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The fall art season may have started last week, but it is not an opening ceremony or even an expo, which has caused the most talk about the market. Instead, it’s a debate about market coverage. On Sunday, with the end of the Armory, Artnet News The analysis titled “Storm Hits the Art Market: Who Was Swept Out” released by Katya Kazakina released its mid-year intelligence report. The title is the alarmer, and so is the copy.
“It seems like there isn’t a week, and there isn’t a major gallery closed: Bloom, Manhattan’s Venus and Casmine are other outstanding summer casualties,” Kasakina wrote.
The last time I checked, the large gallery was not closed last week. All the galleries she cites have New York presence–though she doesn’t clarify that, there is no report outside the city. But, she did point out that in the nearly 20 years that covered the art market, she “never heard of someone as frustrated as this summer” and declared that “the bubble has burst” and now speculators are now “not flipping meme coins.” One collector warned that before the market was recalibrated, “the street bleeding would flow.”
It mentions Kazakina is a highly respected journalist who breaks countless spoons. So, as some dealers have told us, there seem to be many sources that do tell her how much the market is going down.
Still, the backslide will soon be from the inside of the house. Kenny Schachter, artist, dealer, provocateur, and Artnet The columnist posted the Instagram title, chopped it with a thick red X. “Enough!” he wrote. “I’ll save you the cost of subscription: Today, yesterday, 1000 years ago, the art market is good for 1000 years from now.” For Schachter, he wrote a column before Artnews– Speech is just another example of a “passive attack” covering bait click.
The exchange raises a broader question, a world of art often dresses, but never asks: the art market report is fair, what responsibilities the press takes on in a fragile market?
Earlier this week, Shackett told me that for him, the problem was not only a story, but also a coverage that took place in a crisis. “We have reached the saturation point,” he said. “It is the responsibility of journalists to tell the truth, rather than create a self-fulfilling prophecy, even when it is boring, even if it does not produce the most bold title.
Here, it is important to point out that Schachter, unlike Kazakina, operates in the market: as a collector, artist and seller of auctions. Nevertheless, he insists that his views are compared to the meaning of defending the market and the narrative around him. Negative emotions become an injustice entertainment, he said: This performance rewards the proportion of fear. The problem is that such theaters are not limited to pages. It echoes in stalls and back offices, shaping the real-time behavior of dealers, collectors and artists.
“We all have enough sensational headlines, fearful headlines,” he said. “Everything is fueled by fear in our society, but looks back at articles from the recession of the 1990s. Between 1991 and 1995, hundreds of galleries closed, thousands missing. [galleries] More than today. ”
When reporting on the art market, the idea of negative reporting as a self-fulfilling prophecy often emerges. While few right-brain dealers would say that the art of sales was clumsy in the mid-2020s, many dealers recently told me that we live by correcting rather than apocalyptic. Yes, the cost of doing business has risen, but the conversation is more realistic. Seven-digit trading is still in progress – I know at least three trades that happened last week. More importantly, the lower end of the market, the segments that will depend on in the future are growing.
Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at Michael Werner Gallery, said bluntly: The market has “many structural problems”. The overall rising costs (rent, transportation, employees, and especially art fairs) make business more difficult to maintain. He said the fair was underreacting to these pressures, noting that participation fees and production costs surged, even if sales were slowing. However, Vinick Larsen resists the fatalism of headlines. For him, these are not symptoms of collapse, but symptoms of expired correction.
My colleagues at other stores have already made these points–the liquidation Olivier Babin made the same claim to Kazakina, who conducted an invaluable, in-depth interview with him. But Venic Larson also points to the generational transformations that our journalists often miss. The young collectors he works with don’t necessarily want what their ex want.
“They don’t want to buy the hottest stuff because of demand,” Venic Larson said. He saw early echoes: “Things after 1990 and the crash were objections to those macho figures of the 80s.”
Just as this downturn has produced another collection, today’s turmoil is raising interest in neglected artists, historical rediscoveries and categories, and these profiles do not taste like parents. In other words, while the top may swing, the foundation of the market (the part that ensures its continuity) is full of new energy.
For historical ballast, I called Georgina Adam, who has been covering the art market since many millennial and Gen Z art dealers today were born. (She started in the early 1990s.) Adam wrote several books on the market and wrote a long-running market column Financial Times, And a long-term staff member Art newspaper, She is still the place for the entire editor. Adam has no sugar coating.
“The market is really bad right now,” she told me. “But the downturn in the early 1990s and 2008 were much different.” She believes that the perspective is something missing in today’s reports. The 20 million failed batches might say that there is less chance of systemic collapse than the seller becomes greedy. “There are nuances everywhere.”
She also regrets the sameness reported by the art market: “Everyone is writing the same story and reporting the same numbers in art fairs and auctions.” When consensus hardens, the internet speeds it up. Adam said the spoon ended up “maybe three seconds” and then they ricochet on six platforms. She believes that what readers want now is not only to know what is going on, but also to analyze what: what does it mean? However, readers often do the opposite, she says: There is no nuance in speed and no depth in headlines.
Different commentators fill the gap between nuance and noise. Now, anonymous meme accounts are based on market disasters, driving the same melodrama as the deal, while also providing some lovely irony.
But, like politically, people gather around these voices. Jerry Gogosian quickly cheered Kazakina’s report and said, “The storm is here, infectious diseases are global.” Collector-turned Instagram influencer Jeff Magid plays a different video in the video, featuring his gossip style. He declared that he had an epiphany: “I get it. People who write about the art world and the art market feel so unpopular in professional, elite, walled worlds of wealth that they are dissatisfied and take root for their fall.”
Magid made some savvy comments, but this neat reduction fell into the same trap as his recent skewed headlines. Journalists mainly convey what dealers and numbers tell them; it is the speed and fragile nature of our current media environment that creates and encourages closed collapse. The more headlines and memes they drowned out clearly: we’ve been here before.
2009 was a disaster. The collector disappeared. The paintings seen by the auction house once fought suddenly without bidding. The value of the blue chip name is halved. However, by 2011, the market returned to pre-explosion levels. By 2014, it had surpassed them. Five years later, the Doomer in 2009 looks stupid.
It was not an isolated incident. The Japanese speculative bubble and Wall Street romance, more than the late 1980s, pushed prices to absurd heights. When it broke down in the early 1990s, the air broke out from the entire market. Similarly, a funeral was held. Again, the patient lives.
In 1990 New York Times The title of the run is considered a nuance today. “Art Prosperity: It’s over, or is it just a correction?” The two most interesting things in this story are the observations of measurement. Milton Esterow, then publisher and editor Artnews, “What collapsed in the art market is all speculation,” Amy Page, edited Art + Auction Magazine, more measurable. “People say we’ve returned to the 1988 price, but it’s still high, and it’s not a collapse,” she wrote. In the 1970s, some New York galleries were closed due to oil shocks and stagnation. However, the art world endured, adapted and became stronger.
Jeff Poe told Artnet News Recently, the difference between 2001 or 2008 and today is that “the art market is smaller, so there is less climb.” Larger, more global markets will take longer to recover. And size itself is part of the problem: too many galleries are trying to grow too fast, and some shouldn’t be growing at all.
(This is Artnews Editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas herself is a market journalist for years, before leading the publication, I insisted: In her mind, the special combination of international conflict and the recent policies of the Trump administration have mixed together to create an environment that, at least in her memory—at least in her memory—is unique and unpredictable, which has swelled the art market in the way that quantification is estimated.
However: the market breathes. They shrink and expand. They pause and lean forward. We can only assume that this will, too.
Trevyn McGowan, co-founder of the South Guild Gallery in Cape Town, told me that she found the loop of doom coverage was not only misleading, but also stale. “There is a danger of clickbait reporting,” she said. “It’s lazy to dig everything into and do something dramatic for the reaction. But isn’t it a little boring now? We’ve heard the same thing for two years.” For a medium-sized gallery like her, the effect is not abstract: every terrible title will silence collector confidence and make the business work harder.
McGowen believes that negative emotions have exceeded their practicality. Yes, times are tough, but she thinks the new voices that change space, fresh shows, and the young collector base is eager for alternatives. She asked, “Isn’t it fun to talk about this?
Bob Chase, He runs the Hexon Gallery in Aspen, texting me on his way from New York to Colorado. What frustrated him was the way to sloppy report unrelated issues together. “Collectors read, pay attention, stick to acquisitions, and the cycle is in a downward spiral.” Chase compared it to an old news broadcast, stuffing a 29-minute disaster into a 29-minute disaster every half hour, and the last one feels good.
Chase said many of the artists he knew had the best year, not because the market was “good”, but because they had combined quality, patience and long-term thinking.
“At the end of the day, I want to support the ecosystem where the flywheel is constantly rotating,” he told me. “Artists are doing the work, gallery displays, collectors support it, and money flows backwards so that creativity can flourish.”
What he wants to see is more coverage of these “smart things” that may inspire artists, dealers, and collectors to think differently. (Again, I must praise the Art Press: Most of us do cover the U-Haul Art Fair, showing clever things.) Reporting challenges are essential, Chase admits, but it shouldn’t define the market.
“Those stories that are not told are stories that can change the trajectory,” he said.
