![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/31eb5cfd19580fa16ce49d91f8ac1e0dcb886c3c-1676x1484.png\"\/)
<\/p>\nIn the cyclical booms and busts of the art market, downturns tend to reverse prevailing trends. In 2015, for example, the reign of the Zombie Formalism trend died of a 7% contraction in global sales. In Miami that year, Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian mounted the figurative group show Unrealism in its wake, officially anointing figuration as the art market\u2019s next big thing. The art economy recovered, and figuration ascended until the next inflection point in 2022, when, with rising interest rates, prevailing trends again began to reverse. Confident collectors became cautious, expanding galleries downsized, and during this year\u2019s autumn fairs, headlines boasted of Millennials\u2019 rising interest in Old Masters, the ultimate referendum to the ultra-contemporary bubble that just burst.<\/p>\n
Each of these trends underwent textbook asset price inflation, whereby low interest rates send the demand for excess wealth storage skyrocketing\u2014one of many ways financialisation has fundamentally changed the culture of collecting. Now in the third consecutive year of contraction, high prices are under scrutiny as being out of sync with real long-term value, as well as a barrier to entry for potential new collectors. In response, dealers are becoming more flexible, even if only behind the scenes. In an interview with the journalist Marion Maneker, Larry Gagosian defied conventional wisdom and supported the lowering of primary prices: \u201cLike any market, you have to adjust.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the shadow of roiling political turmoil and economic uncertainty, as well as the ongoing closures of galleries struggling to make ends meet, the debate between dealers and artists, and buyers and sellers, is: how much is art really worth?<\/p>\n
Great expectations<\/p>\n
In the speculative market, high prices can be justified by the promise that they will even continue to rise. Or, \u201cif you\u2019re asking $100,000 for an artwork\u201d, the collector Jeff Magid wrote in Artnews, ideally \u201cit might retain some financial value\u201d. This expectation can often end in disappointment, particularly in the growing arena of private sales. Lately, says the adviser Mattia Pozzoni, transactions will stall due to sellers\u2019 \u201canchoring\u201d: \u201cMany bought near the top and don\u2019t want to \u2018let go\u2019 at today\u2019s clearance levels, while others keep citing comps from a frothier cycle.\u201d As the Gagosian director Harmony Murphy points out, auction records have limited accuracy in determining a work\u2019s long-term value. Using Sotheby\u2019s owner Patrick Drahi\u2019s anonymous bidding on a Francis Bacon triptych at his own auction house in 2020 as an example, she says, \u201cthey are buying their own inventory at record just to assign value to something\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Haim Steinbach\u2019s wall-mounted work five1 (2007) sold at Phillips earlier this year for a relatively modest $40,640 Courtesy Phillips<\/p>\n
Outsized expectations on returns might be traced to younger collectors\u2019 skewed vision of older generations, says Brian Butler, the owner of Los Angeles gallery 1301PE. \u201cThey only hear the stories of the great successes, and none of the mistakes.\u201d The reality is that even within celebrated collections, the majority of works depreciate, and recognition is rarely immediate. Joy Simmons, an early patron of David Hammons, Mark Bradford and Mickalene Thomas, is often asked who she is interested in. \u201cThey see that I\u2019ve been successful in collecting artists when they were younger,\u201d she says, \u201cBut 90% of my collection is not making headlines, and the ones who are having a moment right now, for the most part, I\u2019ve held on to for quite some time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Different systems of value<\/p>\n
\u201cThe art world has always been about prices,\u201d says the University of Chicago professor of economics David Galenson, echoing a commonly repeated phrase. But according to an essay for the arts organisation e-flux by Andrea Fraser, an artist and professor at the University of California Los Angeles, the \u201cemergence of art as a financial asset\u201d in the early 2000s split the market into its own autonomous subfield within the art world. One consequence is that the market increasingly embraces the language and fast-tracked expectations of the financial industry. At the height of the ultra-contemporary bubble, Murphy recalls, \u201cEveryone wanted to buy into an artist as they were IPO-ing [Initial Public Offer], and expected everything to ten times within a year.\u201d The focus of market conversations also tends to fall squarely on prices rather than art, adds the dealer Laurel Gitlen. \u201cWe\u2019re not really talking about ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fraser\u2019s essay outlines how the market espouses different preferences and values from other art world subfields: while academia emphasises ideas, and exhibitions trade in experience, the market is measured in dollars. \u201cThe market loves paintings,\u201d says John Schmid of the Chicago gallery Ackerman Clarke, \u201cdue in part to its long history, but also the fact that it\u2019s ripe for consumption\u201d with its relative ease of shipping, storage and display. In fact, according to the latest collector survey conducted by UBS and Art Basel, paintings comprised 64% of dealer sales in 2023. Conceptual sculpture, meanwhile, \u201ctends to require more space and isn\u2019t always as approachable or straightforward to a private collector\u201d, says Avery Semjen, a Modern and contemporary art specialist at Phillips. Consequently, its prices, even among institutionally celebrated artists, offer a glimpse into a world relatively untouched by speculation. At Phillips\u2019s Modern and contemporary sale in New York in February, where a 2022 Marina Perez Sim\u00e3o painting sold for $279,400, a wall-mounted shelf by Haim Steinbach took just $40,640. In September, a 2002 Paul Pfeiffer sculpture from a body of work shown in his traveling museum survey (2023-25) sold for $15,480 at Phillips. And at Ackerman Clarke, conceptual sculpture starts at $3,500, a price Schmid needs to support with additional private sales and \u201cother things I don\u2019t want to do\u201d.<\/p>\n
We do need a little speculation<\/p>\n
There are many benefits of paying living artists more for their art, including higher standards of living and greater access to resources. The artist Alexander Kroll says strong sales have allowed him to scale up and experiment further. But, conversely, \u201cThe attempt to financialise art gets to very dangerous zones of sterility,\u201d where artists are incentivised to repeat commercially successful bodies of work. There is no guarantee that money improves the quality of art. \u201cIn fact sometimes it makes it worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
How much are collectors willing to bet on an unknown name with no guaranteed returns on investment? To attract new collectors in their 30s and 40s, Simmons recommends the $2,500 to $5,000 range. Fellow collector Alain Servais puts his own number at $10,000 to $15,000, while Dean Valentine says $8,000. Faced with increased costs for rent, shipping, employing staff and more, Gitlen says galleries showing works priced under $10,000 \u201care almost certainly losing money\u201d. But by also representing more established artists and foregoing a permanent brick-and-mortar space, she is able to set emerging artists between $3,500 and $5,000. Remaining accessible to institutions and other artists \u201cgoes a long way in establishing peer respect and longevity\u201d, she says. \u201cIt also allows an artist to experiment and build before the price point gets too high.\u201d<\/p>\n
Embracing the investment mindset<\/p>\n
According to Georgia Stylianides, an adviser and quantitative analyst, the best collectors \u201caren\u2019t just picking winners, they\u2019re helping grow them\u201d. On Instagram, she recommends that collectors adopt a venture capitalist (VC) mindset. \u201cEvery work of art is basically an option on an artist\u2019s future cultural relevance,\u201d she says, and like any VC\u2019s investment portfolio, most bets will flop. Out of thousands of artists, she adds, a small sliver may go on \u201cto fundamentally shift our perceptions of art\u201d, but \u201cthose works are the ones that will define a collection\u2019s long-term value\u201d.<\/p>\n
For Butler, investing in the artists of one\u2019s time is \u201cthe adventure of being part of culture\u201d, but in the decade after founding his gallery in 1992, he noticed collectors showing more and more interest in finding \u201csome margin in the market\u201d. Burnt by investments in artists who failed to withstand the test of time\u2014financially or otherwise\u2014risk-averse collectors are now increasingly looking away from the present toward the past, where hindsight is 20\/20. As the market contraction continues, the reversal Butler would like to see now is collectors going back in time in a different way: to simply buying what they like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the cyclical booms and busts of the art market, downturns tend to reverse prevailing trends. In 2015,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[136599,10346,6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55,15478,10478],"class_list":["post-354782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-investment","tag-art-market","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-valuations","tag-value"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}