Last August, the OMA sued De Groft and the owners of a series of paintings included in the scandal-ridden 2022 show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat.” The museum alleged that De Groft and others used the show and the museum’s reputation to legitimize a group of 25 paintings they claimed were by Basquiat so that they could be sold after. However, the show was shuttered in June 2022 after several reports doubting their status as bonafide Basquiats, which culminated in the FBI seizing the paintings. A subsequent FBI investigation provided evidence that the works were not by Basquiat, with Los Angeles-based auctioneer Michael Barzman admitting in a plea deal to helping paint and sell the works himself.

The case figures to be a complicated one. Akerman LLP, the law firm representing the museum, said in the case-management report that it expects to depose 50 “art scholars and museum directors” for the case. Further, a representative for the firm told the Sentinel that the lawsuit could cost the museum $500,000. That’s in addition to the more than $100,000 OMA has already paid Akerman since June 2022, according to the Sentinel, when the FBI raided the museum and seized the allegedly phony paintings.

Further delay in the suit could be caused by a series of countersuits against the OMA. DeGroft filed a countersuit against the OMA in November claiming wrongful termination, breach of contract, and defamation. In the countersuit, DeGroft claimed he is being made a scapegoat as part of the OMA’s media strategy for dealing with the scandal. He alleged that Cynthia Brumback, the OMA’s former board chair who resigned in the wake of the Basquiat scandal, and an outside legal team, had approved of the exhibition, even after it was clear the FBI, which subpoenaed the OMA for records regarding the paintings a year before they were seized, was investigating claims of forgery.

Additional countersuits for defamation are expected from defendants in the case, including the group of artworks’ owners called the Basquiat Venice Collection Group/ who claim “that the value of the Basquiat works of art has been tremendously devalued by OMA’s statements to various outlets, including but not limited to the filing of this lawsuit,” according to the court documents. 

De Groft and the owners of the supposed Basquiats have denied wrongdoing and maintain that the pieces are real.

There have been reports that mediation and a settlement could resolve the dispute between museum and DeGroft, though, according to court documents, “certain parties” have entered into negotiations and “appear to be far from settlement,” however they have agreed to a neutral mediator.

The shutdown took place on the centenary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the French engineer whose company designed and built the tower for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. The landmark is expected to play a large role in the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Staff at the Eiffel Tower declared a strike ahead of contract negotiations with the Paris municipal government, which owns the landmark, according to the news outlet France24.

The tower can receive up to 20,000 visitors per day, a spokesperson told France24. According to the leaders of the General Confederation of Labour, France’s second largest labor union, the Tower’s management company, SETE, has put in place an “unsustainable” business model that is far “too ambitious” and overly optimistic of revenue from future ticket sales while grossly underestimating the cost of maintenance and repairs, according The Guardian.

The union claims SETE has based the budget on the Eiffel Tower drawing 7.4 million visitors per year, a figure the landmark has never achieved. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, just under seven million people visited the Tower at its peak; since, the visitor total has failed to top six million. 

Visitors are still able to visit the glass esplanade below the tower and, according to The New York Times, the tower is slated to reopen sometime on Thursday. The Eiffel Tower, typically open 365 days a year, was last closed in March when many landmark sites shut during strikes related to a hike in the country’s retirement age.

But not everything has changed. While an auction of Gerald Fineberg’s collection at Christie’s this past May seems to have marked the end of a brief boom, the sale also proved that blue-chip artists with established markets, like Christopher Wool and Jeff Koons, couldn’t claw their way out of a slump that began at the start of the 2020s.

Back in November 2021, Artnet News took a deep dive into Wool’s market. The outlook wasn’t good. According to Artnet’s analysis, his sales at auction dipped an astonishing 25 percent since its heyday in 2013, when his painting Apocalypse Now (1988) sold for more than $25 million at Christie’s (all figures include the buyer’s fees unless otherwise noted).

That work featured text referencing a note from a deranged Army captain that appears in a 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola: SELL THEHOUSE SELL THECAR SELL THEKIDS. But it could have just as well have alluded to how desperate collectors seemed to buy Wool’s work.

That’s no longer the case. A colleague at ARTnews called the Fineberg sale tepid, and specifically noted that Wool’s untitled 1993 painting that features the sentence “FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE” splayed across the canvas in bright, popping colors hammered $8.4 million, or $10 million with fees, well under its estimate of $15 million–$20 million.

The market for Koons, easily one of the most famous, and expensive, artists in the world, has borne a similar trajectory. In recent years, Koons has been beset by production delays, with angry collectors clamoring for work they’d paid for years before. His market has also taken a dive in the past few years and has yet to rebound, despite departing longtime galleries Gagosian and Davis Zwirner for Pace, a move which reportedly might streamline his production methods.

Of the seven works of his that sold at one of the three major auction houses in 2023, two sold for just above the low estimate, one was withdrawn, and Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty), from 1987 and offered at the Fineberg sale, sold for $1.9 million when it was estimated to sell for between $3 million and $5 million. While some of the Koons works did sell above their estimate, only one broke the $4 million mark—which is surprising when one considers that the record for the sale at auction of a work by Koons was made just a few years ago, when his 1986 sculpture Rabbit sold for $91 million at Christie’s in May 2019. While Koons hasn’t had a major work like Rabbit, up for auction in a few years, these duds could be related to the lack of interest in his “Gazing Ball” paintings in 2017 and the subsequent downsizing of his studio, all of which could point to a general downturn in his market.

Koons and Wool aren’t alone in market Purgatory. Former market star John Currin’s work has also been in a years long tailspin. Currin’s 1999 picture two naked women jovial chatting on a black background Nice ‘n Easy failed to sell at Christie’s in November despite a relatively low estimate, $7 million – $10 million. In 2016 that same work sold at Christie’s for just over $12 million, a whisper over it’s low estimate. In 2008 at Sotheby’s it went for $5.4 million, comfortably over its high estimate of $4.5 million.

One explanation for the lack of excitement around venerable and once lucrative artists like Koons and Wool is that the art world is in a much different place than it was in 2019. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, museums promised to diversify their offerings, and auction houses began to introduce more women and artists of color to their sales. Though those artists’ markets still lag far behind the Koonses and Wools of the world, it’s telling that, in a 2023 survey of works bought in the past year by collectors in the ARTnews Top 200 list, a majority of the non-historical works purchased were made by younger artists of color, like Rashid Johnson, Alvaro Barrington, and Che Lovelace. 

The top-selling works at auction this year were by Picasso, Monet, and Kandinsky, white modernists whose art has long reigned supreme in the market. But it was also notable that Black artists like Julie Mehretu, Simone Leigh, and El Anatsui all made records this year, with Mehretu setting a new benchmark for the most expensive work ever sold at auction by a contemporary African artist. This new attention to artists that for years lacked a significant market may be directly related to a cooling for blue-chippers like Koons. Certainly, it reflects a trend seen in institutions. Koons’s CV, for example, lists no institutional appearances at all in 2023; Leigh’s CV has her work in three 2023 museum group shows, plus a traveling survey that recently headed to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

What does this mean for rich, white artists like Koons and Wool, whose work once commanded the highest prices on the primary and secondary market? That is unclear. Several market sources declined to comment, suggesting that talking about a downturn for these stars is something of a taboo unto itself. But, the nature of the market is cyclical, and what was once popular always falls out of fashion, only to reemerge years later. 

According to the art adviser and ArtTactic podcast host Adam Green, the art world has for years overlooked marginalized artists, a phenomenon that has only recently has this changed. He told ARTnews that museum curators may be at the vanguard of this settling of accounts, but they aren’t alone. “Some of my clients, for example, are now prioritizing both emerging and established artists from these underserved groups to ensure they have a comprehensive and culturally relevant collection,” he said.

When asked if he thought the market for artists like Koons and Wool would rebound, he said it’s likely the market would “narrow its focus to a more limited number of artists from underserved communities and possibly reconsider certain established non-marginalized artists.” The most important thing, he said, is that “hopefully, in the long-term, originality and quality are sought after irrespective of the artist’s domain.”

The year began on a crisp day, with 100 percent visibility. At least that’s how it seemed at the time. Christie’s was still soaring from the 2022 November evening sales, when the Paul Allen collection took in $1.5 billion. If that sales season was any indication, the market was flush and frothy. ART SG, the Singapore-based art fair, finally launched its inaugural edition in January (with a little help from Art Basel parent company, MCH Group), and Patti Wong’s new advisory in the region signaled that Asia was the art market’s next home base.

The world’s outlook, and the art market’s, did not remain so rosy.

At the beginning of March, sales tax hikes in the European Union caused a stir among artists and dealers. By April, recession—a supposed consequence of the end of low interest rates and cheap money—was being bandied about in every financial sector. Still, the worlds of finance and art cozied up to each other more than ever. Meanwhile, a report from the art sector recruitment firm Sophie Macpherson Ltd. revealed that sales directors at some commercial US galleries made more than $400,000 a year, and that gallery giants were gobbling up artists as if they were turkeys at Thanksgiving.

The winds of change truly began to blow in May. Sales at Phillips, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s produced results that ranged from middling to downright disappointing. If there was one clear sign that the post-Covid sales flood had dwindled, it was the Christie’s New York auction of the Gerald Fineberg collection, in which most lots, if they sold at all, hammered at or below their low estimates. On the fair circuit, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz hired Maike Cruse to lead its flagship fair, the first of many chess moves meant to secure the brand’s future.

At the start of summer, Sotheby’s London ushered Klimt across the auction record line amid increasing worries of a market downturn that was acutely felt at Christie’s London despite a 20th/21st Century evening sale roster reading like an art history textbook. Sotheby’s also gave the world a glimpse at owner Patrick Drahi’s plans for the auction house’s future when it purchased the Whitney’s Breuer Building, slated to become the house’s new global headquarters next year.

Despite the economic turbulence, Frieze announced in July the acquisition of both the Armory Show and Expo Chicago, while Art Basel hired Bridget Finn to helm the Miami Beach fair. Still, by then, the black cloud hanging over the market was undeniable. Sotheby’s and Phillips thinned their respective herds, and Christie’s, having wildly misjudged interest in the generative AI market, announced a 23 percent drop in sales for the first half of the year.

Phillips followed suit in August, announcing a 40 percent drop in sales for the first half of 2023. That same month Christie’s and Sotheby’s began a prolonged battle for the Emily Fisher Landau collection, a sale they likely hoped might set the market right.

By September, most of the art world had accepted that things were no longer easy-breezy. And trouble plagued more than just the balance sheets. Frieze Seoul and the Armory Show opened within days of each other, leading people to ponder the perceived conflict of interest in Frieze’s purchase and the New York fair’s future. Meanwhile, court documents revealed that Christie’s, which early in the month had to cancel a lucrative sale of Heidi Horten’s jewelry, owing to her unsavory life choices, had for years been fighting tariffs on imports spurred by the United States trade war with China.

A cursory look back at the year this past October showed how far the needle had moved. The London sales proved disappointing, which at this point could hardly have been a surprise, and as a spate of galleries closed in downtown Manhattan, hopeful upstarts and longtime power dealers began to move in. On a positive note, the incomparable Julie Mehretu set the auction record for an African-born artist when one of her pictures sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for $9.32 million (with fees).

Though major American artists took the auction block during the November sales, throughout that week, results were expectedly flat, thanks to a new air of penny-pinching conservatism among top-tier collectors. Still, those with the means were happy to spend on the right piece, the proof lying in the Sotheby’s sale of Agnes Martin’s 1961 Grey Stone II, from the Emily Fisher Landau collection, which brought in a record-breaking $18.7 million (with fees).

The final month of 2023 has the art world looking back more clear eyed at the year that’s passed (though some might still be hungover from Miami, which was said to lack its characteristic pop). Christie’s, announcing their year-end projections, blamed a drop in revenue exceeding 20 percent on a temporary spike from the remarkable Paul Allen sale. Sotheby’s laid out their auction calendar a full year in advance, which is all but unheard of in the auction business, as if they had been given a sign of what’s to come.

The only half-certainty here is that the market in 2024 should look a bit better than this year’s, either because the work on offer will be better, or because the players will have finally stepped outside Plato’s Cave and seen it for what it truly is.

The Year in Review:

The work, a stop sign decorated with what appears to be a trio of military drones, was stolen just one hour after the street artist posted an image of the work to Instagram on December 22.

A man referred to only as Alex told the Sun that two people, using a Lime bicycle as a makeshift ladder, removed the street sign with bolt cutters after one of the two “bashed it with his hands” in a failed attempt to remove the sign from its post.

“I opened Instagram and I saw it was posted four minutes before and I was about to go on my lunch break,” Alex told the Sun. “There were about two people there when I got there. We were all sort of admiring it and taking pictures.”

The alleged crooks stole the work at around 12:30 p.m., in full view of the crowd that had gathered to admire the mysterious Banksy’s newest work. Images of the two men, unmasked and in plain view, were posted to the tabloid’s website.

The first arrest came the following day when London’s Metropolitan police took a man into custody on suspicion of theft and criminal damage. The second arrest was made on Sunday.

While Banksy himself never explains the art he installs under the cover of night, much of what his work has an overt antiwar message. Some of the artist’s more than 12 million Instagram followers have viewed the drone-emblazoned stop sign as a call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Banksy and his artwork often make headlines. Earlier this year, his possible identity was revealed in a recently uncovered, decades-old interview on the BBC, and there has been news coverage about his artworks being removed, demolished, or restored throughout 2023.

Since 2010 the Interamna Lirenas Project by the University of Cambridge’s Classics Faculty, has been conducting surveys and excavations in what, in modern times, looks like a field of crops, but in antiquity was the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas, according to Popular Mechanics.

“We started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it,” Alessandro Launaro, the study’s author and Interamna Lirenas Project lead at the University of Cambridge’s Classics Faculty, said in a statement. “That’s very rare in Italy.”

According to the Cambridge Classic’s website the town was founded in 312 BC as a Latin colony affiliated with Rome both politically and militarily, as part of the Roman expansion into Central Italy. 

Study of the area began 13 years ago with deep radar and magnetometry of the around 60 acres of open fields as part of the programs mandate to study “the long-term relationship between town and countryside as reflecting the broader transformations taking place in Roman Italy from Republic to Empire.” 

“There was nothing on the surface, no visible evidence of buildings, just bits of broken pottery,” Launaro said. “But what we discovered wasn’t a backwater, far from it. We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years.”

The key to studying the Interamna Lirenas site was pottery. According to Launaro, the lack of imported pottery at the site led scholars in the past to believe the city was declining by the second century. But by focusing on the pottery used by average citizens in the region instead of the imported wares used by the wealthy the team of archaeologists were able reveal that the town thrived well into the 3rd Century with close to 2,000 inhabitants, and once, in 46 BC, even hosted Julius Caesar himself.

The town was located at the intersection of two important routes, the Via Latina which connected Lazio and Campania, and the river Liris. Over the course of their excavations, archaeologists have discovered a large warehouse, which hints at the possibility that Interamna Lirenas was a port town. They also uncovered evidence of a temple, three bathhouses, and a roofed theater that could hold 1,500 people. Launaro said the theater was “a major status symbol. It displayed the town’s wealth, power, and ambition.”

The town was eventually abandoned in 6th century C.E., likely because of the Lombard invasion of Italy, according to Cambridge. Soon after its inhabitants began salvaging materials to build farms elsewhere. Those that chose to stay, along with new inhabitants, spread dirt and debris over what was left of the town in order to make the land suitable for growing crops.

While modern methods of ploughing the earth have damaged the structures that remained buried, they have also helped uncover the thriving civilization that one lay among the crop fields of Central Italy.

The gold-painted leather sneakers were found in April of this year, in a donation bin at the Burnside Shelter location of the Portland Rescue Mission in Portland—and the donor remains completely anonymous. Sotheby’s truly embraced the season: the full hammer price went to benefit the Mission (the buyer, of course, still paid the regular fees due to the auction house.)

The “Nike Air Jordan 3 Retro ‘Spike Lee Oscars’” first appeared on the auteur’s feet on the red carpet during the 91st Annual Academy Awards Ceremony in 2019. Later that evening, Lee would accept an Oscar for his film BlacKkKlansman. According to Sotheby’s, on the sneaker’s heels are decorated logos for Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, and an oversized Jumpman insignia. The shoes are also embroidered with Lee’s signature and the signature of their designer, Tinker Hatfield.

While this particular pair never graced Lee’s feet, the shoe was never released to the public so there are very few pairs in circulation. 

According to the Mission’s website , a man in the long-term shelter program found the shoes, which appeared in brand-new condition, while sorting through a donations bin. The pair eventually made their way to the program director Ed Holcomb’s office. Holcomb recognized them as the Spike Lee Oscar Nikes, and though he was convinced they were counterfeit, took them to a high-end sneaker resale shop in downtown Portland.

“After taking another long look, the owner returned and offered to buy them from me on the spot for $10,000 or to consign them in his store for a potentially larger return,” Holcomb wrote.

After a bit of research Holcomb learned that a similar pair had been auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2021 and earned nearly $48,000. Later, Mission reached out to Hatfield, who flew to Portland, authenticated the shoes and gifted the Mission “additional design paraphernalia, including a replacement box and a framed design proof, which he signed,” Sotheby’s said. 

“I’m thrilled the shoes ended up here. It’s a happy ending to a really great project,” he told the Mission staff.

Even though single-owner sales these days are a constant during marquee auction weeks, the $1.5 billion Allen sale last year was, as Cerutti noted, “historic and exceptional.” (All figures include the house fees, unless otherwise stated.) Because the Allen sale was such an outlier, Christie’s took an unusual route when it presented this year’s numbers, comparing them to 2022’s end of year figures both with and without that auction counted in.

With the Allen sale taken into account, Christie’s total sales were about 25 percent lower in 2023 than they were in 2022. Take that unicorn out of the equation, and the sum was still in the red, down about 7 percent.

Still, Christie’s $6.2 billion haul is respectable. It’s higher than 2019, the last year before Covid struck, by about 7 percent. And that was before wildly low interest rates made money cheaper and easier to spend than ever before.

“2023 was truly a paradox,” Cerutti said at the start of the press conference, which was conducted over Zoom with executives from across Christie’s global infrastructure on hand.

For the auction house’s chief executive, the decline in sales totals wasn’t the most important metric. That distinction was given to both the year’s sell-through rate, projected to be 84 percent—“slightly lower than last year but still high,” Cerutti said and that a majority of the works that sold did so above the low estimate. “This shows you we continue to deliver strong results for our clients,” Cerutti said.

Of course, lurking behind that metric are the guarantees, which tend to skew results. When asked if data points like sell-through rates have become meaningless, Cerutti said that, yes, they still matter. He gave two reasons. One, sell-through rates are still very much top of mind for those who consign work to the auction house, and two, most of the lots don’t come with a guarantee. Knowing the sell-through rate and percent above low estimate is “particularly relevant” during today’s financially difficult environment because it also reflects the auction houses’ ability to accurately discuss the estimates with their clients.

“It’s of course a reflection of the performance,” he said, “but very often it means that also you have been talking and explaining to your consumers that they need to understand the market as it is.”

Private sales jumped from 14 percent last year of the total sales in 2022 to 20 percent in 2023. Cerutti hinted at, but refused to embellish on, a private sale that brought in “well above $100 million,” marking the highest sale of its kind at the auction house for a single lot. 

For those interested in a more granular breakdown, the house said its auction totals (including online-only sales) came in at $5.02 billion. Private sales stood at $1.2 billion. Luxury sales—for jewelry, handbags, watches and wine—contributing $1 billion to the year’s total, a record for the house for that category.

Asked whether Christie’s employees should see the negative sales as a sign that layoffs could be around the corner, Cerutti said there were no plans for layoffs. He said that Christie’s had emerged from the pandemic “a streamlined and well-organized business. Like in any year we are we are constantly adapting our business to the market. So we’ll continue to adapt and improve, but there are no plans on restructuring.”

The “white glove” sale, a term applied to auctions in which every lot was purchased, brought in more than €22.9 million (roughly $25 million) against an estimate of €6.1 million – €8.9 million.

Among the top lots of the December 13 sale was a carved and regilded Louis XVI chair that is thought to have been executed for Marie-Antoinette’s personal rooms at the Château de Versailles, which broke the record for the sale of a single piece of 18th century furniture after selling for €2,589,000, and crisp work by the painter Pierre Soulages, Peinture (1970), that sold for just over €3 million.

Also notable were the two bronze monkey sculptures by François-Xavier Lalanne that once sat on either side of the 18th century toilet in Guerrand-Hermès’s home in the modestly sized, yet opulent Parisian mansion Hôtel de Lannion, which he purchased in 1997 and subsequently had restored with the help of the architect and designer François-Joseph Graf.  

Two in-person sales followed Wednesday’s white glove affair, the Collection Hubert Guerrand-Hermès, L’hôtel de Lannion, on December 14 and Collection Hubert Guerrand-Hermès, Autour de la duchesse de Berry on December 15. Two online sales, ending on December 19, will wrap up the sales.

The building was never listed, and the sale was so secretive that not even New York City real estate watchdog Curbed, which first reported the sale, knew it was coming. According to Curbed, this is the second time Lauder unloaded the home, which he bought in 1989; in 2000, he sold the home at auction to the London-based art dealer Anthony d’Offay.

The house is as connected to New York’s art world as the Whitney or the MoMA. In 1950, John D. Rockefeller III’s wife, Blanchette, commissioned it from Philip Johnson. According to a T Magazine story, she needed a place to keep her modern art collection, which included works such as Alberto Giacometti’s Man Pointing and Robert Motherwell’s The Voyage. Johnson designed the home not as a living space but rather as a combination gallery, artist’s salon, and entertainment space. 

Accordingly, the home isn’t the most practical to live in. There are two rooms on the first floor with glass walls that border an open-air pond. In the original design, two unheated bedrooms were added, according to Johnson, only because the building would look ridiculous without a second floor. There was no kitchen, though, true to purpose, there was a bar that was attended by a butler. (A kitchen was eventually added in the basement.)

In 1958, Rockefeller donated the house to MoMA, which used it as an extension of the museum to woo potential donors and display artists who entertained “Modernism in its purest and most impressive form,” according to the New York Times. 

From 1971 to 1979, Johnson and his partner, David Grainger Whitney, leased the home from its then owner, Mary Gay Labrot Leonhardt, widow of the journalist Robert Sherrod. The architect moved in and decorated the space with rotating selections from his collection of works by Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, twice a year holding court for guests like Andy Warhol and Fran Leibowitz.