\u201cIt\u2019s the worst business model on the planet,\u201d says Marc Straus, a New York contemporary gallerist who operates two spaces in Manhattan. \u201cRents are way up and the cost of shipping has tripled,\u201d according to Straus, a former oncologist who founded his dealership in 2011 and who was the first gallerist to show Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the US at the 2024 Venice Biennale. \u201cThere\u2019s huge hesitation right now. Older collectors are on pause,\u201d Straus adds, after what he describes as the \u201ccrazy speculation\u201d in ultra-contemporary artists in the early 2020s. \u201cThe prices went up absurdly. Pretty much all of that has collapsed. I think much of the population is focused elsewhere at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, what is going on? Clearly, a major bifurcation seems to be developing between sales at the gleaming top end of the auction market and those achieved by dealers in bricks-and-mortar galleries.<\/p>\n
Steady flow to auction<\/p>\n
Boomer-generation collectors are dying or downsizing, providing a steady flow of big-ticket works to auction, and the houses still have enough wealthy clients on their books to ensure that they sell. Backstage dealmaking and judicious withdrawals ensure that 100% successful \u201cwhite-glove\u201d sales have become routine at the top level of the auction market. Thanks to guarantees, sales are predictable, but few lots sell over estimate. This May in New York, a record 79% of the turnover at Christie\u2019s, Sotheby\u2019s and Phillips\u2019s evening auctions was generated by lots covered by guarantees from third parties, according to data supplied by the London-based auction analysts Pi-eX.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe art market is increasingly behaving like the stock market, with performance at the top end appearing disconnected from wider economic indicators, particularly weak consumer confidence in the US,\u201d says Christine Bourron, the founder of Pi-eX. Yet Bourron also points out that though the results for these May sales were the highest for three years, the totals were still well below the levels the houses achieved in this series in 2014, 2015 and 2019. Between May 2014 and May 2026, the value of the S&P 500 share index increased by over 280%.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Patrick Heron\u2019s Christmas Eve: 1951 was shown at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert during LGW \u00a9 Estate of Patrick Heron \u00a9 DALiM<\/p>\n
It would seem that hoarding, rather than spending, has become a defining characteristic of the tax-averse ultra-rich in recent years. The Financial Times recently reported that the \u201cglobal flight of the wealthy\u201d had slowed sharply as political and tax concerns had eased. Only a quarter of the rich people surveyed by Capgemini said they had changed or intended to change their main tax residence in 2025, down from 56% in 2024. If the ultra-rich sit on their wealth like dragons on piles of gold, rather than let it trickle down into the wider economy by splashing out on luxury items like art, this isn\u2019t great news for either auction houses or dealers.<\/p>\n
Blue-chip 20th century art might have sold for plenty of money at the \u00a3393.3m Lewis sale, but it took noticeably longer for Sotheby\u2019s ultra-wealthy clients to spend it. Time and again billionaires on telephones were taking a minute or two to decide to bid \u00a350,000 or \u00a3100,000 on multimillion pound lots. Auctioneer Oliver Barker spent 15 minutes taking split bid after split bid on an Egon Schiele painting that eventually sold for a within-estimate \u00a317.9m. The dragons are minding their gold.<\/p>\n
There is plenty of publicly available data that confirms the performance of the auction market. Dealer sales, on the other hand, are confidential and those trying to make sense of what is going on in that sector of the art world have to rely on anecdotal evidence.<\/p>\n
At this year\u2019s June edition of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland\u2014the traditional global centerpiece of the gallery trade in modern and contemporary art\u2014much was made of the international mega-dealership Hauser & Wirth selling the 1963 Picasso canvas, The Painter and His Model in a Landscape, for $35m, among more than 30 works on the first VIP preview day.<\/p>\n
But hadn\u2019t the market changed? \u201cThe market is always changing,\u201d countered Iwan Wirth, co-founder of the gallery, keen to create a sense of the art market going through its usual business cycles.<\/p>\n
But on the second day of the VIP preview, the attendance was noticeably thin. Shockingly, there were hardly any queues at Art Basel\u2019s famously popular wurst stalls. It has become common anecdotal knowledge that many American collectors now prefer to visit Art Basel Paris in October, rather than the fair group\u2019s home fixture in Switzerland in June.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t remember a greater moment of uncertainty, what with wars, the state of the economy and generational shifts. We\u2019re experiencing a sea change. We\u2019ve had a good run, but things aren\u2019t easy,\u201d says James Holland-Hibbert, the director of the London-based gallery Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert. Founded in 2002 in St James\u2019s, the dealership put together a stand-out exhibition (until 10 July) of 23 paintings by Patrick Heron from the early 1950s for London Gallery Weekend (LGW) in early June. These include Heron\u2019s early, pre-abstract masterwork, Christmas Eve: 1951 (1951), made for the Festival of Britain, priced at \u00a31.2m. \u201cI sometimes think running a retail premises is hard to justify,\u201d says Holland-Hibbert, who cites the combination fairs, advisers and Artnet as reducing the footfall of collectors into his gallery in recent years.<\/p>\n
Gallery focus<\/p>\n
The sixth edition of LGW, featuring more than 120 participants, put a welcome focus back on bricks-and-mortar dealerships at a time when so much media attention is devoted to auctions and fairs.<\/p>\n
New York-based Lehmann Maupin, which has a permanent spot in Frieze\u2019s gallery hub at No. 9 Cork Street, rather than taking on the expense of a standalone space, showed how dealers can adapt to today\u2019s tough trading conditions. The gallery is showing recent paintings by the London-based artist Anna Freeman Bentley (until 14 August), who studied at the Royal College of Art with Caroline Walker. The two painters share a similar visual language but, unlike Walker, whose works have sold for more than \u00a3900,000 at auction, Bentley has had little secondary-market exposure. By the Friday morning of LGW, at least half the works had found buyers or reserves for prices\u00a0from \u00a310,000 to \u00a370,000, a price point that has become a sweet spot for emerging artists.<\/p>\n
During a panel discussion at No. 9 Cork Street on the Friday of LGW, the east London contemporary dealer Kate MacGarry talked of how \u201cso many challenges continue to bash small businesses like galleries\u201d. On the other side of the road, Tiwani Contemporary, a gallery dedicated to African art, had just shuttered, following the closure of Cork Street\u2019s Stephen Friedman Gallery in February. \u201cWe have to find another story,\u201d said MacGarry.<\/p>\n
Knowledgeable insiders often say that the art trade is not just one market, but several. A single season of better auction results in London and New York isn\u2019t going to transform the fortunes of the entire business. Fewer and fewer people believe any more in the neoliberal story of trickle-down economics. But as we enter a new era of forever wars and continuous, social media-fuelled anxiety, is the virtuously cyclical nature of the art trade turning out to be just another story, too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the aftermath of the latest May series of marquee art auctions in New York and Sotheby\u2019s record-breaking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[10346,6225,6485,6486,67354,20514,1120,96,11460,78894,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-667030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-market","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-auctions","tag-commercial-galleries","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-layoffs","tag-pace","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667030","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=667030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}