Crisis or not?

The United States is the epicentre of the global art market. In 2024, art transactions worldwide were estimated at 57.4 billion dollars, of which 24.8 billion were generated in the United States (1). The crisis, in step with all the economic, geostrategic and political uncertainties then affecting the world, also hit the art world, with a decline in appetite for buying works. It continued in 2025, with gallery closures that shocked observers. Then came the Art Basel Paris fair, which in October brought with its glamour and buzz a new sense of euphoria.

New York November auctions

And in November 2025 in New York sales of modern and contemporary art alone totalled 2.2 billion dollars. Nothing on this scale had been seen for a very long time during these key events, which steer the market for the following six months.

283 galleries

Finally, the last major test of the year: on 3 December 2025 the largest contemporary art fair in the United States, Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), opened its doors with, for its 23rd edition, 283 galleries. Against all expectations – after several participants had pulled out in the preceding months – opening day was euphoric, and the aisles were packed.

Noah Horowitz

For Art Basel’s CEO Noah Horowitz, “Obviously people are still worried. But there is a lot of wealth out there. Collectors needed to return to a positive mindset, to a certain optimism. And in the end, it’s a confidence-driven market. And confidence drives confidence.…”.

Closing galleries

In fact, the art market is undergoing a full-scale transformation. A shift in taste in art, and a shift in the players. Galleries continue to close. In Paris, for example, High Art, an excellent scouting venue for young artists, announced that it would shut its space on 28 November 2025. Other professionals are reorganising.

David Schrader

One of the most powerful multinationals, Pace Gallery, is now teaming up with New York–based French dealer Emmanuel Di Donna, a specialist in modern art, and with American David Schrader, until now head of private sales at Sotheby’s. Within PDS Gallery (Pace, Di Donna, Schrader), which is shaping up to be a new heavyweight in the field, the three partners are pooling their activities in the secondary market (everything that does not concern freshly created art). This new entity, which has not yet found its premises – they will be located on New York’s Upper East Side – aims to organise three museum-quality exhibitions a year. “It is, in a way, a response to the market. We are entering a new cycle. There was still a space to be taken. Taste is more classical. Demand is multifaceted,” explains David Schrader, who had of course travelled to Miami to see the country’s biggest fair.

Karma gallery

If there is one way in which the market has changed, it is in prices. Collectors are less willing to accept runaway price hikes, as was the case in the recent past. The Karma gallery, founded by Brendan Dugan and based in New York and Los Angeles, represents Woody De Othello (born 1991), an American artist of Haitian origin who makes ceramic sculptures.

He is the subject of a remarkable exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, on view until 28 June 2026. It features a repertoire of forms with a fantastical spirit, inspired among other things by the voodoo cult. His works are priced between 20,000 and 100,000 dollars, and Brendan Dugan admits that he has not raised prices for several years despite Othello’s success. That is the market’s new line.

Juliette Roche

One of the persistent waves in current trends, by contrast, is the recognition of women artists, far too long forgotten. The Paris gallery of Pauline Pavec is taking part in ABMB for the first time with a one-woman show dedicated to Juliette Roche (1884–1980), an avant-garde painter. Close for a time to Duchamp and Picabia, she has never really enjoyed a posterity. Within the couple she formed with the Cubist Albert Gleize, perhaps priority was given to him. Juliette Roche’s changing flair sometimes draws on Cubism, but also on a raw painting with naïve accents, yet displaying an astonishing command of colour. On the very first day Pauline Pavec had already sold several canvases by the artist, offered at prices between 38,000 and 150,000 euros. The Centre Pompidou owns a large painting by Juliette Roche, which it was showing before its closure, and according to the gallerist the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently acquired one of her works. At auction, the record price for Roche, achieved in 2023, stands at 115,000 euros for a Cubist painting from 1917.

Joan Mitchell

One of the most impressive paintings at the fair is a diptych by another woman, the illustrious abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), shown on the stand of the Richard Gray Gallery from Chicago. Measuring 3.6 metres across, it depicts, in a tangle of golden yellows and violets, what could be a field of sunflowers. The work is for sale at 18.5 million dollars, one of the highest sums at ABMB 2025. Joan Mitchell was the subject of a successful exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in dialogue with Claude Monet, in 2022.

Beeple

This year, the major innovation at the fair lies in a small section called Zero 10, masterfully curated by a digital-art specialist, Eli Scheinman, which showcases the sheer diversity of work being produced in this field. The headline piece is by Beeple, alias Mike Winkelmann (born 1981), known for having sold, at Christie’s in 2021, a work in NFT form for the record price of 69.3 million dollars. The artist, who has since evolved in remarkable fashion, has this time devised a series of robot dogs with hyper-realistic human heads. Highly provocative, they respectively portray Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Beeple himself, but also Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

These animated creatures romp around in a small park without colliding, and periodically eject from their rear ends photographs showing the spectators who are looking at them. “In future, sculptures will inevitably come to be living objects,” Beeple argues. But why mix artists and tech billionaires here? “Because in both cases we look at the world through their lens.” By the opening of the fair, nine of the ten human-headed dogs had already been sold, at 100,000 dollars each.

The Reefline project

Finally, although over time the art market has become a very serious business in Miami, the city remains the epicentre of eccentricity. One of its local celebrities, cultural entrepreneur Ximena Caminos, has launched an extraordinary project: an underwater exhibition park, The Reefline Project. It was inaugurated with an intervention by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich (born 1973), who also lives in Paris. His project is installed 300 metres off the beach, at a depth of seven metres. It consists of 22 concrete casts of cars, each weighing 13 tonnes. Over time, and with the collaboration of a coral scientist, the installation will encourage marine flora to take over the work, eventually transforming its form.

“There used to be a coral reef here that was destroyed when Miami Beach was built. The scientists are going to make sure it recolonises the site,” explains Leandro. The installation can be visited in diving gear. The other way to see Erlich’s work in Miami is, at the fair, to go to the stand of the Brazilian gallery Luciana Brito. She is showing a large coral mass in resin designed by him (priced at 120,000 dollars). On closer inspection, the branches of this big white bouquet turn out to be buildings. A poetic way of suggesting that every fragment of nature contains teeming pockets of life.

On view through 7 December. www.artbasel.com/miami-beach

(1) According to the Art Basel and UBS survey on global collecting, published in October 2025.