Alas, we’ve come to the end of 2025, a rollercoaster year in the world of art and beyond.

Looking back, some of the climacteric moments include the controversial selection of Alma Allen as the U.S. pick for the 61st Venice Biennale, the heist of crown jewels from the Louvre, and Sotheby’s sale of an 18k gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan for a modest $12.1 million.

Across the country, artists tackled tech giants and the specter of AI, while institutions like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian suffered at the hands of President Trump.

More small- to mid-sized galleries closed, including C L E A R I N G (LA and NY), Tilton Gallery (NY), and Venus Over Manhattan (NY). By the time the powerhouse gallerist Tim Blum shuttered his spaces in LA and Tokyo in July, many fretted the death of the market as we know it. Fortunately, November’s premier auctions tempered anxieties a bit, and Miami Art Week kept up the positive vibes.

Of course, this is by no means a comprehensive list. That’s why we want to hear from you.

Below is NoReserve’s inaugural year-end survey—your chance to weigh in on the people, places, and things that defined the last twelve months in art for you.

To submit your answer, head ➡️ here or just reply to this email!

The final price (with fees) of the only surviving “Rosebud” sled from Citizen Kane, sold in a July 2025 auction of movie memorabilia at Heritage Auctions. That’s the most money paid under the hammer for a Hollywood collectible in 2025 so far—and an avatar for the larger, longer-running explosion in demand for film, TV, and pop culture memorabilia over the past 20 years.

This year alone has seen multimillion-dollar auctions of collectibles from the lives and careers of the late auteur David Lynch ($4m at Julien's Auctions) and the animation and puppet maestro Jim Henson ($2.6m, also at Julien’s), while a sale of objects owned by the late Golden Age crooner Bing Crosby is expected to make $4m to $7m at Sotheby’s later this week. These major results also follow a plethora of others in 2024, including a dedicated sale of more than 900 pieces of memorabilia from Game of Thrones that made $21.1m.

There are two reasons this power surge matters to the art trade. First, the growing popularity of memorabilia from the 1980s to the present suggests that many of its most avid collectors are millennials or younger. That’s an age demographic that art sellers are desperate to bring into the fold in greater numbers.

Second, every dollar that wealthy fans spend on rare memorabilia is a dollar they won’t be spending on rare artwork—and the buyers feel they’re getting something just as prestigious, if not even more so, by making the substitution. Joe Maddalena, the executive vice president of Heritage, put it this way to Artnet News: “A super high-grade first print of Mario or Zelda is as important to a video game enthusiast as what a Warhol meant to somebody 20 years ago.”

That’s great news if you own or consign pop culture collectibles… but less so if you own or consign canonical post-war art.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

This segment of ASK was taped live in Miami at Untitled Art.

Frederico from Milan ASKed: Fairs are very busy. Some collectors feel like there's too much noise around. Do you think that, for them, fairs are still a competitive place, or do they prefer more personalized experiences like dinners and private events? Do you think that art fairs still are the biggest place in the market for getting new collectors and sales?

Josh Baer for NoReserve: These big dinners, the galleries don't want to host them. Collectors don't want to go to them. Advisors really don't want to go to them. That expense is not useful. On the other hand, we do need to recognize that clients are here for fun. We have to balance that kind of fun with rigor, and that relates to how much they’re spending. If you're buying a painting for $8,000, that can be fun. If you're buying a painting for $8 million, well now we're in a different world of analysis. If an art collector came from out of town to Miami, 95% of them bought something, because that's what they do. That's what's fun. Art fairs are for shopping. If you're really a top-line collector, you're already in conversation with the galleries you deal with.

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