THIS WEEK'S HOT TOPIC
Just like that, London’s Frieze week has come and gone. A quick recap: Dealers at Frieze London relayed robust sales, while marquee evening events at the Big Three auction houses told differing tales.
Christie’s two sales on October 14 scored a combined £218.6m ($289.4m) combined, with 91% sold by lot. Then, Phillips had a strong showing with its Modern & Contemporary auction on the 15th, notching a white-glove sale with a £14.8m total.
Later that same night, though, Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction failed to meet its pre-sale estimate of £41.7–£58.6m, hammering at £36.9 million, before fees, with 82% sold by lot. (A reminder for readers: pre-sale estimates do not account for fees, though auction houses will often report sales’ totals with fees included.) Various reports described the mood in the sale’s room as “anxious,” “tense,” and “muted.” An alarm—possibly from someone’s phone—literally went off in the building at one point.
A sign? We’ll see. London’s auctions aren’t necessarily the bellwether events that, say, New York’s own fall sales are. We won’t be able to draw real conclusions from the week until the rest of the fall picture is complete.
In the meantime, the art world (or at least one jet-setting sect) is chunneling down to France for another set of sales and Art Basel Paris. More on that below.
Editor's note: Last week's newsletter mistakenly identified Cecilia Vicuña's new exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery as a benefit show. The exhibition, called "Living Threads," is a standard ticketed exhibition. The works on view are not for sale.
3…THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ART BASEL PARIS 2026
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Art Basel’s Swiss flagship has long been viewed as the brand’s pinnacle, but the shimmering glass walls of the Grand Palais, where Art Basel Paris takes place, have enticed wandering eyes since 2022, when the fair returned to the French city. Highlights this year include Michael Rosenfeld and Jeffrey Deitch’s collaborative booth with Beauford Delaney and Alteronce Gumby, a perfect pairing, and Karma’s booth, which will bring a solo presentation of work by Mungo Thomson.
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Another reason so many collectors and curators prefer Paris is the myriad of world-class institutions the city has to offer. Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France have teamed up to present a barn-burner Louise Bourgeois show, called “Extrême Tension.” It focuses on Bourgeois’ prints and drawings from both museums’ collections. At the Musée d’Orsay, home to Manet’s Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (both 1863), among other masterpieces of art history, Jenny Holzer will be having an exhibition titled “J’ai vu.” Kerry James Marshall’s show at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, already open to the public, will likely draw more crowds during the well-attended art week.
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Painting shows abound across the City of Light this year. Galerie Crèvecœur, a local favorite, will have an exhibition with acclaimed painter of moody quotidian scenes, gallery artist Daisuke Fukunaga. The sun never sets on Gagosian Gallery, and at their rue de Ponthieu location, they are presenting the solo debut of Lee Krasner in collaboration with Olney Gleason and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. At Mariane Ibrahim’s location in the 8th Arrondissement: a slew of colorful portraits by heavyweight painter Amoako Boafo. Get ‘em while Paris is hot!
A NUMBER TO KNOW
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The number of museum and foundation groups that attended Art Basel Paris in 2025, according to the company. The influx crystallizes an extremely inconvenient reality for the crowd that considers the market a pool of slime that should be dammed off from art institutions at all times: going to, and buying from, art fairs has become a vital part of what nonprofit directors, curators, and their biggest funders do throughout the year.
Last year’s Art Basel Paris was hardly an outlier on this front. Frieze, for example, reported that “over 400 groups of patrons” from institutions attended the 2025 edition of Frieze London and Frieze Masters. TEFAF relayed that more than 400 museum directors and 130 patron groups descended on the company’s fairs in Maastricht and New York last year. And the press statements those statistics come from also contain plenty of references to acquisitions made by institutions at these same events.
This phenomenon concisely demonstrates how interconnected the different sectors of the art industry have become in the 21st century. When the first art fairs launched—Art Cologne in 1967, followed by Art Basel in 1970—they were first and foremost trade fairs: large-scale convergence points between dealers and private collectors to do business as efficiently as possible.
Although that identity is still the heart of the format six decades later, fairs have evolved to become 360-degree experiences that extend beyond the walls of the venue and attract brands, celebrities, influencers, casual recreation-seekers, and yes, institutional stakeholders just as much as for-profit actors. It’s a rich tapestry, and whether you like it or not, we’re all woven into it now.
—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market
ASK: ACCESS SOPHISTICATED KNOWLEDGE
ASK: How much overlap do you expect there to be between the art world crowd that attended the London auctions and Frieze last week versus those who will be at Art Basel and the Paris sales this week? Other than yourself, what kinds of people typically attend both? Do you have secret handshakes?
Josh Baer for NoReserve: Yes, we do have a secret handshake for the gatekeeping community. In some senses, with the advent of a large class of professional art advisors, it matters a bit less whether their clients go to London, Paris, or both.
It is true that closing deals is more likely when art is seen IRL, but the story tends to hit the media only about US collectors, whether they attend or not, and leaves out entire continents. Yes, they prefer Paris. Yes, Art Basel Paris is way stronger at the higher price points, and more major galleries do show there. What always confuses me is why attend London or Paris but NOT Basel Basel? That is still the big dog.
So, wave hello to us, but unless you know the handshake, let us do our work discreetly, please.
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 our paid newsletter, The Baer Faxt.
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While in London, Josh Baer sat down with two distinct guests, venerable dealer Timothy Taylor and Gurr Johns Managing Director in Europe, Anika Guntrum, for a pair of podcasts about the fair, auctions, and state of the city’s art scene. Listen below.
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