The most important question to ask when you first enter the art market is not “which artist should I buy or pay attention to?” It’s “how do I get information?” Well you already made a smart step getting in subscribing to No Reserve, and maybe even upgraded to The Baer Faxt.

With 3,000,000+ artists (in the US alone), thousands of galleries and museums, and dozens of art fairs, no one—not even an art advisor—sees it all.

If you were a lawyer and watched Law & Order you would say "that's not what happens" or if you were a doctor and read the local paper on health care, you would say "hmmm, but…” —well, the same logic applies to the art market.

So, who do we choose to listen to?

Behind paywalls are Annie Armstrong at Artnet, whose Wet Paint column spies on a younger generation; former gallerist (and No Reserve contributor) Tim Schneider’s The Gray Market, which gives excellent insights through a broader lens beyond the art world; and for detailed auction/market news, check out Marion Maneker’s Wall Power on Puck.

In the free zone, check out the Instagram of collector Jeff Magid, who often ruminates on the same topics we do. And don’t forget the live-wire artist/dealer/collector Kenny Schachter, on Artnet and/or Instagram.

The number of changes to the top three most searched artists in Artnet's Price Database between 2015 and 2025, according to the company's internal reporting. To save you a click: Picasso maintained his death grip on first place, followed by Andy Warhol in second and Marc Chagall in third.

Despite plenty of talk about generational changes in taste lately, Artnet’s results reinforce that the core of the auction sector tends to remain surprisingly stable year after year, at least over the medium term. Whether most people believe the secondary market is relatively strong (as it was in 2015), distressingly weak (as the narrative holds for this year), or somewhere in between (where it usually is, chatter be damned), the artists making up its foundation stay largely the same.

That said, it’s important to tease out what this ranking actually means—and what it doesn’t. We’re not talking about the top-selling artists at auction, whether by value or by volume. We’re not even talking about the artists with the highest number of lots offered. Instead, we’re purely talking about which three artists’ names appeared the most in any kind of query at all of Artnet’s auction price database, regardless of the details.

In this sense, the best analogy is probably to something like an auction market Q score, aka a measure of how prevalent a particular person or brand is in an audience’s consciousness. Picasso, Warhol, and Chagall have been front of mind for a lot of folks in the trade over the past decade thanks to their prolific creative production and their continued resale appeal. At this rate, it’s not a wild bet that the same will still be true of this trio in 2035, too. (Editor’s note: The most searched artists in The Baer Faxt’s free-to-use Auction Database were Warhol, Basquiat, and Picasso.)

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

This time we turn the tables and play one of our favorite parlor games by asking YOU: Which living artist do YOU think will stand the test of time in 50 years in terms of art, not the art market?

Let us know by replying directly to this email. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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