As usual, art market sales went pretty quiet after the Swiss edition of Art Basel: Gallerists caught their breath and collectors disappeared for the summer holidays. Then came the art world’s annual autumn marathon, covering more than a score of fairs and hundreds of other events from Seoul to New York to London to Paris to Turin. It’s been a tough year and amid continuing macroeconomic uncertainty, many industry insiders feared a season of calamitous sales.
Fortunately for the sector, those fears proved wrong. Many galleries actually did very well, especially at Art Basel Paris. But as the market gears up for next week’s big-ticket Evening Sale and single-owner auctions in New York, with work worth an estimated $800 million (roughly 4 percent of estimated global auction revenues) hitting the block, it’s a good time to take stock of what seems to be going on in the private market.
One caveat: As veteran Rive Gauche dealer Franck Prazan explains, “There are so many clusters within [the market], each with its own market dynamics. And what was true yesterday might not be true tomorrow.” That said, at a macro level, in the present moment, these four things appear to be true:
1. Paris is burning
Despite kicking off with the Louvre getting robbed of $100 million in jewels by a chainsaw-wielding gang (not to mention the precarious state of Macron’s government), Paris Art Week, anchored by Art Basel Paris, was a buoyant affair, with dozens of galleries reporting strong sales, albeit well below boom-time levels and slower to close. (Full disclosure: Art Basel Paris was launched under my leadership.) Collectors came from all over the world, more so than to any other 2025 fair. “In Paris, we felt momentum unlike anything in years,” says Oliver Newton, founder of New York’s 47 Canal gallery. “And we heard similar things from galleries at our level.”
As usual, the PR teams at mega-galleries went into overdrive, announcing high-level sales as the new four-hour “Avant Première” VVIP opening day closed. In fact, most of these works were sold, or at least reserved, before the doors to the Grand Palais, where the event is held, swung open. But reports and conversations with gallerists up and down the market indicate that the fair went well, as did Design Miami Paris and the younger Paris Internationale, which took place the same week.
That said, it’s important to remember that Art Basel Paris is by its very nature set up for success. Not only because it takes place within the context of Paris’ resurgent cultural scene, but also because of the Grand Palais’s physical constraints, which make it the smallest Art Basel fair, both in number of galleries and size of booths, therefore gallery selection is tougher and the inventory on offer is both higher quality and more limited than at other Art Basel fairs, making for a uniquely competitive collecting environment, aided by the efforts of Art Basel’s worldwide VIP Relations team.
Et voila: Results may not apply elsewhere…
2. The highest end is healthiest
For Prazan, quite unexpectedly and counterintuitively, 2024 was the second-best year since the gallery’s founding in 1993. Nonetheless the results gave him pause. “The average value of what we sold went up to €700,000 [$811,000],” he says. “But the number of works that we sold went down substantially.” A smaller number of buyers, Prazan explains, are targeting higher value works. Likewise, at auction, the dealer says he’s bidding against fewer people, even if the hammer prices haven’t generally come down from frothier times. “Every time a collector stops buying, for whatever reason, it affects the market more,” he says. “The buffer is much thinner than before.”
To private dealer Loïc Gouzer, whose Fair Warning app stages single-work auctions, the last three months have marked a strong surge in big-ticket activity. “There are about 10 or 15 guys who entered the market at the highest level, and they’re doing a lot of damage behind the scenes, compensating for other people who got tired or maxed out,” he explains. “Five months ago if you had money you could get anything you wanted. Now, you have to move fast or great paintings disappear. Before, cash was king. Now, speed is king.”
Historically, down markets have hit younger galleries and their emerging artists harder, and that has certainly been the case the last couple years. Last month, San Francisco’s Altman Siegel and Prishtina’s LambdaLambdaLambda galleries closed, despite having built strong reputations and great artist rosters. Rumours of emerging artist galleries closing or quiet-quitting run rampant at the moment — no surprise given how their costs have spiralled as sales stalled. “I had my best Frieze fair ever,” says East End gallerist Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa. “But I’m noticing that artists selling work under £10,000 [$13,000], meaning newer artists, are not selling easily.”
3. Core collectors are everything now
When the market is strong, it’s driven by a mix of 1) collectors focused on the art, 2) profit-seeking speculators and 3) social climbing clout-chasers. The human psyche being complicated, it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between them. But when things get tougher, the speculators stop buying: They’ve either cashed out or are busy cutting their losses. Right now, a lot of those people are still reeling from bad decisions, Gouzer says, describing the market as being in the process of reorganisation: “The shopping era is over. You don’t see the crazy FOMO-based buying. Over the last two years, a lot of people started sitting out fairs and auctions.”
Inside the balloon of the bubble market, however, there’s always a solid core of committed connoisseurs. “The enthusiastic young collectors are still buying, because there’s a close alignment between those curious core collectors and younger galleries,” observes Newton. “But a lot of people who were just dipping a toe into collecting have left. And people don’t buy art now just to get invited to the right parties.”
In an art world where speculation has wrought a lot of damage, is its disappearance necessarily a bad thing? Historically, core collectors buy more avidly during down markets, filling gaps in their collections because they have more opportunities and fewer competitors. In the recently released Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, high-net-worth collectors were found to have actually allocated more of their wealth to art — about 20 percent in 2025, up from 15 percent in 2024. The ultra-wealthy pushed it even higher.
Then again, as Newton notes, “The core is there, but the problem is that the market now is bigger than the core can sustain.”
4. Market Regionalisation
On the topic of the art market’s globalisation, there’s an odd paradox developing: Surging globalisation has meant that most major events feel more regional in terms of who’s attending. Yes, the art world has more power centres. And yes, Paris attracted collectors from all over the globe, at scale. But most of the other fall fairs felt less international than before, except perhaps for the squadrons of art advisors that absent collectors had presumably sent in their place.
“With few exceptions now, fairs tend to emphasise on their local reach,” Prazan says. “Paris, Miami, Hong Kong, Seoul, Maastricht, London… all these places, although international, now also count on their regional audience. Globalisation was a magic word ten years ago. Regionalisation may be the new magic word.”
What’s going on? Part of it is galleries retrenching from faraway fairs. Part of it is the fact that collectors need not travel half the globe to meet the international galleries and artists now traveling to their region. And surely part of it is that, with Art Basel and Frieze alone soon to be staging a total of 13 fairs per year, we’ve gone into Mission Impossible territory, where even the most completist collectors abandon their seen-it-all goals, focus on what they actually want to do and end up going to fewer fairs than before.
SORA 2 x AI Artists = ?
To close AI watchers in Hollywood, Open AI’s release of Sora 2 — which allows basically anybody to render basically anything — was viewed as an omen of impending doom. Already last year, movie mogul Tyler Perry postponed an $800 million studio project after previewing Sora. In an industry where CGI already has a huge impact, Sora 2’s release, combined with widely circulated videos of AI “actress” Tilly Norwood, had doomers imagining feature films being made without real sets, human extras and even human stars. As Sora 2 users integrated real film stars into startlingly realistic deepfakes, those fears got very real, very fast.
Among artists actively working with AI, the reaction was less alarmist. Of course, the financial stakes are much lower than in Hollywood, and clearly Sora 2 will make the path from inspiration to production faster and cheaper for often underfunded digital artists. As Transmoderna co-founder Ana Ofak points out, Sora 2 lets artists go straight to video. “Longer-term, it may help make cinematic thinking a standard part of everyday digital design. For digital artists, the question remains the same: how can we twist it to our own devices?”
Chinese digital art star Lu Yang, meanwhile, hopes that Sora 2 will shift market dynamics in favour of artists whose work is more concept-based than visually slick. “Digital art is just a label — a form of categorisation,” Yang notes. “I think artists who have relied mainly on technical skills or polished visual styles to gain an advantage will gradually lose that edge.”
For now, though, expect more AI slop. “Due to its speed and ubiquity, I see an influx of hastily Sora-made or assisted films growing like a slime mould in digital art spaces,” predicts leading digital artist Alice Bucknell. “And studded within this glut, some interesting applications and breakthrough projects, particularly when the technology is wielded with a critical eye. I still maintain that AI doesn’t magically turn a bad idea into a good one.”
Netflix Enters Podcasting?
In early October, the Financial Times reported an influx of YouTube stars setting up shop in the Burbank city of Los Angeles County, planning to capitalise on its deep reservoir of Hollywood production talent, whose traditional business has shrunk, due to both AI and movie production shifting to cheaper states. For Netflix, which has repeatedly labeled YouTube its main competitor, the slicker streamer productions are portentous. Further strengthening YouTube, the rapid shift in podcasting that has made every major host into a video streamer. Surveys indicate that podcast fans overwhelmingly favour video over audio — and, crucially short-form video excerpts from podcasts allow for viral marketing on Instagram and TikTok.
Perhaps as a counter measure, Netflix will next year license from Spotify 16 video podcasts, including true-crime shows “Conspiracy Theories” and “Serial Killers” as well as the film-focused “The Bill Simmons Podcast” and “Rewatchables.” One Spotify exec told the New York Times that the deal “marks a new chapter for podcasting.” In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, writer Liz Pelly painted a darker picture. “Both companies operate with what often feels like an ambivalence towards the health of the mediums they’ve disrupted,” she wrote, predicting that nothing great would come of the Netflix-Spotify collaboration, which she believes will soon expand and leverage more AI in production. “These technologies help create a sort of music that no one needs to listen to, and films no one needs to watch.”
French-Touch Finale
Bringing together the worlds of art, music and merchandising, the Centre Pompidou closed for extended renovations with a Paris Art Week demolition party-style takeover. Stretching across the Renzo Piano/Richard Rogers building, the two-day Because Beaubourg project included a roller disco, pop-up stores and immersive art spaces, creating a sort of ephemeral culture-consumption festival. The grand finale, totally unannounced outside of music-industry WhatsApp chats: Thomas Bangalter, half of helmet-wearing electro legends Daft Punk, went back to back on the decks with London-based DJ and producer Fred Again. (Arts Radar was there et c’était complètement ouf!)
What Else I’m Reading
NFL Boss Stands by Bad Bunny and Won’t Change Super Bowl Halftime Show Amid MAGA Outrage: He’s Going to Deliver a ‘United Moment’ [Variety]
Welcome to the Era of Art Market Dysmorphia [Gray Market Substack]
No Rap Songs Are in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the First Time Since 1990 [Billboard]
Takashi Murakami Lends His Flower Power to More L.A. Dodgers Merch | Artnet News [Artnet]
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 ArtExplora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, and Sanlorenzo, and cultural commercial projects such as the forthcoming Digital Art Museum in Hamburg and Transmoderna, Spiegler has for a decade served as a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and this year launched the online Art Market Minds Academy.
