Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 21 2025

Susanne Schreiber, former editor of the art market section of Handelsblatt, is now publisher of WELTKUNST Insider (free for 60 days). In the first issue under her leadership, she reads between the lines of New York auction catalogues: ‘A striking number of lots offered at Sotheby's between 13 and 15 May are estimated at between 1 and 10 million dollars. This is an unusually low price level for New York's May auctions, due to the fluctuating market and global uncertainty. This may fill an auction, but it will not lead to increased sales. This season is likely to be a market for price-conscious buyers, rather than sellers.’

The conclusion of the evening auction at Christie's in New York by Karen K. Ho and Daniel Cassady for Artnews can be roughly translated as a weak C: ‘Overall, the night provided a telling snapshot of where the high-end market stands today: steady, still stratified, and leaning hard on proven names. ‘It was a valiant effort to get some numbers that look good. I think that team worked hard,’ art advisor Dane Jensen told ARTnews. ‘It was a tough effort. Not a disaster, but you can tell the market's tight.’

Kabir Jhala breaks down the results in The Art Newspaper: ‘On the surface, results were solid, with both sales falling squarely within their pre-sale estimates (all estimates are calculated without fees), although they fell short of their estimates when discounting buyer's premium. The Riggio collection made $272 million (including fees) against an estimate of $252 million to $326 million, while the 20th-century evening sale achieved $216 million (including fees) against an estimate of $194 million to $260 million, bringing in a total of $489 million for Christie's. Those irrevocable bids, which according to a number of experts were offered with increased flexibility and in package deals this season, helped to achieve a robust sell-through rate of 94%, with just one work bought in and three withdrawn. Yet although there were few casualties, there were even fewer sparks thanks to shallow bidding.

Sotheby's, on the other hand, suffered a veritable setback with a Giacometti sculpture, reports Maximilíano Durón at Artnews: ‘Auctioneer Oliver Barker started the bidding for the work, which was offered without a guarantee, at $59 million. Though a handful of bids got the price up to $64 million, the lot was pulled after four minutes without being sold. (The probable cause was that the seller had set a minimum reserve price above that, most likely the $70 million estimate upon request.) ‘Sales are often managed and orchestrated, but this was an organic auction moment,’ Sotheby's CEO Charles Stewart told the Wall Street Journal. ‘But we stand by the importance of the work.’’ The excuse given as justification is revealing. Ultimately, he admits that auctions are otherwise more like publicly sealed private sales and that ‘real auction moments’ are a disruptive factor. Apart from the fact that he confuses significance and price.

What is remarkable about the auction is the result of 7.5 million dollars for a lamp by Frank Lloyd Wright, as Daniel Cassady, also at Artnews, points out: ‘This newer strategy of placing a design piece in a modern art evening sale seemed to work as Sotheby's intended. The Wright result follows a precedent set in November, when a stained-glass window by Tiffany Studios sold for $12.4 million at Sotheby's, a new record for the studio founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Commissioned in 1913 for an Ohio church, the Danner Memorial Window marked the first time a major Tiffany work appeared in a blue-chip evening sale alongside works by the likes of Monet and Picasso. Together, the Tiffany and Wright results point to a shift in how Sotheby's is positioning design as a rising category with the potential to attract a broader class of collectors. If the Giacometti bust revealed the limits of demand at the very top, the lamp proved that scarcity and narrative still drive action.’

However, prominent provenance still helps, as Anne Reimers reports in the FAZ on 17 May: ‘White glove sales, in which all lots found buyers, were the auctions at Sotheby's of the private collections of New York gallery owner Barbara Gladstone and her colleague Daniella Luxembourg, who opened Sotheby's branch in Israel in 1984. More than 60 per cent of these works were sold above their upper estimates.’

Angelica Villa and Harrison Jacobs strike a conciliatory note for Sotheby's overall results at Artnews: ‘Sotheby's three-part evening sale on Thursday in New York generated a total of $186.1 million on 68 lots, coming towards the high end of its $141 million to $204.9 million estimate. The result, while higher than a similar sale in November, was still a notable 18 per cent drop from the equivalent sale last May, which generated $227.9 million. That solid, if unspectacular, top result reflected the broader trend across this week's marquee sales: strong demand for blue-chip works and more cautious interest in younger and mid-career artists. Across two focused offerings and a broader contemporary sale, buyers bid aggressively for works with strong provenance or institutional appeal, but were more cautious elsewhere.’ However, as usual, they overlook the difference between gross and net. Without the buyer's premium, the result is in the lower (net) estimate range.

The good news includes a record hammer price, even if it was just below the (ambitious) estimate. Karen K. Ho reports for Artnews: ‘A Marlene Dumas painting hammered for $13.6 million during a Christie's sale tonight, making the South African painter the most expensive living female artist at auction. The painting, titled Miss January (1997), had an estimate of $12 million to $18 million, just about ensuring that it would break a record. It was also a last-minute consignment from the collection of the Rubell Family, which regularly appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. It also had a third-party guarantee.’

In the FAZ, Felicitas Rhan takes a look at the upcoming Old Masters auction at Lempertz in Cologne, which, however, already took place on Saturday and grossed 3.55 million euros.

Brita Sachs explains the move of Munich's gallery weekend Various Others to May in the FAZ: ‘Munich's art initiative Various Others (V.O.) aims to put on such exciting opening days that culture lovers will find it impossible to resist a trip to the city. Until now, September was considered the best time for this, but the short span between the end of the summer holidays and the start of Oktoberfest, plus the IAA every two years, created conflicts of interest and made hotel rooms scarce and expensive. That is why V.O. has now postponed the event to May. Whether the date – one week after Berlin's Gallery Weekend – was a clever choice remains to be seen.’

Georg Imdahl reported on his trip to the Market Art Fair in Stockholm in the FAZ: ‘At the 19th edition of the art fair, various booths showed how Scandinavian modernism lives on today on canvas, even if studio-fresh paintings such as ‘Die Sonne’ by Niklas Delin at the stand of the Stockholm gallery Saskia Neuman (priced at 18,500 euros) do not necessarily strike a chord with the contemporary audience.’

Stephanie Dieckvoss reports on the challenges facing the medium and the fair at Photo London in Handelsblatt: ‘In addition to the general difficulties in the art market, the sector is suffering from the departure of some established players such as the Munich gallery Daniel Blau. New and young galleries are emerging, but it is a difficult process. Photography is often integrated into general art galleries, but gets lost there. [...] Established gallery owner Sundaram Tagore is optimistic about attracting new customers, but also emphasises how the market has changed. ‘Photography is more mainstream today. People collect it like other art.’ Indeed, many galleries, including Tagore's, are not specialised photography galleries. However, photographs are still an attractive vehicle for attracting new collectors. Most of the works on offer cost less than £10,000 and are thematically appealing. If you like flowers, landscapes or seascapes, you'll find plenty of options at the fair.’ George Nelson combines his report on the fair for Artnews with an analysis of the photography market: ‘Like the prints market, which is currently dominated by Gen Z and millennial buyers attracted by lower price points, according to Art Basel and UBS data, the photography market is also benefiting from interest among young collectors. ‘I prefer to call it the young end of the market as opposed to the lower end of the market, and there's a lot of excitement and enthusiasm as people are beginning to understand what it means to collect photography,’ Michael Benson, Photo London's co-founder, told ARTnews. However, while this new blood is injecting life into the segment, Benson said that the ‘very established photography galleries have a group of collectors who have kind of aged out, and in some cases, they're deaccessioning their collections, so this is slightly problematic.’

When the luxury goods industry falters, the art market also has a problem. Michael Schweppe reports in Handelsblatt (Paywall) on the persistent slump in sales in the industry: ‘Luxury has been a reliable growth industry for decades – until now. Europe's luxury brands are facing their biggest challenge in decades: punitive tariffs, trade wars and unstable markets in the US and China are hitting luxury goods companies hard. Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Hermès are suddenly having to juggle significant cost increases, while US customers are gripped by fears of recession. […] According to the consulting firm Bain, business with personal luxury goods such as shoes, leather goods, perfume and jewellery shrank by two percent in 2024. This was mainly due to the fact that luxury buyers in China, the most important market for the future, were suffering from the consequences of the economic downturn. And in Europe, too, the middle class has cut back on its luxury spending.’

Annika von Taube explains the difference between blue chip and red chip art in Monopol: ‘Those who don't condemn what red chippers like (for example, merchandise and brand collaboration products by Takashi Murakami or Kaws, algorithms for purchase advice, aesthetically accessible digital art that can be grasped at a glance on a mobile phone display), has no problem with them pigeonholing Beeple, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, because at some point they might buy their first Warhol. […] Galleries such as Gagosian and Emmanuel Perrotin have already begun to open the door to a world where you don't necessarily have to choose between the red and blue pill, reality or illusion – why should you, when in art, after all, both are the same thing.’ Even Max Hetzler is jumping on the bandwagon and announcing his first KAWS exhibition in Berlin.

The dispute over the Hohenzollern art treasures seems to be over, reports dpa: ‘According to Weimer, the solution is that all objects, especially those from the former Hohenzollern Museum, will be transferred to a joint non-profit ‘Hohenzollern Art Foundation’. The foundation's board will have six representatives from the public sector and three from the House of Hohenzollern. The Hohenzollerns‘ “claims to restitution” will be transferred to the new foundation.’ However, this reads more like the dispute has been outsourced rather than ended.