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.

Pope.L brought art to the people, reaching beyond institutions and into the street, putting statements about the condition of Black Americans out into the open. With vivid defiance, Juanita McNeely captured American women’s experiences, making a painting about abortion before the original passing of Roe v. Wade. Vera Molnár propelled us forward with her early usages of computers in her art.

Others left far too soon: Lin May Saeed, whose art encouraged empathy with animals and activist musings, and Vincent Honoré, whose cutting-edge exhibition and criticism championed women and queer artists.

In the case of painter Brice Marden, Barry Schwabsky recalled for Art in America, “It seemed as though Brice Marden had always been there and always would be.” While we may take these continued presences for granted, it’s important to recall the impact that Marden and others have made. As Schwabsky writes, “He managed to make each of us a little bit more an artist.”

Perhaps, then, we ought to remember signs of the people who left us in 2023 will always be with us. Below, a brief look back at the lives of 28 artists, collectors, curators, and more who died in 2023.

As a journalist based in Seoul, much of my year-end top ten, which follows below, comes from South Korea, but I am grateful to have finally been able to bounce around the region a fair amount this year with ease.

The best art I saw was on a visit to Kyoto this summer, when, coincidentally, the millennium-old Gion Matsuri festival was taking place with full pageantry, after scaled-back versions during the pandemic. Towering floats—fantasias of ornate architecture, some adorned with sumptuous tapestries—crawled through the streets, pulled by relentless teams of volunteers. It was captivating. However, as an annual event, that glorious affair is not eligible for this list, which is reserved solely for temporary exhibitions that were on view in 2023.

Before revealing my top ten, I have to note a few remarkable shows that did not make the list: feminist artist’s Yun Suk Nam’s captivating portraits of women who fought for Korean independence (plus more than 1,000 painted sculptures of dogs) at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea; the essential “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (and at the Guggenheim for a couple more weeks!); a revelatory survey of painter Guei-Hong Won (1923–1980), a chronicler of postwar daily life in Seoul, at the Sungkok Museum in Seoul; the excellent Yooyun Yang’s presentation of her latest cinematic, mysterious paintings at Primary Practice; Wang Tuo’s time-bending video treatises on Chinese history and censorship at Blindspot in Hong Kong; Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piquantly odd umbrella-repair shop and robots at David Zwirner in Hong Kong; the MMCA’s richly rewarding retrospective for the beloved painter Chang Ucchin (1917–1990) at its Deoksugung branch in Seoul; and Do Ho Suh’s invigorating, interactive installation at the Seoul Museum of Art’s Buk-Seoul location, which invited children to take brightly colored clay and keep adding, and adding, and adding to it.

Without further ado, my top ten:

The best place to begin is with Amalia Mesa-Bains, who gave a presentation at that 2016 Ford Foundation gathering about her nearly five decades’ worth of advocating for Latinx and Chicanx art. Mesa-Bains, best known for her altar installations, is a towering figure within the Chicanx and Latinx art communities. Her art, activism, and scholarship spoke to our lived experiences when mainstream institutions ignored them. Finally, this year she got a retrospective to honor her indefatigable achievements.

When I profiled Mesa-Bains for ARTnews in 2018, she joked about how she could never “have a retrospective because I would have to replicate [some] 50 objects seven times” in order to recreate some her most significant installations, as certain objects have traveled between them. Thankfully, that did not deter curators María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez, who mounted her career-spanning show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives.

I was most struck by one of the artist’s lesser-known works, Circle of Ancestors (1995), in which seven chairs face each other. Each is dedicated to a different woman, including the Aztec goddess Coyolaxauhiqui, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mesa-Bains’s grandmothers and mother, artist Judith F. Baca, and Mesa-Bains herself at the age of her First Holy Communion. The work imagines the conversations and chisme that would transpire if these seven women gathered. I recalled the work at the show’s opening, where Mesa-Bains was surrounded by artists and curators. In the presence of multiple generations, she said that an exhibition like this could only have come about because a young generation had continued the fight that artists like Baca and herself had taken up years ago. 

Baca’s work, too, got a big showcase this year, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which she has transformed into an artist atelier. In 2021, the Mellon Foundation gave Baca and her arts nonprofit Social and Public Art Resource Center $5 million to extend the imagery of her iconic The Great Wall of Los Angeles into the present. The mural’s new stretches are now being fabricated. Two of the panels were exhibited earlier this year at Jeffrey Deitch’s LA gallery, and until next June, at LACMA, Baca’s team will continue to paint the others on-site.

It would have been unimaginable to find a show like Baca’s at LACMA more than 50 years ago. As the story goes, around that time, a LACMA curator told artist Harry Gamboa Jr. that Chicanos don’t make art, they join gangs; hence why the museum would not display art by them. Shortly afterward, Gamboa with two other members of the artist group ASCO, Willie Herón III and Gronk, spray-painted their name on LACMA’s wall, which was then captured in a photograph by Gamboa. In that image, the group’s fourth member, Patssi Valdez, stands above her cohort’s tags, looking off into the distance.

That ASCO piece, Spray Paint LACMA (1972), would serve as a calling card for Chicanx art, and would eventually move the museum to mount a solo show for another Chicano artist collective, Los Four, in 1974. It moved me to tears to realize that Chicanx painting had moved inward at LACMA, from its exterior to its central galleries, where Baca’s murals are now being fabricated.

Deceased Chicanx artists are still coming into focus, however, and one is Teddy Sandoval, whose work is now the subject of an impressive retrospective by curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California. Sandoval’s most memorable works are his painted images of faceless men, begun in the late 1970s; they took on new resonance at the height of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and early ’90s. (Sandoval died in 1995, the year before antiretroviral therapy—“the cocktail,” as it is informally known—proved to be an effective treatment against HIV, effectively ending the virus’s all-but-sure death sentence.)

But those works only scratch the surface of Sandoval’s oeuvre, which also includes performance, collage, mail art, zines, and riotous ceramics and mixed-media works. (Among the most memorable works are his colorfully glazed “chili penises” and a pair of leather chaps, adorned with chilis and stereotyped imagery of Mexicans.) Yet rather than viewing Sandoval in isolation, the exhibition also suggests that he had a lot to do with many others who followed, hinted at by the inclusion of “and the Butch Gardens School of Art” in its title. As a result, the show also includes fascinating works younger artists, like Troy Montes Michie, Ana Segovia, and Moises Salazar Taltenchi.

With the Sandoval exhibition, Chavoya and Frantz, like many other historians of Chicanx art, are now seeking to show how Chicanx artists have long formed networks. That was also their point of their 2017 show “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.,” which opened as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA initiative and included artists such as Sandoval, Baca, Mundo Meza, Tosh Carrillo, Laura Aguilar, and Joey Terrill. The exhibition helped spur on more interest in late-career artists, the most notable being Terrill, known for his paintings that document the intersections of queer and Chicanx life in Los Angeles and beyond.

This year, Terrill’s work is included in two major exhibitions, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” at the Brooklyn Museum and the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, and he had his second New York solo gallery show with Ortuzar Projects. But the most significant presentation of his work took place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which acquired and then put on display his 1981 triptych Chicanos Invade New York Series.

Showing three scenes featuring Terrill during his first stay in New York (making tortillas, learning of John Lennon’s death, and visiting the Guggenheim Museum), it’s now on view in a permanent collection gallery dedicated to 1980s New York, alongside the work of artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Murray, Jenny Holzer, Martin Wong, and Haim Steinbach. In situating Terrill alongside the stars of the era, MoMA suggested he was just as important as them, a bold statement that did a lot to raise his profile, as did the museum’s decision to promote its offerings on social media. So, too, will a forthcoming monograph on Terrill’s work from the AIDS crisis, which will likely touch on his day job as director of global advocacy and partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

MoMA has been slow to acknowledge the work of Chicanx and Latinx artists in a substantive way until recently. Terrill’s appearance in the permanent collection galleries marks a step in the right direction. But, it has been even slower to acknowledge the scholars who created foundational texts, like Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Mesa-Bains. An exceptional show by Leslie Martinez at MoMA’s sister institution, MoMA PS1, does this well. It includes three commissioned works, including a seven-panel work that takes over the corner of the show’s final gallery. The artist’s no-waste practice, in which rags and other studio detritus are embedded into these eye-popping abstractions, calls to mind rasquachismo, an aesthetic approach by Chicano artists that scholar Ybarra-Frausto coined in 1989. It’s the art of the make-do, being resourceful to create works that speak to the lived experiences of Chicanx communities. Works like Martinez’s subvert expectations of what some might think Latinx art can or should be, and show how artists like Martinez have long been in conversation with canonical figures found in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries.

Meanwhile, a sea change is taking place for mid-career and emerging Latinx artists, who now seem to have more opportunities than they ever did before. Look no further than Made in L.A. Not only was a stalwart of the LA Latinx art community like Terrill included, but so were showcases for other major fixtures of the scene, like Guadalupe Rosales, whose room-size installation that features at its center a sculpture of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl made from lowrider bicycle parts tied together with blue bandanas, cast in a purple and green neon light with a pyramid disco ball spinning in a corner. Presentations for younger artists like Ryan Preciado, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Marcel Alcalá, and Christopher Suarez were powerful as well.

But the standout of this cohort is Jackie Amézquita, who presented a grid of 144 square slabs each of which is made with the soil of a different neighborhood in Los Angeles. Onto these, she has inscribed scenes inspired by those neighborhoods, creating images that serve as tender documents of daily life in parts of the city that don’t exist in the mainstream conception of “Los Angeles.”

One of today’s most closely watched artists, rafa esparza, had two major showings this year: a three-person show (with Rosales and Mario Ayala) at SFMOMA and a solo show at Artists Space in New York. Showcasing a new evolution in the artist’s well-known practice, esparza has created several life-size portraits of his friends and family on adobe, a generational practice that was passed down to him from his father; these works, however, were installed on metal structures and over an adobe brick road that crumpled during the exhibition’s run. It’s a reminder that those we hold close—our family, our friends, our communities, our neighborhoods—can gradually fade away if we don’t take the care to maintain them and their memories.

Memory is also the subject of a powerful exhibition by another LA-based artist, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Aparicio’s work portrays the aftereffects of the Salvadoran civil war, as seen from the artist’s perspective as a second-generation child born in the US. The exhibition’s centerpiece is large-scale floor installation made of amber poured over objects like ceramic bones, volcanic stones, historical documents from the civil war, and clothes found in MacArthur Park. The work’s shape matches that of El Playon, the site of a volcanic explosion just outside San Salvador that once served as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the civil war.

Aparicio’s exhibition found its twin in a survey at the International Center of Photography in New York for photographer Muriel Hasbun, who herself left El Salvador at 18, in 1979, the year before the civil war officially broke out. Her experiments in printing multiple images over each other, including on linens that once belonged to her ancestors, shows how memories past can forcefully collide with the present, their presences serving as haunting reminders of those we have lost.

One could go on about all the artists who have received their due this year. Conceptual artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz had first career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Pepón Osorio’s installations were brought together at New York’s New Museum. A Brooklyn Museum survey explored how María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s practice examines the aftereffects of slavery on Cuba, the US, and the world writ large. Yolanda González’s survey at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, provided new insights into the work of a beloved artist, and there were three exhibitions for Gala Porras-Kim, at MUAC in Mexico City, Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.

Carolina Caycedo’s sublime atarraya sculptures currently fill MoMA’s second-floor atrium. Yvette Mayorga’s maximalist paintings and installations were the subject of two solo institutional showings on view this year, at Crystal Bridges’s The Momentary and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. Accompanying a tightly curated survey of his recent work of lush studio portraits, Ken Gonzales-Day organized an exhibition at Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery that paired selections from his collection of tintypes with works by contemporary queer artists.

Ester Hernandez, Diana Solís, Diógenes Ballester, and Mario Ybarra Jr. were among the artists who received this year’s Latinx Artist Fellowship, which comes with $50,000. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, a 2022 winner of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, had a solo show at Bushwick’s Amos Eno Gallery, showcasing documentation of her riotous performance–cum–beauty pageant, Miss Nalgas USA. At the Armory Show, Ruiz-Healy Art had on view a powerful installation by Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, who is woefully in need of a retrospective. Ruben Ochoa’s mobile art gallery, CLASS: C, made its return, after nearly two decades of retirement, as part of an outdoor project at Frieze Los Angeles. Nao Bustamante opened an artist-run gallery at her grave plot at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Ortuzar Projects mounted an exhibition dedicated to Carlos Almaraz and Elsa Flores, looking at how the artist-couple influenced each other’s works.

Galleries like Ortuzar Projects, Ruiz-Healy, Embajada (in San Juan), Commonwealth and Council, and Charlies James (both in Los Angeles), as well as the now five-year-old Latinx Project at NYU, have nurtured these artists’ careers. They remain exceptions in a market that has largely ignored Latinx artists. But a couple signs of a shift taking place in the upper echelons of the market: Firelei Báez got representation with Hauser & Wirth, one of the world’s biggest galleries, and Christie’s mounted a selling exhibition dedicated to contemporary Latinx artists, with works by Aliza Nisenbaum, Freddy Rodríguez, Juan Sánchez, Gisela Colón, Yvette Mayorga, and more offered.

The support of these artists through solo shows can only go so far; they need major thematic exhibitions that draw out the connections of their works and place them in historical contexts that speak to our contemporary moment.

Three group shows come to mind in this regard. The first is a Lisson Gallery’s summer group show in one of its New York spaces. Organized by César García-Alvarez, “Distribuidx” featured artists like rafa esparza, ektor garcia, Felipe Baeza, Sarah Zapata, Carlos Reyes, and Marcel Pardo Ariza, and looked at how these artists employ conceptual strategies to dismantle structures that seek to confine their art. “Ordinary People” at the Long Beach Museum of Art, focuses on how activism by artists can result in significant change. Among those spotlighted are Tlaloc Studios, AMBOS Project, and Slanguage Studio, each of which prove that artists can help us fight for a better, more just world.

The year’s biggest thematic show came in the form of “Xican-a.o.x. Body,” at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. Bringing together around 125 works, the exhibition looks at how some 70 artists, from multiple generations, have foregrounded their Brown bodies as sites of political agency. Highlights include documentation of Cyclona’s groundbreaking 1971 performance Chicano Wedding, an experimental video by Patssi Valdez, Justin Favela’s large-scale Gypsy Rose Piñata sculpture, and photographs by Fabian Guerrero, William Camargo, James Luna, and Laura Aguilar.

It is wide-ranging surveys like this that create a lineage for Latinx artists. We are witnessing the building of a new canon for these artists on their terms, one that demonstrates just how important Latinx artists are, and have been, to our own understanding of art history.

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.

There is an entire history of artists working at the Museum of Modern Art alone. In the 1960s, sculptor Sol Lewitt worked there as a receptionist, Minimalist Dan Flavin took a job as an elevator operator, and painter Robert Ryman manned the galleries as a security guard. The artist Howardena Pindell even worked as a curatorial assistant in the drawings department; she came up with the idea to use discarded paper punches in her abstract paintings from her time in that office.

This fringe history of artists moonlighting as MoMA workers informed “Day Jobs,” one of the year’s most memorable shows. Held at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the exhibition was “an attempt to dispel the stubborn myth of the lone genius, working in isolation in the studio creating masterpieces,” as curator Veronica Roberts put it in an interview with ARTnews.

She pointed to Tishan Hsu, an artist now known for painting and sculptures that combine the imagery of technology with the human body. “Hsu was a word processor in the 1980s, and was doing this with predominantly women at a corporate law firm… He began thinking about how screens were changing our relationships with our bodies, and that question has been the foundation to everything he has made since.” A painting from 1982, Portrait, is on view in “Day Jobs”; it depicts glitchy lips and eyes on a panel with rounded corners reminiscent of early IBM computing screens.

“Day Jobs,” with its assertion that artists’ art is not the only aspect of their life which defines them, and indeed that such circumstances impact what they make, was emblematic of a larger trend that could be seen in US museums in 2023. This year, many institutions began to focus on how constellations of artists form around shared lived experiences. Artists were being celebrated as multihyphenates who are influenced by their peers.

This framing lends itself to explorations of artists’ biographies, which have not always been celebrated in the field of curating. Roberts told ARTnews that while coming up as a curator, mentioning an artist’s biography was disparaged. “There was an endeavor to keep an artist’s life totally separate from their work,” she explained. Of course, there are dangers in overusing biography, which can result in flattened readings of complex works and practices, especially ones by artists from marginalized groups. Now, however, it feels like a misstep to not thoughtfully pay mind to the circumstances of art-making, and this is encouraged in shows that expand the very concept of what it means to be an artist.

One such show was “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” which opened at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in June. The exhibition considered Native North American artists who had incorporated theatre and performance into their work, and took its inspiration from the 1969 proposal Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, written by teachers at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. The document proposed that centuries-old forms of Native performance could be reinterpreted for a new age, while also noting that all this contemporary practice “cannot be developed overnight.” In the authors’ words, “it will come only as the result of an educational process in which Indian artists are created who can then make their own statements.”

“The document was a revelation to me as it felt like a missing piece of art history,” curator Candice Hopkins said in an interview. “Here were the dual origins of Native theatre and performance art, rooted in practices of experimentalism and cultural difference.”

By rooting her show in what could be labeled experimental theatre, Hopkins was arguing that the artists she included were inspired not just by art history but by the other arts, too. And she suggested that though they were bound by Indigeneity, these artists were also borne from varying experiences, interests, interpretations, and Native nation affiliations that impacted their art. The show included black-and-white videos of IAIA students performing in masks and regalia, but it also included paintings by Kay WalkingStick, a sculpture by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and newly commissioned choreography by Jeffrey Gibson. All of these artists were “making their own statements,” as the IAIA teachers might have put it.

Hopkins’s rediscovery of the 1969 manifesto and archives is a testament to how the IAIA students were creating works not meant for art institutions. The contents of “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” a show at the Brooklyn Museum through March 2024, function in a similar way. The exhibition highlights zines (short for fanzines), made in the advent of accessible photocopy machines, from the 1970s to present day.

More than 1,000 objects are packed into the galleries, which present how zines aided in the formation of networks of avant-garde musicians and visual artists, many of whom were queer.  And many wear multiple hats. Vaginal Davis, for example, appears in this show as an artist, a model, and a musician. She was credited in over a dozen wall labels, for her self-published Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine (1987–91), for being a subject in Rick Castro’s photographs, and for her collaboration with Lawrence Elbert on the music video The White to be Angry (1999), produced to accompany a song by her punk band Petro, Mureil and Esther (PME). Davis even tracked the interconnectedness of the North American punk scene in the “History of Punk Timeline” (n.d.)—a foldout made for the Toronto-based J.D.s magazine (1985–91).

Branden W. Joseph, an art historian who curated the show with Drew Sawyer, said of the exhibition, “These relationships were not only on the basis of actual lived experience, but also, in many cases, fostered by relationships and situations that artists imagined and then brought into existence for themselves.” The zine, which can be printed matter in addition to video and audio cassettes, was an extension of mail art and artist books, and came into being to meet these community-building desires. And while the exhibition tracks the zine’s genesis in a pre-internet era, it also argues for its enduring popularity with a space devoted to contemporary practitioners.

In a much different way, this year’s edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, titled “Acts of Living” and now on view at the Hammer, mirrors the curatorial thrust of “Copy Machine Manifesto” with stated ambitions to “situate art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life,” according to its description. The show includes an exhibition-within-an-exhibition by the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), which has installed a break room (including a Bunn coffee maker, microwave, and soft Muzak) to house a selection from its collections. Food, drink, and casual browsing is unheard of in archives, and LACA wanted to create an alternative space for this.

“It’s very much a conversation on preciousness and preservation” LACA’s director and archivist Hailey Loman told ARTnews. “We emphasize that we want you to work in this space, we want you to hang out here … We are not interested in preserving materials ‘forever.’ We care about how looking at a document can make changes to our lives right now.”

The collections include paper trails from the practices of Patricia Fernández, Barbara Kruger, and others. And while Loman described that archives often prioritize press releases and documentation of exhibitions or performances, those that pertain to the nitty-gritty of process receive a subsidiary focus. In LACA’s collections, there are gas bills, studio leases, even paintings that were deemed subpar by the artists and then tossed out. “These are things that help us to learn how art is getting made and how people are living and surviving,” Loman said.

This greater acknowledgement of the labor involved in the arts coincides with a burgeoning workers’ movement in museums. Across the country, staff at institutions ranging from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum have led unionization campaigns. Meanwhile, artists are agitating for fair compensation. In 2018, the W.A.G.E. organization released their often-cited fee calculator, which determines project-based payment by both an artist’s participation (i.e. solo or group show) and a nonprofit’s annual operating expenses (i.e., from Apexart to the Met). Institutions can advertise their W.A.G.E certification status if they comply with these rates; the most notable ones to do so have been Artists Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. 

Roberts, the “Day Jobs” curator, said that her show is connected to both developments. At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she is the new director and where the exhibition travels in the spring, “Day Jobs” will become the first group show held at the institution where participants will be paid a fee. Roberts said this not only has to do with the agency that comes with her directorial position, but also the labor and financial precarity that her show makes clear: “That discussion connects to the exhibition itself, and the consideration of artists’ lived experiences and the conditions of making.”

To put it another way, there are many forces outside the studio that affect what happens within. In 2023, reconciling the two became the job not just of artists, but the institutions that exhibit their work, too. That trend looks to continue as “Day Jobs” travels in 2024. 

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:

A year later, mainstream museums are still grappling with this shift, as they have indeed historically prioritized the study, display, and preservation of objects in their care, and not the communities that surround them. Exceptions to these are community museums, which arose from a desire for museums to put people and local communities first, which can take the form of building collections or organizing exhibitions together.

In the US, the foundations of these museums date back to the late 1960s, when three now prominent community museums—the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., (in 1967), the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle (1967), and El Museo del Barrio in New York (1969)—were founded as dedicated spaces for communities marginalized by mainstream institutions in their respective cities. 

“You had all these social movements from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the antiwar movement, to the Women’s movement, really challenging all kinds of American institutions, and museums were no exception to that,” Samir Meghelli, the Anacostia’s chief curator, said in 2019.

Below, a look at how these three community museums, as well as the ever-thriving National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago (founded 1987) and the recently reopened Buffalo AKG Art Museum (the sole mainstream institution discussed here), are continuing to move on the needle on the how museums can create community-centered, hyper-local programs.

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.  

One significant way the canon grew this year was through the addition of figures active before 1900, an area that has received less attention in major museums in past years. Female Old Masters were seen anew, especially in the case of a Baltimore Museum of Art show that spotlights women working in Europe between 1400 and 1800.

Yet the art-historical rewriting hardly ended there. It continued with fresh looks for modernists forewent in the past, as well as with retrospectives for artists who hailed from beyond Western Europe and the US. These shows acted as signs of changing times and increased curiosity on the parts of curators, and the momentum is likely to be felt in 2024 and the years afterward.

Below, a look at 10 artists who received their due in 2023.