Art market

Be ultra-wary of the ultra-contemporary: a triumph of hot air over real value

An unquenchable thirst for a certain set of young artists—with the eye-popping price-tags to match—is creating a pressure they are inevitably unable to meet

Next year—for the first time—a Miami gallery is going to Art Basel in Switzerland

David Castillo Gallery will become the only local dealer to make the jump to the mothership in its more than 50-year history

Auctionspreview

From a Dutch Golden Age still-life to a Nobel Prize medal: our pick of the highlights from December's sales

Plus, a Modernist landscape by Ferdinand Hodler and a sumptuous Old Masters Madonna

'Art Basel has to keep changing': after 20 years, what is next for the fair juggernaut?

Noah Horowitz and Vincenzo de Bellis discuss their visions for the global fair brand and its flagship US fair in Miami

Miami—once touted as an NFT hub—suffers through enduring ‘crypto winter’

Amid high-profile bankruptcies of cryptocurrency companies and a dramatically shrinking NFT market, some art world players are pulling back while others double down

Undervalued photographers get exposure at Art Basel in Miami Beach

Fair will exhibit works by Jimmy DeSana and Barbara Ess, largely forgotten artists who were contemporaries of Robert Mapplethorpe

Why are so many African art fairs dominated by non-African dealers?

Comparing the homegrown Art X Lagos to more global events like 1-54 brings up tough questions about race that the art world still struggles to answer

Gagosian showing new Amoako Boafo work in Miami before hosting his first New York solo show

The Ghanaian painter and market darling has not formally joined the world’s biggest gallery—for now

Art marketcomment

'The downside to art world altruism that no one talks about'

Charity sales, while undoubtedly a positive, tend to skew valuable auction data upwards and muddy an already opaque market

Major insurance claims spark questions over ‘damaged art’

A spate of recent high-profile cases demonstrate ongoing challenges for the sector

Would you invest in art without seeing it? New scheme invites users to buy into securitised—but unnamed—art loans

Service offered by the New York-based alternative investment platform Yieldstreet promises healthy returns to investors willing to buy "blind"

Dogsnews

Who let the lots out? A pack of 19th-century dog paintings is coming to auction

Collector Frances Scaife is selling 14 dog portraits by English and American artists at Hindman auction house in Chicago

Auctionsanalysis

Hong Kong's autumn auctions for modern and contemporary art saw a 38% drop from last year—but why?

Closed borders have impacted the selection of offerings this season, specialists say

#metoonews

More artists leave König gallery amid 'sexual misconduct' allegations against its founder Johann König

Monica Bonvicini's departure from the gallery's roster is one of many in recent months

Frieze reveals details of its largest Los Angeles fair to date, with 124 galleries landing at Santa Monica Airport

The fair will take over the west Los Angeles airfield, with strong cohorts of local galleries, international megas and Korean dealers

Works by three overlooked Abstract Expressionists, newly represented by Hollis Taggart, head to Art Miami

The nonagenarian painter Sheila Isham and the estates of Albert Kotin and Norman Carton—all first-generation AbEx artists—are now represented by Taggart, who will show their work at Art Miami

Paris gallerists—found guilty of selling Picasso works stolen by handyman—receive suspended jail sentences

Belle et Belle gallery has now been dissolved, closing the chapter on a decade-long criminal investigation

Art marketanalysis

Despite Shanghai fairs Art021 and West Bund shutting early due to Covid concerns, dealers report decent sales

Collectors were fewer and more local, but the moderate success of some galleries attests to the city’s enduring commercial cache

A crate of 40 Van Gogh paintings was once sold for less than $1

A seascape that fetched nearly $3m at Sotheby’s this week was one of the works abandoned in an attic

a blog by Martin Bailey

Is Qatar's Fifa World Cup a lesson in artwashing?

Plus, how long left of the good times in the New York auction world? And abstract Black figuration

Hosted by Ben Luke. With guest speakers Hannah McGivern and Georgina Adam. Produced by David Clack, Aimee Dawson and Henrietta Bentall
Sponsored byChristie's

A timeline of the $450m Salvator Mundi: centuries of deals, disputes and drama

The Art Newspaper charts the existence of the world's most expensive work of art, from 1478 to today

Modigliani and Basquiat push Christie’s New York double-header sales of 20th and 21st century art to $421.9m

The epic evening saw strong results from a wide-ranging, two-part offering that spanned the 1880s to this year

Fake video claims German auction house will raise funds for Ukraine by selling—and then destroying—Russian art

Bolland & Marotz in Bremen issued a statement this week saying it was "outraged" by the incident

Back to normal? Not quite yet—Art Basel Hong Kong reveals pared down 2023 exhibitor list and new director

Next edition will be first since the special administered region lifted mandatory quarantine—but some Covid-19 measures remain in place

'The Leonardo and the Carpet Dealer': the secretive first campaign to sell the Salvator Mundi

Respected textiles scholar and dealer Michael Franses was employed in 2009, by one of the syndicate who owned the painting, to offer it for sale to a handful of the world's leading museums

Records for rising stars and women artists power an otherwise subdued Sotheby’s New York contemporary art evening sale

The firm’s contemporary and “The Now” evening auctions totalled a combined $314.9m and notched new best prices for Barbara Kruger, Betye Saar and Elizabeth Peyton

Gagosian announces new board of directors including LVMH's Delphine Arnault and filmmaker Sofia Coppola

Star-studded board of 20 will “raise the bar on the gallery’s vision for the future”, mega-dealer says

Phillips’s $138.7m contemporary art sale in New York reflects ‘a general cautiousness in the market’

The measured result, which slightly surpassed its low estimate and the total take from the same sale last year, was bolstered by a late Cy Twombly that fetched $41.6m

Alleged Native American scalp seized from auction house specialised in Confederate and Nazi memorabilia

Authorities received an anonymous tip regarding an object listed for sale on the auction house’s website and described as a Mescalero Apache scalp

Five years since the $450m Salvator Mundi sale: a first-hand account of the nonsensical auction

At the record-breaking sale at Christie's New York on 15 November 2017, the audience gasped and whooped as if they were at a very exclusive firework display