Guarantees, withdrawals and billionaires bidding at their own auction houses: Flagging market gets by with a little help from its friends
Don't be fooled by the higher-than-ever sale figures—the market is softening
Are charity art auctions, not donations, the new model for offsetting taxes?
Paul Allen’s estate has pledged proceeds of its $1.6bn Christie’s sale to unnamed philanthropic causes, while FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried vaguely promised to give away his fortune
The elephant in the booth: the environmental toll of art fairs
With a host of identikit international fairs showing works already viewed online and often already sold, is there a point to generating all those air miles?
Brexit woes contribute to slim Old Master sales in London
Nonetheless, buoyed by the Grasset collection, Sotheby's posted its best results in six seasons and Christie's sale was up 26% up on last December
Old Masters need reinventing to avoid being frozen out
Last year, European Old Masters represented just 4% of the world’s $26.3bn art auction sales. In our contemporary-obsessed world, we’re just not paying them enough attention
Can art actually help improve Saudi Arabia's abject human rights record?
Culture is being used by Saudi Arabia to project an image of a state that “enriches lives, celebrates national identity and builds understanding between people”
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
Why the global explosion of billionaires will keep auction houses afloat—for now
Record-breaking sales from the collections of Microsoft founder Paul G. Allen and the acrimoniously divorced Macklowes herald the start of a 20-year bonanza for auction houses
Five years after #MeToo, what has changed for female artists?
Recently, some major galleries have signed high-profile women, many of whom launched artistic careers long before the industry cared
Pakistani artists raise money for its devastating floods—and question which causes garner art world support
Osman Yousefzada and nine others sold specially created prints, but Pakistan’s worst natural disaster in living memory has yet to galvanise the industry
Paris vs London: which capital will win the hearts of art collectors?
London’s struggles with the reality of leaving the European Union coupled with a government unsympathetic to the arts means the French capital is gaining the edge over its rival
All hot air on climate action? Auction houses pledge to cut CO2 while organising global tours for star lots
In our new series Reality Bites, we assess whether the art market's key players are addressing the urgent issues affecting the wider world
How do you place a price tag on art in an age of perpetual crisis?
Figures are going beserk for work that looks good on Instagram—but the market struggles to find the same fervour for conceptually ambitious, politically engaged art
Auction houses say the art market is booming. But what lurks beneath these shiny numbers?
Despite what hyperbolic marketing might suggest, sales of 20th-century titans are failing to reach expected price points
Digging deep for Old Master treasures: mixed results at London sales as dearth of 'good material' continues
Christie's made a perky £28.1m while Sotheby's raised only £7.1m—a dramatic drop from pre-pandemic totals
The Venice Biennale has long been known as the world's most discreet art fair—where does Ukraine fit into that?
In the wake of Russia’s invasion, some of the spending power at the exhibition is being directed towards good causes
Nefarious art world players: after Russian freeze out, will Saudi Arabia or China be next?
For decades Russian billionaires were feted for their free spending on the arts. Now, they are officially personae non gratae. But what of the other individuals and regimes with dubious reputations?
What does the Art Basel and Frieze art fair duopoly mean for the market?
After Fiac is muscled out of Paris, just two big players are left in the Modern and contemporary events market
How auction houses became the big winners of the pandemic
With the forced shift to online sales due to Covid-19 restrictions, global sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips boomed in 2021, with an increased focus on luxury goods as the rich get richer
Have price and value in the art market parted ways for good?
In the current climate, where a teenaged NFT artist can sell for $2.9m and Old Masters have fallen out of fashion, the fickle art market has become the presiding judge of aesthetic achievement
'There are too many auctions and not enough collectors': Christie's and Sotheby's thin Old Master sales fetch a combined £29.3m in London
The star of the sales was a pair of half-length portraits by Van Dyck that sold for £6.2m at Sotheby's, the second-highest price for the artist at auction
The end of 'isms': is the art market the most powerful movement of the 21st century?
The inexorable rise of the art market this century has put paid to art movements
Can an art market wild about young 'red-chip' artists and NFTs still value blue-chip, white male masters? Answer: Yes, for now
New York's "gigafortnight" sales of the Cox and Macklowe collections showed there is still a market for classics—even while a Beeple sells for $29m to a tweeting tech entrepreneur
Where does art fit in a post-liberal world?
Western liberal democracies have long called the shots when deciding what is “good” art. But that could be about to change
Another Botticelli hits the market: Sotheby's to sell Botticelli's The Man of Sorrows for in excess of $40m
Auction house will sell the painting in January and is dubbing it "The defining masterpiece of Botticelli's late career". But what exactly does that mean?
Young, monied and keen to gamble on art: the super power of Asian collectors
Asian buyers are now the biggest spenders at international auctions and these digitally-native collectors are happy to splurge online
Connoisseurship: is it time for a comeback?
When prices and cultural value are so easily confused, there is a case for the return of critical evaluation—in updated form
As the Euros kick off, we ask…what has football got to do with art? Quite a lot, actually
The European Super League, an elite alliance betraying football’s roots, was scuppered by fans. These same power structures exist in the art world – so where’s the resistance?
NFTs and colossal prices have turbocharged the art market—but has something died in this 'second renaissance'?
As people pay eye-watering crypto-sums for digital art, many see losses as well as gains in this brave new intangible world
The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century?
Similarities between the new digital technology craze in the art world and the surge in value of tulips in 17th-century Holland suggest that it could all end in (real) tears