Time has become a strange and elastic thing in the post-Covid era. Since President Donald Trump reentered office on January 20, his administration has “flooded the zone” with executive orders, outlandish statements, and social media posts both aggressive and digressive. The cumulative result is a year in which each week has seemed to last, for some for an eternity.
So, looking back on 2025, it is exceptionally challenging to boil down what happened in the art market. There were so many mixed, contrasting, and difficult-to-interpret signals that it might be most accurate to quote the Talking Heads and say, this was the year the art market stopped making sense.
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“Everyone has a slightly different take,” said Natasha Degen, chair of the art market studies department at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (and taking up a new post in January as director of the New York campus of Sotheby’s Institute). That’s an understatement. In November, Gray Market columnist Tim Schneider went so far as to diagnose a metaphorical case of body dysmorphia among art market observers, saying that it’s incredibly hard to get an accurate read on its shape and size.
Let’s look back at some high points and low moments and see what sense we can make of the year.
Fairs, Auctions and Tariffs Provided Varying Signals
Coming out of a multiyear market downturn, the year’s first big bellwether was Frieze Los Angeles in February, where numerous dealers reported selling out, ARTnews Top 200 collectors showed up in numbers, and galleries including Gladstone, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Zwirner reported sales above the $1 million mark, providing a profound boost after the wildfires that ravaged parts of the city.
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But the mood changed dramatically not just in the art market but in the economy overall the next moth, when Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China—the US’s top three trading partners. “The market was really already on shaky ground,” said Degen, “and that seemed to suck out all the oxygen and make people feel quite pessimistic.” Later that month, reports at Art Basel Hong Kong were decidedly mixed; even major, globe-spanning galleries like White Cube noted that collectors were “more conservative and more selective than previous years.”
But a high point came in March all the same, Degen pointed out, recalling the record-shattering $13.8 million sale of a painting by Indian artist M. F. Husain, a new high for a modern Indian work of art.
M.F. Husain, Untitled (Gram Yatra), 1954.
Courtesy Christie’s
In April, the overall outlook only worsened as Trump announced new tariffs against every nation on Earth (including some uninhabited islands). And yet in May at Frieze New York, there was optimism, with Gagosian bringing three Jeff Koons sculptures of the Incredible Hulk, rumored to be priced at $3 million. Major galleries reported strong sales. What’s more, Art Basel saw fit to expand, announcing the February 2026 launch of Art Basel Qatar.
In another whipsaw change, and just blocks away from Frieze’s home at the Shed, May’s marquee auctions fell short of even modest expectations: while the houses had estimated they would move up to $1.6 billion in art, they hammered only $837.5 million. The top prices didn’t reach as high as in previous years, and wet-paint works by emerging artists fared badly.
Despite that gloominess, dealers showed some confidence ahead of June’s Art Basel in Switzerland; Pace even promoted a $30 million Pablo Picasso. Was the bullishness merited? Maybe not so much. According to ARTnews’s analysis of sales reports at five blue-chip galleries at the Swiss fair, publicly reported sales were more than 35 percent lower than in 2024.
A Gallery Death Watch
In July, when international dealer Tim Blum revealed to ARTnews that he would “sunset” his gallery, it began a six-month run of galleries large and small announcing closures or reductions. “It seemed like every week” there was another farewell, Degen recalled.
“The closures do indicate something structural,” Degen opined. “Costs have gotten really high, including fixed costs like rent, salary and so on, and certain galleries had expanded or overextended. Lurking in the background are bigger structural questions about the gallery model, period, and whether the ecosystem as it’s existed for a long time can persist in its current form.”
The galleries that remain have to face the current reality, New York private dealer Peter Bentley Brandt told ARTnews. “How many galleries are giving 20 percent discounts rather than 10 percent and offering relaxed payment terms?” said Brandt, who worked for eight years with White Cube before working in private sales at Sotheby’s. Even when the market looks successful, said Brandt, now the principal at Ares Art Management, there’s plenty of wrangling to achieve that appearance: “Sellers are getting to the right numbers to get people to keep buying.”
There is no public estimate for the Original Birkin bag.
Eléa Lefèvre
Degen also noted that some silver linings also have clouds, noting that a record-breaking $10 million Sotheby’s Paris sale of the first-ever Hermès Birkin bag seemed to suggest auction houses might de-emphasize art. “That sale seemed to portend that this was going to be a big strategy for auction houses as the market for fine art slowed down,” she said.
Indeed, the rise of luxury at the auction houses was the big story of the year for Christie’s and Sotheby’s, reported ARTnews’s George Nelson in August.
Back to School Season Brings Renewed Vitality
Another shift came with September’s Armory Show in New York, which saw cautious optimism, and the rousing success of Sotheby’s London’s sale of British socialite and arts patron Pauline Karpidas’s collection, which blew past its $53 million high estimate to take in $100 million, with all lots finding buyers. At October’s Frieze London, dealers reported strong sales.
Then came the third edition of Art Basel Paris, in October; the general consensus was that between Art Basel in June and the fair in the French capital, a switch was flipped. Paris-based adviser Francesca Napoli told ARTnews it was “the most successful Art Basel Paris to date,” with numerous eight-figure sales.
In terms of the Paris fair’s appeal, said Brandt, “I honestly believe that yes, a lot of it is the shopping and the restaurants, but also the Fondation Louis Vuitton doing shows that no other museum can compete with. With those blockbusters, people get FOMO. They’re a real catalyst for people to go to Paris.”
Alex Da Corte, Kermit the Frog, Even, 2018, as performed at Art Basel Paris in 2025.
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
October brought more signs of confidence, especially in the Middle East region, with Frieze announcing the November 2026 launch of an Abu Dhabi fair. Degen recalled another October high point, when a ca. 1575–80 painting by a leading painter of the Mughal court sold at Christie’s London for 12 times its low estimate, fetching £8.5 million ($11.2 million). By contrast, mega-galleries including Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner reported steep drops in profits at their UK locations.
Signs of strength continued at the November New York auctions. Sotheby’s, in its first-ever sales at its newly acquired HQ, Madison Avenue’s Breuer Building, sold Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) for $236.4 million, notching the highest price ever for a work of modern art and the second-highest price ever for an artwork at auction. The same house set a record for a woman at auction with a Frida Kahlo that sold for $54.7 million. Great estates came to market at the New York sales. In addition to the Leonard A. Lauder collection—from which the trio of Klimts were sold—there were the estates of Las Vegas’s Elaine Wynn and Chicagoans Cindy and Jay Pritzker and Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, showing confidence in the demand, which definitely materialized. The houses saw very few withdrawals, high sell-through rates, and deep, lively bidding in a marquee sales week that generated $2.2 billion.
Frida Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), 1940.
Courtesy Sotheby’s
“There was a massive shift, with collectors going back to modern works,” said Brandt. “In this economy, it’s like buying the S&P 500.”
“Morale in the market has been low for some time,” said Degen, “and the November sales provided a much-needed boost.”
At the same time, the topline results should be taken with a grain of salt, Degen pointed out. “Sotheby’s needed a win, and to achieve that they were willing to make concessions, so you never really know how profitable these sales are,” she said, referring to the Lauder sale, and other single-owner offerings. The house certainly needed a PR win; the fall auctions followed several months after a damning New Yorker expose reported that billionaire owner Patrick Drahi had “brought turmoil and trouble” to the auction house. And in September the house had reported a 2024 pre-tax loss of some $248 million.
As for an auctioneer taking over a building that was purpose-built to house the Whitney Museum and later hosted an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a temporary home for the Frick Collection, said Degen, “Some people in the art world had snarky things to say about it, though it was such a triumph, from a publicity standpoint, with the wider public—a real coup for Sotheby’s.” In the end, she added, “I would much rather it be Sotheby’s than luxury apartments or a Porsche showroom.”
The good vibes from November continued into December’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, with megagalleries selling multimillion-dollar works in the opening hours.
The scene outside popular Miami bar The Deuce during Art Basel Miami Beach.
“People were spending in Miami,” said Brandt. “Everyone was very happy with the outcome.”
And in the year’s waning days, Christie’s posted $6.2 billion in projected global sales, up nearly seven percent from last year’s $5.8 billion, and Sotheby’s projected $7 billion in consolidated 2025 sales, a 17 percent increase over last year and the strongest result in the company’s history.
All the same, Brandt said, “What caught my attention is a general fatigue. I am generally in New York in May and November. Everybody comes to town—and this November, nobody was coming. They told me, ‘Peter, we can’t keep going and going.’ People are getting tired of the continual race.” Of course, Brandt remembers many dealers complaining during the Covid-19 slowdown about the art world’s packed calendar. And before long, he notes, “They went back to it.”
After all that, a year starting with post-conflagration success in Los Angeles through doldrums and gallery closures galore, and ending with upbeat reporting from auction houses, what might 2026 hold? From Doha in February to Miami in December, ARTnews will be there, doing our best to make sense of it all.
