On Wednesday afternoon, three days before Sotheby’s was set to open its new home in the old Whitney, the auction house’s CEO, Charles Stewart, was standing in the old-new lobby, snapping an iPhone photo of a color-popped Frank Stella painting from the ’60s. Then he took a picture of a giant Jean Arp sculpture, darting around in his typical natty suit, exuding his usual bucket-of-sunshine demeanor, peppering most sentences with, “Isn’t that amazing ?”

Sotheby’s Breuer building lobby, featuring Frank Stella's Concentric Square (left) and Jean Arp's Ptolémée III (right). Photograph by Max Touhey/Courtesy of Sotheby's.

It was, to be fair, kind of amazing: I was about to be one of the first outsiders to enter the iconic Marcel
Breuer building on Madison Avenue, after years of its lying e

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