Auction houses rely on superlatives to convince their wealthy clients that art is worth millions of dollars. Basquiat’s painting needs to open a “window to another world.” Rothko’s painting must achieve “an intensity commensurate with the human condition.” The Jean Arp statue must have “a presence that evokes both the physical and the transcendent.”
However, over the past three years, collectors may have been disappointed by this exaggeration. There have been layoffs at auction houses. Large galleries are closed. Sales continued to contract by 12% last year, according to the latest global collections survey by Art Basel and UBS.
But with some business strategies and a little luck, auction houses sold $2.2 billion worth of art last week. Overall, New York auctions in November generated a 77% increase in comparable sales from a year earlier, though they are still 30% below the market’s recent peak of $3.2 billion in 2022.
How did they achieve this? This year, auction houses held back on their estimates and encouraged sellers to lower their expectations. They also ensured that 70% of the evening’s estimated sales value were actually sold out even before the doors opened.
The executives acquired rare works from the estate of the recently deceased, including works by philanthropist Leonard Lauder, whose portrait of Gustav Klimt brought $236.4 million — the second most expensive work ever sold at auction. Collectors were able to increase their budgets thanks to the booming stock market.
“Everyone feels a mixture of excitement and relief that there is a real life in the art market,” says Robert Goff, vice president of consulting firm Gore Jones.
In addition to scenes such as Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet, which sold for US$12.1 million to entertainment company Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and a Triceratops fossil for US$5.4 million, bidding was strong on items as diverse as Diego Giacometti’s coffee table, which sold for US$4.5 million, Henri Matisse’s expressive bronze statues, valued at US$16.7 million each, and a forest scene By a contemporary artist. Yu Nishimura, for $711,200, nearly six times the expected price.
However, works with strong estimates or lesser examples of some artists’ careers failed to find buyers, such as a painting of a woman sitting next to a Coca-Cola machine by Barclay L. Hendricks, with a top estimate of $12 million, and A Gray Abstract by Cecily Brown, with an estimate of $6 million.
The mixed results suggest that if the art market has not yet returned to its recent peaks, it may have regained its footing. Twelve paintings sold for more than $20 million each, up from seven last November but down from Nov. 24, 2023.
“Do I suddenly think that every work in a modest gallery is going to sell? No. And I also don’t think the market is healthy when it’s insanely inflated,” said consultant Meredith Darrow. “We are entering a healthier version of the market.”
As the dust settles, here are six trends this season that indicate which direction the market is headed.
Search for new buyers
Last week’s sales seem to have benefited above all from the return of already established buyers, now with new force.
Some were veteran collectors, and they expanded their focus to include new categories such as surrealism and 20th-century design, the experts said. Younger buyers are moving into higher price brackets after receiving large inheritances, part of a trillion-dollar wealth transfer from baby boomers to their children.
The appeal of modernism “spans across generations,” with clients in their 40s drawn to the aesthetics of artists such as Fernand Léger and Wassily Kandinsky, said Stephanie Armstrong, a partner at consultancy Beaumont Nathan. “We are witnessing an embrace of eclecticism and extremism,” she added.
Although the major auction houses did not immediately provide data on the number of bidders and buyers under the age of 45 — something the sector has celebrated in previous years — their approach to the younger audience includes partnerships with brands, investment in luxury sales, a greater focus on social media and even alliances with galleries outside the traditional auction cycle, such as the exhibition Sotheby’s will create in 2026 when it hosts 20th Century Independent in the Brewer Building, in Manhattan.
Sotheby’s reported that 30% of the value offered at its auctions came from Asia, excluding the Middle East, or about double the percentage recorded in November 2024. It appears that the region, which reduced the pace of its purchases during the crisis, is starting to return.
However, the house refused to specify the countries in which these buyers live. According to market veterans, Chinese buyers have been reluctant to buy in recent years.
Rising woman?
Sotheby’s sale of a unique self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, for $54.7 million, has raised a recurring question in the auction market: How long will it take for prices for female artists to catch up with prices for men?
There are signs of upward movement, with records set last week for Dorothea Tanning with $3.2 million, Lynn Drexler with $2 million, and Joan Brown with $596,900. Consultant and former auctioneer Sarah Pritchard says Drexler and Kahlo paid higher prices in private transactions. Christie’s privately sold Kahlo’s self-portrait “Me and My Parrots” for more than $100 million in 2021, according to a source close to the deal.
But the general price gap between historical female artists and their male counterparts persists for several reasons. First, women often produce less throughout their lives because “they don’t have the market support to maintain that level of productivity,” Pritchard says. Contrary to the traditional rules of supply and demand, in the art world, “when the market gets a little hungry, demand can decline.”
Moreover, Pritchard points out, wealthy collectors have spent decades seeing the work of white men celebrated in museums, while many institutions have begun to focus on their female counterparts only in the past 10 years.
Female artists represented just under 15% of the works offered at the high-end evening auctions last week. One collector could have bought them all for $207 million, but spent $29 million less than the price of the record-breaking Klimt painting.
Everything that glitters
In recent years, auction houses have adopted Hollywood-style tactics, attracting new customers with spectacles such as a red Ferrari or a battered Banksy painting. This week, that meant betting on gold, with mixed results.
Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” - a functional toilet made of one hundred kilograms of 18-karat gold – was sold to Ripley’s Believe It or Not for a single bid of $12.1 million. The value is equivalent to the cost of the raw material plus the auction house fees. Phillips offered a gold nugget called “The Thunderbolt”—described as “nature’s masterpiece” with an estimated value of $1.5 million—and it found no buyer.
There was much greater competition for traditional works with gold elements. A fanciful gold-leaf portrait of a man riding a snail by artist Noah Davis, who died in 2015, sold for $1.4 million at Christie’s, above its high estimate of $1 million. A shimmering, sculptural rug woven with gold leaf by Colombian designer Olga de Amaral sold for $3.1 million, more than five times its high estimate, a record for the 93-year-old textile artist.
According to consultant Darrow, the week’s results suggest that “true art lovers, not speculators or bitcoin kids,” are driving the market recovery.
Surrealism is on the rise
Sotheby’s sold more than $128 million worth of surrealist art last week, the highest total for the genre in a single week. Most of this sum was spent on a single-owner evening sale called Exquisite Corpus, titled Kahlo’s Self-Portrait.
The fierce competition also generated new auction records for names previously considered minor, such as Tanning, Wolfgang Ballen and Hans Bellmer. The impressive sales reflect the growing demand for surrealism in the past 15 years, according to experts.
“Surrealism was, for a long time, the domain of London auctions,” says Emanuele Di Donna, whose Manhattan gallery focuses on surreal, modern and postwar art. Now, “there are global buyers for surrealism, especially at the top.”
Very contemporary: downsizing
In no other sector has the redefinition of the market been more evident than in the sales of “ultra contemporary” artists – those born in 1975 or later.
In November 2024, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips featured 16 ultra-contemporary artists at their flagship evening auctions in New York. Last week, they featured Nine, Nishimura, Robert Allis, Lucy Ball, Fairley Baez, Noah Davis, Jade Fadojotimi, Adrian Jenny, Antonio Ohba, and Matthew Wong. The results were mixed.
New auction records were set for Nishimura, Alice, Davis, Ohba and Baez, whose high estimate for their paintings depicting tropical columns on a colonial map multiplied five-fold when they sold for $1.1 million at Christie’s.
But bidding on a huge painting by Fadojotimi at Phillips stopped at $500,000 — well below its low estimate of $800,000 — and a painting by Paul sold at the same auction for $490,000. At least ten paintings by both artists have sold for more than $1 million since 2022, according to Artnet’s price database.
Market volatility revealed
In the auction market – which is unpredictable and emotional – the adrenaline of competition can lead a person to pay too much. “It’s not a linear market,” Darrow said. The week provided many examples of currency depreciation and appreciation. After adjusting for inflation, here are three instances of declines in recurring sales:
- A painting by Emily May Smith, with a cartoon character and a grapevine, sold for $454,000 in 2022, reaching $63,500 at Christie’s on Thursday — a drop of 88%.
- An 1835 painting of Fort Ehrenbreitstein by J. M. W. Turner that sold for $23.9 million at Sotheby’s in 2017 has dropped 62% and sold for $11.9 million at Christie’s on Monday.
- Tom Wesselman’s painting of Feet on the Beach, which sold for $53,846 at Christie’s in 2015, fell 52% to $35,560 at Sotheby’s on Wednesday.
There have also been many cases of price increases as a result of sustained demand for works by specific artists, such as:
- Joan Mitchell’s 1969 “Sunflower V,” an Abstract Expressionist work, sold for $1.5 million at Christie’s in 2005, up 578 percent to $16.7 million at Christie’s on Monday.
- “High Society,” an 8-foot-tall Cecily Brown musical from 1997 to 1998 that sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s in 2006, rose 530 percent to $9.8 million on Tuesday.
The market may be selective, but “a good business doesn’t fail,” says consultant David Norman.