The Tamesis
Loïc Gouzer has new ideas about how to sell art. It’s untested, but for him that’s part of the appeal.
On April 23, his auction app Fair Warning will launch a new format called “No Warning.” The premise is simple and a little unsettling if you’re used to buying art through art auctions, but maybe not if you’ve spent any time on eBay or Poshmark. First, a piece will appear for sale (with a price). You can click “Buy Now” or submit a single offer. Then you wait. There are no bidding wars, no incremental raises, and absolutely no calls from experts urging you to increase your prices.
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“I don’t know if this is the dumbest idea in the world or if it’s a genius idea,” Furusawa told art news in an interview. “It’s probably somewhere in the middle.”
This uncertainty is part of the hype. Offer binding for 72 hours. The highest item goes to the seller, who decides yes or no. Furze said buyers won’t be told if they were outbid, because that feedback would turn the whole thing back into an auction, which is what he’s trying to avoid. “To be successful, you have to give it your all,” Guze said.
If the work sells, it disappears. If not, it will disappear anyway.
This act of disappearance is at the heart of the form. Furusawa said the idea grew out of conversations with sellers who wanted to avoid the paper trail of traditional auctions, where prices and auction failures tend to spread. For “no warning” sales, there is no public record unless someone chooses to make it public. Buyers enjoy the same discretion.
There is a more personal motivation. “There’s so much pressure to auction,” Guze said. He worked at Christie’s for about eight years, rising to become co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art. “I was optimizing my cortisol levels and my doctor said they were too high.”
The first test case is a 1999 watercolor by Elizabeth Peyton, Daniel in Berlin, June 1999priced at $400,000. Furusawa calls it one of the artist’s finest works for sale in recent times. the only other Daniel This series of works is now collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Starting with Peyton, Fair Warning has capitalized on its own history as the platform sells Peyton products blue liam It was sold for $4.1 million in 2024, setting a record for the artist.
Gurze said he does not have a set timeline for the plan. For now, the “No Warning” sale will run concurrently with the regular Fair Warning sale, and some works are already in preparation.
Essentially, “No Warning” takes away from the most exciting moment in an auction—the moment when a work is live and someone has to make a decision—and stretches it into a format that makes you pay for your hesitation. No drama, no incremental drama, just a yes or a no that you have to live with.
