According to many people in the industry whom I’ve spoken with, it’s not true at all! In fact, for many of them, business has never been better. A lot of art is still selling everywhere, all the time. Many dealers, artists, auction houses (not the major ones), online platforms, and other places where art changes hands are doing just fine. Art Basel’s annual reporting puts the aggregate of sales (that they’re tracking) at a 12% decline from 2023 to $57.5 Billion in 2024, still a hefty sum that likely vastly underestimates the amount of art being sold by professionals in the industry.
Now more than ever, there’s a tremendous amount of provocative, thoughtful, unique, insightful, and just flat-out gorgeous work being made by artists from all walks of life being introduced to audiences by an increasingly diverse, open-minded, optimistic group of dealers, curators, and other cultural facilitators. So why are we seeing this sentiment echoed amongst so many art-world commentators? Why do so many of them look to the same sources to measure the industry’s health?
If you focus on a small segment of the industry, you could be forgiven for thinking that you're witnessing an art market and an art industry overall that is gasping for air in a world that is shifting before our eyes. It doesn’t help that a right-wing surge in economic and political environments is fueling what is, at times, an openly anti-art mindset further creating an atmosphere of despondence. I think the conversation needs to shift away from hand-wringing about a slowdown in a few segments of art sales as a proxy for the ‘health’ of the art market and therefore the state of the art industry. The idea of aggregating sales numbers from fairs or reports from a specific subset of dealers, auction houses, and other familiar sources (which surely can’t capture the entirety of the activity happening at scale) is already suspect. Economics is an already questionable lens with which to view art both at a singular level as well as the aggregate. It simply doesn’t tell a particularly useful story. In fact, from my perspective, the economic lens limits our ability to gain clarity on the truth of what is actually happening. It’s an ‘easy’ but ultimately unhelpful measure of value showing up in the storytelling about art that obscures the true nature of what we’re trying to do here.
I’m reminded of the way in which many people look at federal or national level politics as a reflection of the actual political situation throughout the United States. If you believed the reporting, you’d think that our persistent demonization of disadvantaged groups, the chasm in policy preferences between two neighbors on a given street, and the overwhelming impact of falling health and environmental standards have turned our on-the-ground reality into a total hellscape. Then, you actually speak to people and you find optimism about the future, some doing the best they can to build with others, and countless others who have never given up on trying to make the dream of a just, equitable, and prosperous America real.
It’s clear that people are being squeezed from all sides without a clear, decisive answer on how to adapt, adjust, and decide on what should come next. There are galleries that are struggling or downsizing, museums that are dealing with budget shortfalls as well as layoffs (Guggenheim) or threats of layoffs without further funding (Brooklyn Museum), public art budget cuts worldwide (with Berlin’s being the most visible), and other similar situations that are putting different but very important groups in the industry under pressure. Some galleries are closing doors because the owner wants to retire and move on from the business. Some galleries just made catastrophic strategic errors with expansion and/or real estate. I’ve personally experienced this reality in my own business. We have to accept that these are natural cycles that occur in every single industry.
Even if you focus only on fairs, the news isn’t all bad. Some that may have been duplicative for the bigger galleries or a bit ahead of the collector base in certain international markets were always going to eventually struggle after the froth of the early pandemic era died down. Simultaneously, newer, smaller fairs in underappreciated regions (like Untitled Houston) or with unique audiences and perspectives (like Offscreen Paris) are quickly rising. If anything, the fair sector is getting more interesting. Overall, it just seems like there’s a lot more happening for more types of people who want to be involved in art at all levels, which is a great thing.
If we step back a bit, the picture we’re looking at should resemble economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’. In an art world (and market) that is essentially capitalist, restructuring that alters the existing modes of production while introducing new (and hopefully, but not always better) possibilities should be quite natural. In this light, there is no positive or negative, good or bad, should or shouldn’t. It just is. The ways in which different players are affected are absolutely impacted by numerous factors ranging from talent and timing to financial, but the reality remains the same.
If creative destruction is the natural state of the art world, then we ought to focus on diagnosing structural issues that impact our ability to harness it for better ends. This means interrogating the fundamental mechanisms that prevent the creation of real opportunity for evolution, growth, and a resilient future for the art industry, market, and world. I’d argue the anxiety and sense of ‘crisis’, which seems to appear around the same time of a general sense of overall economic uncertainty (and this era not being the first) comes from the way in which the art world tends to play small and, at times, curiously elitist, inviting risk, uncertainty, and a fundamental inability to claim importance in a ruthless world perpetually ready to do away with any industry that fails to aggressively advocate for itself.
From my perspective, the current ‘collapse’ discourse has an ‘out of ideas’ feel to it, which seems incongruent to the possibilities that brought many of us to art in the first place.
-PB