Christie’s and Sotheby’s were both founded in 18th-century Britain and, emulating their mother empire, proceeded to colonize the globe. City by city, the two companies—very different but sharing essential DNA—have been bringing auctions of art, antiques, wine and baubles of varying luster to anyone willing to hold a paddle and foot the bill in pretty much any major currency. Leading the global charge of these quaint gavel wielders turned multibillion-dollar, multinational corporations are their two CEOs: Edward Dolman, at Christie’s, and William F. Ruprecht, at Sotheby’s.

The houses’ latest expansions are the most far-flung from their original London home and perhaps the riskiest and most rewarding, as well. “We believe that there is a huge potential for our business in these so-called emerging markets,” says Dolman. “There is a very big future for us in Asia, and we’ve been looking very closely at the Middle East and India, too.” Dolman, a nearly 25-year veteran with the company, has concentrated, for sales venues, on Dubai, Abu Dhabi and, particularly, Hong Kong, already the house’s third largest hub. But he looks to Moscow as a vital and growing source for buyers and, for promoting and touring material to be auctioned elsewhere, casts his eyes as far as Kazakhstan.

It’s not curiosity that drives Dolman’s growing reach but the exigencies of an ever-changing economic landscape and of a business that lately has seen more than its share of challenges. “Where our top buyers are from has completely changed,” he says, noting recent Christie’s auction previews around the world. “We took a major Warhol selling exhibition to Hong Kong in May this year; we now take the highlights of the Impressionist and the postwar contemporary sales to Hong Kong. We would never have done that three or four years ago, because we didn’t have the clients out there for that type of material. But now we do.”

Hong Kong is also prominent in the plans of Dolman’s opposite number at Sotheby’s. Ruprecht, at the house’s helm since 2000, has been instrumental in moving all its Asian contemporary sales, including the New York ones, to the port city. And in October he announced the opening of an office in Doha as a first step toward a series of major sales in the Qatari capital in 2009. But as head of a publicly traded company, Ruprecht has paid attention as well to some basic economic realities: Sotheby’s can’t be everything to everyone, and it’s better to zero in on the very best markets and the highest-quality material. “We used to have auctions in 20 different locations,” he says. “We now sell in many fewer locations than we used to, and we tend to focus our business on a smaller portfolio of art and objects.”

Another part of this strategy is acknowledging the importance of the home base. “The United States remains the largest art-buying community and the largest art-selling community in the world,” says Ruprecht. “And the U.S. has become a net exporter of art, but only in the last couple of years.” Sotheby’s staged exhibitions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in October to ratchet up demand.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the globalized age is the importance of the human factor—something well known to the 21st-century heirs of James Christie, whose name still appears above his eponymous house’s door, and Samuel Baker, the Sotheby’s founder. “Relationships with people in different corners of the world have become critical,” says Ruprecht. “But that does not always mean holding auctions—it means being real to all those people.”

"William F. Ruprecht + Edward Dolman" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.