Section · 7 pieces
Sales, auctions, price formation, and the data behind the art trade.
MarketThe autumn sales in Hong Kong were the first serious read on Yayoi Kusama's market since she died in August. Her pumpkins sold at roughly what they would have fetched a year ago. The bidding fights were elsewhere: an untouched single-owner collection and Southeast Asian modern painting.
MarketThe fair's two new acquisition prizes paid out as promised, and the Bronx Museum spent $14,000 of its $15,000. The harder number to read is the one nobody put in a press release: what a 50% US duty on Canadian art did to the dealers who came down from Montreal and Toronto.
MarketSingle-owner collections made up 24% of what Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips sold in 2025, against 9% a decade earlier. The trillions everyone talks about are changing what comes to market faster than they are changing who buys.
MarketFrieze runs London, Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, and since 2023 The Armory Show and Expo Chicago. The Armory's two-week move this September is the first time the group has visibly managed its fairs as a portfolio rather than as rivals.
MarketThe auction houses closed a solid H1 2026. Read the results by category rather than by total and the recovery looks narrower: postwar and modern absorbed the money, and everything edgier stayed where it was.
MarketThe tenth Art Basel and UBS report puts 2025 global sales at $59.6 billion after two years of decline. Underneath the recovery, the channel that was supposed to be the future had its worst year in six.
MarketNearly 140 exhibitors at NADA, 157 at Untitled, and a week in which the emerging end of Miami Art Week did the quiet work of proving the recovery was not confined to the blue chip.