It’s auction week in New York, which some think shows the “real” market in a transparent way—and in many ways it does. But one thing to keep in mind, especially in a less speculative and “frothy” market, is that secondary prices (e.g. auction) are often now lower than primary market prices (e.g. when an artist first sells a work through a gallery).

Some argue, as Damien Hirst does, that this is the proper state of affairs that maximizes what the artist earns, seeing as they don’t make much, if anything, from the artist resale royalty at auction. After all, the expectation that ALL prices should increase is not reasonable.

Pure auction data does not work in a linear regression model to predict actual value because there is no coefficient for condition and quality. This is only meant for you finance and math geeks who probably have degrees in this stuff—but you can all get the point: if the model doesn’t know how good an item is, it can’t correctly estimate its value.

What counts is that there IS an auction market, which promotes buying art in the first place. So the fact that there will (may) be an outlet later on provides the entire market the illusion of liquidity, even if it cannot be actually always liquid.

Take the art market media reports with a grain of salt—it's hard to comment on sales results without knowing the actual numbers on the deals for work sold.

So, bid wisely and as we always say: only buy works you love, not works you like.

The rumored cost of George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

The institution, set to open in Exposition Park in 2026, is dedicated to what Lucas called both “the orphaned arts” and “the art people respond to in the real world” in a Wall Street Journal profile last month. Its core will be the more than 40,000 objects he has collected in niches spanning illustration, cartooning, commercial art, design, and more.

On the other hand, the museum’s holdings do include several major works that would unquestionably be considered “fine art.” Its confirmed acquisitions include Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) for $15.3m, Artemisia Gentileschi’s The Triumph of Galatea (ca. 1650) for more than $2.1m, and Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser (1940) for an undisclosed amount.

Once complete, the museum will almost inarguably be the planet’s highest-stakes public example of cross-collecting, or buying across object categories and time periods rather than sticking to a narrowly defined mandate. The practice has gotten a ton of attention amid the high-end art market’s post-pandemic doldrums, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s novel. The strategy has actually been a staple since the Enlightenment, with centuries’ worth of aristocratic Wunderkammern (aka cabinets of curiosities) to prove it.

Asked about the rumored price tag of the museum, Lucas told WSJ that $1bn “is close, but we haven’t gotten there yet.” Although the final figure will be a justified object of interest, it will have no material impact on taxpayers. Another vital way in which Lucas and Hobson’s institution breaks from institutional norms is through their decision to fund the whole thing themselves.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

This question was ASKed as part of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s class ‘Making Without Objects’ at Columbia University, held at The Baer Faxt HQ.

Mino, Shaina and Jasphy ASKed: What is the relationship between artists and collectors, what should it look like?

Rirkrit Tiravanija: I think the artist needs to make a work through their own experience or their own self—to not make work through the eye of the other, like the eye of the market or the collector. But of course, it should always be your own, right? This is a weird space, on one hand: to try make things in the world to reflect on the world; and on the other, to come up with your own worldview. So you have to find yourself first…but how does a 25 year old find themself? This is the hard thing. I always say, try to not think about anyone else when you make art—think about what you are going through, what you are experiencing. I don’t think about the collectors market, or galleries or museums, curators–nothing. My process is my total experience, and while the social or relational part is about other people, it still starts with me.

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