This month Mari-Claudia Jiménez joined UK law firm Withers as a partner and head of its newly formed art and advisory practice in New York. For nearly a decade, Jiménez served as Sotheby’s chair, president for the Americas and global head of business development. She left the luxury auction house in February to form her own legal and art advisory practice, which is being combined into Withers. While at Sotheby’s, Jiménez was its principal dealmaker and driver of major estate and single-owner collections.

In this Q&A interview, Jiménez provides insight into her long career in the art world, high-profile transactional work and her personal art collection.

AI is changing many things in the art world, especially related to the intellectual property rights of AI-generated works. Do you have an opinion on AI and whether it’s something positive, negative or neutral for the art world?

AI will never replace the concept of connoisseurship in the art world, but AI can certainly help to simplify and speed up some processes, like appraisals, that currently take hours into seconds. While art experts’ experience is crucial to the determination of the value of a work, AI tools can quickly identify the artist, pull comparable works and prepare the necessary background that the expert needs to do their appraisal, and that is a hugely helpful innovation.

Thinking about your long experience at Sotheby’s, what changes did you observe in the auction industry from when you started to when you left? How has that industry changed and/or evolved?

The biggest change I witnessed in my almost decade at Sotheby’s was the way that technology and innovation were quickly adopted during the pandemic to push the boundaries of how people engaged and bought art. Before Covid, auctions were largely in-person-only affairs, and with limited exceptions, collectors bought artworks only after engaging with them in person. From one day to the next, auction houses were forced to make their sales entirely virtual and collectors were forced to buy artworks without the benefit of seeing and experiencing them firsthand. While some aspects of what we experienced during Covid dissipated, others like the fully produced online auction remain as innovations that the art world embraced and now couldn’t live without.

You’ve worked on several high-profile projects in the art world. What is one of the most memorable to you and why?

I adored art and immersed myself in it from a very young age, and when I was 13, I became completely obsessed with the work of the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt. While Klimt may be a household name today whose ‘Kiss’ painting graces countless dorm rooms, that wasn’t the case when I was a child, and there were actually very few Klimt paintings on view in the United States. After I exhausted the few that were viewable in New York City, I begged my parents to take me to Vienna, Austria to see the largest collection of Klimt works firsthand and I was lucky enough that they did. I got to see my favourite work by Klimt – the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II – a work that is widely considered his masterpiece. Fast forward to when I was a young art law associate at Herrick Feinstein, and I got a call from the head of my team telling me I needed to report to his office for an ultra-confidential purchase that one of our clients was about to embark on, and that turned out to be the purchase of the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II by the Neue Galerie in New York. Working on that historic transaction, which was at that time the most expensive painting ever sold, was and still is to this day, a dream come true.

What advice would you give to a young lawyer starting out in the art industry?

The most important piece of advice I give all aspiring art lawyers is that they need to remember that although the subject matter you are working with is glamorous and exciting, at the end of the day you are practising law, so you must like the law and embrace the idiosyncrasies of being a lawyer. While it seems pretty obvious, you would be surprised how many people get into art law because they love art and forget that most of the time art law is more about law and less about art in many ways.

Tell us about the art you collect. What appeals to you and why?

While I would love to own a Klimt oil painting, and aspire to one day, at the moment I collect contemporary Latin American and Spanish art. The themes and aesthetic really resonate for me culturally and given that the artists I collect are all fairly young and new to the art scene, it allows me to support artists at the early stage of their careers and gives me the opportunity to get in early and see how the market will eventually validate my choices.