When Novak Djokovic smashed his racquet against the net post in frustration during the Men’s Final at Wimbledon this year, it reminded me of another destructive occasion literally burnt into the memory.

That happened in March 1967 at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, London, when the late great Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar on stage after an unbeatable performance, almost as a ritual sacrifice to the gods in thanks. That iconic moment made the guitar one of the most sought after musical instruments at auction and it duly sold for £280,000 in 2008.

When it comes to sporting memorabilia, in the UK and much of the rest of the world, nothing beats football, especially World Cup Winners medals, which leave just about everything else standing. In 2016 Pele’s 1970 World Cup Winners medal took £280,000, setting a new record – in fact the Pele collection of football memorabilia sold for a total of £3.6m at the time.

By contrast, iconic tennis memorabilia can be had for relatively modest sums. Bjorn Borg’s racquet from the 1981 Wimbledon Final sold for as little as $18,500 in 2007, while Fred Perry’s racquet from the 1934 Wimbledon Final took £23,000 in 1997.

A London Underground poster from 1933 promoting the championship sold for £25,000 in 2012, but the top price to date is the $71,500 paid in 1992 for Bill Tilden’s 1920 Men’s Singles trophy for Wimbledon. Mind you, that’s close to $1m in today’s values.

Now back to Novak’s smashed racquet. You may have noticed that he later threw it into the crowd, directing it at his most vocal supporter, a man in a bright yellow jacket sitting behind the umpire’s chair who had spent the match waving the Serbian flag.

Like Hendrix’s guitar, its destruction probably adds to its value, and that value will already have soared owing to it being the racquet with which Djokovic played most of the final – the final at which his ten-year unbroken run on centre court came to an end at the hands of the new tennis superstar, Carlos Alcaraz. In short, the racquet is a talisman for a key moment in sporting history, and nothing gets better than that for collectors.

I have just completed a Q&A for a trade magazine, and it made me think, once again, of how the public view not just auctions but the wider art and antiques trade. While there are still a few people running cobweb-ridden, cluttered shops in country backwaters, where the stock seems to have been there from new, don’t make the mistake of thinking that auction houses and dealers are still living in the Dark Ages.

The auction process is both more complicated and exciting than retail, and that means we have to have technology that is able to do a lot more than just complete a customer’s order online.

Live bidding, previewing lots for sale with multiple images, registering bidders from dozens of different countries, fulfilling our obligations under due diligence and other regulations means we have to be at the top of our game all of the time. We’ve just added to all this by launching our own bidding platform, John Nicholson’s Direct, to give bidders a more competitive selection.

I’m delighted to say that this is as much a young man and woman’s game these days.

The excitement of buying and selling, collecting and doing deals knows no barrier when it comes to age or generation. It’s just the things that we choose to trade in that change over the years.

Even better news in the past few days is that the new generation of young adults are turning their attention once more to traditional antiques and decorative objects, having become bored with the monochrome clean lines of contemporary design.

Bedazzled by pattern, colour and craftsmanship, they are delighting in the discovery that striking pieces, from pictures to ceramics, combine well with muted interiors, enabling them to create room sets that reflect their own character and interests.

The wonderful thing about this for buyers is that many attractive items that have been out of fashion for a while can now be had for extremely competitive sums. For sellers, as such pieces become more popular, demand will catch up with supply and they will be able to make more money from them.

Getting the asking price right is as much a skill at chattels auctions as it is when putting your home on the market: price it too high and you can kill demand but undercook it and you risk giving it away.

Overexposure over a prolonged period tends to raise questions as to the condition of the property on offer. A newly redeveloped house near me went on the market for around 30 per cent more than I would think is reasonable. This is because it was priced according to what the plot cost to buy, what the developer paid to knock it down and create the house that now stands there, and what their projected profit would be added on top. After a few months, no one has shown any interest – the price may reflect the developer’s needs, but it doesn’t reflect the market.

Soon, I expect market reality to kick in and it will be re-priced accordingly, but that exposure will cost the owner dear, and they may well end up with less than if they had simply pitched it at a more competitive rate in the first place.

It’s the same for chattels auctions. Those prepared to consign items at come-and-get-me estimates very often spark a bidding battle, with lots selling for what they really hoped to get for them, or even higher.

Protecting oneself as a seller can be done through setting a reserve below which the item may not be sold. In the UK, at least, it is illegal to set the lower estimate below the level of the reserve, because that would be fraudulent: effectively offering an item at a price that you already know you wouldn’t sell it at.

However, the clever seller will build in flexibility to their reserve, usually allowing the auctioneer a ten per cent leeway on it, if it is clear that they will secure a sale that way on the day. Even if it isn’t quite as much as the seller hoped to get in the first place, it gives them certainty and a quick return.

The least successful sellers at auction tend to be those who have an unrealistically high view of the value of their consignment and refuse to budge. They may be able to force their point of view on a reluctant auctioneer, but they won’t be able to force it on the bidder.

After decades in the business, new developments continue to amaze me. Following the emergence of NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) as a traded digital collectable, we now have the rise of Artificial Intelligence. That hit the headlines recently when German artist Boris Eldagsen turned down the Sony world photography award after admitting that his entry had been generated using AI. Meanwhile love letters, poems, songs, greetings cards messages and other missives can now all be created using AI instead of having to engage one’s own brain. To top it all, AI generated artwork is also selling at auction.

It’s not often that I dwell on the philosophical, but I do wonder whether anything created by a computer programme, without the input of the spark of life and spiritual inspiration, can be classified as art. I’m not expecting an answer to that one in the next five minutes – after all, the human race has been creating art for at least tens of thousands of years and no one has yet been able to pin down a catch-all precise definition of what art actually is, and in many ways I hope they never do, because that would break art’s magic spell.

This calls to mind the late great Kenneth Clark, whose ground-breaking TV series Civilisation put the cultural cap on the 1960s.

In his introduction to the first episode, entitled The Skin of our Teeth, Clark famously opined: “What is civilisation? I don’t know; I can’t define it in abstract terms, but I think I can recognise it when I see it.” Of all the emblems of civilisation across the world, what did he decide to use as his backdrop to illustrate this point? Notre Dame in Paris, now rising from the ashes after is catastrophic fire in 2019.

It’s reassuring to know that great treasures of the past, the results of creative genius, still mean so much… and that traditional art and antiques can still get the heart racing at auction.