Defining the skeleton: the search for stability in the art market

Harry Laventure

Paul Cézanne's The Card Players (1894-5). Credit: Wikipedia 

In 2011, one of Cézanne’s Card Players series set a record for a single painting’s auction price. Unsurpassed until 2017, the Royal Family of Qatar had acquired it for around $250 million, a Post-Impressionist totem for the newly rising biome of museums in the desert. The picture itself is a macabre witness to working class Aix-en-Provence. Two men sit opposite each other, too glum for the artist to carve any light in their eyes, locked in the silent monotony of quotidian stalemate. Their only other guests are ourselves, positioned at one end of the table - a corked bottle rests at the other. Beyond my own love for this work, the painting is an apt thematic prelude for an evaluative overview of the art market at present. After the boom and boon of post-covid’s toil, recent performances are not so much detonations as sighs. Heads as margins are down, and there is little optimism for the next deal’s hand. Still the river runs. 

Indeed, across private dealerships large and small, auction houses, and the broader infrastructure of global art distribution, the waves of recent tides are breaking a little weaker. Wealth transfer, political management, and more broad culture shifts are tectonics operating with enough discordant autonomy to bring an unstable incoherence to the art market’s foundations. The reverberations are calculable. Only last year, global auction sales fell 20% [Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report]. Galleries and megadealers thought to be invincible are beginning to close branches across the map or call stumps early altogether. In Europe and the US alike, legislation with (some) welcome intentions has brought with it repercussions in mitigating efficiency of transfer. To many, this was inevitable – the curious thing is attempting to charter what people, buying and selling, are planning to do next.  

Before drawing from this deck, it is a worthy exercise to review the prior run of fortune which has left us disappointed. The art world’s metamorphosis into the art market can be traced to larva in postwar America. With the advent of Abstract Expressionism and future titans like Rothko, Pollock, and De Kooning wetting their palettes, the US had stimulated products that were not only explicitly identifiable of their climate, but their place. Answers to Europe’s many modern -isms began to enter the zeitgeist’s bloodstream to guffaws between the cocktails and cigarette smoke, and the audacity had a magnetism. Sensitive connoisseurs like Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Charles Egan migrated to 57^th Street, and championed their new gladiators vigorously. Stipends were developed to keep artists loyal and professional in the face of creative caprice and rare market success stories. 

But the prices rose swiftly. In a handful of years, De Kooning’s works had gone from around $1200 to $7900 each. Come 1957, amidst positive vibrations, the era had its duke of sprezzatura in the form of Leo Castelli. Later, his pecuniary insouciance and chivalry would be exploitable anachronisms; in the meantime, Castelli’s grace was not only admirable but profitable. It is not possible to pinpoint every upward shift in this allegedly brief paragraph, but suffice it to say that in 1973, Pollock’s One: Number 31 sold for $900,000 - twenty years earlier, Ben Heller had acquired it from the artist for $8000. As names like Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Johns bloomed, soon-to-be megadealers like Arne Glimcher and Nicholas Logsdail swept in to represent them. SoHo ushered in the Warhols and Basquiats, and Larry Gagosian met Leo Castelli ahead of the incredibly lucrative eighties. The LA collectors, none more prominent than David Geffen, inadvertently crowned Gagosian as arbiter of taste and value. In one notorious deal between the Tremaine family and publishing magnate SI Newhouse, Gagosian juiced $11million for Mondrian’s last masterpiece – Victory Boogie Woogie. If it is indeed possible to say, it is here that the art market truly underwent a change in key. Lack of regulation was no longer the arena for gentlemen’s words and handshakes, but useable lacunae in legal infrastructure.  

Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 in the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 (with observer). Credit: Wikipedia 

There is no better example of this than ‘1031 like-kind trades’, adopted with particular frivolity in the 80’s Warhol market. Two dealers agree on an equal, if inflated value, on their paintings. The two are exchanged, sales taxes are avoided, and – regardless of actual market popularity – there is a public record of each painting being worth whatever value has been allocated to them. Nothing but their agreement sanctifies the new, grossly elevated cost. So the palace begins to rise skyward on bargain balloons. Extra helium came in the wake of the ’87 crash, as investors turned to art – the reliable, alternative asset. Johns’ False Start sold for $17million just a year later, and Gagosian hiked up his prices furiously. I fear my lamenting tone is a drag - let us speed through. The 1990’s of Koons, YBAs, sharks in tanks, unmade beds, identity art, lawsuits, bigger galleries, booming costs (over $30million to fabricate a set of balloon dogs?); the 2000’s of Art Miami Basel, Fischer’s 38x30ft crate entitled Earth, Warhol’s Green Car Crash at $71.7million, ’03-’06 up 600% all told, Hirst’s self-initiated Sotheby’s auction, total art market value of $63billion; the 2010’s of battles for artists’ estates, bigger lawsuits, online markets, Kerry James Marshall, a billion dollar week in 2013, eyes turn to Asia, Sotheby’s acquisition by Drahi, a new Da Vinci at $450million; the 2020’s of remote auctions, ‘experience’ exhibitions, NFTs, virtual viewings, and now… slump.  

Jasper Johns’ False Start, 1959. Credit: Artchive 

The above is description rather than explanation, but (I hope) illustrative of the head-spinning escalation to the art market’s present vertigo. Our contemporaries are left in the debris of dubious dealings, astronomical prices, and artistic projects that have all but found their ostensibly elastic limits. As far back as 1959, Peggy Guggenheim mourned that ‘the entire art movement had become an enormous business venture’. What of today? 

Regarding auction houses, rosy is not a word that comes to mind. Over the first half of this year, overall sales across Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips were 44% below the same period in 2022. Fees are higher than ever, and expertise is lower than ever. Sotheby’s is in a particular mire. French-Israeli telecoms magnate Patrick Drahi acquired it in 2019 with a view to streamline, and adapt into more of a financial service than a hub for connoisseurship. Attempts to change fee structures and installation of his children in various branches have been both unpopular and unsuccessful, alongside mass axing of staff (more often academics than fiscal advisors). The arrest of Drahi’s old business partner, and debt-fuelled failures of previous ventures have likewise been cause for panic. As Sam Knight of The New Yorker wrote, the May auction of a Giacometti bust valued at $64million failed to garner a single bid, after 28 attempts: ‘The buyers were watching; the buyers were wary. And nobody wanted what Sotheby’s was selling’. Christie’s have had a flat year thus far, which is a relative success. It instead seems like auction houses are turning to the $330billion luxury goods market now; whether a Birkin bag or the upcoming week in the Middle East of jewellery and unraced F1 cars, art has not been chosen as their ladder out of the pit.  

Smaller dealerships and galleries have long been trodden underfoot, but today’s scene is separating the sea urchins from the hedgehogs. The established megadealers of Gagosian, Pace, Hauser and Wirth, and David Zwirner among others continue to glut themselves on the largest sales and clients for postwar art. Art Fairs, like rent, are crippling for those looking up at them. In writing this article, I spoke to a private dealer who paid just below six figures to attend a fair and left without a single sale. Perhaps at a better time, this was justifiable. In 2019’s Art Basel: Miami for example, three editions of Cattelan’s Comedian (more popularly known as the banana taped to the wall) sold for between $120,000 and $150,000. But in a calendar now peppered with fairs of this prestige and cost, inflation is a merciless double entendre. Alongside must come the consideration that people are, in general, less willing to attend in person on the back of the pandemic. The flesh decays, and defining the skeleton is a tricksy task indeed. Once the buyers stop bringing their subjective if monetarily backed value, what remains? The future of the market is unknowable. On the European side of things, matters have not been made easier by legislation designed to eradicate the darker side of dealings. Prompted by Unesco’s 2020 estimate of $10billion of illicit cultural property trading taking place annually, the EU’S 2019/880 legislation requires declarations of legitimate export amidst other regulations for any objects over €18,000 – the older the object, the more thorough the paperwork. This obviously reduces the appetite for all the inefficiency of transfer and added labour incurred. Perhaps worse still, it turns the screws more tightly on the less lucrative markets; Art Basel and UBS found that the average dealer turnover of old masters (1250-1821) was $4.8million in 2024. I need not mention the Trump tariffs beyond name. Admirable innovations have come on both sides, whether Zero Art Fair or Condo, but as of yet there is no stable solution – and no fashion of reanimating art as financially fashionable.  

As for the megadealers, it is more a matter of self-preservation than survival. The biggest names still change hands – Gagosian must be overjoyed to have won Jeff Koons back in the last few weeks – and even though their clients are less eager to buy, they remain their clients. I do not doubt that, however the market shifts, the lions’ share is theirs for at least the decade to come; in many ways, they are the market. Yet, the bigger players are not without symptoms of concern. Blum Gallery’s closure was an immense shock to many – regardless of their alleged stability as they do so, it is too soon to say whether this is a portent of sad prescience or a conservative bet against the art market’s resurgence. Gagosian has closed flagship galleries in London and New York in the last two years. Pace has shuttered in California and Beijing, and Pace African & Oceanic Art has been bought out. To use Gavin Brown’s terminology from Shnayerson, the market has always been sharks and suckerfish – whether room remains for megalodons is yet to be crystallised. 

Optimism in navigating the next few years will be a mood eliciting Daedalian calculation. Buyers will undergo the great wealth transfer, but are hitherto expected to spend on experiences rather than traditional luxury assets. How art can thrive in tech’s new ecosystems is an enigma without decryption at present. This article has not even touched on new art itself, the development of which may be a more interesting challenge than anything outlined above. One thing is certain: the orthodoxy with which the art market has swelled to Goliathan proportions is entirely unsustainable. The simple increase in scale – bigger galleries, bigger fairs, bigger prices etc. – just won’t bring the gavel down anymore. To ensure survival, let alone accomplishment, we must be more radical in our inventions. Lest the market befall Deydier’s prophecy: ‘it won’t take long to destroy the market. There are already very few real collectors now. They will all just want to buy bananas’. 

Returning to our gloomy Cézanne of The Card Players, I’m reminded of a sobering visit to the Musée d’Orsay earlier this year. There, alongside their Card Players, the gallery has an unfinished version from the same series. Only half the canvas is vaguely painted. As such, only one player is present. He sits, otherwise identical to his fully-fledged counterpart: remorseful, isolated, and imprisoned in his own game, only without an opposite. Like many dealers today, I wager. The brutal thing is that it could be the same painting. Slumps, like a bad hand, are always lonely regardless of how many players are involved. No one stops to look anyway – there’s something bigger on the other wall.