If one were to go by the first-day sales results of last month’s Art Basel, one might come away with the impression that the fair was a relative success. For the megas, that might be true. David Zwirner started the fair by selling a Joan Mitchell diptych for $20 million, and Hauser & Wirth sold its most expensive offering, a $16 million Arshile Gorky work, despite noticing a slowed pace. By the end of the fair, Pace had sold its star Agnes Martin painting for a reported $14 million. 

But upstairs at the fair, where smaller and mid-size galleries typically reside, rumors were flying that delicate changes in the market weather were being more acutely felt. These dealers are facing thinner margins, rising shipping and material costs, inflation, and more cautious collectors. The risk, as dealer René-Julien Praz recently told Le Quotidien de l’Art, is “enormous.” Praz recently closed his gallery, the Paris- and Los Angeles–based Praz-Delavallade; he said the high total cost for exhibiting in the international fair circuit contributed to the decision. 

Transportation, insurance, on-site personnel, and booth fees all add up. “During one participation at Art Basel Miami, we left Florida with an $80,000 deficit,” he told Le Quotidien de l’Art. “It’s like playing Russian roulette every time.”

Now, a month on from the fair, with the art calendar’s summer respite in full swing, ARTnews spoke with several small and medium-size galleries, most of whom were at Art Basel, and one at Liste, to discuss the current market. 

None of the galleries found the most recent Art Basel to be a bust, with top-line impressions including “surprisingly well,” “relieved,” “better than expected,” and “good sales and a general positive sensation.” One gallery, Paris’s Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, went so far as to say it was “one of our best” fair outings. (However, that assessment by founder Jocelyn Wolff came with the caveat that the gallery has “never sold out an exhibition at the gallery or a booth at the fair.”)

And yet, there was a definite sense among dealers that the market is in a far different place from 2019, or even from the first fair after the start of the pandemic. As Alex Mor, cofounder of Mor Charpentier (of Paris and Bogotá), told ARTnews, “Art Basel remains the most prestigious fair, where we bring the best works, and where you have connections with people that you usually don’t connect with … But I think the level and the volume has decreased.”

Dealers said the sales activity at Basel and Liste was not uniform. Some reported making numerous sales on the first day, as has been typical, while others described a move further away from the “one-day fair,” where sales mostly happen during the opening, and offer a good indication of how the fair will go from there. It should be noted that smaller galleries tended to say they have traditionally made sales through the week at Art Basel, with the first day setting the tone. Now, collectors are putting down holds and dealers are selling unevenly through the weekend.

That slower atmosphere tracks, dealers said, with an “overall slowdown” in the market over the last six months to a year. “Collectors are being very discerning, which I think is a good thing, but it’s gone back to a slower pace that was very over-accelerated since Covid,” Chicago-based dealer Monique Meloche told ARTnews. “Covid happened and the market went crazy, but that wasn’t real. That pace can’t be maintained.”

To Wolff, the slowdown is less about a lack of collectors willing to buy, but rather comes down to a “pricing-trust issue.” 

Wolff traced this to a combination of high primary prices for some mid-career artists on fast tracks, while the value that institutions have typically lent to contemporary artists “is weaker than before.” Museums’ “stamp of approval is being challenged,” and is “less readable” today, he said, particularly for collectors less interested in certain identity-themed works popular in institutional exhibitions. 

“There was always a little gap between the values promoted by the art market and the values promoted by the museum,” said Wolff. “But it is a little more complex today and prices are higher.”

For these smaller and mid-size galleries, however, the slowdown makes the calculus around fairs trickier, particularly when you consider the overhead for a fair. As multiple dealers told ARTnews, shipping, framing, storage, and other overhead costs have risen dramatically, with Meloche suggesting that such costs are “at least 50 percent higher” than pre-Covid. Those costs are felt by collectors too, who Meloche said continue to gravitate toward paintings, due to the efficacy in those costs. 

“I don’t complain,” José Kuri, cofounder of Kurimanzutto (of Mexico City and New York), told ARTnews of Art Basel. “We did well, but it’s true that the shipping on average costs are way higher, than two, three years ago, and so the margins are way lower. So, you can feel that.”

Those issues are especially pronounced for galleries hailing from the Global South. As Catalina Casas, founder of Bogotá gallery Casas Riegner, told ARTnews, South American galleries need to do the fairs “because that activates our market, in a way,” but the costs make it difficult to compete. 

“But what I think the art world needs to think about, if they want us to survive, is: under what conditions are we going to compete?” Casas said. “We are basically participating under the same conditions of the galleries who occupy the upper side of the market, where I would have to sell my whole booth to amount to one work in a major gallery.”

At the fair, which she described as better than last year, the gallery presented works ranging from $7,000 to $95,000. But it’s hard to totally evaluate this year’s performance when deals started at the fair are still being negotiated.

Always looming above the market in recent years, and especially over the last 12 months, has been geopolitics, which all the dealers agreed have resulted in collectors being cautious and, in some cases, not traveling at all. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the turbulence in elections across the US and Europe, among other issues, have created “a climate of uncertainty,” according to Kuri.

“People are holding onto their assets, not spending in the way it used to be,” Kuri said. “Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen, so this might create a tighter market, so it’s not as liquid as it was in the last couple of years.”

While the tight market has led some to conclude that collectors are looking for “safer,” more established names, all the gallerists interviewed emphasized staying the course with their unique programs, and even taking on more risk. 

Mor Charpentier, for example, is set to open a new Paris space in the Marais district in October timed to Art Basel’s French fair that is double the size of their current location. The gallery is also investing in its residency program in Colombia. Jochen Meyer, cofounder of Berlin’s Meyer Riegger, has opened a new gallery in Seoul in lieu of participating in multiple Asian fairs each year, with the hope that a permanent space helps build long-term relationships in Korea and Asia more generally. Barcelona’s Bombon Projects has continued to develop its summer space opened in collaboration with Prats Nogueras Blanchard (in Barcelona and Madrid) in the Spanish countryside during Covid.

“It is true that fairs are necessary, they give you visibility and sales, especially if you come from a place like Barcelona that is not in the center of the art world, but this collaborative spirit that we experienced during Covid in which you could share energies, artists, collectors and costs is definitely something to continue bearing in mind,” the gallery told ARTnews in an email.

For Meloche, staying the course means continuing to move slowly and steadily with their artists, and working harder to meet collectors where they are at, whether visiting them in their homes, having more serious in-depth conversations about an artist’s work and practice, and collaborating with other galleries to sell together. 

“It’s the moment also that you have to insist on who you are,” Kuri of Kurimanzutto said. “You cannot change your face at this moment or just go with the market. I think that will be very harmful for the artists.”

Before Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale in London on Tuesday, the omens weren’t good. There was a stuttering UK economy, an impending election, and a cooling art market. Plus, the headline lot, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict, was listed with a $20 million–$25 million estimate, a noticeable drop from the $30 million estimate Christie’s gave the piece in 2022 before it was withdrawn. Very few were holding out for a blockbuster auction. The result, a shade over $105 million (including buyer’s premium) and $20 million short of the high estimate, was received with determined sanguinity by the top brass.

Were they relieved? Probably a little. 

The outcome—similar to that of Sotheby’s last London contemporary evening sale, in March—won’t send the house spiraling into despair amid ongoing talk of the art market “correction.” Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s vice chairman of global fine arts, told ARTnews that the result was “solid” but said the auction was “difficult to put together” because “people are short on reasons to sell at the moment.” People were short on impetus to spend big as well, relatively speaking. 

The hot, humid weather—about 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the British capital—didn’t exactly fry the bidding. Several lots edged past their low estimate, largely thanks to the patience of auctioneers Oliver Barker and Helen Newman. By the time Lot 27, a landscape by Vilhelm Hammershøi that eventually hammered for $834,669, came up for sale, a heckler (reportedly veteran columnist Danny Katz of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald) shouted, “Put the hammer down!” Newman implored, “But she came all the way from Asia!”

Ninety percent of the lots sold, a figure that’s on par with what Sotheby’s saw in New York during its marquee sales. The aforementioned Basquiat triptych prevailed, selling for $20.2 million and making it the evening’s top lot. Three works by Tamara de Lempicka, Loie Hollowell, and Emily Kam Kngwarray were withdrawn, while five passed after failing to meet their reserve, including an untitled 1958 Robert Rauschenberg piece, estimated at $440,000 to $570,000. 

Works owned by the late Chicago collector Ralph I. Goldenberg injected more than $16 million into the total. Cy Twombly’s Formian Dreams + Actuality (1983) doubled its estimate, at $3.11 million. Meanwhile, his By the Ionian Sea (1988) went for $2.73 million, nearly double its high estimate of $1.5 million.

“Some very solid, efficient results, and some great surprises,” Tom Eddison, Sotheby’s senior specialist of contemporary art, told ARTnews. “There was a depth of bidding on the Goldenberg collection that truly captivated us internally and UK dealers and collectors alike.”

In view of the softer market and the big three houses’ tilt toward Asia, did Eddison think London’s status was at risk? “No, I don’t agree with that notion. We are very passionate about London being a great platform. We had 35 different countries bidding tonight. Certainly, for Sotheby’s, London still remains the global hub for people coming to buy. We are resolute.”

Contemporary specialist Antonia Gardner echoed his sentiment. “Given that we just had a $100 million plus sale here tonight, it doesn’t feel like we are losing our way,” she said.

London dealers at both ends of the game, meanwhile, were generally upbeat. Elliot McDonald, Pace Gallery London’s senior vice president, told ARTnews in an email before the auction, “We’re experiencing a market that’s becoming more selective in its acquisitions, yet the appetite for exceptional quality and exciting contemporary artists remains as strong as ever.” He pointed out that Pace sold major works by Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, and Kngwarray at Art Basel earlier this month. “Going in [to Basel], there were some uncertainties, but the very strong sales at our booth demonstrated the enduring vigor and enthusiasm in today’s art market.”

McDonald was optimistic for the future too, adding, “The ongoing stability we’ve observed in the auctions offers reassuring evidence that the broader ecosystem is thriving.”

Will Hainsworth, the cofounder and director of recently opened Palmer Gallery, located near London’s Edgware Road and dealing in emerging artists, told ARTnews that at his end of the market, “things seem strong.” 

“There’s a lot of doom-mongering going on, perhaps some of it justified by poor auction results. When you’re working with emerging artists the price points are accessible for a range of collectors and the enthusiasm to collect is definitely there,” he said in an email pre-sale. “London’s emerging gallery scene is a very exciting place at the moment—there are people doing interesting, risky things and, as ever, there are people on hand to support that.”

Back at the auction, a trio of lots by Alberto Giacometti incited a flurry of bidding, with the penultimate lot, Figure, dite cubiste I (ca. 1926), going for $2.28 million on a $884,000–$1.26 million estimate. Lot 37, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bouquet de Iilas (1878), sparked a 10-minute bidding war. When it hammered for double its high estimate at $8.7 million, the crowd cheered and whistled, perhaps a little sardonically. Aside from Giacometti’s bronze sculpture, the excitement faded soon after. When Lot 38 rolled around, the Baer Faxt’s Josh Baer walked past and said the night “wasn’t exactly a home run” for Sotheby’s. Melanie Gerlis, the Financial Times’ art market columnist, also said she felt the sale was “flat.”

In the press room at the end of the evening, Newman, the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and co-head of Impressionist and modern art worldwide, said she was far from disappointed. “I’m actually pleased with the result,” she told ARTnews enthusiastically. “We saw a depth of bidding on such a complete range of works, including the red Lucio Fontana [Concetto spaziale, Attese, from 1966, which sold for $4.3 million] to Zdeněk Sýkora’s first appearance at an evening sale [Linie Nr.94, from 1992, which sold for $950,000].”

Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art day sales follow on Wednesday, the latter featuring another tranche of works from the Goldenberg collection. Alex Katz’s Danielle (2020) and Peter Doig’s Border Country (1999) are both estimated at $630,000–$880,000, and Andy Warhol’s 1980 portrait of Joseph Beuys is valued at $500,000–$750,000.

Contemporary sales at Phillips and Christie’s are set for Thursday, with top lots at the former including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 2022 painting Minotaur To Matador (estimate $1.1–$1.9 million) and George Condo’s Green and Purple Head Composition (estimate $884,000–$1.1 million). The Christie’s sale is also led by a Yiadom-Boakye work, 5am Cadiz, with an estimate of  $758,000-$1 million.

If one were to liken the marquee New York auctions in May to the homecoming game between rival high schools, then Art Basel is certainly the art world’s prom. Next week, 287 galleries from around the world, including the four biggest, will jet to Switzerland, closely followed by the traveling circus of collectors, art advisers, and, of course, journalists.

And, while rumors are flying that the newly christened Art Basel Paris may soon overshadow the Swiss flagship fair, plenty of dealers are pushing back. As one dealer told ARTnews, the fair in Basel is still where galleries show their best work, and the collectors—even if they prefer Paris—will follow. That sentiment was echoed by Tornabuoni gallery coordinator Ursula Casamonti, who told ARTnews the gallery saved its best—six works by proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico—for Art Basel.

“I hope all the galleries do the same,” she said. “I’m worried that the people around the world have the idea that Paris+ will be better than Basel.”

ARTnews reached out to art dealers with reputations for bringing the most select, choice, and rare secondary market works and asked: what’s on the menu? Bon appétit. Or perhaps, more appropriately, En Guete.

Hauser & Wirth

The Swiss gallery giant is bringing several big-ticket works to its home art fair, none perhaps more exciting than Philip Guston’s Orders, a defining late-era work completed two years before his death in 1980. Priced at $10 million and depicting a cluster of shoes silhouetted against a pink-and-blue sky that rises above a crimson horizon line, the work was included in Guston’s 1980 retrospective at SFMOMA. It continued to travel for the following year, before being sold at Sotheby’s in 1989 for $528,000 from the collection of art collector and Southern California real estate magnate Edwin Janss Jr. As the gallery told ARTnews in an email, “The forms in Orders are personal symbols of the broader historical and psychological trauma that reverberates powerfully throughout the artist’s late oeuvre.”

The gallery is also bringing the largest charcoal drawing by Arshile Gorky still in a private collection, Untitled (Gray Drawing (Pastoral)), from 1946-47 priced at $16 million. There is also the marble and wood Louise Bourgeois sculpture Woman with Packages (1987–93), consigned by her trust for $3.5 million. Other works include an oil-on-cardboard Francis Picabia painting titled Nu assis listed at $4.85 million, and the David Smith stainless steel and wood sculpture Aggressive Character (1947), being sold from Smith’s estate.

Gagosian

For Gagosian’s booth at Unlimited, the fair’s sector for monumental works, the gallery is bringing a work that may carry some sentimental value: an untitled 1970 masterwork by Minimalist Donald Judd that was first shown by Gagosian’s late mentor, Leo Castelli, in New York. A related work is in the Guggenheim in New York’s permanent collection. The sculpture consists of a band of five-foot-high galvanized iron panels standing end-to-end, eight inches from the surrounding walls. The gallery’s booth presentation will be supplemented by a show of works by Judd at their Basel location consisting of 11 single-unit, wall-mounted works made between 1987 and 1991 at the artist’s home and studio near Lake Lucerne. While the gallery did not provide an exact price for the 1970 work, ARTnews has learned that is priced in the region of $15 million to $20 million.

Pace

While Pace is bringing an extensive presentation anchored by historical 20th-century works from marquee names like Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Pablo Picasso, the gallery is betting that Jean Dubuffet’s Banc-Salon will be the showstopper. Anchoring the booth, the installation comprises a low swooping bench with three kites that hover above, encouraging tired fairgoers to sit and reflect.

But, for our money, Agnes Martin’s Untitled #20 (1974) will be the real star attraction. The painting last sold at auction in 2012, at Christie’s New York, where it made $2.43 million. But, as we wrote this past November, the artist’s market has been heating up in the intervening years—in November, Sotheby’s sold a 1961 painting by Martin, Grey Stone II , for $18.7 million. While Pace declined to provide current pricing, it is very likely that the Martin will be the gallery’s priciest offering at the fair.

Thaddaeus Ropac

Among the significant works heading to Basel courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac are Sigmar Polke’s 1994 canvas Lapis Lazuli. The picture, priced at $3.8 million, is a brilliantly blue abstraction from what Polke called his “alchemical” turn, during which the artist moved away from artistic takes on consumer culture and began exploring the use of forgotten pigments like lapis lazuli, a blue shade ground from stone that was prized in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Also notable is Market Altar / ROCI MEXICO (1985), the inaugural work from Robert Rauschenberg’s 1984–91 Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) program. Not seen publicly since the final ROCI program exhibition in 1990 and never having been on the market, the work is priced at $3.85 million.

The gallery is also bringing Georg Baselitz’s roughly five-foot-tall sculpture of a female head in cadmium yellow, Dresdner Frauen – Die Elbe (1990/2023). The carving was roughly hewn with a chainsaw, an axe, and a chisel from a single tree trunk in 1990; it was cast in bronze in 2023. There are five “Frauen” in museum permanent collections, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. It is priced at $2.18 million.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan

An untitled David Hammons sculpture from 1990 anchors Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s Basel presentation. Consisting primarily of a coat rack with hat stand, the five-and-a-half foot sculpture, priced at around $9 million, features rubber, plastic bags, paper bags, a tin can, and a baseball cap, all of which give it a very humanlike aspect. The work’s first appearance at an art fair, it has been exhibited publicly only once, at Tilton Gallery in 2006.

“It’s an incredibly powerful piece that is very political and it’s very much, I feel, a self-portrait of the artist,” Dominique Lévy told ARTnews. “It’s the heart of our presentation.”

The gallery is also bringing Übernagelter Hocker (1963) by German artist Günther Uecker. Basically a wooden stool, the seat and one leg of which are covered in painted nails, the sculpture was created the same year as Stuhl II (Chair II), in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It is expected to fetch around $1.5 million.

Landau Fine Art

The Montreal gallery will be bringing Wassily Kandinsky’s Murnau mit Kirche II, 1910, a piece stolen by the Nazis in 1938. Gallery founder Robert Landau purchased it this past March at Sotheby’s London for 37.2 million GBP ($44.8 million), making it the 9th most expensive work sold at auction last year. Landau then promptly exhibited the painting at both TEFAF Maastricht and TEFAF New York. And though the painting may be at Art Basel, it won’t be for sale.

“It does not have a price on it and it’s going to be front and center at Art Basel and I’m sure there will be a lot of people looking at it,” Landau told ARTnews. “Why not? It’s of great interest to people.”

Landau said that he has spent the last year working on a book about Murnau and has invested millions additionally in the work, including a consultation with a museum curator. Landau claimed that an auction house evaluation put the work’s value at more than $100 million.

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art

With Jean-Michel Basquiat continuing to run hot with numerous auction sales in May, the Upper East Side gallery will be bringing Cash Crop, a 1984 acrylic-and-oilstick depicting a silhouetted figure in front of a sugar box. The $5 million to $6 million price tag is significantly higher than at its last appearance at auction, when it sold for £713,250, or around $1.11 million, at a 2010 Phillips evening sale in London. The estimate for the work then, when it was consigned by Gagosian, was £600,000 to £900,000.

Gallery director Stacie Khandros told ARTnews that the recent auction sales had prompted more conversations with potential consignors compared to last year. “I think we’re still optimistic that … what we have is still competitive pricing. And I think our works are spectacular. It’s just finding the right price to entice potential buyers,” Khandros said.

Editor’s Note, 6/11/2024: An earlier version of this story stated that the price of the 1970 work by Donald Judd offered by Gagosian was $10 million. It has been updated with a revised figure of $15 to $20 million.

Late this past Sunday, RansomHub, a group of cyber-extortionists, claimed responsibility for the apparent hack of Christie’s previously at perhaps the most inopportune time for the auction house: New York Auction Week.

In a message posted to the dark web, the group shared an image containing a sample of the data taken in the attack, which it said included “sensitive personal information” concerning the auction house’s rarefied clientele. The message also had a timer counting down to RansomHub’s threatened release of the data, set to hit zero by the end of May.

This is just the latest development in what CEO Guillaume Cerutti euphemistically termed a “technology security incident” earlier this month, which caused a shutdown of the house’s website. For the entirety of May’s marquee auctions, clients had to make bids in person, by phone, or through a temporary site. Luckily for Christie’s, the incident didn’t appear to derail the sales—all the auctions went on as planned and the sales totaled more than $640 million—and the website has since been restored.

“Subsequent to the breach, everything seems fine,” art adviser Mary Hoeveler told ARTnews. But, she added, a big question remains: What information, if any, did the bad actor collect?

In a statement published this past Sunday, a Christie’s spokesperson, Edward Lewine, confirmed that “there was unauthorized access by a third party to parts of Christie’s network.” However, he added, the company’s investigations found no evidence that the hackers had compromised “any financial or transactional records,” taking only “a limited amount of personal data.”

If that is truly so, it would explain why the auction house appears to have taken a hard line with RansomHub: a dark-web message from the group said it “attempted to come to a reasonable resolution,” but Christie’s cut off communication halfway through negotiations.

Like many sectors, the art market is facing a growing onslaught of cybersecurity threats. In the broader economy, the number of online attacks small businesses experienced in 2023, for instance, increased 28 percent from the year prior, according to a report by the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center.

“When it comes to data breaches and hacks, auction houses and galleries are no different from, say, financial institutions or car companies,” art market lawyer Thomas C. Danziger told ARTnews via email. “To a savvy hacker, the Monet consignor’s personal data may be worth as much as his bank PIN code.”

The incident at Christie’s is not the auction house’s first, nor is it the art and culture sector’s only recent tech threat.

This past December, Gallery Systems, a software company that museums use to display their collections digitally and to manage documentation, saw their operations suddenly cease in an apparent cyberattack. In 2021, dealers who exhibit at Art Basel received an email from the fair stating that its parent company experienced a malware attack that potentially exposed their data. And years before that, several galleries and individuals in the United States and overseas were targets in an email scam in which hackers hijacked invoices from galleries to clients, and collected on them.

What makes auction houses, museums, and galleries particularly vulnerable is their clientele: high-net-worth individuals with coveted financial information. Possessing sensitive details about those with immense wealth, some in the industry think art institutions and businesses should do more to safeguard against potential breaches.

“Unfortunately, what we see is … a degree of risk tolerance that you would never typically see in the physical security realm,” Jordan Arnold told ARTnews; a former Manhattan prosecutor, he is a cofounder and partner in the ArtRisk Group, a risk advisory and investigative firm focused on fine art, antiquities, and collectibles.

Arnold said most businesses functioning in the art sphere would never allow unlocked doors or windows in their spaces. Yet, some are doing the digital equivalent.

While large, private institutions usually have the capital to maintain robust digital security systems and teams, it’s a heavier financial burden for small, nonprofit, and state-run entities. Remigiusz Plath, a board member of the International Committee for Museum Security, told ARTnews that cybersecurity has been top of mind for museum members. But he added that hiring the most qualified people to lead cybersecurity teams is a challenge, given that the private sector offers higher salaries.

“The market is so competitive,” Plath said. “They are extremely hard to find, especially for museums and cultural institutions.”

Few doubt that large institutions, from museums to auction houses, already have some cybersecurity measures in place. But whether they and the larger art world have enough is another matter.

“I think they do the minimum required as they understand it,” art adviser Todd Levin told ARTnews. “I don’t know if they even fully understand what they might actually have to do.”

Cybersecurity has been a priority for Levin for years. His security practices for his own business include keeping a separate dedicated server for client information that isn’t connected to the internet and to which only he has access.

One reason clients decide to work with him, Levin said, is because “I don’t have multiple young employees and interns with access to clients’ private computer data, seeing what artworks they own, what they paid, when they bought it, where it’s located, what it’s insured for, et cetera.”

Hoeveler said she maintains similar practices, what she refers to as “good security hygiene.” She utilizes multi-factor authentication and makes sure staff is trained to detect phishing scams.

Simple and uncomplicated as they seem, basic precautions like educating employees to recognize email and online threats and to run regular backups go a long way. The number of attacks in which cybercriminals exploited system vulnerabilities—weak passwords, outdated web browsers, and design flaws—saw a 180 percent increase in a one-year period, according to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report.

“Basically, if we just raised the bar for the bad guys, it would make it dramatically harder for them,” Jason Hong, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told ARTnews.

Now that even semi-sophisticated cybercriminals can purchase ransomware at the touch of a button or employ a chatbot to write a compelling scam email, shoring up cybersecurity has never been more important.

While not intending to alarm, Arnold said that the reality is, it’s never been simpler to stage a cyberattack. “And it seems, with the advent of things like automation and AI, it’s only getting easier.”

Before the Blade helicopters disembark Friday for a Memorial Day of rosé and white linen Out East, this week provides time for reflection now that the marquee New York auction sales are over. These few weeks before Art Basel—when the art world decamps for Switzerland for what is widely considered the world’s most important fair for modern and contemporary art—are typically a time for considering how the market is doing. And, while top collectors (and dealers) head to the evening sales to make their big purchases, the day sales are a far better instrument for measuring the market’s current temperature and spotting upcoming squalls.

At Christie’s, the postwar and contemporary day sales had 296 lots—almost 30 more than this past November’s sales—with an aggregate estimated total between $66.5 million and $99.8 million. The final hammer price for the collected works was $59.7 million, just below estimate. With premiums, that climbs to $77.7 million, a figure comfortably in the estimated range. Add in a healthy sell-through rate of 84 percent, a few ticks lower if including the withdrawn lots, and the picture is that of a functional market. Sotheby’s contemporary day sale proved even more successful: the aggregate total for its 345 lots (compared to 338 last fall) was just over $78 million with fees, against a $63.8 million–$90.8 million estimate. Sell-through rates there reached 83 percent, again, a few ticks lower including lots withdrawn.

With their lower values, day sales may not be as sexy as evening sales, where artworks regularly sell for tens of millions, but they carry indicative trends. As we noted in January, Indigenous art is seeing a long-overdue rise in recognition, which the market is reflecting. That’s one reason to explain why, even as numerous market stars have struggled in recent seasons, Emmi Whitehorse’s Canyon Lake I  (2001) sold for nearly 10 times its $18,000 high estimate, to bring in $177,800 with fees at Phillips modern and contemporary day sale.

But this season, as a dealer told me earlier this week, wasn’t so much about setting records—though a couple were set—but rather living to fight another day. It’s been clear since the lots were announced last month that specialists at all three houses were scrounging to find the best work they could to auction and, given the number of guarantees and irrevocable bids at the sales, fighting just as hard to sell them.

“What you saw this season was a defensive posture, where the houses decided to trade the possibility of breakout bidding and competition for certainty and security,” Alex Glauber, an art adviser and president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, told ARTnews. “Sure, there isn’t a lot of appetite for risk right now, but this isn’t two or three years ago.”

There have been a lot of high-value estates coming to market in the past few years, from the $1.5 billion Paul Allen sale at Christie’s in 2022 to last year’s sale of Emily Fisher Landau’s collection at Sotheby’s. But this season’s big prize, to the extent there was one, was the modestly valued Rosa de la Cruz collection: that put pressure on the houses to source works, which drove consigners to think hard about the economic lay of the land before putting up a work. The houses accurately took the temperature of a collector class that was finally coming down to earth after riding a low-interest-rate wave into the stratosphere, and wisely responded with reasonable reserves and estimates that resonated with those collectors happy to spend if the price was right.

“The market relearned the value of a dollar,” Glauber said. “People, I think, are much more thoughtful about the value of their money and what they can do with that and what they can get.”

The takeaway from many advisers and market-watchers seems to be that, in place of the frothy post-Covid market, we now have a more cerebral collectors’ market shorn of the finance and tech bros who treat artworks more as commodities and points on a stock chart. It’s worth wondering, then, if or how this new line of thinking will affect galleries in the near future, especially for those dealers who jacked up primary prices for early and midcareer artists amid the 2021 and 2022 secondary-market bonanza.

“Galleries and artists need to understand that three or four stellar auction results don’t mean the price should automatically move up. You need to play this a little more like a chess game,” art adviser Ralph DeLuca told ARTnews. “Often you see younger artists go to bigger galleries, and prices go up because they’re used to selling at a higher price point and they have more overhead. But I don’t know if that’s the best thing for a younger artist’s career in most cases.”

The one major estate on sale this season, that of Rosa de la Cruz, did admirably, and it included real cornerstones of contemporary art history like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1992 work“Untitled” (America #3) hammered at $11.5 million ($13.6 million with fees).

Of course, there were casualties this season too. At the last moment, Christie’s withdrew its top lot, Brice Marden’s Event(2004–07), which was estimated at $30 million to $50 million and had been set to break the artist’s $30.9 million auction record. After the sale ended with a $114.7 million total, Christie’s chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art Alex Rottersaid that decision was made by the house.

“It wasn’t Brice’s evening, and we’re not willing to jeopardize the market of an artist like that,” Rotter said in the post-sale press conference.

Some pointed to the withdrawal of the Marden as a sign that the market was still suffering from post-Covid-induced anxiety fueled by a lack of masterpieces and collectors willing to part with the cash. In short, the estimate may have just been unrealistic.

“Often, there are aspirational estimates which come from the houses trying to meet a consignor’s aspirational expectations,” one insider told me. “This season’s estimates were much more reasonable, but in this case the market pushed back.”

If the market is in a malaise, you wouldn’t have known it from the sale of Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert, which went for $28.5 million with fees this past Wednesday at the Sotheby’s modern evening sale, a record for the artist and a wonderful price for a painting that was universally praised as brilliant.

“For every example of a weak market, there’s an example to prove the opposite,” Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, told ARTnews. “There were surprises this week across all three auction houses, and that’s the magic of the auction.”

Friedlander pointed to the sale of a 1964 Andy Warhol “Flowers” series painting—auction sales of which there have been many—that hammered at $30 million, its high estimate, with four bidders competing. With premium, the price totaled $35 million.

Christie’s deserves special mention for dealing with a “technology security issue” (that’s hacking, folks, most likely a targeted cyberattack) that may have unforeseen ramifications. No one would have begrudged a delayed sale or two on the house’s part, but they soldiered on. And rightly so. These houses are in the business of making consignments and selling art. Not every sale can be a blockbuster. It’s impossible. And comparing year-over-year to the recent past, when it was effectively free to borrow money—and the world was going through a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime crisis—seems callously dishonest.

“In the most public way possible, all three auction houses had to do some very heavy lifting to answer the question that’s been asked over and over again, ‘Is there a still market?’” art adviser Gabriela Palmieri told ARTnews a few days after the sales, when everyone had caught their breath.

“The simple answer, against all naysayers, is yes. In many cases the houses were able to sell works that had been sitting on the market and hadn’t sold because of different expectations and prices. They found the buyers. At the end of the day I really believe that people need to look at the fact that now we’re back to establishing trends, and stop focusing on outliers.”

One of the most startling things I saw happen during the first two days of art auctions in New York took place before any bids had been made.

A few minutes before Sotheby’s ultra-contemporary evening sale, “The Now,” was set to begin, a cameraman tripped over a stanchion and narrowly avoided putting an entire palm into a large, untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Several staffers were clearly shaken by the near-disaster involving this collaborative piece from 1984, which carried a low estimate of $15 million. 

Thankfully, Lot 105 remained undamaged. It sold for $19.4 million, a record for a Warhol-Basquiat collaboration, and the fourth-highest amount for the night.

Even with a crisis averted, the mood throughout the first two days of sales of the New York May sales was filled with anxiety among buyers and consignors. “It didn’t feel exciting in the room,” art adviser Dane Jensen told ARTnews.

A sense of narrowly avoided disaster characterized two sales at Christie’s the following night, held after several days of the auction house’s website being down due to a “technology security issue.” The de la Cruz collection and the 21st century evening sale still managed high sell-through rates; a YouTube livestream went on as planned, and online bidding continued through Christie’s Live, the house’s online platform for remote bidding. But several art advisers told ARTnews it would be hard to know how many people were deterred from jumping in on the action, especially for an estate that was so well-known. “Even one less bidder can make a huge impact on the performance of a work,” Jensen said. 

A high number of guarantees and irrevocable bids helped smooth things over and raise sell-through rates, but many lots by notable artists went for sums below their low estimates. Other lots were withdrawn, and still some others did not sell at all. At Phillips, Frank Stella’s Lettre sur les sourds et muets II (1974), from the private collection of gallerist Marianne Boesky, was estimated to sell for $5 million to $7 million. It failed to find a buyer. And despite being described by Christie’s as “considered the most important and ambitious painting” of Mark Tansey’s career, Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 (1987), estimated to sell for between $8 million–$12 million, also went unsold.

Incremental bids from several specialists in pursuit of a deal also pulled down the mood, with auctioneers like Sotheby’s European chairman Oliver Barker exclaiming, “It’s like extracting teeth, my goodness.”

As a result, several art advisers who spoke to ARTnews immediately after the start of the marquee sale week in New York also noted the unevenness of the initial results. 

On Monday night, art adviser Ivy Shapiro told ARTnews that, while there were a few sales that “went through the roof,” for the most part, Sotheby’s was subdued. “It’s cautious, but it’s steady. And if people want something, they want it.”

Jensen said the spectacle of art auctions can blind people to noticing how long things haven’t been doing well in different areas of the art market, such as flat demand for established postwar artists. It’s commonly thought that artists’ prices rise once they die, but this isn’t always the case, as evidenced by Stella, who passed away on May 4. Ifafa I, a significant 1964 shaped canvas by him, came to auction at Sotheby’s with a $14 million low estimate and hammered only just a little above that. “It may be that there isn’t a reason” the painting didn’t sell, Jensen told ARTnews. “It’s just because the market has gone down.” 

There were still bright spots, especially for painting and sculptures by artists of color, queer artists, and women. At Christie’s, records were set for Ana Mendieta (twice over in the same sale), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Reggie Burrows Hodges, and Diane Arbus. At Phillips, Kent Monkman tripled his record, bringing it to $381,000, for the 2020 painting The Storm. And at Sotheby’s, new records were established for Faith Ringgold, Justin Caguiat, and Lucy Bull, whose works all sold for more than $1 million. 

Sotheby’s extensive contemporary day sale on May 14 also saw several paintings far exceed their high estimates: Emmi Whitehorse’s #534 Untitled for $127,000 on an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000; Alex Katz’s May for $1.88 million on an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000; Salvo’s Senza Titolo for $406,400 on an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000; Olga de Amaral’s Pueblo X for $698,500 on an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000; and Antonio Obá’s Sankofa – Figura Com Alpargata for $228,600 on an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000. The works by Whitehorse and Salvo both did not have guarantees or irrevocable bids, and they sold for more than six times their high estimates. 

One of the most astute comments on the wobbly state of the art market came just as the week of sales was about to start. On the Nota Bene podcast, recorded last week and aired on Sunday, dealer Lock Kresler observed that we are seeing a very different scenario today than in the wake of the 2008 recession, when the art market made a pretty speedy recovery. “We haven’t seen a crash,” he said, “but we also haven’t seen anything resembling a window out.” 

Before 2023, Takako Yamaguchi’s work was little-known to market observers, selling mainly in smaller auction houses in the low five figures. But in the past year alone, the 72-year-old Los Angeles–based, Japanese-born artist has seen several of her paintings appear in high-profile sales at bigger auction houses, one of them taking in more than $1 million.

Next week, several of her works will go on the block in evening sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, alongside those by fast-rising emerging artists, showing that Yamaguchi’s paintings, some of which are on view in the current Whitney Biennial, have become an unexpected market phenomenon.

At Sotheby’s, an untitled oil and metal-leaf painting from 1998 has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. The luminescent dreamlike scene, featuring coral reefs, sea anemones, and pink lotus flowers, has a third-party guarantee.

At Christie’s, Yamaguchi’s oil and bronze-leaf painting Sally and Miu-Miu (1994), showing a woman smoking alongside her cat, has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. Christie’s, which has never before auctioned a work by Yamaguchi, has featured the painting in advertisements for its 21st-century art evening sale.

Things had been heating up for Yamaguchi’s market for a few years before her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. In 2019 she appeared in a Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition devoted to Pattern & Decoration, a 1970s art movement that drew craft techniques into painting, often as a feminist gesture. (Yamaguchi was among several artists in the show who were not directly tied to the movement.) Acclaimed exhibitions at galleries, including a critically lauded solo show at New York’s Ortuzar Projects last year, followed. And then there’s the current Whitney Biennial.

Several dealers have been supporting Yamaguchi since well before the world’s biggest auction houses sold her work. “I knew from the first time I saw her work, that it would have this huge impact,” Stars Gallery owner Christopher Schwartz told ARTnews. Having done a show with her in 2021, he added, “I didn’t think it was going to happen so quickly.”

“I gave her her first show, I think, in ’83,” dealer Kathryn Markel told ARTnews. “Her work was just beautiful, from Day One.”

Among these dealers, as well as critics and historians, Yamaguchi’s paintings are prized for their precision. She’s worked in a variety of different modes. In 2021 New York’s Ramiken gallery mounted a show of her realistic close-ups of buttoned-up shirts. These look markedly different from the “Smoking Women” paintings, of which the Christie’s Sally and Miu-Miu is a part. Those canvases feature beautiful curves, elaborate garments, and geometric shapes, and incorporate Japanese printmaking techniques and clear references to Art Nouveau and Art Deco; they stand far apart from the sinuous abstractions Yamaguchi is showing at the Biennial.

The “Smoking Women” works are Yamaguchi’s most popular. Fair Warning, an auction app run by former Christie’s rainmaker Loïc Gouzer, listed one this past February with a $500,000–$700,000 estimate. It ended up selling for more than $991,000.

About a month later, Yamaguchi’s auction record blasted past the $1 million mark when Catherine and Midnight (1994) hit the block as Lot 1 during a Sotheby’s London modern and contemporary art evening sale. The 80-inch-wide painting drew a hammer price of approximately $874,000 ($1.11 million with fees), on an estimate of $500,000 to $750,000. (Catherine and Midnight also had a third-party guarantee.)

Tom Jimmerson, director of Los Angeles gallery as-is.la, and Yamaguchi’s longtime husband, said that, “from the market point of view,” the “Smoking Women” paintings are “outliers.” “For reasons that might remain mysterious,” he said, “they generate more desire of ownership, and more excitement.”

Jimmerson told ARTnews that almost all the collectors who bought Yamaguchi’s work as recently as a decade ago were people who knew her personally. While they were not amateurs, they were not people who bid at auctions either.

Her prices were not high at the time. And up to the time of her recent auction records, they remained that way. Markel said that when she sold Yamaguchi’s work to potential buyers in 2009, the price range was $12,000 to $14,000. During the exhibition at Stars Gallery in 2021, that range rose to $20,000 to $30,000—including the untitled painting since consigned to Sotheby’s. “We felt like the market had no idea … what was coming,” Schwartz said.

Past appearances of Yamaguchi’s works at auction bear out that evidence. According to the Artnet price database, Yamaguchi’s serigraphs Quaretto III and Quaretto IV together sold for $1,500 in February 2013, at Weschler’s Auctioneers & Appraisers in Rockville, Maryland. The consigner was the global law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, which imploded and had to sell off its extensive collection of artworks by figures such as Christopher Wool, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt.

Just under a decade later, in December 2022, Palm Beach Modern Auctions sold Yamaguchi’s four-foot-wide painting French Curve 26, #8 for $10,000 on a $3,000–$5,000 estimate, consigned in that case by the Tupperware Brands Corporate Collection in Orlando, Florida, whose holdings totaled more than 800 artworks. (Tupperware acquired the painting in 1980.)

That’s a fraction of the prices Yamaguchi’s work now command on the block. When her painting The Fire Next Time (2004) appeared at Sotheby’s Hong Kong last month, it sold for $260,000 (2 million HKD), on an estimate of approximately $200,000 to $320,000 (1.6 million HKD to 2.5 million HKD).

The Biennial aside, Yamaguchi is still awaiting greater attention from institutions. (Though the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and other museums now own her works, she has never had a major retrospective.) This may soon change. Yamaguchi is currently represented in New York by Ortuzar Projects, whose clients are predominantly established collectors and museums. “I would think that the support of Ortuzar Projects makes Takako’s work look more serious to buyers than it might have looked otherwise,” Jimmerson said.

“She really needs a museum retrospective to kind of put all these pieces together,” Mike Egan, Ramiken’s founder, told ARTnews. He estimated that the public had only seen 10 percent of her work. “She’s got 40 years of art … really waiting to be discovered.”

The annual May auction sales in New York are always an important indicator of the market’s health, and next month’s sales appear all the more notable after a year most art dealers would rather forget. And you can add to that more than a little pearl-clutching that the art market is all but ready to collapse.

Even so, auction performance almost always comes down to the material, and this May’s sales are conspicuously lacking in major estates, apart from the Rosa de la Cruz collection, which goes on offer at Christie’s on May 14 before its general 20th/21st Century Art sale. Perusing the provenance of the major evening sales indicates that a great many of the works are fresh to market or close to it, with quite a few having spent a fair amount of time within one collection after having been bought from a gallery, estate, or directly from the artist. The general composition of the lots suggests hard work on the part of the specialists, who no doubt had to comb through their Rolodexes for novel material that could get collectors excited in an iffy market—after all, that freshness may be just the salve the market needs.

At Phillips, the Modern and Contemporary evening sale on May 14 is full of works being sold by the descendants of deceased collectors. There are, of course, the two early Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings that were in the collection of anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, who bought them from Basquiat’s first dealer, Annina Nosei, in the early ’80s. The most valuable among them—with an estimate of $40 million–$60 million—is Untitled (ELMAR), a monumental 1982 painting that Pellizzi sold to another collector who is now selling it at Phillips. But Untitled (Portrait of Famous Ballplayer), a 1981 painting estimated at $6.5 million to $8.5 million, comes directly from the Pellizzi family. 

Then there are two works, Henri Matisse’s Portrait de femme (1917) and Marc Chagall’s Fleurs chez Bella (1935-1938), being sold by the descendants of Ruth Mae Morris Bakwin and Harry Bakwin, two New York–based pediatricians, who died decades ago. Their sons, Edward Morris and Michael Bakwin both died in 2019. The descendants of Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan, founders of the chemical company Vigoro and noted Chicago philanthropists, are selling Jean Dubuffet’s 1957 work Paysage à la vache (Le rendez-vous)—estimate $700,000–$1 million—while the descendants of the late Los Angeles doctor Jacob Terner and his wife, Sandra, have put up Jules Olitski’s Boyar Time (The Small Painting), a 1962 work with a $400,000–$600,000 estimate. (A longtime trustee of LACMA, Sandra received the title of Lifetime Trustee.)

But while those consignors were known by a glance at the provenance, ARTnews had to dig through the listings to reveal some others.

First up is the Noah Davis 2010 painting Untitled (Boy with Glasses), which is being sold by Aryn Drake-Lee, the ex-wife of Grey’s Anatomy star and rising collector Jesse Williams. While the painting was listed as in the couple’s collection when it was last exhibited at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum in 2016, a spokesperson for Williams told ARTnews that it went into Drake-Lee’s possession after their divorce in late 2020. The Davis work will hit the block at the Phillips May 14 sale (est. $150,000–$200,000).

Williams has become a notable young collector of art from the African diaspora, holding 250 works, many of them by emerging artists. Of Davis, Williams once told ARTnews, “He was my brother—a very good friend of mine … Being able to live with his work and have it right by my doorway when everybody comes in and out—and gets washed over by it—is critical for me.”

Barkley Hendricks’s Vendetta, a 1977 oil and acrylic painting of a Black woman in a tank top that reads BITCH, is set for the same Phillips Modern and Contemporary Evening Sale on May 14. That work carries a $2.5 million to $3.5 million estimate; it was last seen in the landmark 2008 exhibition, “Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The seller is Richard D. Segal, CEO of Seavest Investment Group and a trustee at the Whitney Museum; the work is currently held in Segal’s eponymous Seavest Collection.

It appears that dealer Marianne Boesky is selling Frank Stella’s Lettre sur les sourds et muets II, a painting of concentric squares nearly 12 by 12 feet in size that carries an estimate of $5 million to $7 million. The provenance for the May 14 Phillips sale says it was acquired directly from the artist in 2017. The piece was featured in an exhibition of Stella’s work at the Charles Riva Collection in Brussels throughout 2017, where it was cited as Private Collection Marianne Boesky. Boesky declined to comment.

Tracey Emin’s 2018 But you never wanted me is consigned by Stuart and Gina Peterson at the Sotheby’s “The Now” Evening Auction May 13 after being exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in its 2022 exhibition “Women Painting Women.” Stuart is a venture capitalist who is most famously an early investor in YouTube, while Gina is president of the Peterson Family Foundation and a trustee of SFMOMA and the Met in New York, among other museum affiliations.

The Petersons aren’t the only high-finance collectors who appear to be doing some spring cleaning. ARTnews Top 200 collectors Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman appear to be selling Julie Mehretu’s Fever graph (algorithm for serendipity), from 2013. The work has been sold only once, by Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Baltimore Museum of Art listed the couple as lending the work for its 2019 show “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art Now.” Fuhrman declined to comment on the sale.

Artnet News reported this past March that Richard Schlagman, the enigmatic former owner of Phaidon Press, is selling the Brice Marden diptych Event (est. $30 million–$50 million), also at the Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art sale. And the listings suggest that may be far from the only work Schlagman is putting up: could he be the consignor of several “Abstract Masterworks from a Distinguished Private Collection” in that sale? The works with that appellation include: Web #10 (2006) by Vija Celmins (est. $2.5 million–$3.5 million); Uke (2012) by German-born, London-based artist Tomma Abts (est. $200,000–$300,000); and Robert Mangold’s 1999 work  Four Figures II (A & B & C & D) (est. $700,000–$1 million). Christie’s did not immediately return a request for comment.

Schlagman has been described as “one of the more mysterious figures in the publishing industry,” whom staff at Phaidon referred to as a “Bond villain” type; he lives alone with his housekeeper between London and a Marcel Breuer–designed villa on Lake Maggiore in the Swiss Alps. Schlagman holds a seat on the board of the Judd Foundation and has a reputation for collecting Minimalist art.

At Sotheby’s May 13 Modern evening sale, Swiss art trading firm Diane SA is selling René Magritte’s oil painting La Main heureuse with an estimate of $3.5 million to $5.5 million. Dallas-based oil and gas baron Barron U. Kidd is selling his Paul Cézanne Les Bastides Lou Deven et Barbaroux with an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. The watercolor and graphite artwork was most recently included in a 2021 exhibition of the artist’s drawings at MoMA.

At the Sotheby’s Contemporary sale on the same day, Alice Neel’s 1969 portrait of Gerard Malanga, the Andy Warhol confidant and studio assistant who arguably made more Warhols than Warhol did, will be on offer with an estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million. The artwork went directly from the artist’s estate to Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, from which the current owner acquired it in 2005; it was last shown at the Munch Museum in Oslo in the 2023 show “Alice Neel: Every Person Is a New Universe,” which listed it as coming from the collection of the Locks Foundation.

Lastly, two works in that Sotheby’s sale, Agnes Martin’s 1959 canvas Earth II (est. $3 million–$4 million) and Andy Warhol’s 1961 Carat (est. $5 million–$7 million), are being sold by the Daros Collection, the private collection of Swiss industrialist, financier, and former ARTnews Top 200 collector Stephan Schmidheiny.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story listed Jesse Williams as a co-consignor of the Noah Davis painting. He is not. ARTnews regrets the error.

In September 2021, when Rachel Mijares Fick and Rebeca Laliberte launched the first iteration of Future Fair, they intended it to be a cooperative space where they could minimize the hierarchies so conspicuous at the major fairs. Their first in-person edition, held at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, featured 34 galleries. For this year’s edition, held at Chelsea Industrial, the number of participating galleries is 60, almost double, and features more than 100 artists.

That expansion reflects the growing popularity of boutique fairs, each of which follows its own model. Future Fair runs on a communal model: the founding galleries adopted a five-year profit-sharing agreement under which 35 percent of the fair’s profits, generated from visitor traffic or sponsorships, are distributed among those galleries that collectively fund the fair.

In the case of hotel fairs like Felix, held during Frieze Los Angeles since 2019, and the Dallas Invitational, which held its second edition during Dallas Art Fair this month, their chief attraction is a chic, fun venue and more modest fees (participation in each runs around $10,000).

But the buzziest alternative model thus far may be Basel Social Club (BSC), which launched in 2022 as a satellite space during Art Basel. Organized by Parisian gallerist Robbie Fitzpatrick, the fair was first held in a 1930s villa; last year, when 90 galleries participated, it took place in a former mayonnaise factory. The atmosphere at both editions was casual, and there were no booths. Participating galleries hung works throughout the space, and films, performances, pop-up restaurants, bars, and a makeshift nightclub kept things lively. The success of BSC inspired others: for Art Basel Hong Kong this year, Hong Kong gallerist Willem Molesworth, together with two other local dealers, put on their own version, called Supper Club, an evening-only salon-style fair including 20 galleries at a 19th-century heritage site. Molesworth told ARTnews in March that he saw the Basel event (and their own) as serving a dual purpose: it was effective transactionally, but also had a fluid element, calling it “a process of hanging out” that felt more organic.

“That’s what contemporary art is all about,” Molesworth said at the time. “It’s about connecting, networking, chatting, and, ultimately, making sales, of course. But, when you’re showing really boundary-pushing stuff, it’s difficult to pull the trigger. You want to learn, you want to chat, you want to talk about it.”

This year, New York will get its own salon-style fair with Esther, debuting in May at the Estonian House in midtown during Frieze. Of some 20 presentations to be shown there, most will be site specific, and some artists will show new works that respond to the site’s 1929 interior. When announcing the launch, cofounders Margot Samel, a Tribeca gallerist, and Olga Temnikova, a Tallinn-based gallerist, cited Basel Social Club as inspiration.

“Something that’s important to us is the social element,” Samel told ARTnews. “What was important for us was creating an environment where galleries can take risks and think about it as a complementary platform versus a more competitive one that fairs tend to be. I feel like, in a lot of ways, it’s an experiment.”

In addition to the social atmosphere, these types of fairs are attractive because they are far more economical, with participation fees a fraction of, say, Frieze or Basel. For Esther, exhibitors paid a $1,500 fee; at Supper Club, the fee was around $3,800. By comparison, booth fees for participation in Art Basel Miami Beach run between $11,000 and $45,000 for the prestigious Nova, Positions, and Survey sections. Booth costs obviously go up from there.

“There’s so many galleries in New York who don’t do any art fairs during Frieze and Armory week because they feel like they’ve already paid the high costs of being in New York, and it just doesn’t really make sense,” Samel said.

Boutique fairs typically cater to emerging galleries unable (or unwilling) to spend on the big events. But as the alternative fair model matures, so too does its exhibitor base and appeal. Laliberte, the Future Fair cofounder, told ARTnews that this year’s fair is no longer meant to be collectors’ first look at new artists. Future’s focus is instead on appealing to New York City’s established old guard collectors interested in finding artists previously unknown to them. There’s a selection committee now that didn’t exist for previous editions, and sales are often in motion via social media months before opening day.

“The goal is to introduce our audiences to the presentations before we even open our doors,” she said.

Samel and Temnikova, meanwhile, aimed to fill Estonian House with a range of galleries from the start, not just emerging firms. Veteran mainstays like Richard Saltoun and Andrew Kreps Gallery sit alongside such new kids on the block as New York’s Someday and London’s Gathering galleries.

What unites the gallerists who show in the alternative fairs, it seems, is a common belief that a better experience for art and art collectors lies outside the convention center.

The Venice Biennale was essentially an art fair when it opened in 1895, an exhibition built specifically to establish a market for what was then considered contemporary art. From 1942 until 1968, there was even an official office, run by Italian art dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari, that helped find buyers for works that showed in the exhibition. That is, as long as artists (and their galleries) didn’t mind that Ferrari pocketed 15 percent of the sale price for the Biennale and 2 percent for himself.

As the art world’s commercial and institutional structures solidified, open sales were banned in ’68, though it was understood that the works would, at some point, become available, especially to a buyer with a dedicated interest. And if the buyer represented a major institution, all the better. Even up until 2019, exhibition labels noted a given artist’s dealer, so interested parties could initiate a transaction, or at the very least, a conversation.

Such vulgarities are no longer permitted but that doesn’t mean the Biennale is not transactional in nature. It is, even if the benefits are generally distributed these days in a slightly more egalitarian, trickle-down fashion befitting the birthplace of modern capitalism.

“One of the most important aspects of appearing in the Biennale is that an artist suddenly appears on the radar of collectors from all over the world,” Simon de Pury, the celebrated curator, columnist, and auctioneer, told me outside the Giardini.

Obviously, that can and often does generate commerce, de Pury added. In the same way that a museum exhibition organized by a notable curator brings credibility and desirability to an artist’s oeuvre, participation in the Biennale is a gold-leaf star on an artist’s curriculum vitae. Before we parted ways, de Pury told me that the 2022 Biennale was especially fascinating for him.

“It put a spotlight on female artists. Today, when you look at auctions, the majority of contemporary artists who sell very, very well are women. Can you ascribe that specifically to the Biennale? No, not really. But it’s one element, of course,” he said.

The institutional halo effect of the Biennale is real. Over lunch at the café at the Arsenale, Maria Montero, of the newly formed São Paulo– and Brussels-based gallery Martins&Montero, told me that Venice is the ideal setting to “internationalize and institutionalize” an artist. While deals may not be closed at the Biennale, many can be closed through the Biennale.

“Galleries are always looking to offer more visibility to their artists. I don’t think there’s a better way. It has a big impact,” Montero said. “Perhaps, let’s say a conversation between a gallery and an institution started a while ago. Then, of course, when the work is here, the conversation goes to another level. Especially with serious institutions.”

Martins&Montero has three artists in the Biennale’s main pavilion, which was organized by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil: Jota Mombaça, Manauara Clandestina, and Dalton Paula. In addition to his works’ appearing in the main exhibition, Paula received the 2024 Chanel Next Prize, an unconditional €100,000 purse that comes with two years of mentorship from the brand’s global partners.

Apart from the institutional cachet, artists typically experience a financial restructuring of their market. “There’s prestige to any biennial in terms of garnering interest and the critical positioning of an artist,” art dealer Stuart Morrison of New York’s Hales Gallery told me.

“Obviously, the Venice Biennale is arguably the peak of that kind of attention. It’s very much a natural series of events,” Morrison said. “The curators … brought in to organize these shows are some of the most important working today. That adds a particular significance to the artists and their work.”

Morrison added that, while every dealer is different, inclusion in the Biennale does usually affect how most think about pricing an artist’s work, particularly when they see an increase in demand.

“We work with estates like [those of] Anwar Jalal Shemza and Elda Cerrato, both of whom are in the Biennale, and Kay WalkingStick, who has five works here,” he went on. “With both estates and living artists who can only produce so much, scarcity becomes a very real thing. which again kind of plays into it.”

In the Centrale Bar in the Giardini, a brightly lit café just behind the main pavilion decorated with visually intense black-and-white graphics (which also happens to be the quickest and cheapest place to eat anywhere near the Biennale), Nick Olney, president of Kasmin, told me that “what really matters is that during a Biennale, people are able to get a broader and deeper knowledge of an artist’s work. For a lot of artists that maybe haven’t been exposed to or had an international platform like this before, it provides an opportunity for countless very bright, very curious, and very influential audiences, be they writers, curators, or collectors, to actually engage with the work in a direct way.”

When the work is great, he said, that drives conversations, and those conversations have real world effects, such as institutional shows and acquisitions, which of course lead to an increase in demand and in an artist’s influence and durability.

“Those are natural things,” he said. “It’s not a machination of manipulation of the market, which is very inorganic, but rather a natural, organic way that leads to more interest, dialogue, exposure, and of course, demand for an artist’s work.”

Call it the Biennale bump.