{"id":12908,"date":"2025-09-10T20:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/12908\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T20:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:20:08","slug":"the-art-market-isnt-dying-the-way-we-write-about-it-might-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/12908\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art Market Isn\u2019t Dying. The Way We Write About It Might Be."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEditor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance<\/a>,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market<\/a> and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe fall art season may have kicked off last week, but it\u2019s not the openings, or even the fairs, that are generating the most talk about the market. Instead, it\u2019s a debate over the coverage of the market. On Sunday, as the Armory Show<\/a> wrapped up,\u00a0Artnet News\u00a0released its mid-year intelligence report, led by\u00a0a Katya Kazakina analysis<\/a>\u00a0titled \u201cThe Storm Hits the Art Market: Who\u2019s Getting Swept Away.\u201d The headline was alarmist, and so was the copy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNot a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties,\u201d Kazakina wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLast time I checked, no major galleries closed last week. And all of the galleries she cited had a New York presence\u2014no major closures have been reported outside the city, though she didn\u2019t clarify that. She did, however, note that in nearly 20 years of covering the art market, she has \u201cnever heard people as down as they have been this summer\u201d and declared that the \u201cbubble has burst,\u201d with speculators now \u201coff flipping meme coins.\u201d One collector warned that before the market recalibrates, \u201cblood will flow in the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt bears mentioning that Kazakina is a well-sourced reporter, who has broken numerous consequential scoops. So, it seems clear then that a number of sources did tell her how down the market is\u2014as some dealers have told us.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, pushback came quickly\u2014and from inside the house.\u00a0Kenny Schachter,\u00a0artist, dealer, provocateur, and\u00a0Artnet\u00a0columnist, posted the headline to Instagram, slashed through with a thick red X. \u201cEnough!\u201d he wrote. \u201cI\u2019ll save you the subscription cost: the art market is fucking fine today, yesterday, 1,000 years ago and 1,000 years from now.\u201d For Schachter\u2014who formerly wrote a column for\u00a0ARTnews\u2014the rhetoric was just another example of coverage baiting clicks with an \u201conslaught of negativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exchange raises a broader question, one that art worlders often skirt but never ask: Is art-market reporting fair, and what responsibility does the press bear at a fragile moment for the market?<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier this week, Schachter told me that for him, the problem wasn\u2019t just one story, but the drumbeat of coverage that trades in crisis. \u201cWe\u2019ve reached the saturation point,\u201d he said. \u201cReporters have a responsibility to tell the truth, not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy\u2014even when it\u2019s boring, even when it doesn\u2019t generate the boldest headline. You can\u2019t just harvest negativity because it makes for clicks. It\u2019s not the case, and it\u2019s not the whole story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHere is where it is important to point out that Schachter, unlike Kazakina, operates in the market: as a collector, an artist, and a seller at auction. Still, he maintains that his point is less about defending the market than about the narrative surrounding it. Negativity, he said, becomes a kind of perverse entertainment: a performance that rewards fear over proportion. The problem is that such theater doesn\u2019t stay confined to the page. It reverberates across booths and back offices, shaping how dealers, collectors, and artists behave in real time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve all had enough of sensational headlines, and fear mongering,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything is fueled by fear in our society, but just look back at articles from the \u201990s recession. Between 1991 and 1995, hundreds of galleries closed, and there were thousands less [galleries] than there are today.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea of negative coverage as a self-fulfilling prophecy comes up a lot when reporting on the art market. While few dealers in their right mind would say that selling art is hunky-dory in the mid-2020s, numerous dealers told me recently that we are living through a rectification, not Armageddon. Yes, the cost of doing business is up, but conversations are more genuine. Seven-figure deals are still going through\u2014I know of at least three that occurred last week alone. And more importantly, the lower end of the market, the segment that the future depends on, is growing.<\/p>\n

\n\tGordon VeneKlasen,\u00a0partner at Michael Werner Gallery<\/a>, put it bluntly: the market has \u201cmany structural problems.\u201d Rising costs across the board\u2014rent, shipping, staff, and particularly art fairs\u2014have made business harder to sustain. The fairs didn\u2019t respond quickly enough to those pressures, he said, noting that participation fees and production costs have ballooned, even as sales have slowed. And yet VeneKlasen resists the fatalism of the headlines. For him, these are not symptoms of collapse but overdue corrections.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy colleagues at other outlets have already made these points\u2014Olivier Babin of Clearing\u00a0made these same claims<\/a>\u00a0to Kazakina, who ran an invaluable, in-depth interview with him. But VeneKlasen also points to a generational shift that we journalists often miss. The younger collectors he works with don\u2019t necessarily want what their predecessors wanted.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey don\u2019t want to buy the hottest thing available just because it\u2019s in demand,\u201d VeneKlasen said. He sees echoes of an earlier moment: \u201cWhat followed after 1990 and the crash was an opposition to those big machismo personalities of the \u201980s.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJust as that downturn produced a different kind of collecting, today\u2019s turbulence is fostering interest in overlooked artists, historical rediscoveries, and categories that feel less like a mirror of their parents\u2019 taste. In other words, while the top end may wobble, the base of the market\u2014the part that ensures its continuity\u2014is alive with new energy.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor historical ballast, I called\u00a0Georgina Adam,\u00a0who has been covering the art market since before many of today\u2019s millennial and Gen Z art dealers were born. (She began in the early 1990s.) Adam wrote multiple books on the market, penned a long-running market column for the\u00a0Financial Times,\u00a0and was a longtime staffer at the\u00a0Art Newspaper,\u00a0where she remains editor at large. Adam didn\u2019t sugarcoat the present.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe market really isn\u2019t good at the moment,\u201d she told me. \u201cBut the downturns of the early 1990s and of 2008 were far worse.\u201d Perspective, she argued, is what\u2019s missing in coverage today. A failed $20 million lot may say less about systemic collapse than about a seller getting greedy. \u201cThere\u2019s just a lack of nuance everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also lamented the sameness of art market reporting: \u201cEveryone\u2019s writing the same story and reporting the same figures from art fairs and auctions.\u201d And when consensus hardens, the internet accelerates it. Scoops last \u201cmaybe three seconds,\u201d Adam said, before they ricochet across half a dozen platforms. What readers want now, she argued, is not just to know what happened but analysis of it: What does it all mean? But too often, readers get the opposite, she said: speed without nuance, headlines without depth.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat gap between nuance and noise has been filled by a different breed of commentator. Anonymous meme accounts now feed on market catastrophe, pushing the same melodrama as the trades do while also offering some cutesy irony that journalists don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut, just as in politics, people rally around these voices. Jerry Gogosian quickly cheered on Kazakina\u2019s reporting and said \u201cthe storm is here, the contagion is global.\u201d Jeff Magid, the collector-turned-Instagram influencer, took a different view in a video that featured his chummy walk-and-talk style. He declared that he\u2019d had an epiphany: \u201cI get it. People who write about the art world and art market professionally feel so unwelcome in the elite, walled-off world of wealth that they resent it and root for its downfall.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMagid has done some astute commentary, but this kind of tidy reduction falls into the same trap as the very headlines he\u2019s been skewering lately. Reporters mostly relay what dealers and the numbers tell them; it\u2019s the speed and fractious nature of our current media environment that creates\u2014and encourages\u2014context collapse. The louder the headlines and the memes get, the more they drown out the obvious: we\u2019ve been here before.<\/p>\n

\n\t2009 was a cataclysm. Collectors vanished. Auction houses saw paintings once fought over suddenly passed in with no bids. Blue-chip names were halved in value. And yet, by 2011, the\u00a0market was back<\/a>\u00a0to pre-crash levels; by 2014, it had surpassed them. Those doomsayers of 2009 looked foolish just five years later.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat wasn\u2019t an isolated incident. The Japanese speculative bubble and Wall Street\u2019s love affair with excess of the late 1980s drove prices to absurd heights; when it burst in the early 1990s, the air went out of the entire market. Again, the funeral rites were performed. Again, the patient lived.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1990, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0ran with\u00a0a headline<\/a>\u00a0that would be considered sleepily nuanced today. \u201cThe Art Boom: Is It Over, or Is This Just a Correction?\u201d The two most interesting things in that story were the measured observations. Milton Esterow, then the publisher and editor of\u00a0ARTnews,\u00a0wrote at the time, \u201cWhat has crashed in the art market is all the speculation.\u201d Amy Page, editor of\u00a0Art+Auction\u00a0magazine, was even more measured. \u201cPeople are saying we\u2019ve gone back to 1988 prices, but that\u2019s still extremely high, that\u2019s not a crash,\u201d she wrote. Go back farther. In the 1970s, amid oil shocks and stagflation, some New York galleries shuttered. Yet the art world endured, adapted, and emerged stronger.<\/p>\n

\n\tJeff Poe\u00a0told\u00a0Artnet News\u00a0recently<\/a>\u00a0that the difference between 2001 or 2008 and today is that \u201cthe art market was smaller then so there was less to climb.\u201d A bigger, more global market will take longer to recover. And the size itself is part of the problem: too many galleries tried to grow too fast, and some shouldn\u2019t have grown at all.<\/p>\n

\n\t(Here is where\u00a0ARTnews\u00a0Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas, herself a market reporter for years before leading this publication, insists I add a note: To her mind, a particular mix of international conflicts and the recent policies of the Trump administration have created an environment that\u2014at least in her memory\u2014is unique and unprecedented, and that is inflecting the art market in ways that defy quantification.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet: markets breathe. They contract and they expand. They pause, then lurch forward. We can only assume that this one will, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTrevyn McGowan,\u00a0cofounder of Southern Guild<\/a> gallery in Cape Town, told me she finds the cycle of doom coverage not just misleading but stale. \u201cThere\u2019s this danger of clickbait reporting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s lazy to scoop everything up together and do something dramatic just for the reaction. But isn\u2019t it a bit boring now? We\u2019ve been hearing the same thing for two years.\u201d For a mid-sized gallery like hers, the effect isn\u2019t abstract: every dire headline dampens collector confidence and makes the business harder.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcGowan argues that the negativity has outlived its usefulness. Yes, times are tough, but she sees change creating space for new voices, fresh programs, and a younger collector base eager for alternatives. \u201cIsn\u2019t it more interesting to be talking about that,\u201d she asked, \u201cthan recycling another end-of-days story?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBob Chase,\u00a0who runs Hexon<\/a> Gallery in Aspen, texted me while he was en route from New York to Colorado. What frustrates him is the way sloppy reporting lumps together unrelated problems. \u201cCollectors read it, get concerned, hold off on acquisitions, and the cycle takes on a downward spiral,\u201d he said. Chase likened it to the old news broadcasts that crammed 29 minutes of calamity into every half-hour, with a single feel-good story tacked on at the end.<\/p>\n

\n\tMany artists he knows, Chase said, are having their best year yet\u2014not because the market is \u201cfine,\u201d but because they\u2019ve combined quality, patience, and long-term thinking.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the end of the day, I want to support an ecosystem where the flywheel keeps spinning,\u201d he told me. \u201cArtists make work, galleries show it, collectors support it, and the money flows back so creativity can thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat he wants to see is more reporting about those \u201cingenious things\u201d\u2014stories that might inspire artists, dealers, and collectors alike to think differently. (Again, I have to give credit to the art press: most of us did cover the U-Haul Art Fair, Exhibit A under Ingenious Things.) Reporting the challenges is essential, Chase acknowledged, but it shouldn\u2019t define the market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe stories that aren\u2019t being told,\u201d he said, \u201care the ones that could change the trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[12580,12581,72,12582,61,60,123,12583,12584],"class_list":{"0":"post-12908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-armory-show","9":"tag-art-market","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-hexon","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-markets","15":"tag-michael-werner-gallery","16":"tag-southern-guild"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}