OLD NEWS

IT’S BEEN TEN DAYS AND 2026 IS ALREADY YELLING
Welcome to the collapse of the world, Real Housewives of New Jersey–style. We are barely a week and a half into 2026 and already it feels like the episode where the table flips before anyone’s ordered, Teresa is screaming that she’s calm, Danielle is saying don’t bring her into it while absolutely being the reason behind everyone’s fighting, and somehow the vibe has gone fully off the rails. America invaded Venezuela and is acting like it might send a follow up text, people are being killed by ICE, headlines are floating invasions that sound fake until you remember nothing feels fake anymore, and the general energy is loud, defensive, and one sentence away from security stepping in.
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It’s giving RHONY emotional chaos with New Jersey volume. On paper, things are “fine,” but spiritually we’re all clutching our drinks, bracing for impact. Add in my own chaotic personal life, and suddenly every morning feels like waking up mid Jason Bourne movie, except instead of amnesia you just have notifications and a sense of dread.
Naturally, the art world is not immune. Museums are in limbo mode, galleries are quietly power shifting, dealers are recalibrating their personalities, and everyone is insisting this is all very normal.
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Blue chip galleries are reshuffling like musical chairs with endowments, legacy institutions are leaking drama through court filings, and soft power visits in tasteful scarves are doing more work than official announcements. The market isn’t hot or cold, it’s haunted. Everyone is busy. Nobody feels settled. The vibes are unmistakably transitional.
And because this is a Weekend Wrap Up, Daddy is serving straight gossip this week. No formal headlines, no institutional throat clearing. And my first for 2026 so far so be nice. That said, this is not chaos without cause. The gossip is pulled directly from the headlines, the filings, and the moves everyone is pretending not to notice _TheArtDaddy

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HOW MUCH SHOULD ART COST? THE PITFALLS AND PARADOXES OF PRICING WORKS
In the cyclical booms and busts of the art market, downturns tend to reverse prevailing trends. In 2015, for example, the reign of the Zombie Formalism trend died of a 7% contraction in global sales. In Miami that year, Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian mounted the figurative group show Unrealism in its wake, officially anointing figuration as the art market’s next big thing. The art economy recovered, and figuration ascended until the next inflection point in 2022, when, with rising interest rates, prevailing trends again began to reverse. Confident collectors became cautious, expanding galleries downsized, and during this year’s autumn fairs, headlines boasted of Millennials’ rising interest in Old Masters, the ultimate referendum to the ultra-contemporary bubble that just burst.
Each of these trends underwent textbook asset price inflation, whereby low interest rates send the demand for excess wealth storage skyrocketing—one of many ways financialisation has fundamentally changed the culture of collecting. Now in the third consecutive year of contraction, high prices are under scrutiny as being out of sync with real long-term value, as well as a barrier to entry for potential new collectors. In response, dealers are becoming more flexible, even if only behind the scenes. In an interview with the journalist Marion Maneker, Larry Gagosian defied conventional wisdom and supported the lowering of primary prices: “Like any market, you have to adjust.”
In the shadow of roiling political turmoil and economic uncertainty, as well as the ongoing closures of galleries struggling to make ends meet, the debate between dealers and artists, and buyers and sellers, is: how much is art really worth?
Great expectations
In the speculative market, high prices can be justified by the promise that they will even continue to rise. Or, “if you’re asking $100,000 for an artwork”, the collector Jeff Magid wrote in Artnews, ideally “it might retain some financial value”. This expectation can often end in disappointment, particularly in the growing arena of private sales. Lately, says the adviser Mattia Pozzoni, transactions will stall due to sellers’ “anchoring”: “Many bought near the top and don’t want to ‘let go’ at today’s clearance levels, while others keep citing comps from a frothier cycle.” As the Gagosian director Harmony Murphy points out, auction records have limited accuracy in determining a work’s long-term value. Using Sotheby’s owner Patrick Drahi’s anonymous bidding on a Francis Bacon triptych at his own auction house in 2020 as an example, she says, “they are buying their own inventory at record just to assign value to something”.
Outsized expectations on returns might be traced to younger collectors’ skewed vision of older generations, says Brian Butler, the owner of Los Angeles gallery 1301PE. “They only hear the stories of the great successes, and none of the mistakes.” The reality is that even within celebrated collections, the majority of works depreciate, and recognition is rarely immediate. Joy Simmons, an early patron of David Hammons, Mark Bradford and Mickalene Thomas, is often asked who she is interested in. “They see that I’ve been successful in collecting artists when they were younger,” she says, “But 90% of my collection is not making headlines, and the ones who are having a moment right now, for the most part, I’ve held on to for quite some time.”
Different systems of value
“The art world has always been about prices,” says the University of Chicago professor of economics David Galenson, echoing a commonly repeated phrase. But according to an essay for the arts organisation e-flux by Andrea Fraser, an artist and professor at the University of California Los Angeles, the “emergence of art as a financial asset” in the early 2000s split the market into its own autonomous subfield within the art world. One consequence is that the market increasingly embraces the language and fast-tracked expectations of the financial industry. At the height of the ultra-contemporary bubble, Murphy recalls, “Everyone wanted to buy into an artist as they were IPO-ing [Initial Public Offer], and expected everything to ten times within a year.” The focus of market conversations also tends to fall squarely on prices rather than art, adds the dealer Laurel Gitlen. “We’re not really talking about ideas.”
Fraser’s essay outlines how the market espouses different preferences and values from other art world subfields: while academia emphasises ideas, and exhibitions trade in experience, the market is measured in dollars. “The market loves paintings,” says John Schmid of the Chicago gallery Ackerman Clarke, “due in part to its long history, but also the fact that it’s ripe for consumption” with its relative ease of shipping, storage and display. In fact, according to the latest collector survey conducted by UBS and Art Basel, paintings comprised 64% of dealer sales in 2023. Conceptual sculpture, meanwhile, “tends to require more space and isn’t always as approachable or straightforward to a private collector”, says Avery Semjen, a Modern and contemporary art specialist at Phillips. Consequently, its prices, even among institutionally celebrated artists, offer a glimpse into a world relatively untouched by speculation. At Phillips’s Modern and contemporary sale in New York in February, where a 2022 Marina Perez Simão painting sold for $279,400, a wall-mounted shelf by Haim Steinbach took just $40,640. In September, a 2002 Paul Pfeiffer sculpture from a body of work shown in his traveling museum survey (2023-25) sold for $15,480 at Phillips. And at Ackerman Clarke, conceptual sculpture starts at $3,500, a price Schmid needs to support with additional private sales and “other things I don’t want to do”.
We do need a little speculation
There are many benefits of paying living artists more for their art, including higher standards of living and greater access to resources. The artist Alexander Kroll says strong sales have allowed him to scale up and experiment further. But, conversely, “The attempt to financialise art gets to very dangerous zones of sterility,” where artists are incentivised to repeat commercially successful bodies of work. There is no guarantee that money improves the quality of art. “In fact sometimes it makes it worse.”
How much are collectors willing to bet on an unknown name with no guaranteed returns on investment? To attract new collectors in their 30s and 40s, Simmons recommends the $2,500 to $5,000 range. Fellow collector Alain Servais puts his own number at $10,000 to $15,000, while Dean Valentine says $8,000. Faced with increased costs for rent, shipping, employing staff and more, Gitlen says galleries showing works priced under $10,000 “are almost certainly losing money”. But by also representing more established artists and foregoing a permanent brick-and-mortar space, she is able to set emerging artists between $3,500 and $5,000. Remaining accessible to institutions and other artists “goes a long way in establishing peer respect and longevity”, she says. “It also allows an artist to experiment and build before the price point gets too high.”
Embracing the investment mindset
According to Georgia Stylianides, an adviser and quantitative analyst, the best collectors “aren’t just picking winners, they’re helping grow them”. She recommends that collectors adopt a venture capitalist (VC) mindset. “Every work of art is basically an option on an artist’s future cultural relevance,” she says, and like any VC’s investment portfolio, most bets will flop. Out of thousands of artists, she adds, a small sliver may go on “to fundamentally shift our perceptions of art”, but “those works are the ones that will define a collection’s long-term value”.
For Butler, investing in the artists of one’s time is “the adventure of being part of culture”, but in the decade after founding his gallery in 1992, he noticed collectors showing more and more interest in finding “some margin in the market”. Burnt by investments in artists who failed to withstand the test of time—financially or otherwise—risk-averse collectors are now increasingly looking away from the present toward the past, where hindsight is 20/20. As the market contraction continues, the reversal Butler would like to see now is collectors going back in time in a different way: to simply buying what they like.
_Janelle Zara_ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4c7sn78b> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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SCHACHTRADAMUS SPEAKS! KENNY REVEALS by Kenny Schachter
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Admittedly, I’ve always loved cartoons (and maybe still do), but it’s an altogether different thing to live smack in the midst of the United States of Looney Tunes. To think, we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the second term of one of the craziest and greediest presidents of all time—an alarming mixture of Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Porky Pig, all in one chancy caricature.
Looking at the year ahead, I foresee developments that I will detail below, but rest assured, I’ll drop the political theme for now, as not even Nostradamus could begin to foretell what’s in store for us next week, never mind the remaining three years of the Trump administration. In 1991, I curated an exhibition entitled “Certain Uncertainty” at the Lobby Gallery at Deutsche Bank in New York, and in the ensuing 35 years, nothing much has changed, other than the inexorable march of time. Though I must concede, the degree of precarious political farce in the U.S.A. could not have been foreseen, and it has redefined the notion of impulsivity.
Columnist Clive Crook penned an opinion piece comparing the cataclysm wrought by artificial intelligence to that of the Industrial Revolution, while arguing that this is all happening faster. He writes: “Where will this unprecedented surge of disruption lead? Everybody who claims to know is either lying or deluded, leaving us with what’s called ‘radical uncertainty.’”
Even as development continues on artificial general intelligence (A.I. that can equal or exceed human intelligence), the next thing on the horizon is advanced machine intelligence, which is being developed by Meta’s former A.I. chief scientist, Yann LeCun, and others. It aims to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data in order to be capable of planning and reasoning with enduring memory. When LeCun was questioned in last week’s Financial Times about persisting in pushing A.I. into such uncharted territory, he replied that we humans “suffer from stupidity.” (From the top down, he might have added.)
Even as development continues on artificial general intelligence (A.I. that can equal or exceed human intelligence), the next thing on the horizon is advanced machine intelligence, which is being developed by Meta’s former A.I. chief scientist, Yann LeCun, and others. It aims to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data in order to be capable of planning and reasoning with enduring memory. When LeCun was questioned in last week’s Financial Times about persisting in pushing A.I. into such uncharted territory, he replied that we humans “suffer from stupidity.” (From the top down, he might have added.)
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It’s a fool’s game to try and predict precisely how and to what extent A.I. will inexorably impact the world, and the art world in particular. But whether you notice it or not, the impact of A.I. on art is already being felt, from making, to researching, to curating, to writing (not mine, mind you), to collecting. As the gallery grim reaper draws nearer, are you ready for A.I. Larry G?
Clare McAndrew, the Madonna of art-market metrics, reckoned the total of art sales in 2024 to be $57.5 billion and estimated it would be about the same (give or take a hundred mil) for 2025. I don’t anticipate more than a marginal uptick in 2026, though the sum will exceed last year’s, I can confidently avow. But to put that number in perspective, Bain & Company and Altagamma estimated the personal luxury goods market at approximately $420 billion in 2025 in their annual report on the subject.
This category of crap (a.k.a. luxury goods) will increasingly and insipidly gnaw at the heels of our insular little world, with bags, baubles, watches, and cars, not to mention soiled jerseys and dinosaur discards (fossils and skeletons), appearing in exhibitions, fairs, and auctions.
Sotheby’s will continue to lead the charge in its hybrid auction house/museum/gallery digs, blurring distinctions with dog and pony shows, like its recent parading of high-priced bounty in its traveling not-for-sale “Icon” show, largely comprised of Ken Griffin’s astronomical acquisitions (including the $200 million Basquiat that I revealed he bought), with a few other expensive items tossed into the mix. In the former Breuer Building, museum labels were simulated to detail a pageantry of prices, rather than provide actual art exegesis.
In every epoch, we get what we deserve: In ours, it’s the apotheosis of short-attention-span mindsets, characterized by an unquenchable pursuit of wealth, the most reductive of all criteria for assessing cultural significance (besides social media tallies of likes and followers). In such a context, the art itself becomes all but irrelevant, well-nigh beside the point.
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When I paid a visit to the by-appointment “Icons” show, a coveted Gerhard Richter double candle composition was replete with exposed surface cracks, revealing the white underpainting pervading a third of the composition. I queried a Sotheby’s employee who was shepherding a well-heeled couple around and asked:
KS: Excuse me, do you work here?
Sotheby’s specialist: Yes.
KS: What’s up with the cracks all over the surface of the Richter [for kicks, knowing full well what was up with them]?
Sotheby’s specialist: They are inherent to the work, he did it on purpose for effect.
As if. In 2014, I curated an exhibition of Richter and his former compatriot Sigmar Polke at Christie’s in London, their first show together in nearly 50 years. Its title was “polke/richter, richter/polke,” the name of their 1966 exhibition at Galerie h in Hanover, the only time they collaborated before falling out in the ensuing years. Of the 30 Richter canvases on view, both abstract and figurative, not a single one—including the candle painting—bore a visible crack.
Coaxing out information about a secretive private auction (a trend nowadays) in a room peopled by pornographically deep-pocketed bidders is neither an enviable task nor an easy feat, I assure you. The latest treasure to cross the block: Vincent van Gogh’s Le Zouave (1888), of a soldier in that class of French light infantry, who were known for their distinctive and (for the intent of the artist, ideally) colorful uniforms and bravery.
The Zouaves inspired the French phrase faire le zouave (“to act the goat”), meaning to act silly or clown around, but it’s not a laughing matter that the world’s cultural heritage is being picked off and bagged like big-game trophies by techno overlords and fossil fuel–funded sovereign wealth tourist attractions. Fully 99.9 percent of the world’s museums are priced out of the mix.
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One of a number of works that the artist made of the subject, Le Zouave was offered privately, via Christie’s, during Covid, I’m told, with an asking price of approximately $300 million (eye-roll), unframed and with a number of visible cracks of its own, though it was in nowhere near the lousy condition of Richter’s candles.
After being framed and restored, the painting came back to market, this time around in that private auction I mentioned, with a handful of auction specialists seated around a table wielding phones with six registered bidders. It’s a safe bet that Griffin, Jeff Bezos, maybe the Zuck (who recently splurged on a Magritte), an Asian collector or two, and some members of the Arab aristocracy joined the fray.
From what I can glean from my sources, Le Zouave sold for just above $190 million, with the art-dealing Nahmad dynasty dropping out at approximately $160 million. The Nahmads, when reached by email, had no comment. The air is thin at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, the location of Christie’s headquarters. Give me a sec to determine who landed the masterpiece, and I’ll revert soon. (Katharine Arnold, Christie’s vice chairman for 20th- and 21st-century art, did not respond to a request for comment.)
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By the way, since 2011, the Nahmads have been embroiled in a dispute over Amedeo Modigliani’s 1918 painting Seated Man with Cane, allegedly stolen by the Nazis, which they bought in 1996 for $3.2 million, a fraction of what it’s worth today. Information that came to light in the Panama Papers helped enable Philippe Maestracci, the grandson of a French antiques dealer who once possessed the piece, to win an appeal in 2017 to revive the suit, which is finally scheduled to come before a jury in New York in May. So much for swift justice.
Representing the Nahmads is none other than my old friend, 83-year-old lawyer Richard Golub (Google our names together for a history of our well-documented skirmishes). They maintain that a different Modigliani was looted from Maestracci’s grandfather. Count me in for the role of junior court reporter.
I am self-aware enough to acknowledge that a significant portion of my writing (on the art market) is about as vital as the latest software updates for our phones and laptops, which we are led to believe are life-or-death imperatives. Needless to say, they rarely are, and instead relocate various buttons and invariably present an inane new garbage-can icon. In the end, they are yet more invasive intrusions into our privacy and data, and I rue the day I upgraded (and the time before that).
At the very least, one thing that A.I. can’t do (for now) is ferret and tease out info from those who are usually unwilling to talk. That means that I can continue to steal it from the rich to share it with the aspiring rich and, more meaningfully to me, the plainly curious. _artnet

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KENNY SCHACHTER AND THE COURAGE TO NEVER LOG OFF EVEN IN 2026
Another year, another Kenny Schachter column arriving like a haunted object the art world forgot to deaccession. You open it knowing exactly what will happen. Cartoons will stand in for analysis. AI will be treated like both apocalypse and punchline. Billionaires will be scolded lovingly by name. Auctions will be itemized down to the dollar. And Kenny will once again cast himself as the lone adult wandering through a cultural kindergarten, exhausted by everyone else’s stupidity yet somehow unable to leave the room.
The central fantasy remains intact. Kenny believes proximity is insight. If he stood near it, overheard it, curated it once in the twentieth century, or spoke to someone adjacent to the thing, then the thing belongs to him narratively. This is not reporting. It is ownership cosplay. The column reads like a man guarding a collapsing border post screaming that no one else understands the terrain while refusing to acknowledge that the map has changed and he is shouting at a different country entirely.
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What’s most impressive is the stamina required to keep mistaking volume for relevance. Thousands of words spill out to tell us that money has ruined art, immediately followed by a lovingly detailed inventory of who paid what, when, and where. He condemns spectacle while staging it sentence by sentence. He rails against ego while building a monument to his own endurance. The art world is allegedly drowning in excess, yet Kenny cannot stop producing excess takes, excess anecdotes, excess self citation, as if stopping would confirm the nightmare that the world kept turning without him narrating every spin.
And then, like clockwork, comes the self awareness paragraph. The ritual absolution. Kenny briefly admits his writing might be pointless, only to continue writing as if that admission were a moral cleanse. This is not humility. This is indulgence disguised as honesty. By calling himself out first, he secures permission to go on unchanged. The column does not sharpen or evolve. It bloats. It lingers. It refuses to die, much like the very market structures it claims to despise.
Kenny has become what he warns us about. A system that will not sunset. A voice that will not log off. A man convinced that yelling longer is the same as seeing clearer. With love, fatigue, and a deep spiritual longing for silence, 2026 remains the year Daddy demands Kenny log off, unplug mid rant, and finally allow the art world the radical possibility of a future not endlessly narrated by the same voice insisting it is the last one that matters. _TheArtDaddy