Welcome to Arts Radar, a monthly column by Marc Spiegler breaking down key developments in contemporary art and the wider worlds of design, music, cinema and television.
Like every other highly globalised industry, the art world was jolted by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” edicts. Although sharp-eyed lawyers soon opined that most artworks imported into the US seemed to be exempt, the radical shift in US trade policy added another layer of uncertainty to a sector where the artwork, its seller and buyer often come from three different countries. Even if tariffs land at “only” 10 percent, the impact will be significant for an art market that’s already been struggling for the last two years – and fundamentally stagnant for far longer.
The day before the US treasury bond market’s “yips” triggered Trump’s tariff climbdown, Dr. Clare McAndrew released the findings of her closely-watched annual art-market report, produced by Art Basel and UBS. The report (which, full disclosure, I helped launch in 2016), revealed that the art market in 2024 had retreated by an estimated 12 percent, dropping to $57.5 billion, near to its 10 year low.
Tough times aside, the art market has long been surprisingly small, despite all the glossy media coverage. For sake of comparison, LVMH’s 2024 sales alone were roughly 50 percent higher than those of all galleries and auctions globally. And, in addition to being small, the art market is highly consolidated. Over recent years, less than 1.5 percent of auction lots sold made up roughly 75 percent of the auction market’s total value. In the gallery world, meanwhile, McAndrew’s research has consistently indicated that among the two to three dozen artists that galleries typically represent, the top-seller represents a third of total revenue, and the top three drive almost 60 percent. (As a rule, all three are painters.)
As revealed by the report, art sales last year actually grew at lower price points, but above $10 million the action cratered — and when the high air gets too thin, the top-heavy art market shudders. Making matters worse, costs for insurance and shipping have jumped sharply, so profit margins have been hit severely.
Suffice to say, it’s a very challenging moment for the art sector, and the pressure has led to a lot of flux.
In the auction world’s de facto duopoly, Christies recently appointed a new CEO after revenues dropped 33 percent from 2022 to 2024, while Sotheby’s last year took a $1 billion cash injection from Abu Dhabi, giving the emirate a 25-30 percent stake in the business. Sotheby’s is also reported to be in talks to “partner” with mega-gallery Pace.
Meanwhile, in the world of art fairs, two weeks after super-agent Ari Emanuel stepped back from the CEO role at Frieze parent company Endeavor, a fund led by Emanuel bought two major tennis tournaments from Endeavor for roughly $1 billion, in a deal that may reportedly come to include the Frieze organization. Originally spun off from era-defining British art magazine Frieze, the fair has been on the block since October, when private equity group Silver Lake took Endeavor private after an underwhelming IPO in 2021. Meanwhile, reports of a potential Art Basel partnership with Abu Dhabi have been circulating for about as long as Frieze has been for sale.
While none of these developments is extreme when taken in isolation, it’s hard to imagine them all happening simultaneously in a healthier market.
Actually, the existential issue here isn’t just a tough market; it’s that the art sector is roughly the same size as it was in 2010. Over the last 15 years, as the number of billionaires in the world tripled and their net wealth soared 6x. But unlike the luxury goods sector, the art world never managed to capitalise on this surge in new wealth creation.
Art insiders have long held that the pendulum simply swings back and forth. Some believe the current doldrums are just one of those “market corrections” — a trough that precedes another peak. Others predict the pendulum won’t swing back, however.
One key issue is the great intergenerational transfer of wealth, from Boomers to Millennials, who don’t collect art as their parents did. “We are witnessing a sea change in the art market,” says Georgina Adam, author of the forthcoming Next Gen Collectors and the Art Market, who has analyzed the artworld’s evolution for three decades. “A new generation is inheriting great wealth, and they have different tastes and attitudes. I’m sticking my neck out a little bit here, but I think they will not buy art in the same way — and to the same degree.”
As countless surveys show, this next generation of would-be patrons seem to have far less interest in physical objects than experiences, which can be uploaded to social media and signal status. Within the sector, there’s the matter of how art is being pitched and sold. During the time of easier money, art was commonly described as “an alternative asset class.” In truth, art is an asset with high carrying costs — such as insurance and storage — and the tendency to become completely illiquid — literally unsellable — when markets shift.
“This market created more artists than demand can sustain, so we are likely to see substantive changes in general appetite of collectors,” says Allan Schwartzman, who advises premier private and public collections worldwide. “I think this is an inflection point in appetite, demand, and taste.”
The other problem is that it’s hard to see a substantial art-world response to the rise of the experience economy. The gallery that has done most is Hauser and Wirth, which in addition to having 13 gallery spaces in 6 countries also operates four restaurants and three hotels, not to mention a pub, an organic grocery, a fishmonger, a working farm, London’s Groucho Club and Gunter Sachs’ former chalet in Gstaad.
For the most part, though, the art market is going in the other direction. “The amount of art that’s being bought sight unseen is enormous — that’s a big change, and a completely different collecting experience,” says Lucy Mitchell-Innes, whose decades in the art world include being worldwide head of contemporary at Sotheby’s before opening Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York and serving as the president of the Art Dealers Association of America. “Collectors who for decades were highly engaged seem to have recently lost their enthusiasm. Others are aging out. We used to get hundreds of people coming in on weekends in Chelsea, including real collectors. That never came back after the pandemic.”
Of course, the pandemic did push the art industry more online, but few galleries put prized works for sale on third-party platforms. They want to retain control over who buys the work, which is how they build an artist’s brand. On the one hand that’s totally understandable but, on the other hand, “Buy Now” is pretty much the sine qua non of successful e-commerce.
Some young gallerists are trying to counterpunch by building true communities of collectors around themselves and their artists, one in which the collector feels like a real patron, not just a portfolio builder, by staging more intimate events. Others have experimented with not sending out booth-inventory PDFs before fairs, favouring collectors who show up. They aim to make collecting art feel like an IRL experience again — fun, exciting and meaningful.
Alternately, dealers could make an even harder pivot, toward what Artnet columnist Annie Armstrong defined as the “Red-Chip” market — flashy, sometimes puerile editions driven by memecoin-style market dynamics and open speculation.
Either way, what’s needed is a paradigm shift: long driven by exclusivity and opacity, the art trade to thrive will need to become more open and transparent, and better meet the expectations of the next-gen potential patrons.
YouTube dethrones Disney?
Not content to dominate phones, YouTube for years has been building itself into a TV channel, albeit one with infinite content. Q1 marked an inflection point in that mission, as the company reported that it now streams more content to TV screens than to phones. Veteran media analyst Michael Nathanson made news when he projected – based on current numbers – that YouTube will this year supplant Disney in screen-based revenue, becoming “the new king of all media.” Already in March, YouTube beat Disney, Netflix and Fox in viewership – and the money is following. Nathanson predicted YouTube will make more ad revenue than Disney this year and valued the Google division at $550 billion if it were freestanding.
Minecraft: the new MCU?
Surprising everyone — except perhaps male teenage gamers — “A Minecraft Movie” roared out of the gate in early April to become the year’s highest-grossing film despite mediocre reviews. Helmed by “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess and starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, the film has the makings of a 21st-century “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” propelled by a viral TikTok trend that involves viewers screaming at the screen and throwing popcorn upon the utterance of specific lines such as “Chicken jockey!”, “I am.. Steve” and “Flint and steel.” Theatres issued security warnings and proclamations such as “Disruptive behaviour, including taking part in TikTok trends, before, during, or after a screening will not be tolerated…. and where necessary, the police will be called.” Predictably, this did not work. But theaters sold tons more popcorn in a post-Covid era when non-ticket revenue is everything. Watch this space: this may mark the start of a new manosphere franchise analogous to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
What Else I’m Tracking
James Cameron Says Blockbuster Movies Can Only Survive if We ‘Cut the Cost in Half’ [Variety]
Art Adviser Sentenced to 2.5 Years in Prison for Defrauding Clients [The New York Times]
Armin van Buuren’s Armada Music Teams With Peloton for DJ Residency [The Hollywood Reporter]
Bells Larsen Says He Can’t Get a Visa to Tour the U.S. as a Trans Man [Billboard]
Having led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, Marc Spiegler now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects. He is President of the Board of Directors of Superblue, works with the Luma Foundation, and serves on the boards of the ArtTech and Art Explora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, KEF Audio and Sanlorenzo, Spiegler has long been a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and recently launched the Art Market Minds Academy.