The stainless-steel “Rabbit” created by Jeff Koons in 1986 was sold by Christie’s in New York for $91.1 million
For years, a fissure could be felt beneath the polished surface of the contemporary art market, an invisible yet growing crack made of excess, saturation, and fatigue. Today, that crack has become a fracture. Auctions are slowing, sales are falling, galleries are closing or even converting into non-profit spaces (to ease tax pressure and escape media scrutiny), and some are quietly selling on the side. Yet more than an economic collapse, what we’re witnessing is a narrative breakdown: the system has lost the story that once gave value its meaning.
For over two decades, the market functioned as a myth-making machine. It didn’t just sell artworks, it sold stories, symbols, projections. Every emerging artist was a promise of aesthetic yield, every collector, a protagonist of status. The value of art relied on trust, a performative, shared trust, continuously fueled by fairs, media, and publicity. Ah, publicity… and the glorious 1990s! Until, inevitably, that trust began to crack.
Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019. Courtesy Sotheby’s
The numbers confirm it, but psychology preceded it. After years of uninterrupted growth, auction after auction, the entire system now appears exhausted, like an organism that has consumed its own vital reserves. Contemporary art, as a media phenomenon driven more by market dynamics than by thought, has come to mirror the very speculative logic it once claimed to critique. Artworks multiplied, but attention dispersed. Prices rose, but meaning declined.
The reasons behind this contraction are manifold and intertwined: the global economic slowdown, the withdrawal of major collectors, the inflation of sales channels, and the digital overexposure of everyone, big and small, indistinguishably. Yet at its core, the true engine of collapse is conceptual.
The auctioneer takes bids for the sale of David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) during the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale November 15, 2018 at Christie’s in New York. - David Hockneys Famed Pool Scene Sells for $90.3 M. at Christies. (DON EMMERT / AFP/Getty Images)
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1982). Sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s New York in May 2017 to Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa.
Art has lost its status of exception, blurring into the diffuse aesthetics of the network, the spectacle of events, and the monetization of visibility. When everything is art, nothing fully is anymore, as we’ve already written in previous essays.
This text is not meant as an obituary for the market, but as an attempt to read this crisis as a symptom, and perhaps an opportunity. Because every collapse in cultural history marks a shift of state. When a system implodes, it leaves behind the conditions for a new equilibrium to emerge. (…)
Adrian Meyer, global head of private sales at Christie’s, auctions Flowers (1964) by Andy Warhol in New York. Despite the effects of a recent cyber-attack, Christie’s sales held firm, with the 20th-century evening auction reaching $413.3 million. (Photo courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.)
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