Q1 2026 Auction Recap: The Market Didn’t Break. It Just Got Pickier.
Three cities, four evening sales, one message. The lots that deserved to sell, sold. The rest were quietly withdrawn, bought-in, or sent to private.
How to Read an Auction Result (the Way Pros Actually Do It)
Price isn’t a number. It’s a tuple of estimate, guarantee, buyer’s premium, and market context. We unpack what you should see when you look at a sale card.
The Hockney Trade: Everyone Owns One, Almost Nobody Is Buying
A granular look at Hockney’s secondary market: where the bid is, what’s drying up, and why his mid-1990s works are quietly the category to watch.
The Ultra-Contemporary Boom Cools — But Doesn’t Crash
The red-chip cohort that defined 2021–2023 has entered the messy middle. Prices are normalizing, flippers are tapped out, and the real discovery starts now.
The Next Wave of Women Painters: What the Data Actually Says
We pulled five years of evening sale results and museum acquisitions. The correction on women painters isn’t what the press releases tell you.
Cecily Brown: The Painter the Market Finally Caught Up With
For years Cecily Brown was the artist serious collectors name-checked while her prices stayed suspiciously reasonable. That window has now closed.
The Catalogue Raisonné Is the Most Important Document in the Market
It’s also slow, political, and increasingly contested. Here’s how to use one, how to read one, and what it actually guarantees.
The $100M Problem: Why the Top of the Market Is Getting Narrower
The number of artists capable of producing a $100 million lot is stuck at roughly twenty. It’s getting harder to get on the list and easier to fall off.
Christopher Wool: A Market That Forgot How to Set Prices
Wool’s last great year at auction was a decade ago. We look at what’s actually trading, where the liquidity hides, and why word paintings sell better than the rest.
Basel Postmortem: The Fair Has Decided What Decade It’s In
Switzerland looked like a museum. That’s a feature now, not a problem. We unpack the buyer mix, the slow-mover list, and what it signals for June.