Now, that bar has lowered. In 2023, the landscape changed once again, the prices of the most expensive works sold at auction having dropped significantly from last year.

Compare this year’s 10th most expensive work to that of 2022. Henri Rousseau’s Les Flamants (1910) sold this past May for $43.5 million, setting a new auction record for him. That’s a little more than half the price of the Magritte sold in 2022.

Signs of a downturn are evident in other ways too. This year, four of the works that generated the year’s top 10 prices overall went for under $50 million—many fewer than last year. Consider the most expensive work sold at auction too. This year’s most expensive work, a Picasso painting, sold for $139 million. Last year’s, a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, sold for $195 million. That’s a 29 percent difference between the two.

The total figures for the top 10 lots exhibit a similar loss—$660 million in 2023 versus $1.1 billion in 2022.

Below, a look at the most valuable lots sold at auction in 2023.

For end-of-year coverage, we’ve also got lists of the year’s defining art events, exhibitions, and artworks, as well as roundups of under-recognized artists who got their due and assessments of the year’s major news stories, from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the British Museum’s various controversies.

Thank you for reading, as always, and we look forward to seeing you in 2024.

The Headlines

ANNUAL REVIEW. Only moments remain in 2023, and ARTnews is looking back with a “Year in Review” package. Gameli Hamelo charted developments in African art, Francesca Aton examined the most important archaeological discoveries, and Daniel Cassady charted signs of an art market that is “no longer easy-breezy.” There is a great deal more: Karen K. Ho on the trials and tribulations of the beleaguered British Museum, Tessa Solomon on how the Israel-Hamas war is “reshaping . . . the art industry in real time,” and Alex Greenberger on the bevy of Pablo Picasso shows that were tied to the 50th anniversary of his passing. It’s “safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process,” Greenberger writes. And there is still more—with more to come today at the ARTnews site. The full lineup is here. Have a great end to your year.

RESTITUTION WATCH. A painting by the Dutchman Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638), Adam and Eve, which was looted by the Nazis from the storied Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, has been returned to his heir, the Art Newspaper reports. The work was identified as stolen after it was offered to the Musée Rolin in Autun, France, as a donation. Goudstikker’s family has been trying for years to recover material plundered from him during World War II. More than 1,300 paintings were taken, according to a law firm working for the family. The Dutch government restituted 200 almost two decades ago; more than 800 stolen by Nazi Hermann Göring are believed to be at large.

The Digest

South Korea’s culture ministry said that it will revamp its grant system for artists to award larger sums to fewer projects. It anticipates that the average funding for a proposal will go from about $23,000 today to $79,000 by 2027. It is also planning an effort to provide young people free access to culture. [Yonhap News Agency]

It is not just big-name museum curators who are decamping to commercial galleries, Julia Halperin reports. Registrars, educators, video editors, and more are also making the switch from the nonprofit to the for-profit realm. “I felt underpaid but not overworked,” one job mover said. “I felt under-appreciated.” [The Art Newspaper]

Critic Jason Farago has a clear-eyed essay on the rise of AI-generated art. “If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that—what do you know?—a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial,” he writes. [The New York Times]

Writer Nicholas Day has penned a book for young readers about Vincenzo Peruggia’s 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. It’s called The Mona Lisa Vanishes. “I think everyone has this sort of weird soft spot for art theft,” Day said in an intervew. [New England Public Media/Maine Public]

Actor and painter Pierce Brosnan is accused of going out-of-bounds in a thermal area of Yellowstone National Park near the border of Wyoming and Montana. He reportedly has a court date at the park next month and has not commented. [The Associated Press]

Behold, a guide to many of the luxe properties owned by members of the Rockefeller family over the years, including the art-rich Kykuit manor north of New York City. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK. Back in July, ARTnews reported that actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie had taken a lease on 57 Great Jones Street, the Downtown Manhattan building once owned by Andy Warhol, where Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked, for her fashion venture, Atelier Jolie. The business has since moved in, and in the New York Times, reporter Alex Vadukul has a deep dive on the long history of the place. One choice anecdote: Back in 1905, it was apparently home to a rowdy saloon, where one John Ratta was wounded in a gunfight. Declining to cooperate with the police, Ratta apparently said that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it entered his flesh,” according to the Times. Hate it when that happens! [NYT]

The Headlines

EXCHANGE PROGRAM? The diplomatic drama around the Parthenon Marbles continues. Greece’s culture minister, Lina Mendoni, told the Guardian that if the UK sends the contested sculptures back to Athens from the British Museum, “Greece is prepared to organize rotating exhibitions of important antiquities that would fill the void.” The museum’s chair, George Osborne, has been open about trying to reach some form of “partnership” agreement with Greece on the contested material, but that has yet to materialize. One major issue: UK law forbids the British Museum from deaccessioning work, and Greece has been resolute that it is the rightful owner of the pieces. Last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak nixed a meeting with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, because of the latter’s vocal advocacy for the repatriation of the works during a trip to the UK.

THE PUBLIC REALM. Since 1915, a Confederate monument, Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy, has been on view in Jacksonville, Florida’s Springfield Park. No longer. The sculpture was removed on Wednesday by the city’s Democratic mayor, Donna Deegan, the Associated Press reports. “Symbols matter,” Deegan said in a statement. “They tell the world what we stand for and what we aspire to be.” The chair of the county Republican Party, Dean Black, said that the action “is another in a long line of woke Democrats obsession with Cancel Culture and tearing down history.” On a decidedly lighter public-art note, a massive bronze statue of the superstar singer Shakira—more than 20 feet tall!—was installed in her hometown, Barranquilla, Colombia, BBC News reports. The artist responsible for the piece is Yino Márquez. A plaque at the sculpture’s base speaks of “hips that do not lie, a unique talent, a voice that moves masses.”

The Digest

The revered artist Pope.L, “whose daredevil performances and conceptual artworks unraveled the concept of race and explored the complexities of language,” died at his home in Chicago on December 23, Alex Greenberger reports. He was 68. [ARTnews]

Unionized employees at the Eiffel Tower in Paris went on strike on Wednesday, with contract negotiations looming. The action will shutter the structure’s upper levels for the time being, a spox said. Around 20,000 people typically visit the place every day at this time of year. [AFP/France 24]

The French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, whose collaborative practice made them leading figures in the design world for more than 20 years, have parted ways and are now working independently. Colleagues in their field spoke of intense public arguments between the two. [The New York Times]

South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art said that it has finished cataloguing the art of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee that was donated to the state by his family. It includes 1,494 pieces by 266 artists. A not-for-sale book on the material will be viewable at the museum’s libraries. [Korea JoongAng Daily]

Reporter Alex Marshall paid a visit to the very cool-looking Crab Museum in Margate, England. It is about a whole lot more than crabs! [The New York Times]

The Kicker

BURNING QUESTIONS. For the Associated Press, Scott Sonner took a look at the state of Burning Man, which has been drawing larger and larger crowds of revelers—from hippie types to billionaires and celebs—out to Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the past three decades. Among participants, there is always debate about how the festival should operate, and perhaps a generational divide, Sonner reports. One five-time Burner told the AP, “The people that created this community, a lot of them are getting older and retiring and there’s a lot of new young people coming in, the kind that have, you know, a couple $100,000 RVs and are kind of just careless about the environment.” Sick burn. [AP]

Which is not to say that grand blockbusters didn’t happen. There was a Vermeer retrospective that had been awaited for years, and Édouard Manet’s Olympia visited the US for the first time ever as part of a Manet-Degas double-header. That both kinds of exhibitions could coexist, sometimes even within the walls of the same institution, demonstrated just how much the remit of major museums has changed in the past few years.

Below, a look at the 25 exhibitions which defined 2023.

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH JUSTICE. OR ART. An absolute television legend, Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, is promising a trove of works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zachary Small reports in the New York Times. The bounty includes more than 200 pieces, from giants like Vincent van Gogh (an early oil landscape), Orazio Gentileschi, and his daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi . Wolf’s gift also includes a financial component in an undisclosed amount that a museum rep said is in the tens of millions of dollars, Small writes. That donation will endow two galleries in the museum’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts that will bear Wolf’s name.

SUMMARY JUDGEMENTS. A French couple who parted with a rare 19th-century Fang mask for €150 (about $164 million), only to learn that it later sold for €4 million ($4.38 million), lost their legal bid to nix the sale and obtain those proceeds, CNNreports. They argued that the dealer who purchased the piece had acted improperly; a French court said they showed “carelessness.” Speaking of price differences: An N.C. Wyeth illustration purchased for $4 at a bargain store and sold at auction for $191,000, only to have the winning bidder refuse to follow through on the transaction has found a buyer, the New York Times reports. The collector is going unnamed, as is the price, beyond “six figures.”

The Digest

The Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, has named as its next director Namhee Park, a veteran of the nation’s art scene who curated the 2022 Jeju Biennale on that Korean island. A visiting professor at Hongik University, Park succeeds Seong Eun Kim, who took the helm in 2019. [Artforum]

Musician and fashion designer Kanye West, who has been widely condemned for making antisemitic statements, has listed a Malibu home designed by Tadao Ando for about $57 million. The residence is in the midst of a gut renovation, and “several million dollars” will be required to finish it, a listing agent said. [The Wall Street Journal]

Artist Stephen Power’s art shop in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, Espo’s Art World, will close at the end of the year after 11 years in business. Speaking about his team, Power said, “We want to discover something else because we’re artists, so it’s time for a change.” [NY1]

Earlier this year, it was reported that the longtime Italian political leader and media baron Silvio Berlusconihad a collection of some 25,000 paintings, but that each was worth only an average of €800 ($880). Louisa McKenzie looked at the long history of powerful people acquiring art, good and bad. [The Times of London]

The Prado has spent three months restoring Caravaggio’s astonishing David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1610), and just put it back on view. “Now, viewers can more easily distinguish several planes in the painting,” Ana Marcos writes. [El País]

The Kicker

COMING TO RELIGION. The U.S. government has designated the beloved Wayfarers Chapel—an ingenious, elegant construction of glass and wood amid redwood trees in Rancho Palos Verdes, California—as a National Historic Landmark, the Los Angeles Times reports. The place was designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright) in 1951 for the Swedenborgian Church, and it has been known to have a powerful effect on its visitors. The Rev. David Brown told the paper, “Militant atheists who don’t believe in anything feel something in our chapel.” [LAT]

The Headlines

MORE MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS. The oil and gas giant BP has agreed to a £50 million ($63.3 million) sponsorship deal with the British Museum, drawing a great deal of criticism from climate activists, the Financial Times reports. “No cultural establishment that has a responsibility to educate and inform should be allowing fossil fuel companies to pay them to clean their image,” Greenpeace UK staffer Doug Parr told the paper. The funds will go toward a £1 billion ($1.27 billion) renovation of the gallery over the next 10 years. In the Art Newspaper, Martin Bailey reports on newly released minutes from meetings that the British Museum’s board held at which they discussed the potential funding. Some trustees stated objections, but the board “unanimously agreed that accepting the sponsorship was on balance in the best interests of the museum,” per the minutes.

THE TOP JOBS. The treasure-filled Uffizi in Florence will soon have a new director, art historian Simone Verde, the New York Times reports. Eike Schmidt’s term is expiring, and he has been tapped by the Italian government to run the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, though he has teased a possible run for mayor of Florence. The new hire, which was announced along with eight more selections for museums in Italy, comes as Italy’s right-wing government aims to put Italians in charge of its national museums. An earlier Italian government had opened the posts to foreigners like Schmidt, who recently received Italian citizenship. Meanwhile, over in Jakarta, Indonesia, Museum MACAN said that its inaugural director, Aaron Seeto, will depart at the end of January, after seven years.

The Digest

Three curators have been tapped by the Armory Show to helm various projects at its 2024 edition: Lauren Cornell, chief curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; the Kitchen’s chief curator, Robyn Farrell; and independent curator Eugenie Tsai. The fair will run in September at the Javits Center in Manhattan. [Artforum]

The Stockholms Auktionsverk auction house sold 122 vintage Ikea pieces on Monday night for the equivalent of about $40,700. Some early designs by the Swedish maker of affordable furniture (and delectable meatballs) have become hot items for collectors in recent years. [The Guardian]

Two teens were arrested for allegedly spray painting the walls of Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul on Saturday. Another individual surrendered to police for spraying the walls on Sunday in what may have been a copycat crime. [Yonhap News Agency]

To benefit its acquisition fund, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is selling a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington next month at Christie’s with a high estimate of $2.5 million. Penny-pinching Washington lovers may be interested in a Rembrandt Peale portrait of the first U.S. president in the same sale that has a $500,000 top mark. [Penta]

Two months after it laid off 20 staffers and cut its hours, citing a need to “realign” its budget, the Dallas Museum of Art said that it will make its ticketed shows free on the first Sunday of each month—a potential $40 saving for visitors. Funding is coming from collector Alice Walton‘s Art Bridges Foundation. [The Dallas Morning News]

The Kicker

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN. Artist Andrew Prekker is only 24 years old, but he has already made history. His proposal for a new Minnesota flag (many considered the old one offensive) was selected from more than 2,600 entries, the New York Times reports. It is a clean, handsome design, with two panels of two different blues and a white star. Some of the other ideas were . . . interesting. They included a color photograph of a dog and more than one drawing of hands coming together to form a heart. The whole contest seems to have generated a lively public debate about art and design. One perfectly nice idea involving a snowflake drew a sharp reaction from a commenter, the Times notes. “Absolutely not,” they said. “This is horrible.” You can view all the proposals here. [NYT]

Below, a look back at the defining artworks of 2023.

Architect David Adjaye, adviser Lisa Schiff, and artist Yayoi Kusama all found themselves in hot water, while the fallout over the October 7 attack by the militant group Hamas in Israel and the resulting war on Gaza continues to upend the art world.

This was also the year that the post-pandemic boom times, marked by big debuts, rampant speculation, and a flood of new galleries, finally ended. The all-important auctions in May and November were middling at best, and while the art world’s fair calendar was in full swing, the usual optimism was not. The euphemism “market correction” could be heard across the trade, as uncertainty was the name of the game.

The sentiment about 2023 from most major figures in the art world seems fairly uniform: they’re just glad it’s over.

Below, a look back at the defining events of 2023.