Where Art Insiders Are Placing Their Bets in 2026

0:00The latest Artnet Intelligence Report is out and now we're taking it live. On April 8th, Editor-in-Chief Naomi Rae joins award-winning senior reporter Katya Kazekina for a virtual conversation unpacking the report's key findings. Tap the link in the show notes to reserve your spot. There's a model of patronage where instead of buying a ton of art and then building a museum with your name on it, you actually fund great projects which are very visible, which hundreds of thousands of people interact with. That's where you get your cloud and your status, but you don't necessarily own something.

0:37I'm Kate Brown and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:48In 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak at the top of the year, and people's worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market, you've been hearing the drumbeat of bad news. galleries shuttering, a lot of buying energy drying up, fairs closing down some operations, and the secondary market going down. But the picture is as usual nuanced depending on how you cut it, and there were some upsides to the slowdown, especially with regards to the speculation game of art, which by and large seems to be over, which some people say also isn't the worst thing.

1:21There were also the closing months of 2025, which included a successful fall New York auction week and a stronger than expected edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Following two years of a down market, two leading auction houses, Chrissy's and Sotheby's, reported at the close of 2025 upticks in total projected revenue. So, is the wind back in the sails after years of a downturn? Has the art market changed in permanent ways? And what shifts can we expect in 2026? I'm very pleased to be joined by Mark Spiegler to consider these questions. For those who don't already know, Mark led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, and the brand saw a major expansion under his tenureship.

1:59He now works on a portfolio of cultural strategy projects, working with major foundations, private corporations, and projects in the immersive digital and experiential spaces. Speaker has long been a visiting professor in cultural management at Bacana University in Milan and in 2025 launched the Art Market Minds Academy. With that, I'd like to say hello, Mark, and thank you for joining me. Thanks, Kate. It's always a pleasure to see you, whether it's on the Zoom or in person. For sure. You're back in Zurich after a jet-setting fall, I presume? Yeah, I mean, I think the joke about my travel schedule is it didn't change after I left Art Basel.

2:31It just got weirder and more spontaneous. Yes, weird is one of the topics that we'll be getting into today. The art business is getting weird. You and I have been chatting ahead of this, and we can both agree that it's a hard market to read right now. So we have some big questions, five big questions, actually, that we're going to pose and spar about a bit. But first, I'd like a quick synopsis from you about why you think that the market is so hard to read right now. And part of it has to do with the fact that, I mean, inherently the art market has been hard to read always. The fact that both of the major auction houses are now privately held doesn't make it any easier because it used to be that Sotheby's at least had to publish exhaustive results.

3:11Right. And even at the auction houses, a lot of the sales, a lot of the volume now is private treaty sales. So you don't even see what's going on in a room. And already what you were seeing going on in the room often had a lot of things like chandelier bidding and, you know, people bidding up things that they actually had a commercial interest in. Then, of course, you have the entire gallery world, which is, let's say, half of the market. And there people only tell you what they want to tell you. Yes, it's a big problem for us as journalists to try to navigate, especially in the first days of an art fair.

3:40So I think that's really accurate. And at the same time, there's been this speculation on where the new business is going to be because there has been this sort of panic about the downturn. And while things are looking better right now, it's not clear how sustainable this is going to be. One of the big gambits for 2026, which will be our sort of first topic, is the Middle East. And I guess the question is, is the art world betting too deep on the Middle East? I think that is the$64 billion question,$64 billion being the size of the art world in a good year. On the one hand, obviously, there's a lot of activity going on in the Middle East.

4:16We have a kind of soft power race between Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia. And each of them, interestingly, have been approaching this in different ways. The Saudis have leaned more into doing their own branded events, but using Western expertise and Western figures. Abu Dhabi has partnered with people from outside to bring their own brands, you know, like the Guggenheim and Louvre and Team Lab and, of course, most recently, Freeze. Qatar traditionally built its own things using great architects like IM Pei and Jean Duvel. But, of course, Art Basel Qatar is launching in February. And then, of course, Dubai has been more of a commercial marketplace because it was the freest and most dynamic part of the region.

5:03Interestingly, they just announced the Tadala Ander Museum. So what's interesting is the way in which the soft power games are being played, and they are being played with very, very big budgets, and that's clear. But also the way in which people's strategies, which used to be more distinct from each other, are becoming a little bit more conflated. All of that being said, I had a conversation with a gallerist who's very active in the region, who's from the region. And I said exactly this. I said, hey, Art Basel, Qatar, February, freeze Abu Dhabi in November. What do you think? Is the buying power there?

5:33And the important thing is clearly the governmental buying power is there. What's not clear is the private buying power. And if you look at the data that Claire McAndrew has regularly produced for the UBS and Art Basel art market report, something like 85 % of the buying in the art market is private. It's a mix of private collectors, private museums, people working with art advisors. So in the art market as we know it, governmental entities have played a very small role. And so if the Middle East is going to save the market, it's going to be in a very different way because as my gallerist friend said, his estimation was there may be somewhere between a dozen and two dozen active private collectors in the region.

6:16Parenthetically, what is a serious collector in this context? The best definition I've heard is it's when your storage bill is bigger than your mortgage, but it doesn't really matter. You know, we can use different metrics, but the reality is there are not as many active private collectors in the entire Middle East as you would have in the tri-state area or perhaps even a city like London or Paris. Right. And, you know, that dovetails with something that art advisor Ed Dolman was saying to art market columnist Tim Schneider in a recent piece for the art newspaper. However, by and large, 60 % of the market is being purchased and sold by less than 250 clients.

6:53So it begs this question, like how much demand is there for another art fair? I mean, the first year, I think a lot of people are going to descend on Art Basel Katar and also freeze Abu Dhabi. But are they going to be the ones who are going to continue to have to buy in the Middle East? I guess this is the question, right? Like, are they going to be able to bring up a new generation of buyers? And Dolman also told Kelly Crowe at Wall Street Journal that there is a new generation of young buyers in the region. Of course, there's also Qatar is well located. It's equidistant in a sense from New York as it is to Shanghai.

7:22And there's also India and the whole South Pacific that can get there very easily. But it remains to be seen. I mean, 250 is still a small number, right? Yeah, and I think he's talking about that globally. And what's interesting is I did a piece for Business of Fashion for my Arts Radar column a while back. And I was talking to Lee Guzer. And he was saying that what was interesting to him about the market is the fact that there are new players and they're coming in at the highest level. And this explains also why you got these unexpectedly good results during the auctions. I'm sure those people are within the 250 that Dolman was talking about.

7:51But when we're talking about a market that has to sustain hundreds of galleries working with thousands of artists, it's going to take more than a few people. And the other thing is the people coming in at that level tend to be looking for trophies and not for emerging young artists. Like, I don't think they're going to do the thing that you and I do, Kate, which is like go to London and like go out to the East End and hop on a line bike and, you know, walk down weird alleys to see strange galleries with cool young artists. You know, I think these people are the type that are going to like walk around Mayfair, walk up and down Madison Avenue, like that's their shopping trip.

8:24And that's cool. But if you think of the art market as an environment whose purpose is to sustain cultural production, you know, in the same way that if you think of companies whose purpose is not to generate shareholder value, but to generate employment, if you think of the art market not as a place where speculators trade in baubles and billionaires adorn their houses, but whose purpose is to drive patronage to the artists that you and I and probably everybody listening to this podcast. listened to, then it's not going to be enough to have a dozen whales coming into the market every year. Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

9:01And I was actually looking at the list of Art Basel Qatar because a young dealer pointed out to me that there are no emerging galleries going to the fair. It's an approach, you know, I don't think that their strategy for this fair is to even bring in, you know, the young emerging faces that we're used to seeing at the other fairs, which, you know, gets to something that we're going to talk about later, which is regionalization. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And it's also connects to something that we've been seeing at Art Basel and at Freeze, which is that this so-called graduation program that you would be able to move from the young gallery sector very smoothly to the main sector.

9:35That is just not the pattern anymore. We need to evolve this model because that myth just has been busted. This is not how it works. Okay. So I'm going to do a rare thing, Kate, which is to disagree with you, at least start to disagree with you. In this sense, like, I think actually the path is clearer to move up into the main sectors in Frise and in Basel. Certainly at Art Basel and Art Basel Paris, it's very hard to get into the main sectors because those fairs are still so competitive. Every other fair, because of people closing or quitting the fairs, has more space. And what's interesting to me is the fact that a lot of younger galleries are choosing not to enter the main sector.

10:17They are choosing not to take the greater risk because they don't necessarily buy into the notion that they have to make this progression. I think actually the issue is not that the young galleries can't graduate. Like if I think about when I was running Art Basel, all the galleries that were knocking at the door ready to come in, like they're now in the main sector. And that's because, of course, there was a generational shift. You know, I think the big issue is that there's not a next generation of galleries coming up as hard as we had, say, 10 years ago, but also that a lot of the galleries coming up are looking at the people that were the front runners of the previous generation who closed.

10:56You know, they look at people like Clearing and JTT and they say, like, that's not the path. I don't necessarily want to do 10 fairs in my fourth year of business. That's an interesting point for sure. To sort of phase us into the next big question, which we've already kind of touched on, which is will the art world go regional in 2026? Will this regionalization movement continue to move? I think there is like a connecting point with the Middle East. I was talking to a journalist at ArtNet, Vivian Chow, and she was saying that there are some comparisons to be drawn perhaps between the rush to South Korea and the rush to the Middle East, you know, and there's a regional lesson here where a lot of Western galleries, Vivian was saying, the bet on Korea.

11:37They are now, you know, seeing that what Korean buyers want is to buy Korean art. They're not bringing their Western positions to this fair as much. So in general, I think that that perhaps brings us to this question, like, has there been this anti-globalization turn and will it continue to be that way? And will fairs really have to define themselves by their regional profiles as opposed to this global carousel of traveling patrons? So I think the Korea example is interesting. I would say probably part of the reason why gallerists are having difficulty selling foreign artists in Korea might be the fact that the won has dropped strongly against other currencies.

12:15And so suddenly foreign artists are 10 or 15 percent more expensive than they were before. Maybe that's too granular. So I think you have two competing factors here, which will determine the degree to which maybe not the art world, but individual members of the art world live more or less regional existences moving forward. One is the fact that every card-carrying member of the art world that I respect, that I find interesting, is a neophiliac. It's a word that, to the best of my knowledge, Charles Saatchi invented, or at least introduced in the art world. He said, we're all neophiliacs. I agree.

12:50The interesting people in the art world, and most of them are interesting, are people who will go really far to see a cool young gallery or to check out a new fair. You know, I think a lot of people are trekking to Thailand. I just couldn't make it this fall, but I'm going to make it next year. You know, when you sense something bubbling up, you want to see it for yourself. Like when you see K-culture, not just like Korean art, but I mean, more globally, K-pop, K-movie, K-skincare, et cetera. You want to see that. You want to understand, like, what the hell is this gentle monster thing? What's going on in Korea with all these museums?

13:23And you see it. You want to see it. Of course, after a certain point, you've seen it, right? And like, either you fall in love with that place. I happen to love Korea because I feel like when I'm there, I'm in the future. But maybe you don't fall in love with it. And you're like, well, that was a fun fling. And now we're going to move on. And of course, there are new places coming along, right? The other thing that I think is going to be interesting is we live in an art fair duopoly world, basically. You know, the top 10 fairs in the world unquestionably are owned by either Art Basel or by Fries as an organization.

13:51And next year, those two organizations will stage a total of 13 fairs. The two of them together will bring at least two fairs to every continent except Latin America and Antarctica and Australia, if that's a continent. I can never keep track. But so the question is, I don't think anyone is going to do all 13 fairs unless they work for a major gallery and they're like on the fair team. Right. And so what's interesting to me is what happens when you have not just the tyranny of choice, but almost like the oppression of choice. I first started thinking about this during the evolution of Art Basel, my beach, which I tracked as a journalist.

14:27So in the first year, if I remember correctly, you had just Art Basel. The second year, you had Art Basel and Scope and Design Miami and maybe not. And then you had like four fairs. and everybody, you know, who wasn't too lazy or partying too hard went to all four fairs because that's what you did, you know? But then suddenly there were like eight fairs and 12 fairs and 22 fairs. And what was interesting is the people who used to go to four fairs were like, well, actually, I definitely don't need to go to scope and I'll make it to NADA if I can. Maybe I'll swing by Design Miami. And so what's interesting to me is my observation is that when you give people too many options, even the completists retreat, it's not they do as much as they did before.

15:06they do less because they now make a conscious choice. It's not like I will do everything. It's like, well, what can I actually do? What do I want to do? And so the question I think will be, what does the art world want to do? I mean, keep in mind that in addition to those 13 fairs, you also have the Venice Biennial. So that's like 14 art world events in 12 months and people get tired and people don't do business in every place. And if people aren't careful, they start seeing the same stuff over and over. So this combination of like deja vu and making choices and trying to live some semblance of a balanced life.

15:44And, you know, many of us have kids and many of us have partners we want to spend time with. And many of us don't actually make money going to these things. Like we need to go back, like we consume somewhere and then we have to come back and digest and produced. So to answer your question in a very roundabout way, and now quite directly, I observe a greater regionalization in the art world. We saw Paris was really international because people were super excited about it. It's the second year of the Grand Palais. Paris is super chic. It's a tight fair. There are good museum shows. So there you saw a large cross-section of the art world, which you didn't see as much of at Frise and you didn't see as much of in Miami.

16:26And you certainly didn't see in Seoul. I wasn't there, but I don't think you saw it at the armory either. And then the question is, how do you make an event work if you're not able to draw the international art crowd? Because they've made other choices, right? And what's interesting to me is this is kind of an echo of a previous pattern I'd observed in the art world already starting 10 years ago. When I entered the art world, when I started going to major art world events, like I would go to Documenta and everybody was there. Artists, gallerists, critics, auction house people, advisors. There was this kind of notion that like, if you were going to be in the art world, you needed to see documented yourself.

17:02Now, I think the curators feel like they need to see it. I don't think the auction house advisors feel like they need to see it. I don't think that the consultants feel like they need to see it. I'm not even sure that all the journalists feel like they need to see it. And so what's interesting is you have this kind of fractionalization of the art world into like its different stakeholder groups and to a different camps and they have their own events, but they don't interact as much as they did, which I think is super sad. I think it's interesting to talk to people who do something different than you in the art world.

17:30And so I love this art world, this kind of traveling circus, but the reality is the circus has gotten so busy and there are so many stops that nobody can do them all. Yeah, you mentioned a lot of really interesting points there. And I think the question of regionalization is also right-sizing things for the audiences in light of what you said, where people just can't be traveling all the time. People work for their money, even super wealthy people. A lot of them are working for their money. And yeah, it's something we've talked about on the podcast before, this bifurcation, or as you say, actually could be a fractionalization into many different parts of the art world.

18:04And in particular, there is less of a pressure. And it's also, this is a social networked place and a social networked business. You don't need to check the box of being at all five art balsals in order to be deemed a successful gallery anymore. It's okay to drop out. I mean, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025, a few galleries dropped out and it's not like anyone thinks that the writing is on the wall. It's like an acceptable thing to be doing at this point. And I feel like that would have been quite shocking a few years ago. And yeah, and your point about Paris is really interesting. I think that a lot of wealthy people are concentrating there at the moment, but I do think in the long term that Paris's strength is going to be Paris itself and the Paris galleries and the Paris buyers.

18:43And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the galleries that rush to open satellites there are going to quietly be scaling back business. And to that effect, in London in 2025, there was also a lean-in on the regional. You know, a lot of London dealers were talking about focusing on London. A lot of the London galleries were showing local artists. So yeah, it is a change. I think, you know, it gets us to the next question, which is how do galleries respond to all of this? You know, there's a lot of changing pressures, and it is going to reshape the way everything looks for the primary market in particular.

19:18And the question for us is really like how, maybe if, but how will the emerging and middle market recover from these couple of years, which saw so much change? So if I understand the question correctly, it's the old model is probably broken. What is the new model for galleries at that smaller and mid-level. The good thing, not for society, but for art gallerists, is that there is an ever greater number of very wealthy people. The bad thing is that galleries have been very, very bad at recruiting them into buying art. We saw during a period in which the number of billionaires surged and during which companies that deal in luxury goods went through the roof, that the art market stagnated.

20:10And in fact, if you look at the UBS and Art Basel art market report and you look at the chart, we all know where the market goes up and down. If you inflation adjust that chart, it actually shows you not a market which is going up and down, but a market which is actually declining. The highs are lower and the valleys are lower. and the overall impact is that the market is declining in a way which isn't just the last two years, it's the last 15 years. It's kind of mind-boggling that at a time when you have more potential clients, you don't, as an industry, grow. In a market which was driven forward, at least in the short term, and we'll get to this, by financialization, the number of regions in which it was present increased, and the number of events increased, that the market still didn't grow.

21:00And so I think there's a fundamental problem with how art is being positioned and how galleries are recruiting collectors. And I think the future galleries which work, when I look at galleries who I think are meeting the moment, you know, I think of someone like Vanessa Carlos of Carlos Ishigawa in the East End. Vanessa as a person and as a gallery has a very distinct identity. Her artists are like a family. She stays very close to them, both geographically and emotionally. She has a core of collectors who are very loyal to her. And it's not about ever bigger galleries. I mean, she's in the same place where she's always been.

21:45I've been going to that East End, like past the mechanic shop and the halal food stand. It feels like for the last 15 years. And it's not because she didn't have artists that would have sustained her growing into a bigger space. So I think the future gallery model is not empire building. I think it's community building. And I think the reality is this. Major galleries have always been sustained by a handful of collectors. If you looked at the revenue for a mega gallery, you would probably find that it's not even like 2080 rule. It's like more like probably like 590 rule. Like 5 % of the collectors represent 90 % of the revenues, you know?

22:24And so the reality is that you don't need to have 200 collectors to function as a gallery. You need to have 15 that really work with you. And by the way, you know, operating on a completely different scale, it's also how I think of a gallery like Sadie Coles, a relatively tight group of artists, of collectors working together to do great things with each other. So I think the sort of expansionist, let's call it alpha male model of gallery development is something that needs to be reconsidered because it certainly hasn't proved out very well. It may work for the half dozen mega galleries, but that model doesn't work farther down the chain.

23:03They have to play a different game.

23:12this you know gets into this buzzword of 2025 the k-shaped economy and i think you know in 2025 in the auction weeks there was all this excitement about the sale of the gustav klimt painting which set a record there was like a triceratops that also set a record and these records and the secondary market trading does not have a clear effect on the primary market, on contemporary artists, on ultra contemporary artists who tend to be younger and more emerging. The whole thing is very like loosely correlated. So I think that your point about galleries like Vanessa Carlos, and I also, it makes me think of Jenny on Frederick, who also is experiencing a lot of success right now.