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.

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:

Last year saw a 14 percent year-on-year decline in sales across mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the most recent Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Though sales in the region were still 13 percent above 2020 at $11.2 billion, it was the second lowest total since 2009 and the report found that auction sales dipped in Japan, South Korea, and other smaller markets internationally in 2022.

Given that, it was altogether surprising when market indicators this year revealed a wholly different shift for the wildly diverse Asia region.

In November, the 2023 Survey of Global Collection by Art Basel and UBS reported that, in the first half of this year, collectors from mainland China had the highest median expenditure of all collectors, at $241,000. That figure was a sharp increase over the previous two years. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s homegrown art fair Art Jakarta rolled out a well-attended edition at its new venue and time slot from November 17 to 19, while Art Fair Philippines returned for its tenth edition in February with 63 exhibitors, an increase from 46 last year. The country’s leading gallery, SILVERLENS, expanded with an outpost in New York last July.

It is safe to say that the regional art market has been buoyed by a sense of confidence, hunger for disruption, and deep pockets. It was exactly this atmosphere in 2021 that allowed NFTs and related technologies to become so popular in various parts of Asia beginning, with young tech entrepreneurs making their first forays into the art market, changing the very ethos of buying art in the region, for better or worse.

While techno-optimism remains especially prevalent in major capitals like Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore, such a mindset tends to engender wilful ignorance towards the various pressures floating in the background, such as growing censorship and social inequities, geopolitical conflicts, and the looming climate crisis. These issues were clearly showing amidst ambitious efforts to expand or innovate this year.

To that end, here are five major trends that stood out in Asia’s art market and institutional landscape in 2023.  

This year’s edition of ABMB takes place after a “fair and sober” evening auction season, but any concerns about international conflict or an economic recession were quickly mitigated during preview days.

“Sales at the booth have been strong since the opening hours of the fair, signaling an optimistic shift in this year’s sleepier market and economy,” Lehmann Maupin partner Fionna Flaherty said in a press statement. (Sales are self-reported by galleries, making the data difficult to confirm.)

Dealers reported robust attendance from collectors, curators, and museum groups hailing from Aspen to Paris to Hong Kong, as well as sales of works valued as highly as $20 million.

Below, a look at seven works that galleries said sold during Art Basel Miami Beach’s opening days, as well as a major work that could break an artist’s sales record.

When Noah Horowitz rejoined Art Basel a little more than a year ago, there were questions about what exactly the fair’s prodigal son had in store for the business. Horowitz’s newly created title, that of CEO, seemed to provide some indication of Art Basel’s growing corporatization. But that corporate structure had already begun under his predecessor, Marc Spiegler, whose role had been global director.

Several months before Horowitz returned, Spiegler named Vincenzo de Bellis, a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, to the newly created position of director, which gave him oversight of all Art Basel’s fairs and exhibition platforms globally, a role in which he continues today. Then, this year, Horowitz restructured the company further, naming a dedicated director for each fair, all reporting to de Bellis, and a dedicated head of business and management who reports to Andrew Strachan, a 12-year Basel veteran now serving as general manager of fairs and exhibition platforms.

But a more important indicator of the Swiss fair’s future may lie in its announcement in September that it had hired Hayley Romer, former publisher and chief revenue officer of The Atlantic, as chief growth officer, and Craig Hepburn, former head of digital at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), as chief digital officer. Reading corporate tea leaves can often be a fool’s errand, but those very not–Art World hires would appear to augur a new approach, a point not lost on Horowitz.

“When you’re in a leadership role, that role has to change as the business grows,” Horowitz told ARTnews last week. “Of course, I want to make sure that we are working closely with our gallery clients and collectors, both emerging and established, but the day-to-day maintenance of that has been passed to our team. My job as CEO is to put people like Craig and Hayley in place and to make sure our teams, internally, work well with each other.”

Romer has spent her career courting luxury and high-end corporate clients, at Forbes Media as head of luxury advertising, at media giant Condé Nast as executive director of corporate sales, and at Atlantic Media, where she was initially hired as the head of luxury advertising. Two decades’ experience in those roles builds a deep rolodex, not to mention proficiency in building media brands.

Hepburn, meanwhile, worked at Microsoft, Nokia, and Indian telecom company Tata Communications in various high-up roles manning digital marketing and consumer engagement prior to joining UEFA. But it was at UEFA that Hepburn created a “digital-first mindset,” along with building interactive services, a streaming platform, and the company’s nascent Web3 strategy.

Hepburn described his digital philosophy at a 2019 conference hosted by SportsPro, which covers the business of sports. Hepburn lamented that the proliferation of streaming services had made it difficult for consumers to find the sporting events they wanted, even if they subscribed to the service that streamed them. The future, he went on, was for the sector to consolidate so that streaming could become truly “frictionless” in the way that dominant apps like Uber or Airbnb now are.

“These are problems that, quite frankly, consumers and fans will not put up with,” Hepburn said at the 2019 conference. “We need to figure out a way in the industry to make OTT [over-the-top] frictionless to fans, where it feels really smooth. That will be the biggest challenge.”

Horowitz’s appointments have not gone unnoticed among the art dealing community. “I think what you’re seeing under Noah is a kind of next level professionalization of the art fair business,” Sean Kelly, who founded his eponymous New York gallery in 1991, told ARTnews. “He’s brought in art world experts who are well respected in the gallery circuit like Bridget Finn and Maike Cruse, and people like Romer and Hepburn who are bringing a level of professionalism to the business side. It’s very analytical. He’s strategically putting building blocks in place that will benefit the future of the fair.”

What does all that mean for Art Basel? It would appear we’re heading toward a world where Art Basel the brand is as important as Art Basel the fair. It wouldn’t be out of step with the rest of the art world.

After all, the line between fine art and luxury has been all but erased in recent years. Every season of fashion week offers abundant artist collaborations; a slew of startups are developing platforms to turn paintings into other luxury investment vehicles; Hauser & Wirth is hard at work building out a luxury hospitality business; and Gagosian famously flirted with a sale to French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is enjoying a licensing bonanza, producing everything from Édouard Manet–inspired Amish furniture to Dr. Martens boots emblazoned with Hokusai’s Great Wave. And it’s not just businesses, artists too are riding the wave: Kehinde Wiley is selling a limited-edition soccer ball this holiday season, while the Museum of Modern Art Design Store is selling Yayoi Kusama pumpkins.

Then, consider that Art Basel has become one of the largest media platforms in the art space almost by default. Its 2.4 million followers on Instagram may be a far cry from the hundreds of millions following Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but it’s nearing striking distance of the Met (4.2 million), the Louvre (5 million), and MoMA (5.8 million), which top the list for art. As longtime gallerist Wendy Olsoff put it recently, “Art fairs are big business now.”

“It’s a completely different industry than when I started 40 years ago,” Olsoff told ARTnews (she cofounded PPOW Gallery in 1983). “I think the fairs, and the galleries and the museums are grappling right now with how to adjust to the pressures—financial, sociological, and political—of the new digital era.”

However, if Horowitz has an Art Basel streaming service in the works, he isn’t letting on. When asked if there were designs for a new Art Basel media outlet, Horowitz mentioned that the company already publishes the annual UBS Art Basel Report.

“With the assets we already have, there is so much potential. When you bring on someone as talented as Hayley, it’s all about giving them access to our assets and our clients and seeing what we can accomplish,” he said.

The changes then appear as a strengthening of Art Basel’s underlying structure, setting the foundation for what comes next, whatever that may be. It speaks to Horowitz’s reputation as an astute critical thinker and his too-often-overlooked background: he’s an art historian and an economist.

“A fresh lens is a great way to have somebody reevaluate the same thing, and Noah, who stepped away from Art Basel for a short while to work at Sotheby’s, has that, on top of an intimate knowledge of the fair,” art dealer Anthony Meier told ARTnews, noting the similarities between Horowitz’s restructuring and Larry Gagosian’s formation of a board of directors in 2021. “It’s about the legacy of the brand. The goal is for the brand to outlast any one individual.”

Zipping to and from each fair was the main item on everyone’s agenda. With more than 160 exhibitors, there is a lot to see. Several great booths are even spread among them.

To point you in the direction of those standout booths, below is a look at the best presentations at Untitled Miami Beach, which runs through Sunday, December 10.

A major change to this year’s edition is that its dates have been pushed back two weeks; the fair’s previous editions have typically taken place during the second week of February and often coincided with Valentine’s Day and the Presidents Day holiday weekend in the US.

“People tend to skip away for that long weekend,“ Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas, told ARTnews in an interview. “Since we’re a four-day fair, the hope is. that this will draw more people to come to the fair and spend more time in LA.“

The fair will return this year to the Santa Monica Airport, where it relocated beginning with the 2023 edition. For this edition, Frieze LA will reconfigure its floor plan and now include a central outdoor space that will be designed by WHY Architects. The fair will also not make use of the Barker Hanger, where a portion of exhibitors had been located last year. This edition of Frieze will also activate the athletic field and community park with performances and sculptures, respectively.

“The layout for 2024 is streamlined and efficient but designed with good sight lines and discoveries at every corner,” WHY founder and creative director Kulapat Yantrasast said in a statement. “Inside is a focused art experience with uplifting filtered natural light while the outside courtyard is full of art and cultural activities for friends to linger and connect.”

Messineo said she wanted to re-design the fair’s layout after her observations from last year’s fair where she noticed that visitors had decided to spend the day at the fair, as opposed to “dipping in and out” like they might in New York before gallery hopping in Chelsea. The central outdoor space itself responds to where many visitors congregated during the 2023 edition. “We have the feeling of a campus—and that’s something to embrace,” said Messineo. “We wanted to give visitors comfortable moments there.”

As with past editions, the fair will be split in two sections, with 83 exhibitors in the main Galleries section and 12 in the Focus section, dedicated to emerging US-based galleries. Across the fair, nearly 50 percent of participants have a location in the Greater LA area, and 13 will participate in the LA fair for the first-time, including closely watched galleries like Silverlens (of Manila and New York), Bank (Shanghai), and Kasmin (New York).

Among the leading LA galleries that will participate in the main section are David Kordansky Gallery, Blum (formerly Blum & Poe), François Ghebaly, Night Gallery, Nonaka-Hill, Regen Projects, Various Small Fires, and Anat Ebgi, which had previously participated in the Focus section.

Blue-chip galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, Pace, White Cube, and David Zwirner will also participate, as will Pilar Corrias, Gladstone, Xavier Hufkens, Gallery Hyundai, Jenkins Johnson, Mendes Wood DM, Ortuzar Projects, and Proyectos Monclova.

“What I have loved witnessing about LA is its growth over the past three years,” Messineo said. “LA has really been embraced the commercial art world, as evidenced by galleries who plant to open spaces there or have recently done so. And the city’s institutions have also embraced the fair. There’s a sense of excitement for this edition.”

Looking at artists “ecologies as a vibrant framework for art making,” the Focus section—which includes galleries like Matthew Brown, Lyles & King, Shulamit Nazarian, Make Room, Ochi, and Hannah Traore Gallery—will be curated this year by Essence Harden, visual arts curator at the California African American Museum.

In a statement, Harden said, “I was deeply interested in the possibility of stretching the term ecology to include position, geography, material and theoretical concerns within art making. The presentations chosen for this year’s Focus section reflect that winding impulse, highlighting a series of dynamic emerging galleries and artists.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

Galleries

Focus

A little over a year ago, just as the art world was emerging from the pandemic, Marc Payot, co-president of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, and dealer Nicola Vassell started having conversations about the challenges of the current gallery ecosystem. Vassell had opened her eponymous New York gallery in 2021, after stints working for Deitch and Pace galleries, and as an independent consultant. As Vassell recalls it, the conversations led to the question of the challenges faced by galleries of different scales. Was there a way. they wondered, that galleries could work together to support a thriving ecosystem, rather than one where artists left galleries like Vassell’s for those like Hauser?

“We all had a lot of time to think during the pandemic,” Payot told ARTnews recently, “and I came to the realization that the art world is in a state where the few very large successful galleries are becoming more and more successful and larger, and for the rest of the ecosystem, things are very tough.”

In the meantime, Payot became interested in an artist Vassell represents, the painter Uman. The two dealers decided to give a new arrangement a shot: a full partnership that will be the first in a new initiative for Hauser & Wirth modeled on a framework of collective impact.

Collective impact is a model that became popular in philanthropic circles around 2011. It refers to an intense partnership between organizations (often ones of different scales) to accomplish a shared goal. The criteria for such a relationship are a common agenda, a shared measurement system, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone organization. In the case of Hauser and Vassell, they’ll be leaning on transparency and “intensive resource sharing” to develop the partnership.

“It’s an entrepreneurial way of thinking differently in order to develop the career of an artist, on one hand, and, on the other hand, to support a smaller gallery in its development,” Payot said of Hauser and Vassell usage of collective impact.

Vassell started working with the Somali-born, upstate New York-based Uman shortly after opening her gallery, and the works have caught on with collectors. Uman started out selling art on the street in New York in the early 2000s, before a 2015 show at the alternative space White Columns. Downtown New York dealer David Fierman, founder of Fierman gallery, worked with the artist for three years, at Fierman and previously at Louis B. James gallery, and sold her work to both collectors and institutions. Vassell, who began representing Uman in 2022, sold out a booth of the artist’s paintings at the Independent Fair that year, and had a successful solo show with Uman this past spring.

“She is a remarkable artist,” Vassell told ARTnews. “A once-in-a-generation talent. And her work has this capacity for evolution. She needs an outlet to express that that reaches far and wide. But that gives fuel to the capacity to evolve.”

Fiercely protecting such artists from the incursion of larger suitors, Vassell said, is not a good way to further their careers. “When you have a talent like Uman in your stable the reflex might be to build a wall,” she said, “but I’ve been in the business long enough to understand that you can’t challenge a talent that may not stay in place. So you widen the circumference, recognizing the global forces of the market.”

The idea, Vassell said, is to have the best of both worlds: the important context of the smaller gallery, and the support system of the mega. Move to a mega too soon, and a young artist can get lost; stay too long with a smaller gallery and an artist can start to feel suffocated. “It’s the ability to have the sum total of two different, but potent support systems, to create an amplified advantage.”

Artists having more than one dealer representative is, of course, nothing new. When an artist is represented by more than one gallery, things often split along geographical lines: one gallery in Europe, for instance, and another in the U.S. The artist decides which artworks go to which gallery, and for each sale the artist makes a set percentage—50% is standard—and the gallery that sells the work gets 50 percent. (Alternatively, one gallery, the artist’s main representative, can consign work to the another, and take a ten percent profit on the sale.) Under the collective impact arrangement, Hauser & Wirth and Vassell will work as a single team for Uman, sharing their respective networks of collectors and museums, and jointly deciding which artworks go where. The financial split is 50 percent to the artist and 25 percent each to the galleries.

Historically, Hauser & Wirth has taken on numerous artists for worldwide representation, and Payot said that won’t necessarily change. But he sees the non-competitive partnership framework as a step toward mitigating the paradigm where young, modestly sized galleries with rigorous programs, like Vassell’s, risk losing their more successful artists to a larger shop.

“This is not something we will do with every single artist,” he said of the Uman deal. “This is one option among many.”

Such dynamics are hardly new. Around 2016, there was a spate of gallery closures in New York, and many blamed mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth, Pace, Zwirner and Gagosian for hoovering up artists from younger galleries’ programs, putting them at financial risk. Shortly before the pandemic, certain measures were put into place to help smaller galleries along, like David Zwirner’s suggestion, at a New York Times arts conference in 2018, that the megas help to subsidize their smaller colleagues’ participation in major fairs like Art Basel. Basel implemented the idea just a few months later.

The pandemic may have hit pause on some of these concerns, with art fairs on hold, financial support packages from the government, and the increased ease of selling art online, but recently there has been another round of closures, such as that of Lower East Side favorite JTT, and those concerns about the mega-galleries are back in the spotlight.

Payot says that over the next few months Hauser & Wirth will reveal more of these collective impact relationships. In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you overhear some booth-to-booth conversations between Payot and Vassell at Art Basel Miami next week: both galleries are bringing works by Uman, priced at around $90,000.

The galleries will unveil their first jointly organized exhibition of Uman’s work in January at Hauser & Wirth London.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Uman was based in Buffalo, New York. She is based in upstate New York.

Billed as “the only fair devoted to self-taught art, art brut, and outsider art,” the upcoming edition will feature galleries from 32 cities, among them are stalwarts in the field, like Cavin-Morris Gallery (of New York), Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), Carl Hammer Gallery (Chicago), and Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York). Likewise, the fair will include nine first-time exhibitors, including Montreal’s Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Baltimore’s New Door Creative, Nashville’s Elephant Gallery, and the Ruffed Grouse Gallery of Narrowsburg, New York.

As with past editions, next year’s Outsider Art Fair will include two curated sections. Titled “Beat Art Work: Power of the Gaze,” the first is to be organized by legendary American poet Anne Waldman and will include visual art by poets like William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joanne Kyger.

The second curated section will celebrate the 50th anniversary of long-time exhibitor Creative Growth Art Center, the Oakland-based nonprofit that is the longest running organization of its kind, dedicated to supporting the work of artists with disabilities. Tom di Maria, Creative Growth’s director emeritus, will organize the presentation, titled “Expanding the Canon: 50 Years of Creative Growth”; it will feature never-before-exhibited works by artists like Dwight Mackintosh, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, Monica Valentine, Aurie Ramirez, William Tyler, and Judith Scott. In October, the San Francisco Museum of Art announced that it had acquired 114 works by 10 Creative Growth–affiliated artists and that it would mount an exhibition of the acquisitions next spring.

“For anyone who’s ever been to Creative Growth, every day feels like a celebration,” Outsider Art Fair owner Andrew Edlin told ARTnews. “And Tom Di Maria, in particular, deserves tremendous accolades for his stewardship—guiding these artists on their journeys from [founders Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz’s] garage to the Venice Biennale. With the major acquisition and exhibition plans by SFMOMA, Creative Growth and its artists have solidified their place in art history. OAF is always delighted and takes pride when the art world embraces work that we have been championing these last 32 years.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.