Welcome to the era of Art Market Dysmorphia

A unified theory of why no one seems to agree on the health of the art business

• Like this undulating reflection of skyscrapers and high-rises, what people see in the art market often no longer lines up with what’s really there. Photo by Zooey Li on Unsplash

Welcome back to The Gray Market! In today’s post, I try to get to the bottom of why so many people who make their living in art seem to disagree so violently about how things in the business have been going lately.

As a reminder: TGM is a completely solo, twice-weekly project funded entirely by paying subscribers who, like me, probably care way too much about the surreal effects triggered by the full-speed collision of art and business. If what I’ve written has ever momentarily turned you into a flesh-and-blood version of the “thinking face” emoji (in a good way), consider upgrading your membership for $8/month or $75/year. Every additional paid subscriber reinforces the hull of this ship as it sails a media-industry sea of increasingly toxic sludge and bad incentives.

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Being a journalist is on some level about making it your job to get caught in the middle of competing opinions. So in the weird niche I’ve carved out, I’m no stranger to people arguing through me (and with me) about the health of the art market. But after 20 years of working in this business, I’ve never experienced as much whiplash on the subject from art pro to art pro as I have this past year.

Probably a third of the people I talk to believe the market is in a generational crisis being papered over by self-interested sellers consistently duping a too-credulous press. Another third believes one of the only things holding a pretty good business back from being phenomenal again is a coalition of cretins, alarmists, and bad actors screaming about how the trade is in shambles. And most of the rest of the field oscillates back and forth between the two extremes for reasons ranging from the latest newscycle to their latest workday to the latest purported sign from a Rube Goldberg machine of superstitions they’ve constructed to cope with life in a broken timeline. (No shade on the latter method: the Frank Sinatra endurance principle is evergreen in my book.)

The good news is that I think I finally have a framework that makes the extreme level of dissonance make sense. The bad news—for both the trade and the prospect of sharing a mutually agreed reality with your fellow human—is that I don’t think it’s going to tone down anytime soon.

Tell me a story

Here’s one popular interpretation of what’s been happening in the art market for the past ten months, laid out sector by sector.

In the first half of the year, the Big Three auction houses—Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips—collectively made a grand total of just under $4bn in auction sales, according to data from ArtTactic. That was a decrease of around -6% compared to the same stretch of 2024, making this the third consecutive year of decline. If not for the world historical anomaly of a Covid-disrupted first half of 2020, the opening six months of 2025 would have delivered the lowest total in the past 11 years.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the Frieze Week auctions in London were nothing to write home about, and the $110m (with fees) generated by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips’s marquee autumn evening sales in Hong Kong made this most recent season the third-worst for the trio since 2015—and would rank even lower if you were to adjust for inflation.

The gallery sector, meanwhile, has looked more and more like a mass grave every month. Since January 1, at least 18 dealers have announced they are either permanently closing at least one of their locations or else shutting down their business entirely.¹ Chief among them is Blum (fka Blum & Poe, until co-founder Jeff Poe stepped away in 2023). Its owner, Tim Blum, blew a hole through the dominant narrative of what a successful gallery is supposed to look like when he announced after this year’s Art Basel that he would be “sunsetting” the enterprise.

From the outside, Blum looked like he had it all figured out. The gallery spanned a multistory headquarters in LA, a long-running space in Tokyo, and was set to expand again with a new location in Tribeca this autumn. It did all the best fairs. It had, between its two iterations, nurtured the careers of multiple artists who went on to reach blue-chip status and also opened up American audiences to pathbreaking artists in postwar and contemporary East Asia, most notably Japan.

And yet, Blum told Daniel Cassady of ARTnews (in the first of what turned out to be several exit interviews), “This is not about the market… This is about the system,” adding: “It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working… Even when it looked like it was.”

As for the art fair sector, at least six organizers have either cancelled or “paused” (see: cancelled) what would have been the next edition of their expos: the ADAA Art Show, NADA Paris, Taipei Dangdai, Photofairs Hong Kong, the India Art Fair’s Mumbai show, and the Baltimore Fine Art Print & Photo Fair. In October, ARTnews also reported that seven high-end dealers had made the unusual move of pulling out of Art Basel Miami Beach months after the fair had revealed its exhibitor list.

This means the departing dealers would have to eat the full cost of their booths—which seems not great as a money-saving move at first, until you realize it means those galleries won’t have to pack/crate, ship, and install any work or travel any staff to South Florida for a week, let alone do any of the other spending required to (try to) make it a worthwhile trip for the business. And by the way, the cost of doing fairs was ranked in the top three biggest concerns among dealers surveyed for the 2025 edition of the Art Basel & UBS Art Market report.

Add it all up, and this story’s conclusion is that it would be delusional, irresponsible, or both to imagine that working in the art industry right now makes you anything other than the inferno-encircled “this is fine” dog.

Is there a different story, though?

Sure, here’s another popular read of 2025 YTD in the art market…

Auction sales in the first half of the year were down the least amount as a percentage of value in three years, suggesting that the sector could stabilize by the end of 2025. This seems especially likely when you consider that:

• Sotheby’s off-cycle evening and day sales of works from the collection of Surrealist connoisseur Pauline Karpidas raked in $136m (with fees) in September, making hers the top-selling single-owner trove ever to cross the auction block in London;

• The six auctions staged by Christie’s and Sotheby’s during Art Basel Paris Week made $212m (with fees), an increase of +30% by value versus the same sales in 2024; and…

• This month’s New York auctions are loaded up with high-value single-owner collections that could trigger more than $800m worth of deals in their own dedicated sales, to say nothing of the results from the regularly scheduled marquee auctions from the Big Three houses.²

On top of that, the less-than-stellar results in the first half haven’t prevented the major houses from muscling up and fanning out. Sotheby’s staged the first live international auction of art and collectibles in Saudi Arabia in February, beating Christie’s to the punch despite the latter technically securing a license to operate in the kingdom first. The House of Drahi will also unveil its new Empire City headquarters in the Breuer building on Madison Ave this weekend, finalizing a journey that began with Sotheby’s buying the property in 2023 for a reported $100m.

On the gallery side, at least 18 dealers have either debuted new, larger locations in cities where they already had a footprint, or else added new spaces in new locales where they didn’t previously operate. That is the exact same number of galleries as those that have closed at least one of their locations over the same time frame. The list of expanders ranges from heavy hitters Sadie Coles, David Zwirner, and Thaddaeus Ropac to fast-rising outfits Amanita, Sebastian Gladstone, and Sea View.³

Certain fairs are growing again, too. Art Basel announced it would launch its fifth annual show in Qatar in February 2026, while Frieze—freshly acquired by Ari Emanuel’s new “global experiences and events” company, MARI—will expand to Abu Dhabi by taking over the emirati fair Abu Dhabi Art next November.

It’s not just the apex expos growing, either. Independent will double the square footage of its main fair by moving the event from Spring Studios to Pier 36 in May 2026, and it will also roughly double the exhibitor capacity of Independent 20th Century as part of a deal with Sotheby’s to stage the more tightly focused fair at the Breuer starting next September.

With all this as a backdrop, the market looks sturdy, if not ascendant, and the sellers who share this vision sound like Christie’s global president Alex Rotter at the press preview for the house’s November auction cycle yesterday afternoon: “We’re coming out, as you’re fully aware, of a time where there was a certain uncertainty in the market, a calmness and quietness,” he said. “I’m here to tell you the tide is changing, and I’m feeling the movement.”

In other words, the art market is BACK, baby!

Or… is it? I mean, how do we make sense of all this conflicting information?!

What you get is what you see

Welcome to the era of what I’m calling Art Market Dysmorphia.

The origin of the term comes from Body Dysmorphic Disorder, more commonly known as Body Dysmorphia. Essentially, it’s a condition in which a person’s image of their own body becomes fundamentally disconnected from the reality visible to, and measurable by, the rest of the world. In other words, someone with body dysmorphia doesn’t see what’s actually there; they see what they believe to be true.

Since I don’t take mental health problems lightly, I might have hesitated to transpose this concept onto the art trade if left to my own devices. However, it’s already made the jump to a different financial and economic context in the form of a mentality some financial planners have started calling Money Dysmorphia.

Emma Goldberg, the journalist responsible for the New York Times story linked above, writes that money dysmorphia “refers to people who have a distorted view of their own financial well-being.” The result is “a mind-bending split-screen of reality” in which—you guessed it—people don’t see their own finances as they actually are but rather as whatever they’ve convinced themselves their finances must be.

You see where this is going, right? I’ll spell it out anyway. Art Market Dysmorphia describes a person’s tendency to see the conditions in the art trade that they believe to be accurate, irrespective of evidence that their framework doesn’t fit the facts. Again, they don’t see what’s actually there; they see what they believe to be true.

Art Market Dysmorphia is only possible because the industry has spent the past year treading an in-between zone where examples of expansion and examples of contraction keep emerging in almost equal measure. On one hand, if you believe the market is a dumpster fire and everyone who thinks otherwise is lying, you can find enough examples to more-or-less credibly make that case. On the other hand, if you believe the market is healthy and everyone who says otherwise is absurd, you can find enough examples to more-or-less credibly make that case, too.

The black box multiplies

Now, some of you might say, “Tim, people could always believe whatever they wanted and reverse-engineer an argument to justify it. That’s not new!”

I don’t disagree with that in principle, but I do think the information landscape of the 2020s makes the era of Art Market Dysmorphia different in important ways.

We have all heard the art market described as “a black box.” Just about every company in the trade is privately held and thus has no obligation to make any financial disclosures it doesn’t want to make.⁴ On top of that, the asymmetry of information (aka knowing more than everyone else in a potential deal) is a major part of succeeding on either the buy or sell side of the trade, so keeping things close to the vest is often a business imperative.

The black box analogy is legit, but what isn’t discussed enough is that it’s only legit to an extent. Why? Because both the scale of the art industry and the amount of information available about the art market in 2025 absolutely overwhelms the state of play even ten years ago, let alone multiple decades back.

When I checked my theory with the great Georgina Adam, who has been covering art since 1989 (though it took a few years before she carved out her niche as a market specialist), she agreed. “The way today you have wealth managers, insurance companies, banks, and financial services companies of all sorts that can look up or produce all these charts, particularly for works that are reasonably comparable to one another—like Warhol flowers or Albers squares—none of that existed when I started out,” she said. “It was very much more of an insiders’ game.”

There are also many, many info generators beyond institutions like the ones Adam mentioned. Art fair sales reports, deeply problematic though they are, routinely provide a deluge of approximate quick-twitch pricing information about the often-opaque primary market and private resale market.⁵ A whole range of actors from nonprofit organizations to for-profit companies produces surveys and reports on elements of the business that often extend beyond typical sales results. And social media remains an on-demand firehose of takes, gossip, and metadata about the industry. (Think: Which dealers follow or consistently like posts by which living artists who aren’t already on their rosters? Which works are visible on which collectors’ walls when they’re just, say, making content about their kids on their personal IG accounts? Who left an ominous or aggressive comment on a post by a known figure or institution, and why?)

Crucially, however, the scale of the art media—meaning both the trade media and the culture wing of the mainstream media—has lagged behind the scale of the industry it’s now tasked with reporting on. Adam’s suspicion is that the fourth estate may even have shrunk relative to its reach and perceived importance a few decades earlier.

“I think the coverage of art has incredibly increased. Coverage of the art market has decreased,” she said. “You used to have regular coverage of auctions in daily newspapers in the UK, anyway: The Telegraph, the Times.”

Adam also cited Geraldine Norman’s Times-Sotheby Art Index and Carol Vogel’s stateside work on the auction beat in the New York Times as once-vital contributions that fell victim to a journalism industry remade by the internet, the socials, and the attention economy: “I don’t think anyone cares anymore. What’s the point of reading about the sale the next day when you’ve had all the information immediately in real time as it’s happened?”

My hunch is that the increasingly large scale mismatch between the art media and the rest of the art trade is one of the reasons that the latter’s collective faith in the former has eroded, setting up the conditions for Art Market Dysmorphia to emerge. The phenomenon aligns with the deterioration of the larger relationship between all journalistic institutions and all news consumers to one of the lowest points in the modern era. A Gallup poll published in October 2025 showed that only 28% of survey respondents now trust the American media. That’s the worst rating since the organization started tracking this metric in the 1970s.⁶

But there’s an industry-specific dimension, too. Even though the art trade is simultaneously bigger and broader than it’s ever been, it’s still small enough and private enough that many pros on the sell side believe that all journalists should and do have a stake in protecting the industry they cover.

Whether or not that’s fair or accurate (it’s neither), it puts members of the art media in a precarious position. If dealers stop talking to them at all, they have almost nowhere else to go to get the information they need to do even routine, uncontroversial stories in exchange for pay that, to put it mildly, doesn’t exactly incentivize them to dig in on a Seymour Hersh-like, take-no-prisoners stance.⁷ That, in turn, can pressure journalists to pull their punches a bit on market stories—even as, ironically, the suspicion of punch-pulling reinforces a distrust of the art media among art pros and observers who want uncut realness about the state of the trade.

This is a perfect storm for any notion of shared truth in the art market: a historically large and ever-growing volume of information about an intensely private and increasingly global industry, continuously communicated from, on one end, a shrinking cohort of specialty journalists clinging to dwindling salaries or freelance word rates to, on the other end, publics with a cataclysmically low level of faith in the idea that any media institution can—or should—be trusted as a rigorous, neutral messenger of what is actually happening.

At least, that’s what I see in the era of Art Market Dysmorphia. But what does it look like through your eyes?

1. The list of complete closures is: Blum, Clearing, Venus Over Manhattan, Kasmin, Altman Siegel, LA Louver, Tilton Gallery, Rhona Hoffman, Project Native Informant, TJ Boulting, Nir Altman, Anya Tish Gallery in Houston, and Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne. The list of partial closures is: Pace’s Hong Kong location, Almine Rech’s London location, Tanya Bonakdar’s Los Angeles location, Sean Kelly’s LA location, and Tramps’s New York location. And now that I’ve typed that all out, I feel like I’m going to turn the corner and run into the “Great party!” guy with an axe lodged in his forehead in the final sequence of The Shining.

2. The full accounting of standalone single-owner auctions is: up to $400m for the Leonard A. Lauder collection at Sotheby’s; in excess of $180m for the Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis collection at Christie’s; up to $120m for the Cindy and Jay Pritzker collection at Sotheby’s; and up to $105m for the unnamed single-owner collection of Surrealist works that Sotheby’s is offering in evening and day sales branded as “Exquisite Corpus.”

3. The galleries that expanded in a pre-existing location were: Sadie Coles, Maureen Paley, Stuart Shave’s Modern Art, Zwirner, Olney Gleason, Sebastian Gladstone, Sea View, and Chris Sharp. (You could argue that Olney Gleason didn’t “expand,” it just took over the spaces that used to be Kasmin; but if we’re going to count Kasmin as a gallery that closed, which seems fair, then I think you also have to balance out the calculus by counting Olney Gleason as a gallery that expanded from nothing to something.) Anyway, the dealers that announced new locations in new markets were: Perrotin (London), GRIMM (London), Pace x Galerie Judin (Berlin), Meyer Riegger x Jocelyn Wolff (Seoul), Waddington Custot (Paris), Ropac (Milan), Mazzoleni (Milan), Amanita (Rome), Colnaghi (Riyadh), and Herald Street (Bologna).

4. There is a caveat for art businesses operating in the UK, where it’s necessary for even private companies registered there to make limited (albeit regular) disclosures in their filings with Companies House. But this cohort makes up only a small portion of the overall picture in an industry dominated by the US market first and foremost, with China perpetually jostling within Britain to be the runner-up.

5. I say “approximate real-time pricing information” because, as anyone in the trade will tell you, the price of a work can change substantially depending on who wants to buy it, with top museums and major private collectors sometimes able to snag discounts of 25% or more.

6. It’s actually even worse if you slice the data by political viewpoint; only 8% of surveyed Republicans trust establishment media in the US.

7. The decline in compensation is a criminally under-appreciated element of the decline in both hard-edged criticism and hard-nosed business reporting over time. Want to know why “no one writes negative reviews anymore” or “no one writes investigative business stories anymore”? Part of it is that you used to be able to make an upper-middle-class living doing those things. Now going that route means continuously breaking yourself on the wheel to earn manual-labor wages, meaning you have to be a special brand of masochist.