Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 32 2025

Being a mega-gallery owner does not seem to be the endgame for young professionals entering the art industry, as Tim Schneider discovered for the Financial Times (paywall may apply): "This strategy's precedents include Sadie Coles. Founded in London in the 1990s, her programme has grown to encompass around 60 artists and two permanent locations (with a new space set to open in October). Coles has also pioneered multiple initiatives to engage younger dealers and audiences — most notably The Shop, a space dedicated to hosting emerging galleries and creative ventures, and Gargle, an ongoing series of cross-disciplinary happenings. [...] This mentality continues to echo into the next generations of gallerists. “Rejecting the empire-building model for me boils down to: do you grow into essentially becoming a CFO, where your life is being on airplanes getting between your multiple locations to have team meetings about your sales targets instead of ever being in an artist’s studio connecting to what got you into art in the first place?” says Vanessa Carlos, director of London’s Carlos/Ishikawa gallery and founder of the international gallery-share initiative Condo. “I would have just gone into investment banking as a career if that was the goal.”

Contrary to the prediction made by WFA AG CEO Rüdiger Weng in the previous issue of WELTKUNST Insider (60 days free) about the fate of the gallery business, Düsseldorf art dealer Hans Paffrath counters in the latest newsletter: "Galleries that boldly break new ground have a strong future. Digital platforms will grow, but they will not replace the traditional gallery business – they will complement it. It is crucial that we as gallery owners adapt our self-image: we are not just dealers, but hosts, mediators and creators of experiences. Those who recognise this and act accordingly need not fear the “end of the gallery business”.”

The closure of the Blum Gallery may not have been as strategically planned as Tim Blum would have us believe, reports Brian Boucher at Artnet (paywall): "Interviews with Blum's artists and staffers present a more complicated story. The gallery's sudden closure blindsided everyone, according to seven people I spoke with who were willing to discuss the situation only on condition of anonymity, for fear of retaliation. ‘Sunsetting’ typically means a deliberate process unfolding over an extended period, but this shuttering is taking place rapidly [...] ‘The current situation comes from ego, poor decision-making, and overextension,’ said someone with knowledge of the gallery's operations. “What’s the least comprehensible is the lack of notice. Either you give people no severance but some time to figure out their situation or you get rid of them overnight but with a generous payoff. It’s hard to understand the way this was handled.”

Of all people, Marc Spiegler is calling for an end to marketing art as an investment in Business of Fashion (free registration required): ‘Thus, a new paradigm entered the art market in the early 2000s, framing artworks not as symbolic goods whose value was rooted in cultural significance, but rather as financial assets akin to stocks and bonds, where what mattered most was the return they might yield.’ Unfortunately, the author only rose to the top of the world's most important industry event in the mid-2000s, which continued to grow under his aegis. But by then it was probably too late to reverse the trend. However, he has a solution: "Here's my proposal: The art trade needs to rapidly pivot away from selling art as an asset and towards selling art and its collecting as an Instagramable, sapiosexy pleasure for the wealthy, high IQ set, who get excited about culture, complex ideas, access to artists and the possibility of signalling all of that. [...] Wishful thinking? Maybe, but after a quarter century of financialisation and the ravages it's brought to the art market, it's time to shift the conversation." The biggest critics of the elves used to be the elves themselves. (F.W. Bernstein)

Reuters has some good and not-so-good news from Hermès: ‘Although strong sales of Birkin, Constance and Kelly handbags bolstered business in the second quarter, as the company announced on Wednesday, growth slowed in the fashion and silk divisions, while the perfume and cosmetics business actually contracted.’ However, the group is outperforming its competitors with its strategy, explains Sarina Rosenbusch in Der Aktionär: ‘The highlight in July was the sale of an original Birkin bag at an auction in Paris for 8.58 million euros. This shows that Hermès' business model is booming even in weak economic times. The focus on artificial scarcity has helped the French company to manoeuvre through the crisis better than competitors such as LVMH.’ Tobias Kaiser sees tough times ahead for the industry in the WeLT newspaper on 2 August: "The tariffs are also likely to accelerate the selection process among luxury brands, with the gap between winners and losers already widening significantly since the end of the luxury boom. Ultra-expensive brands whose products are bought by the world's richest people are stable and crisis-proof. Ferrari sports cars are among them, as are cashmere sweaters from the Italian manufacturer Brunello Cucinelli. In the segments below, however, business is more volatile. When brands are on a roll, business booms, as is the case with bags from the US company Coach. When customer interest wanes, as with British manufacturer Burberry, market share, profits and prestige shrink, and the brand risks becoming a bargain bin. The tariffs are likely to exacerbate the economic divide."

Harrison Jacobs reports for Artnews on the opening of Hauser & Wirth's 18th location: ‘According to Henley & Partners' U.S. Wealth Report 2024, the Bay Area has a comparable number of millionaires and centimillionaires—and slightly more billionaires—than New York City.’

The fact that KAWS is now being shown by top-tier galleries is probably part of the new normal in the art market. Lisa Zeitz reviewed his current exhibition at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin for the Handelsblatt on 1 August and previously for WELTKUNST: "The sculptures can be made of plastic and only a few centimetres high, or monumental, made of steel or wood, inflatable and sometimes measuring 20 metres. His works have often exceeded the million mark at auctions. Once, in Hong Kong in 2019, a Simpsons motif from 2005 even fetched around 13 million euros (including buyer's premium). However, KAWS' popularity extends far beyond the art world and also appeals to toy fans and collectors: when the MoMA's online shop announced a $200 action figure of him, demand was so high that the system crashed."

The New York U-Haul Gallery, founded last year in a rental van, is set to grow into a U-Haul Art Fair and take place for the first time alongside the Armory Show with around ten participants, reports Francesca Aton at Artnews. It's a nice joke, but not far from a vendor's tray.

Gallery owner Thaddaeus Ropac provides detailed information about his career in an interview with Sondermann for WELTKUNST: "You need luck and really extreme dedication, and you also need people who believe in you. I was lucky that Leo Castelli, who was the most important gallery owner in New York at the time, came from an Austrian-Italian family, which I didn't know at the beginning. From Trieste. He helped me a lot back then to get some of the important American artists to exhibit in my small gallery in Salzburg, whether it was Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist or Donald Judd. And Beuys was also a patron in the end; he connected me with Warhol and enabled me to put on an exhibition of his own drawings at a time when the gallery still had little to offer."

Eva Karcher spoke to Munich gallery owner Bernd Klüser, who is retiring after 50 years in the business, for the Tagesspiegel newspaper: "I was impressed by Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, two prototypes of the Transavanguardia, which replaced the Arte Povera movement in the late 1970s. I found their work poetic and radical at the same time; painting, so often declared dead, was back. Their gallery owners Anthony d'Offay, Enzo Sperone and Bruno Bischofberger were among the most influential in the market. Bischofberger in particular spoiled his artists Chia, Cucchi and Clemente. First, he gave each of them a Mercedes 190, then he flew them to New York and had them portrayed by Warhol. Of course, I couldn't keep up, but Cucchi and Paladino still wanted to work with me. All four artists became international stars, and prices rose and rose. One museum exhibition followed another until, after a lavish ten years, their market almost collapsed."

Daniel Cassady reports on the merger of two internet service providers for the art industry at Artnews: "In the latest sign of consolidation sweeping the art-tech sector, inventory management giant Artlogic and gallery software firm ArtCloud will merge in an attempt to reshape the digital infrastructure that underpins the global art market. The move combines Artlogic's long-established strength in inventory systems and website solutions—used by more than 5,500 clients across 70 countries—with ArtCloud's rapid growth in collector engagement tools, AI-driven features, and integrated payments. Together, the firms now support over 6,000 galleries, artists, and collectors, managing more than 15 million artworks."

Art sales on cruises don't always have to be a rip-off, as Susanne Schreiber discovered for the Handelsblatt newspaper: "Since 2016, the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd has been offering a programme for art lovers. The “Art2Sea” programme is designed by modern art expert Thole Rotermund and “Weltkunst” editor-in-chief Lisa Zeitz. In 2025, strategy consultant and collector Christian Schwarm and his wife Lea joined as experts in conceptual art. The primary goal is not sales, but to foster understanding of contemporary perspectives and attitudes."

In South Korea, a fraud case is making headlines in which investors are said to have been cheated out of the equivalent of up to 60 million euros in alleged art investments, reports Kim Young-ri in Hankyung (German translation): "In recent years, the art auction market has heated up due to the “arttech” trend (art + investment), in which works of art are bought and sold for profit. As a result, new types of investment fraud targeting this market are on the rise. Young people in their 20s and 30s who initially have no financial knowledge and are interested in art investments are suffering irreparable damage. According to police reports on the 9th, the Gangnam Police Station in Seoul has launched an investigation into the representative of ‘Art Continue,’ an art brokerage firm, and his recruiters, who lured mainly people in their 20s and 30s with promises of high returns on investment funds, only to fail to repay the capital and interest."

The US now also wants to disregard internationally applicable legal principles in restitution cases, warns lawyer Zacharias Mawick in WELTKUNST Insider (free for 60 days): "Whereas US courts – like the courts of other countries in cases of doubt – have previously applied principles of international law and rules of private international law to reach a solution, this is now to be discontinued in restitution cases. The HEAR Act 2.0 will allow US courts to rule on property issues in cases that took place entirely abroad and under foreign law. This is difficult to reconcile with the central principle of international law of the sovereign equality of states." But it gets worse: ‘This will also have consequences on our side of the Atlantic, as it will mean that the US could become the global jurisdiction for restitution claims – given the astronomical legal fees in the US, law firms in particular will benefit from this.’

European museums are therefore also facing trouble if the HEAR Act is extended indefinitely and there is no longer a statute of limitations for restitution claims, as Zachary Small reports in the New York Times (paywall): "It gave people a new window of up to six years to file lawsuits from the time they discover the location of the artwork and can show their right to it. [...] A bipartisan bill in the Senate aims to strengthen it by explicitly barring defences based on the passage of time. ‘The intent of this act is to permit claims to recover Nazi-looted art to be brought, notwithstanding the passage of time since World War II,’ states the new bill, whose sponsors include Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat."

Kai Müller summarises the dispute over the Guelph Treasure and its resolution in detail in the Tagesspiegel: "What is interesting about this is that the idea has a history in the debates about the colonial heritage of German museums. The return of the Benin Bronzes showed that cultural treasures, whose restitution may be morally imperative, can be lost to everyone if they merely change hands. The return of stolen cultural property may be different from uncertain ownership titles resulting from the separation of state and monarchy. But at the heart of the matter lies the same difficulty: preserving the general interest in such treasures and protecting them from the art trade.‘ What is interesting here is that ’the art trade" is positioned as the bogeyman. Yet it has only a marginal bearing on the dispute and nothing at all to do with the problem itself.

Alexandra Wach saw the film ‘Ecce Homo – Der verlorene Caravaggio’ (Ecce Homo – The Lost Caravaggio) for Monopol: "Longoria takes cinema audiences on a tour of important museums such as the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Prado in Madrid and the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, unfolding Caravaggio's range of motifs in elegiac, albeit brief scenes. In between, he repeatedly dives into the shark tank of the commercial art trade, which, with its profit-oriented auction houses and exemplarily networked, predominantly male dealers, is the real subject of the film. The latter target their lucrative prey like wolves, develop PR strategies and remove most obstacles from their path. There is silence about the commissions they received for selling to an anonymous collector. In the finale, the secured Caravaggio hangs in pristine condition in the Prado, surrounded by the self-satisfied truth seekers basking in the glow of a happy ending."

The Manching gold treasure is gone, but the thieves are going to prison, reports dpa: "The main defendant is a 48-year-old man from Plate near Schwerin, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Two men from Schwerin, aged 44 and 52, were also charged and sentenced to seven years and four years and nine months respectively. The fourth defendant is a 45-year-old man from Berlin who was sentenced to eight years in prison. He had several small gold nuggets with him when he was arrested. These are believed to be around 70 melted-down coins from Manching."

Frankfurt gallery owner Anita Beckers has died. She passed away unexpectedly last Thursday at the age of 78. Ursula Scheer pays a touching tribute to her in the FAZ: ‘She conveyed with a naturalness that was perhaps explained by her biography that engaging with visual forms of expression is far more than mere decoration or business, but rather a fundamental human joy and essential for social cohesion.’