Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, less than the equivalent figure from the previous year.

The downturn follows a financial peak in 2022, precipitated by a surge in collecting during the pandemic. Advisors, gallerists, and auction house specialists have told ARTnews recently that, over the last six months, they’ve seen first-hand the significant slowdown in art sales.

Other analyses of the art market show an even starker drop-off. In a recent report by industry analyst Art Tactic, which tracks art sales data globally, the combined auction sales across Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s amounted to $11.2 billion in 2023, a 19 percent decrease from 2022. (This figure excludes sums generated through private sales.)

Meanwhile, the cumulative sales for the top ten artworks at the three auction houses exhibited a significant drop, totaling $660 million in 2023 compared to $1.1 billion in 2022—a nearly 50 percent decrease. In 2021 and 2022, the prices for top artworks consistently increased, with few works in the top ten selling for less than $50 million. Last year, however, four of the top ten artworks sold for under $50 million—far more than in previous years.

A full view of the economic situation is not yet available, as Phillips has yet to disclose its 2023 results. In 2022, the three auction houses collectively generated $17.7 million in sales and Phillips saw a 10 percent increase from 2021, reaching $1.3 billion in 2022. (Phillips declined to respond to inquiries about its 2023 figures.)

Beyond the auction circuit, where prices are transparent, contemporary art galleries featuring earlier and mid-career artists told ARTnews last month that they had experienced significant pullback in buying, particularly from U.S.-based collectors, starting early last year. Multiple gallerists said that their sales were down as much as 25 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The slower sales environment persisted through Art Basel Miami beach, which has become an important venue for young dealers aiming to boost their year-end sales totals. By the fair’s end, ARTnews found that nearly 50 small-scale galleries participating in ABMB’s specialist sections reported making only $1.6 million combined. This figure represents a minuscule portion of the $41.5 million generated through the sales of just three works disclosed by mega-dealers David Zwirner, Pace, and Gagosian during the fair’s initial days.

The Financial Times report, which was based on two anonymous sources, said that high net worth investors based in Europe were approached. So was the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a wealth management fund worth established in 2005 that oversees the assets of the state of Qatar.

The QIA reportedly held discussions with the auction house’s owner a year ago about the purchase of a stake in Sotheby’s via a potential capital increase, a maneuver meant to finance a new investment. Drahi did formally not pursue plans to offload stake in Sotheby’s, the report said. Those discussions are no longer active.

Drahi purchased the auction house in 2019 through his family office for $3.7 billion. The private proposals for the sale of a minority stake in Sotheby’s followed the owner’s announcement in August of a plan to leverage the Altice assets to deal with a $60 billion debt accumulated through acquisitions in France, the US, Portugal, and Israel.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Stewart, the Sotheby’s CEO, denied that Drahi was considering a public offering for Sotheby’s. He also said that the business was not in need of capital raising to fund its operations.

Private investors are commonly pitched for partial sales of companies leading up to IPO offers. In the interview, Stewart said that it is common to occasionally assess investor interest. He said Sotheby’s had exhibited “strength” recently, noting that the house is projected to bring in $8 billion in 2023 sales, around the same amount as last year.

Representatives for Sotheby’s and the QIA declined to comment on the reasons why the discussions ended.

The news comes as the Israel-Hamas war causes tensions for wealth managers and their affiliates. Auction houses have generally not commented publicly on the conflict, and their CEOs have largely kept silent on how the war might impact their businesses.

Qatari officials have been active brokers of negotiations between Hamas and Israel. Historically, Qatar has supported Palestine.

Drahi, who maintains citizenship with Israel, is a prominent philanthropic figure within the country. He oversees his telecommunications company there, and he has a family foundation that funds Israeli cultural initiatives.

Members of Qatar’s royal family are high-profile clients for auction houses and patrons for major museums. In 2021, Qatar gave $5 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to fund its Islamic art wing as part of a loan partnership. In mid-October, shortly after Israel began leading air strikes on Gaza following the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, the Qatar Museums called off a planned opening ceremony around a joint exhibition planned with LACMA and expressed support for Palestine.  

Qatar has in the past demonstrated business interests in investing in the luxury sector, attempting to take a more active role in auction houses in the process. In 2010, Qatari officials expressed interest in bidding for Christie’s, owned by the French billionaire François Pinault. Qatar has also diversified its interests in trophy assets like real estate, acquiring Harrods in London and engaging in discussions about buying a stake in historic hotels in Egypt.

As first reported by Artnet News, WCM will begin moving in early next year with an anticipated opening date of late 2026. Sotheby’s has been the only entity in 1134 York Avenue since 2020, after billionaire Patrick Drahi bought the storied auction house in 2019 for $3.7 billion and took the company private. According to Artnet News, Sotheby’s has a lease on the 10-story building through 2035 with a yearly rent of $42.1 million, paid to a holding company set up by Drahi after the Sotheby’s purchase, which owns the building.

Weill Cornell will lease 200,000 square feet of 1334 York Avenue, replacing Sotheby’s galleries on the fifth through the ninth floors with cutting-edge medical research equipment and laboratories. A source familiar with the arrangement said there will be no overlap between the Sotheby’s staff and the Weill Cornell staff. By the time WCM will have moved in, Sotheby’s will have relocated to the Breuer Building, which it purchased from the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this year. The Breuer will serve as Sotheby’s new global headquarters.

The real estate developments at 1334 York Avenue are part of Sotheby’s relocation plan, a spokesperson told ARTnews, and come as Drahi seems to be evaluating his assets in the face of a $60 billion debt and significant tax charges in Switzerland. Drahi’s money troubles are compounded by allegations of money laundering and tax fraud by a fellow executive at his telecom-slash-media company, Altice. 

A spokesperson for the auction house told ARTnews that “the leasing of some of our space at 1334 York Avenue is a continuation of the strategic transformation of our operational process and client experience in New York. Sotheby’s will continue to host exhibitions and auctions without disruption at 1334 York Ave until 2025.”

Despite the Emily Fisher Landau sale at Sotheby’s being anchored by Pablo Picasso’s 1932 painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Femme à la montre, it was Martin who people were talking about over champagne and white wine both before and after the sale. Grey Stone II had the night’s deepest bidding and eventually hammered at $16 million, more than double its low estimate. With buyers fees, the final price was $18.7 million. That price earned Grey Stone II the title of the most expensive work by Martin to ever sell at auction, a title previously held by Untitled #44, which also sold at Sotheby’s, for $17.7 million last fall during the Macklowe sale.

Keen observers of Martin’s market won’t be surprised by the fact that her work is reaching such heights. Martin is part of a group of historically important artists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, all of whom, not coincidentally, are women who have not been as monetarily appreciated as their male counterparts. Grey Stone II was arguably the perfect work for this season, which saw a return to the importance of provenance, rarity, and historical importance.

“That painting, Graystone II, was a unicorn,” David Galperin, a senior vice president, head of contemporary art, and co-head of marquee sales at Sotheby’s told ARTnews. “It’s the painting that the market has been waiting on for a long, long time.” According to Galperin, Greystone II is one of the earliest examples of Martin “homing in on her archetypal minimal grid compositions” and only one of three large scale works on which Martin used gold leaf. The other two are in museum collections at MoMA and SFMOMA.

The work was cleverly priced. “The specialists at Sotheby’s saw a great amount of interest in the work,” said Masha Golovina, the executive vice president of acquisitions at the fractional art startup Masterworks. “Interest is frequently a function of the estimates. When a historic work could possibly be bought for between $6 million and $8 million dollars that sends a very specific message to the market people who might consider bidding.” 

Recent record-breaking works by Martin that have come up for auction have, in fact, all carried roughly the same estimate dating back to May 2016 when, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary evening sale, Orange Grove (1965) sold for $10.7 million (with fees) against an estimate of $6.5 million to $8.5 million. During the Macklowe sale in 2021 and this month’s Fisher Landau sale, the estimates for Agnes Martin paintings that went on to break her auction record were less than those at an evening sale nearly seven years ago. 

“What we are seeing is the art world asking why artists like Martin, and Mitchell, and Krasner have markets that are significantly lower than their male counterparts,” Marc Glimcher, the chief executive of Pace Gallery told ARTnews. Pace is the only gallery to have ever represented the artist and Marc Glimcher’s father, Pace founder Arne Glimcher, published what some consider the seminal text of Martin’s life and works, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances in 2012, eight years after her death at 92.

“Agnes made about 450 paintings in her lifetime. Or rather, there survive about 450 paintings. When she discovered the grid, in 1960, she destroyed everything she’d made before that point, and she’d been working since the 1930s,” Glimcher said. There are only 60 such grids that survive, of which, according to Glimcher, only five could possibly come to market over the next decade. 

Apart from their rarity and beauty, Martin’s work holds a particular place in the art world, not only for collectors but also for historians and artists: For many she stands as an inspirational character, who like Mark Rothko, represents a purity of artistic mission and eschewed the commercial and financial trappings of the market.

Glimcher described the quickening of Martin’s market as “a moment that has been in the making for a while” and analogous to Rothko’s market in the early aughts. In the 1990s, acquiring a Rothko at auction would cost between $1 million and $3 million. Over the course of  five or so years, that price rose steadily between $3 million to $6 million. 

“Then there was this auction of Tom Hill’s blue and yellow Rothko,” said Glimcher, referring to Rothko’s 1954 painting No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray), which sold for $17.36 million at Sotheby’s in 2004 and is now owned by the collector Tom Hill. “It was estimated for between six and eight million and sold for 17, and everybody thought, ‘Oh my God! The world’s gone insane! We all sat in the auction floor thinking everyone’s lost their minds. Now you can’t get a work on paper for $17 million.”

The steady increase in Rothko’s market is the same logarithmic change that Glimcher sees happening in Martin’s market. The fact that Martin’s work is so rare—Glimcher estimates about half of her paintings are held by institutions and says there was nothing left in the estate when she passed—means that with each year the prices at auction will likely rise.

“The real issue is that the work is finite, as in Martin always had an audience but the work was never that valuable, so it was never traded,” said Anthony Meier, the San Francisco-based art dealer and president of the Art Dealers Association of America. “When compared to her male counterparts of that vintage, the price achieved at Sotheby’s, just like Christie’s in 2016, is absolutely cheap.” 

Meier said the result at the Fisher Landau sale was simple to qualify: beauty and quality rule. “Yes, the art market is down, yes, the world is in a precarious place. But Grey Stone II was a glorious thing that’s not coming around again. For an all-time great artist? It was a bargain. Good luck finding another one.”

The sale set records for Marina Perez Simão, Mohammed Sami, Julie Mehretu, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ad Reinhardt, and Amy Sillman.

As is typical of evening sales staged in New York, a significant portion of the lots came to the sale with financial arrangements that the house secured in advance to ensure risks were offset for consignors of major lots: 42 lots—nearly 70 percent of those on offer—were backed by presale financial guarantees.

Julie Mehretu Tops ‘Now’ Sale

Kicking off the evening, the Now sale lasted exactly an hour, and turned out to be a white-glove event, meaning all the 18 lots offered found buyers. Sotheby’s launched the “Now” series after the height of the pandemic, and it quickly began racking up speculative demand for rising painters. Three years later, the bullish demand for artists still early in their careers has notably cooled, but tonight’s edition saw success for artists who have previously exceeded expectations at auction. And nearly 40 percent of the offerings also hammered at prices in excess of their high estimates.

Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s Americas chairman, won the bid for Julie Mehretu’s Walkers With the Dawn and Morning. The gray-toned abstract painting appeared in the 2008 showcase Prospect.1 New Orleans, at the New Orleans Museum of Art. A catalogue for that show reveals MoMA trustee Michael Ovitz as the Sotheby’s consignor. The painting hammered at $9.5 million, at the high end of its $7 million–$10 million estimate; the final price of $10.7 million (with fees) set a new record for the artist, surpassing Mehretu’s previous record of $9.3 million set just last month. Wednesday night’s result was also the highest public price recorded for an artist born in Africa.

Jadé Fadojutimi’s Teeter towards me, from 2019, nearly reset the record for the young London-based artist, who last year appeared in the Venice Biennale and joined the roster at Gagosian gallery. After several minutes’ bidding, the lot hammered at $1.4 million ($1.8 million with fees), demolishing the low estimate of $600,000 and narrowly missing the record $1.94 million the British artist set at Phillips on Tuesday night. Another record set at Sotheby’s was that for Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami. Six bidders chased his 2021 canvas The Praying Room over the course of nearly 4 minutes, after which it hammered on a bid of $750,000, more than six times its high estimate, going for a final price of $952,000.

Some of the sale’s more anticipated lots, works by Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, and Jenny Saville sold from the private holdings of Chinese collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, founders of Shanghai’s Long Museum, saw less action among bidders. The collectors made headlines earlier this fall when they announced plans to part with nearly 60 contemporary art works from their collection. The Marshall painting titled Plunge (1982) hammered at its low estimate of $9 million. Meanwhile, Saville’s Shift (1996), depicting a view from above of five nude figures lying side by side, hammered at $9.2 million, just above its $9 million estimate. Dumas’s 1994 canvas Love your Neighbor, also a figurative work, hammered at $5 million, below its low $5.5 million expectation. Together, the three works brought in a collective $27 million with fees.

Contemporary Sale Sets Records for Barkley Hendricks, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Others

Bidding was more restrained in the second half of the evening, when Sotheby’s London-based auctioneer Oliver Barker took over to lead the contemporary art sale. This seemed to follow a trend established during last week’s sales, where tried-and-true blue-chip material by male artists is performing less well than that by women artists from the postwar period, as well as certain artists in the ultra-contemporary category.

One of the night’s most expensive lots—as well as one of the largest, standing more than 9 feet high—was Gerhard Richter’s 1997 canvas Abstraktes Bild. The work was estimated to make $25 million; offered with an irrevocable bid, it attracted only two bids with Sotheby’s New York specialists, hammering at $27.5 million ($31.9 million with fees), placing among the top 10 most expensive Richters to sell at auction.

Blue-chip stars on the auction circuit that typically serve as cover lots in evening sales also failed to surpass expectations. A Basquiat from the important year 1982 and a Diebenkorn hammered at $39 million and $10 million, respectively. Both prices fell below their low estimates.

At another point, a 1962 painting by Frank Stella hammered at $16 million, eliciting applause as it beat its $10 million low estimate. Several lots later came another high point: a 1960 Ad Reinhardt monochrome canvas from his “Black Paintings” series set a record at $3.7 million.

Competing for attention with the Richter were works by two Black artists, Barkley Hendricks and Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose prices are finally catching up with their historical value. Both set records during the sale. Hendricks’s 1984 work Yocks, a portrait of two men standing casually with one’s hand on the other’s shoulder, sold for $8.4 million on a $6 million estimate. Sotheby’s New York head of private sales David Schrader competed for the work for a phone bidder, losing out to another New York specialist, whose client scored with a hammer price of $7 million. The result broke the previous record of $6.1 million set for Hendricks at Christie’s New York earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the sculptor and writer Chase-Riboud’s La Musica / Amnesia, a bronze figurine from 1990, hammered at $647,700 with fees, five times its $120,000 high estimate. The record comes nearly a year after Chase-Riboud, whose practice centers on Black activists and political figures, was the subject of a retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, and less than a year after she joined gallery giant Hauser & Wirth.

More than anything, the solid sale served as reassurance for the art trade, which went into this auction season with a fair amount of jitters. “The market remains selective,” Sotheby’s New York contemporary art specialist David Galperin said after the sale, “but overall tonight proved that, at its core, the market is deep and remains hungry for works that are smartly brought to market and estimated competitively.”

Eight lots were withdrawn, while nearly half the lots were backed by financial guarantees.

Monday’s sale marked the second week in New York’s marquee fall auction season, so far highlighted by a white-glove sale of 31 works from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection last Tuesday at Sotheby’s that brought in $406 million and a $640 million sale of 20th-century art at Christie’s that set several artist records last Thursday.

Despite that success, Monday’s sale was a comparatively more subdued performance. Led by Sotheby’s auctioneer Michael Macaulay, a contemporary art specialist, the sale saw works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Alberto Giacometti, and Rufino Tamayo, among others, hammer at prices below their low estimate.

A work by Hedda Sterne, who died in 2011 and whose affiliation with the New York School is lesser-known in the market, however, set a new record for the artist.

One of the night’s highest performers was Claude Monet’s 1888 painting Le Moulin de Limetz, sold by the descendants of Chicago industrialist Potter Palmer. After deep competition by bidders on the phone with specialists and in the room, it hammered at $21.5 million, well above its $18 million high estimate, or $25.6 million with fees. It sold with applause to a bidder on the phone with Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s vice chairman of global fine arts.

Around the same point in the sale, Sotheby’s deputy chairman of Asia Jen Hua won the bid for a 1924 painting by Marc Chagall titled Au-dessus de la ville after a bidding war with Scott Niichel, Sotheby’s Americas senior vice president of modern & contemporary art, that lasted several minutes. The work hammered at $13.3 million, above its $12 million low estimate, going for $15.6 million with fees.

Another high point was La Patience, a 1948 painting by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, more commonly known as Balthus, that was being deaccessioned by the Art Institute of Chicago. Estimated to sell between $12 million and $18 million, the work depicts the young model Jeanette Aldry hunched over an antique game table. It hammered just above its low estimate at $12.5 million to sell for a final price of $14.7 million, marking the third-highest price achieved for the French artist at auction.

Following the Balthus sale, a 1968 untitled work on paper by Mark Rothko brought one of the night’s unexpected moments of excitement. Sold from the holdings of Tennessee philanthropist Pitt Hyde, the work hammered at $20.5 million, far surpassing its $7 million low estimate. Proceeds from the sale, which came to $23.9 million with fees, went to benefit the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which the Hyde family funds through a foundation.

Notably, Philip Guston’s 1952 canvas The Bell was among the six works withdrawn prior to sale. Slated with an estimate of $6 million to $8 million, the work appeared in the “Philip Guston Now” exhibition when it traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Met trustee and Miami-based collector Aaron Fleischman, who has owned the work since 1990, told ARTnews of his plans to sell the work after deciding not to donate it to a museum.

Hedda Sterne’s 1956 canvas Roads #7 was the night’s opening lot, bringing attention to one of the sale’s lesser-known artists. An active member of the New York School and a subject in the Centre Pompidou’s 2021 exhibition “Women in Abstraction,” Sterne’s is not a name widely recognized on the auction circuit. This sale marked the first appearance of her work in an evening sale. The winning bid, pursued by four phone bidders, ultimately went to a woman in the room; it hammered at a price of $650,000, surpassing the $600,000 high estimate. The final result, $818,000, set a record for the artist.

The hype around mid-century female painters, which had been evident in previous seasons, has notably cooled lately. However, toward the sale’s end, Julian Dawes, an Impressionist and modern art specialist at Sotheby’s New York, secured the bid for a Remedios Varo oil painting titled Astro errante (1961). The painting, depicting an anthropomorphized star appearing as a female figure emitting rays of light, surpassed its $1.2 million estimate, hammering at $1.7 million with fees. Varo’s current record of $6.2 million was set in 2020.

The hammer price for the red, white and blue stamp was $1.7 million. The auction was conducted by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries on November 8.

“This is a historic moment for the hobby,” president Scott Trepel said in a statement emailed to ARTnews. “The Inverted Jenny we sold today is the best example of the 100 stamps from the sheet. We have tracked each of the stamps and are certain no other example compares to this one. For the collector, it simply doesn’t get better than this and the sale price of over $2 million reflects that fact.”

The 24-cent stamp was part of a rare sheet of 100 sold to a collector for $24 in 1918. The was an error made by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in the rush to print the design commemorating the world’s first regularly scheduled airmail route. All the other sheets with the image error were destroyed. It has become one of the most famous stamps in American history, and was even featured in the season five premiere of the Simpsons.

The stamp sold by Siegel Auctions was reviewed by two expert organizations, given a grade of 95 on a scale of 10 to 100 and deemed “Mint Never-Hinged”—in the same condition as when it was sold 105 years ago.

Prior to the record-breaking sale, Siegel Auctions sold several other examples of the Inverted Jenny stamp, included a block of four in 2005 for $2.7 million and another in “Mint Never-Hinged” condition in 2018 for $1.35 million. Trepel told the New York Times he has handled 66 of the stamps, selling a few more than once, and the company’s website also features an image of the stamp in its logo.

In June 2021, Sotheby’s sold a block of four Inverted Jenny stamps for an even higher sum during its “Three Treasures” sale of items from shoe designer Stuart Weitzman. The “lightly hinged” group of four had an estimate of $5 million to $7 million, and sold for $4.86 million with fees.

That $406 million total figure represents one of the highest ever achieved for a single-owner collection at auction. Still, that sum is modest still in comparison to the $676 million brought in from the court-ordered sale of the Macklowe collection, sold at Sotheby’s last fall, and the $646 million total drawn during the sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018.

The Landau auction was what’s called a “white glove sale”, meaning that each and every one of its 31 lots offered were placed with buyers, though it’s worth keeping in mind that each of those lots were backed by third-party guarantees—minimum bids secured by the auction house in deals with outside parties ahead of the sale that are meant to offset financial risk. There were some disappointments and some bright spots: nearly a third of the lots hammered at prices below their low estimates, but new records were set for Agnes Martin and Mark Tansey.

Anchoring the evening sale was a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso. Bidding for the canvas, depicting Picasso’s early muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, started at $100 million. A few bids brought the hammer price for the work to $121 million. The work eventually went to a bidder on the phone with Brooke Lampley, head of Sotheby’s Global Fine Art division. Ahead of the sale, the painting was offered with an estimate upon request of $120 million. The end result, inclusive of fees, came to $139 million, the second highest price ever achieved for Picasso at auction, below the $179 million paid for Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), 1955, when it was sold at Christie’s in 2015.

After the Picasso hammered, the sale seemed to lose a bit of momentum. Multiple lots sold for upward of $20 million, but didn’t far surpass the auction house’s expectations for them. Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss), a black-ground canvas featuring the word “BOSS” in bold red lettering, brought the second-highest auction price ever for the West Coast artist, going for a total of $39.4 million with fees. The painting hammered just below its $35 million estimate. Following a similar course was a 1958 canvas from Mark Rothko’s heralded series of works commissioned for New York City’s Seagram Building. That work hammered on a bid of $19 million, well below its $30 million estimate. It sold to a bidder on the phone with Sotheby’s Asia chairman Wendy Lim, the final price coming out to $22 million with fees.

Elsewhere in the sale, historically important women artists were a focus. Agnes Martin’s large-scale canvas Grey Stone II (1961), an off-white monochrome painting, was the among the works that saw the deepest bidding of the night. When Barker opened the lot to the room, bids quickly soared, and eventually, the work hammered at a staggering $16 million, more than double its low estimate of $6 million. It went to a determined bidder in the room for a final price of $18.7 million with fees, surpassing Martin’s previous record of $17.7 million, for her painting Untitled #44 at Sotheby’s Macklowe sale last November, and setting a new record for the artist.

Earlier in the night, four bidders battled for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Tulip (Abstraction – #77 Tulip), a floral abstraction that she produced in 1925 and that was featured in exhibitions at New York’s Intimate Gallery the following year, when O’Keeffe was still rising as an artist. Landau bought the canvas directly from O’Keeffe in 1985, just a year before the artist’s death. The work went to a bidder in the room for a final price of $4.75 million, hammering over its low estimate of $3 million.

By contrast with Christie’s sale of 21st century art on Tuesday night, living artists were few and far between in the Sotheby’s sale. One standout was Glenn Ligon, whose black-and-white textual work, Untitled (I Lost My Voice, I Found My Voice), hammered at $2.7 million, above the $2.5 million estimate, going for $3.2 million. Landau bought the piece in 1991 and later loaned it to the the artist’s 2011 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

“Given the strength of the material I was expecting more,” said collector Max Dolciger, speaking to the sale as a whole. “But it was still a success. People were excited about how fresh the works were and of course about the provenance, but they were still cautious. It has nothing to do with the art. It has to do with where the world is right now and everything going on.”

With London and Paris auctions behind us, all eyes are on the New York evening sales—the final fall touchstone of the art market—which kick off November 7 with Christie’s 21st century evening sale, led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version II), which carries an $18 million–25 million estimate. But the sales this year come amid a far different economy and auction market than last year.

For even casual art market observers, the phrase “market correction” has been ubiquitous since at least this past spring’s New York sales, the market’s other major defining period. In May, Sotheby’s pulled five lots from their contemporary evening sale. The move, along with multiple bank failures and the much-talked-about end of the “cheap money” era , led some insiders to predict a correction to the market’s top end. Others noted that the previously white-hot ultra-contemporary market had noticeably cooled.

Even then, there were questions about whether the art market’s post-Covid bounce-back, which roughly tracked the frothiness around other alternative assets beginning in 2021, had begun to fade. Last year’s UBS Art Basel Report noted that public auctions generated $26.3 billion in 2021, a 47 percent increase over the previous year. Meanwhile, this year’s report (on 2022) noted a 2 percent decrease over 2021’s total. The auction houses seemed to quietly acknowledge the new climate, with one New York–based auction house chairman telling ARTnews in May that the major houses were being “sensibly aggressive” in negotiations with potential consignors, as they tried to draw strong works to the block.

It is, of course, difficult to directly compare one year to another, given how much the auction market seems to be at the mercy of large estates coming to market. Last year was no different, supercharged as it was by the Harry and Linda Macklowe collection, which famously came to auction, thanks to a bitter divorce and backed by a court order . That sale drew $922.2 million, making it the most valuable single-owner sale ever to be auctioned. That record was promptly broken in November by the Paul Allen sale, which drew $1.5 billion. And then there was the sale of Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, which Larry Gagosian bought at Christie’s for $195 million , making it the most expensive work by a 20th-century artist ever to be sold at auction. There are marquee collections coming up for auction this year—for example, Emily Fisher Landau’s, with its pristine Picasso, at Sotheby’s—but on the global auction scale that’s comparing apples to Apple stock.

Those headline-grabbing results hid a wider shift among bidders, according to Drew Watson, head of art services with Bank of America Private Bank. “If you scratch beneath the surface last fall, and you looked at the evening sales, and especially the day sales, you can see that there was less depth of bidding than we had gotten used to,” Watson told ARTnews. “A lot of things were selling at the low estimate on the reserve, even as sell-through rates still looked okay.”

There are other indications of the market softening. Auction sales at the three main houses during London’s Frieze Week evening sales this year were down by 20 percent, with only 80 percent of the works sold, as opposed to last year, when there was reportedly “an air of reassurance in the middle market .” The slip in sales during Frieze week feels like a repeat of the June auctions in London, during which Christie’s saw most lots generate hammer prices near or below low estimates during its 20th and 21st century evening sale. This despite the assurances of Keith Gill, the house’s London head of Impressionist and modern art, who said the house’s strategy consisted of offering “the right works at the right estimates.” Last summer in London, Christie’s three-act evening sale achieved “ few records and fewer fireworks,” despite being bolstered by two paintings by Monet, one from his famous water lilies series, but still brought in £203.9 million. This year their total for the same London June sales was £63.8 million.

So, is the market “corrected” from the Covid boom? It’s hard to say. This year, the Federal Reserve has embarked on its most aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes since the 1980s, in an effort to curb inflation. While some have claimed such hikes have little effect on the ultra-rich, the rates have had a devastating effect on venture capital and the tech industry , among other sectors. It would be silly to suggest that collectors alone are immune. The obvious other data point being the exploding Covid art market in 2021, when interest rates hit their all-time low. One doesn’t get wealthy enough to spend millions on a painting by ignoring macroeconomics.  

The reality is this: the market fluctuates, often dramatically. In 2017, the UBS Art Basel Report found that the auction market in 2016 had tanked 26 percent from 2015. The following year, it jumped 27 percent. The year 2019 saw a 17 percent drop from the previous year and 2020 was a 30 percent decline from 2019. And, of course, all that was sorted by 47 percent jump in 2021. 

The market dips and bounces back, as Josh Baer noted in a recent episode of the BaerFaxt podcast. “There’s always a new group coming in supporting the market,” Baer said. “Somebody will step into the fray and some people will move on. Nothing is new.” At the end of the day, with collectors, he added, what it really comes down to is “what’s going on with the stuff I collect.”