Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 39 2025

The auction results for the Karpidas collection in London are cause for celebration for George Nelson at Artnews: "The Sotheby's sale of British socialite and arts patron Pauline Karpidas's collection blew past its £53 million high estimate on Wednesday night, taking in £100 million (all prices include fees). The “white glove” result—meaning 100 per cent of lots sold—was the highest total for a designated auction held in London."

Is this already a sign of a market recovery? It was already clear in advance that the auction would be successful. The provenance was exquisite, the works first-class, the estimates attractive and all lots sold in advance with guarantees – hardly anything was left to chance. Nevertheless, the bidding wars are a good sign, because sentiment is probably the most important economic driver in the art market.

The real success story of the evening at Sotheby's was the results for Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, according to Harrison Jacobs at Artnews: "Nine works by the artist-designer couple—also known as Les Lalanne—achieved £18.5 million, more than five times their combined high estimate of £3.5 million. Put another way, they were expected to account for just over 6.5 per cent of the evening sale's total but ended up contributing nearly 20 per cent. The result tracks with an ARTnews analysis in April that found prices for Les Lalanne sculptures have surged in recent years. Four of the top 10 auction results for François-Xavier were recorded in 2024 alone."

Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small see Sotheby's latest acquisition as the next breakthrough for the struggling auction house in the New York Times (paywall may apply): "In what may provide a jolt to a weakened art market, Sotheby's has won a Leonard Lauder collection valued at more than £300 million to sell this autumn, the auction house announced on Monday. The trove of 55 works includes important museum-quality prizes by artists such as Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch that made Lauder, the cosmetics magnate who died in June, one of the world's leading collectors."

Susanne Schreiber experienced a brilliant auction at Kornfeld in Bern for the Handelsblatt: "An offer like this will never come back onto the market: 247 catalogue numbers of prints by Edvard Munch, compiled during the artist's lifetime by the banker and lawyer Arnold Budczies. Kornfeld in Bern dedicated a separate catalogue to this Munch collection, which had been preserved in the family, listing not only the most distinguished previous owners, but also the printers of the prints, which are important for connoisseurs. According to its own figures, the Bern auction house generated sales of just under £17 million on 11 September, out of a total of around £80 million. Fifteen million-pound works in one season – no auction house in this country can achieve that. And on top of that, 100 works above the threshold of 100,000 Swiss francs. A brilliant result. The combination of motif and first-class provenance was a recurring price driver here.“

As a regional fair, the first Untitled Houston is positioning itself as an alternative to its larger competitors for medium-sized galleries, Francesca Aton of Artnews has learned: ’When asked why Half Gallery decided to skip New York's Armory Show earlier this fall, Goldberger explained, 'Mostly the cost. The booth is extremely expensive. We’re not a blue-chip gallery, but we’re too old to get these emerging gallery prices.” She added, “The exposure wasn’t really enough. I didn’t feel like I gathered a bunch of new clients. And you’re basically breaking even, even when you’re in New York. This is a good way to expand into new territories without fully breaking the bank.” Though it's hard to beat the critical mass in large city centres like New York and Miami, gallerist Michael Kohn said that there are still many collectors outside of those areas and diversifying among cities like Aspen, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle is important as the fair model and market changes."

In his new free newsletter, Josh Baer considers it a good idea for the auction house to host the Independent 20th Century art fair at its recently acquired headquarters, Met Breuer: "It does more than talk about how to broaden audiences—it actually does it. It's a sign of confidence in the market and shows willingness to change the model of how to expand audiences and be cost-efficient. These activations are part of Sotheby's larger strategy to grow—and not just by focusing on luxury.‘

In the same newsletter, he sets clear limits on the price madness (in US galleries) of recent years: “£10,000 That’s the maximum you should pay for a large-format work from the first solo exhibition of an ‘ultra-up-and-coming’ artist – e.g. a graduate of Yale University’s Master of Fine Arts programme – in a ‘renowned’ gallery, and perhaps £3,500 for a small work (generally speaking, we are thinking of paintings)." £10,000 is roughly the amount you would expect to pay for a week's holiday in the Bahamas. Perhaps the dollar is simply massively overvalued after all.

Kate Brown of Artnet sees the chance for a new art market boom in Poland: ‘After decades of work, Poland's new money is buying art. ’More people from all over the world are travelling to and through Poland, to rebuild Ukraine, to carry out business, logistics,‘ said curator and co-organiser of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Jacek Sosnowski. ’Warsaw provides a safety net of being a solid Western economy. What's interesting to me is that war has created a regional identity, including and beyond Poland, that is much stronger.‘ ’

The Fed's interest rate cut in the US could bring about a turnaround in the art market, speculates Daniel Cassady at Artnews: "Joshua Greenberg, managing director and private client advisor at Bank of America Private Bank, echoed that view while taking a broader perspective. “It is a signal in terms of the direction of rates,” he told ARTnews. After a modest period of interest rate hikes and stability, “the market has an expectation that a trend of lowering interest rates has started.” That expectation carries psychological weight, which often translates into market movement. In an environment where rates are rising, Greenberg explained, clients may be less likely to put capital into illiquid assets like art. But if they believe rates are headed down, they might feel more comfortable borrowing—especially since art loans are typically floating-rate and interest-only." However, as recent history has shown, such a credit-financed boom could quickly backfire. If interest rates rise again, many positions will suddenly be liquidated and flood a market that is already unable to absorb them.

Scott Reyburn describes the bleak outlook for the art market as a whole in the The Art Newspaper (paywall may apply): "The recent stampede into crypto-, tech- and AI-related stocks might indicate where investors think easy money is to be made. But what about the age-old power of art as a status symbol? Surely that is still a reason why the wealthy should spend at auctions and art fairs? Perhaps some insight into how our algorithm overlords view art can be gleaned by Google's AI Overview of the ultimate status symbols for the wealthy. Listed are items such as private jets, high-end cars, exclusive travel experiences, luxury pet services and even the ‘bookshelf wealth’ of a curated library. Art is not mentioned. [...] There you have it. The trade should concentrate on selling art as status symbols to the richest, brainiest 0.01%, who, as influential neo-reactionary thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land predict, will rule what is left of our world once democracy is eradicated and the so-called Dark Enlightenment prevails. Fortunes could be made selling endorphin-stimulating art to decorate the walls of tech billionaires' post-apocalypse bunkers. Ready for Art Basel Auckland?"

French collector Antoine de Galbert, who is donating or selling large parts of his collection, is profiled by J. Emil Sennewald in the Handelsblatt: "Unlike other multimillionaires who collect art, Antoine de Galbert trustingly places his art in public hands rather than in his own home. The heir to the “Carrefour” discount chain [sic!], who also has experience as a gallery owner, owns around 3,000 works. [...] Until then, French collectors never displayed their treasures publicly for fear of the tax authorities and envy. Now art was part of everyday life. In France, which has no art associations, this was a novelty. Every year, 100,000 visitors came to the Maison Rouge. It became a model for other players to privatise the power to define art. In 2014, luxury billionaire Bernard Arnault opened the Fondation Louis Vuitton at the Parc d'Acclimatation. François Pinault followed suit in 2021 with the Bourse de Commerce in the centre of Paris.‘

The new arbitration tribunal for restitution disputes is taking shape, reports dpa: ’More than 80 [years] after the end of the Nazi dictatorship, an arbitration tribunal is to speed up the process of returning so-called looted art. To this end, 36 arbitrators have now been appointed, according to Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer. The plan is to have a dual leadership of the presidium with former European Court of Human Rights judge Elisabeth Steiner and former CDU politician and constitutional judge Peter Müller. This is the last major step in establishing the arbitration tribunal, Weimer said."

Laura Helena Wurth discusses the status of copyright in relation to art and AI with lawyer Katja Dunkel for the FAZ on 20 September: "As an artist who uses AI in their work, you need good criteria for differentiation and a good explanation of what the plan was. What prompt did they provide? What is their motive behind the artwork? What are they trying to say with it? It must be possible to prove this personal intellectual creation. The more precisely the artist can do this, the more likely it is that their contribution to the work is actually much greater than that of the image-generating AI. Then copyright law also applies." However, this is likely to be more relevant for commercial graphic designers and similar professions, as the visual arts are generally much further ahead and use AI in complex creative processes in which AI is actually only a tool and where authorship is beyond question.

Claudia Reinhard gives the all-clear for Berlin's culture budget in the Tagesspiegel: "The most important figure here is 110 million, which is how much is to be saved next year according to the negotiations so far. The original figure was 160 million, set under Joe Chialo (CDU), who resigned from his post as Senator for Culture in February. ‘I said from the outset that we couldn't do it,’ said Wedl-Wilson, adding that there were limits and that these had been reached with the 130 million saved in 2025."

Artforum reports the closure of another established gallery in the USA: "LA Louver, the gallery founded by Peter and Elizabeth Goulds in Los Angeles's Venice neighbourhood in 1975 and the longest-running operation of its kind in the city, will close its space this autumn. The gallery will no longer offer public programming but instead will pivot to private art dealing, consultation, and projects, additionally providing artist support. LA Louver will donate its archive and library, which document more than fifty years of contemporary art in Southern California, to the Huntington in San Marino, just northeast of LA." After 50 years in business, it's perhaps time to take a step back.