Remote bidding is taking part in an auction without being present in the saleroom, with a member of the house's staff, a telephone operator or an online platform bidding on your behalf. It comes in three basic forms: the written limit (an absentee bid, that is, a maximum bid entered in advance), telephone bidding and live online bidding. A numbered paddle in your hand has long since ceased to be the only ticket into an auction.
With a written limit you set your ceiling in advance, and the house or the system bids only up to the sum you have chosen. With telephone bidding a member of the house's staff calls you during the sale and relays your instructions to the room live. Online, you register on a platform (in the Czech Republic often Livebid) and bid in real time. Galerie ART Praha takes this further with a two-round system: an online round runs first, in which you can bid and enter limits, and its results are carried over into the saleroom auction.
Remote bidding has opened auctions to people outside the big cities and outside the Czech Republic. The covid pandemic set it in motion and it has been growing ever since: according to the Livebid Index for 2024, online auctions passed one billion crowns for the first time, out of a total auction turnover of more than three billion, roughly a third of the market. A written limit is also a natural safeguard against the adrenaline of the room. If you are not sitting in the front row, you are far less easily swept along.
View the work in person before the sale if you can, at a pre-sale exhibition for instance, because in a photograph it may come across quite differently. Include the buyer's premium in your limit, since it is only added on top of the hammer price. And read the conditions of sale: Galerie ART Praha, for example, reserves the right, if it cannot reach you during telephone bidding, to bid for you up to the opening price plus twenty per cent. Small print, big difference? It is certainly worth knowing before the telephone rings.
— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club
Related terms: Bidding limit · Pre-sale exhibitions · Buyer's premium · Reserve price and buy-in · Auction house
