THIS WEEK'S HOT TOPIC
Recently the Big 3 (or Big 2 plus 1) announced their 2025 totals for Private Sales: Christie's led the way with $1.5 billion (yes, billion), Sotheby's at $1.2 billion and Phillips at $202 million.
To think of these companies strictly as auction houses misses what has been their most substantial change over the last 20 years—privately selling secondary market works.
If you think of them as galleries (just for sales purposes and not their other responsibilities), it makes Christie's and Sotheby's probably the biggest secondary dealers/galleries in the world. They have the advantage of a global sales team with a deep understanding and knowledge of the market. Now, although the total sales figures of the mega-galleries —Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace and Hauser & Wirth— are not made public, we still think their global sales for the year are less. *Note to those mega’s: if you want to tell us, we’re happy to be proven wrong.
When this began we told private galleries to either work together with the auction houses or face getting run over. Has that time come?
On that note, happy holidays everyone! We’ll see you in 2026.
3…THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ARTS LAW
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The way the art market is regulated can be delicate, and as you go deeper into your collecting practice, a few legalities are worth keeping front and center. First among them is title and provenance law. This mainly applies for work bought on the secondary market. One of the biggest risks in art buying is unknowingly purchasing something a seller doesn’t have the right to sell. Thus, you should ask to see a proof of provenance (a documented chain of ownership) and check for any gaps in the timeline. Reputable dealers will offer you a warranty of title, and if you are buying from an auction house, you often get a limited guarantee, not a full warranty, and the terms vary. Read them closely.
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Another issue to be aware of is artist resale rights. If you’re a collector living in the U.S., this area remains unregulated. But in the U.K. and Europe, reselling an artwork may legally require you to pay the artist (or their estate) a small percentage of the sale price. If you’re collecting across borders, it’s wise to check the rules of the jurisdiction where the sale takes place. One asterisk, though: in the U.K./EU, resale royalties apply only when a professional art market participant is involved (like a gallery, auction house). Private-to-private sales aren’t always covered.
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Finally, sales tax and use tax (paid to the state by the buyer where the work will reside. This is especially true in California) will come up often as you navigate the global art circuit. In the U.S., sales tax is usually based on the shipping destination (but collected in the region it was sold, if it was sold in the U.S.), not where you happened to buy the work. A painting purchased in Basel and shipped home will be taxed at American rates, not Swiss ones. Some collectors have historically tried to use tax-free zones to sidestep costs, but misrepresenting shipping is illegal, and never worth the risk. Freeports are legal, but the misrepresentation (e.g., saying a work will remain in Switzerland when it’s actually coming to New York) is illegal.
A NUMBER TO KNOW
5,000+
The square footage of the immersive public restroom installation by Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) at the Chinese mega-mall Deji Plaza in Nanjing. The brand hopes to use the project as a bridge of sorts between mainstream shoppers in Asia and contemporary digital art, particularly through its own Deji Art Museum, located in the same complex.
In November 2024, the museum opened the first-ever institutional survey exhibition of Beeple’s work. His screen-covered, cosmically styled loo partly works as a pipeline between the mall and that show. Even its viewing hours are geared toward a segment of the population that might not otherwise engage with this branch of culture; the Deji Art Museum is open from 10:30am to midnight, seven days a week.
In this way, Deji looks to be offering a populist alternative to the more traditional arts patronage model of European mega-brands like Cartier, Prada, or Louis Vuitton, whose private art foundations are known for staging refined exhibitions of acclaimed Modern and contemporary artists. You’re not going to find an immersive Gerhard Richter bathroom in the Louis Vuitton Foundation before the German painter’s own survey show ends its run there, but maybe the audience for the exhibition really will be narrower because of it.
—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market
ASK: ACCESS SOPHISTICATED KNOWLEDGE
This segment of ASK was taped live in Miami at Untitled Art.
Liz ASKed: I think that there are solutions to making people closer to art or creating connections so that they feel that they can collect. It's about education, schools. Because it is a system that wants you to go out and make numbers and produce and be a soldier, they separate humanities from science, then we're made to look like outcasts. Do you think that schools or educational systems in the US should be giving more focus to humanities?
Josh Baer for NoReserve: How many booths are there in the fair? 160. And let's say there's five artists in each. That's 800 artists, each of whom took out a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt. That's $800 million in loans. Let's be honest, it's hard to imagine that, 50 years from now, the value of all the work in this building is gonna be worth $800 million. We've made being an artist a middle class job that you get a degree in and you take on all this debt with very little chance of return. That education system is messed up. It all funnels down and creates a tiny pyramid of success. We're not teaching artists what we need to teach them in schools. We also need to teach the little ones that art's important too.
Have your own question for the NoReserve team? Reply to this email or reach out to us on Instagram, @no.reserve. Readers whose submissions we choose get a special prize—six free months of The Baer Faxt.
2 MINUTES WITH…
Before Adam Weinberg stepped down from his 20 year long tenure as director of New York’s Whitney Museum, we sat down to discuss the challenges of running a museum, their collection strategy and critically, the connection between curator and artist (Weinberg was succeeded by Scott Rothkopf, Chief Curator and Deputy Director). Here’s ⬇️ a snippet on the size of the collection—which is smaller than you might think (and intentionally so). To listen to Part 1 and Part 2, head ➡️ here and here.
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