The world of African art collecting has been rocked by an announcement made by Emmanuel Macron on 23 November. Following the submission of a report on the restitution of artworks to Africa, the president of the French Republic has decided to return 26 works requested...
On 15 November 2017 a painting was sold at Christie’s in New York for 450,312,500 dollars, the highest amount ever attained at auction, which was one of around twenty known to us by the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci. This result gave rise to various...
The next modern and contemporary art sales of the season will take place the week of the 12 November in New York. The programme features a large amount of expensive art, the most expensive of the last six months, being passed from one hand to another with creations...
Information has a resounding impact in the art market not when it addresses such notions as beauty, aesthetic renewal or visual research, but rather when it uses superlatives: it’s always the most expensive, the biggest, the most spectacular. In the race to extremes...
The day I understood the contemporary art market (the market as opposed to the art itself) was the day I realized that everything in this industry is a question of confidence. The art market isn’t about justice for art nor art history. In an age when virtuosity and...
There are two trends currently shaping the art market. The first is the presence of an art with some kind of political dimension, be it environmental awareness, feminism, or a problematic American presidency... The second is that galleries are having trouble selling...
The Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa (born in 1975), the eighteenth richest man in Japan according to Forbes, founder of Japan's largest online fashion mall, Zozotown, became an overnight celebrity in May 2017 when he announced that he’d purchased an enormous...
The American businessman Mitchell Rales (born in 1956) can’t be said to be wanting for money. Forbes values the wealth of this man, who started out in real estate in 1983, at 3.5 billion dollars and ranks him 652nd in their list of the world’s richest people in 2018....
She told me: “If I were you I would think twice before you decide to go to Tehran. The Grand Bazaar is on strike. The last time that happened the Shah was overthrown”. She’s an American-Iranian friend who receives daily news from Tehran via her family who live in the...
"The art market of today sends very mixed messages.On the one hand, we continue to sell the most expensive, rarest and most important artworks.On the other hand, the paintings that are not so very rare, the works that trade at around 100 00 euros despite being made by...
On Friday 8 June, Christie’s is auctioning a group of 62 artworks estimated at 800,000 euros owned by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. They all share the distinguishing feature of having once belonged to a Milanese dealer, Arturo Schwarz (born in 1924). Schwarz has now...
“I don’t want to dishearten you, but there will inevitably be a serious and lengthy crash caused by the large number of exhibitions and the weariness the public will feel towards contemporary painting. The crash may take place tomorrow or in ten years’ time, I don’t...