’t faze the ever camera-ready de Pury, who enjoys nothing more than upending expectations. “I didn’t have any reservations,” he noted, admitting that he watched only last season’s first and final episodes but helped cast the artist-contestants for the new season. “I always felt there was a misconception that art was elitist, and I like the fact that it shows you precisely what it is to create a work of art and to judge one. And the fact that it does so in an entertaining way—so much the better.”
He’s been called the Mick Jagger of auctioneers for the sizzle he brings to the salesroom, but on first meeting, de Pury more readily suggests a fusty aristocrat. He favors French cuffs and tailored double-breasted suits with gold buttons, wears his side-swept hair behind his ears, and speaks with a Mittel-European accent and in four languages; in this casual age, his manners seem a holdover from a lost era. Meeting a woman for the first time, he’s likely to kiss her hand. And at an August benefit in the Hamptons for Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, he refused to take off his jacket while dancing wildly, even though he was dripping with sweat.
“There’s this tremendous Swiss restraint combined with a hint of old-world decadence,” said Lindemann. “He’s culturally at home in many places, and not just in Europe or America or Asia,” said the art publisher and collector Benedikt Taschen, a friend for over 20 years and de Pury’s soon-to-be singing partner in a concert they’re cooking up for their pals. “He’s never made any distinctions between so-called high and low.” He once organized a hip-hop jewelry auction to lure younger collectors, and you’ll find him on YouTube in a Euro-pop rendition of “If I Had a Hammer,” featuring de Pury at the rostrum and actors bopping to the beat while pumping their fists in the air. This past March, he appeared on The Colbert Report, proclaiming his love for the music of “Snoopy Dogg”—as he inadvertently called the rapper—and busting some moves with the host before selling a self-portrait of Stephen Colbert, amended by Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey, and Andres Serrano, in an auction at Phillips. (Colbert himself hammered the work at $26,000.)
