Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker and this is our exclusive Inner Circle edition. Still haven’t upgraded? Fix that here or email Fritz@puck.news for a group rate. You can afford it, but can you afford to live without it? (Unlikely…)
Clare McAndrew’s annual art market report has become the only consistent barometer of the industry’s waxing and waning health. This year, of course, the news wasn’t so good. As I wrote last week, the report suggested some democratization in the art market, with fewer major transactions but more buyers at relatively inexpensive price points. McAndrew’s report also sketched out a portrait of what it is like to run an art gallery in 2025, which is my focus tonight.
But first…
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- Elaine Wynn dies at 82: The co-founder of two transformative casino businesses, Mirage Resorts and Wynn Resorts, Elaine Wynn was a fixture in the civic life of Las Vegas. Married and twice divorced from Steve Wynn, she developed a competitive interest in art collecting after their second divorce in 2010, famously paying $142 million for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud in 2013. In recent years, Wynn had been the primary force behind plans to build a Las Vegas Museum of Art in partnership with LACMA. The museum plans to break ground on a building next year. Wynn had previously declared that she would fund the museum as much as needed. At the moment, it is unclear if she made provisions for the museum in her estate plan.
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- Heidi Zuckerman pivots to podcasting: The Orange County Museum of Art’s director will be leaving at the end of 2025 when her contract expires. Zuckerman took the helm of the museum in 2021, after a 14-year tenure as director of the Aspen Art Museum. During her time in the O.C., she oversaw the completion of a new, 53,000-square-foot facility that has welcomed half a million visitors and raised $85 million dollars. The release announcing her departure also illuminated the next phase of her career. “Zuckerman will focus on her media company HZ Inc., including her podcast About Art, in partnership with Pardon, a modern family office and venture studio working at the intersection of art and entrepreneurship,” it read. Good luck, Heidi.
- Jack Shainman Gallery now represents the Faith Ringgold estate: Jack Shainman was honored by the Appraisers Association today. Attending the luncheon were Barkley Hendricks’s widow and Faith Ringgold’s daughter. That’s because Shainman is planning a show of Ringgold’s work this November to kick off the gallery’s representation of the estate.
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Monet’s $30M Poplars at Christie’s in May
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Claude Monet, Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule (1891). Photo: Courtesy of Christie's
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Christie’s announced today that it will be auctioning Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, from 1891, in its May 12 20th century evening sale, with an estimate of $30 million. The painting was owned by the family of dealer Paul Durand-Ruel until 1955, and eventually found its way into another family collection, where it has remained for the last 60 years. Monet painted 24 of these images of poplar trees lining fields in France, and this particular example captures the crepuscular moment between sunset and dusk. More than a third of the works in the series are in museum collections, including the Met, Tate, Musée d’Orsay, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This one has been on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine Art for the last 30 years. Demand for Monet’s work has never been stronger. And Christie’s Vanessa Fusco says the work is the impressionist picture of the season. She’s not wrong.
Now let’s get to the main event…
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In her required-reading annual report on the art market, Clare McAndrew gathered responses from 1,600 galleries in 58 countries to convey what it’s like to be an art dealer these days. The short answer: It’s hard.
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Last night, at the opening of Cecilia Alemani’s new Willem de Kooning show at Gagosian, I fell into one of those existential conversations about the state of the art market, and the health of galleries, in particular. The current downturn in art sales has now dragged on for nearly two and a half years, and it’s been tough on everyone in the business. I get fairly regular calls, texts, and emails from folks in the art trade telling me that galleries are behind on their accounts, or about dealers leaving galleries and then suing to collect their sales commissions.
At Gagosian, there was talk of how important it was to have a diversified program with primary artists, secondary sales, and a range of historic and emerging work—to be nimble enough to adapt to the shifting demands and interests of collectors. I’m mindful that every dealer has a different story. The conversation got me thinking about Clare McAndrew’s annual dissertation on the art market, formally the Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report. For the 2025 edition, McAndrew incorporated responses from 1,600 galleries around the world to present an of-the-moment, wide-angle overview of what life is like for an art dealer in 2025. In short, it’s complicated…
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The overall landscape of art dealing is changing. Costs are rising, sales are falling, and inventory is sitting for longer. More galleries rely on a smaller number of artists for the bulk of their sales, often to a smaller number of clients. But many galleries are also seeing substantial turnover in their client base, and a shift in interest from primary market sales to historic work, particularly from the postwar period.
On the cost side, art galleries are getting pinched by an overall increase in the costs of shipping art work to clients and art fairs, travel expenses, and the general costs of attending art fairs. Yet art fairs remain the primary source of new buyers. It’s a vicious cycle.
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The Post-Pandemic Gallery Landscape
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McAndrew reports that dealer sales fell by 6 percent in 2024, to $34.1 billion from $36.2 billion in 2023. Of course, those top-line numbers conceal a more nuanced story. Dealers with annual sales up to $5 million continued to grow. Dealers with annual turnover from $5 million to $10 million saw their sales fall by a manageable 3 percent, while the largest dealers, with annual sales of $10 million or more, saw a significant drop of around 9 percent. (A full 40 percent of the galleries that McAndrew polled sold less than $250,000 of art last year. The next band up, $250,000–$500,000, comprised 13 percent of respondents; 10 percent sold from $500,000 to $1 million; 30 percent made sales of $1 million to $10 million; and only 7 percent sold more than $10 million in art. So that 9 percent drop had a limited impact.)
Within those bands by turnover volume, there was an interesting story to tell. Two-thirds of the galleries with sales over $10 million a year saw sales drop in 2024. But three-quarters of galleries with sales below $250,000 saw stable sales, or an increase year over year. This is more of the same news that we’ve been seeing in auction figures—that buying remains robust at the lower price points, while the largest players are amassing dry powder or cooling their heels.
Taking a longer view, McAndrew decided to map how galleries have fared through the pandemic. After the closures of 2020, the market rebounded in different ways for different dealers. The biggest galleries saw the largest drops in sales volume in the 2020 pandemic year, but dealers in the $5 million–$10 million range enjoyed the largest rebound in 2021. In 2022, galleries with sales above $10 million and those with sales between $500,000 and $1 million saw the only double-digit gains. In 2023, the gains continued for galleries in all bands but the top two, or above $5 million. Last year, the $1 million–$5 million turnover galleries seemed to be right in the sweet spot.
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McAndrew also noted that the galleries’ mix of art is changing as interest in new names wanes and more collectors seek out historical work from established artists. Half of the galleries in McAndrew’s survey sold works directly from an artist’s studio; 41 percent sold art from both the primary and secondary markets; and only 9 percent sold only secondary market material. Even as there is an increasing turn toward historical art, 48 percent of dealers sell contemporary art, and only 17 percent traffic in postwar art, leaving 12 percent to cover modern art and 4 percent to cover impressionism.
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Still, postwar art seems to be having its moment, “with dealers noting that higher prices were concentrated on the most established artists,” per the report. Dealers who only sold contemporary art, according to McAndrew, reported an 11 percent drop in sales. Sales also became more concentrated in a few top artists. Most galleries could expect their biggest artist to account for about a third of all sales, and slightly more than half of sales came from the top three artists in a gallery’s stable.
On the buyer side, there was also a large turnover: Galleries reported that 44 percent of their buyers were new. That said, those buyers accounted for only 38 percent of sales volume. In other words, as you might expect, longer-tenured clients spend more money than newbies. The smallest dealers saw the highest share of new buyers. The largest dealers, those selling more than $10 million a year, had seen real growth in their customer base in 2023; but these galleries relied on a smaller number of their best customers in 2024, as sales slumped.
To give some context to the sales volume, McAndrew’s surveys indicated that the highest volume of sales took place at the galleries selling in the $1 million–$10 million range, which averaged 245 sales. Galleries with sales above $10 million make a slightly lower average number of sales at 207. That just illustrates the power laws underlying art sales—how the presence of bigger-ticket items determines the overall sales volume of a dealership. Interestingly, the median number of sales at galleries in both the $1 million–$10 million band and above $10 million is the same. The above–$10 million galleries just have artists who sell at a much higher price point.
Finally, McAndrew tried to outline the most significant costs that art dealers bear. Of their external expenditures—meaning beyond rent, salaries, and other internal costs—galleries spent 27 percent on art fairs, 15 percent on packaging and shipping, and 13 percent on travel. Only 11 percent of their spending went toward advertising and marketing. Other costs like professional fees, insurance, I.T., and conservation costs were all in the single-digit percentages. This illustrates the importance of art fairs in the art market equation—but also the vulnerability of dealers when the sales generated by those fairs are slumping.
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Those were my highlights from McAndrew’s report. But you really ought to read it for yourself. There’s just a lot more detail in the report than I can cover here.
And do let me know what you think: You can hit reply to this email or message me at +1.917.825.1391 on SMS, Signal, and WhatsApp.
I’ll have more for you on Friday.
M
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_01JRZZF86M0RAEYX95F79BH4WS.png "Claude Monet, Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule (1891). Photo: Courtesy of Christie's")
