Welcome to 2026, where sticky issues old and new continue to loom over the art world. But before we look forward to the rest of the year (more on that next week), let’s take one last glance at 2025.

Last month, we presented our year-end readers’ poll in which we posed a series of questions and prompts to subscribers—and thankfully, you responded in kind. (We launched a separate poll for subscribers to our paid newsletter, The Baer Faxt. Those results will also be shared this week.) While most submissions varied, there was some overlap too.

The Met’s “Sargent and Paris” survey was a recurring choice for “Best exhibition or show you saw this year,” as was MoMA’s comprehensive Jack Whitten retrospective—the first such show dedicated to the late artist. Those two New York institutions also appeared among readers’ choices for “Best museum or gallery,” along with the M+ museum in Hong Kong, The Perimeter gallery in London, and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Instagram is “Where you encountered the most art this year.” That’s also where you could find Jeff Magid’s endless cache of dad hats; his @magideye account was a popular pick for readers’ “Favorite art world influencer,” though the @theartdaddy_ (which is engaged in an ongoing and often one-sided war with Magid) and @theartmarketguy accounts also scored some votes.

The most revealing responses were also the most diverse. For “Favorite artist you fell in love with this year,” you chose an encouragingly wide array of names: Ed Atkins, Hilary Harkness, Keiji Ito, Nour Malas, Raul de Nieves, Nani Wijaya—the list goes on.

Complaints of shrinking markets and institutional hegemony can leave us feeling like opportunities for artists are disappearing by the day. If this humble poll reveals anything, it’s that, amid all the noise, artists of all kinds are still cutting through.

The combined share of the bidding and buying pool made up of millennials and zoomers in Christie’s rare watch auction during Geneva Luxury Week. The live sale, staged on November 10, brought in a fee-inclusive CHF21.6m (around $27m) and reaffirmed that high-end timepieces are resonating with younger collectors in a serious way.

Christie’s results on this front were no anomaly. Geoff Hess, Sotheby’s global head of watches, said at a luxury conference in September that one-third of his house’s timepiece buyers are millennial or Gen Z—right in line with the age breakout of Christie’s recent Geneva watch auction.

Although the selective year-end results from Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips could say otherwise once they’re released, fine art still seems to be one of the passion assets on the wrong side of the generational divide. Case in point: in the days immediately following their $2.2bn November art sales in New York, none of the Big Three houses was willing or able to provide any data on the age demographics of the buyers and bidders responsible for the blockbuster outcome. (Trust me, I followed up.)

Despite the avalanche of press requests the trio gets during those few days, it’s fair to think that if millennials and zoomers had been a major force in the week’s results, at least one of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, or Phillips would have made sure the art world knew about it. Instead, the silence suggests the art market still has a lot of ground to make up on the watch market when it comes to youth appeal—and the clock is ticking.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

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

Harry in Miami ASKed: I work for a gallery, but I'm also starting to do more of my own independent curatorial projects. In the past year or two, we've seen a lot of gallery closures and a softening of the contemporary market in some aspects. What do you think about a more nomadic structure where you don't have a permanent space, but are instead moving around and staging more project-based exhibitions? Do you think that we're going to see a shift away from galleries signing 30-month leases?

Josh Baer for NoReserve: It's not unusual for galleries to go out of business. Why should we think that, of the hundreds of galleries showing at the fairs in Miami, 980 of them will still be around 10 years from now? It's a natural state of affairs.

Too often we get ahead of ourselves in thinking, ‘What should we be doing?,’ instead of thinking, ‘This is what we need to be doing.’ You do a gallery program because you have artists that need to be shown in the location, or you have art that needs to be better articulated to the world. You don’t do it because it's going to be fun or cool or you’re going to get rich. You fit the structure to what you have rather than fit what you have to existing structures. We need more new ideas. We also need more of the right questions.

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