Art Market: Records at the Top, Closures at the Bottom

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The facts

On July 15, 2026, The Art Newspaper published the half-year results of the three major auction houses: Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips together posted 6.8 billion dollars in public sales — up 70% year-on-year, their best first half since 2022. At Christie's, public sales reached 3.5 billion dollars (+71%), driven by the Newhouse collection, which sold for 630.8 million dollars alone in May, including a Pollock at 181.2 million and a Brancusi at 107.6 million dollars. At Sotheby's, the flagship spring week brought in 908.6 million dollars, and private sales hit a record 826 million.

This rebound doesn't come from a market doing better everywhere: it rests on a handful of trophy lots* and on financial mechanisms that mainly bulk up sales at the very top. Sotheby's closed a 900 million dollar securitization* in January 2026, turning part of its art-backed loans into a standard financing tool. Christie's, for its part, is building up its luxury goods sales — watches, jewelry, classic cars: 539 million dollars in the first half, up 15%, in a segment growing 25% industry-wide.

That rest of the market is precisely what's called ultra-contemporary art* — works by living artists born after the mid-1970s. Its global auction total had quadrupled between 2019 ($183.4 million) and its 2021 peak ($742.2 million), fueled by Covid-era euphoria. Since then, it has fallen for a fourth straight year: $229.9 million in 2025, down 26.5% year-on-year — barely 31% of its 2021 peak. The average price of an ultra-contemporary work sold at auction drops to $15,629 in 2025, a ten-year low. And the number of works from this generation selling for more than $10 million collapses, from 21 in 2021 to just 3 in 2025, according to the annual Art Basel & UBS report.

More broadly, contemporary art in the wider sense now makes up only 11% of the total value of the global art market, down from 23% in 2020, according to Artprice — even as the number of transactions hits a new record for the fifth year running: more and more small sales, fewer and fewer big ones.

This decline hits directly the galleries that carry young artists toward the market. In the United States, Marlborough, Simon Lee and Clearing have closed over the past three years. In London, Beers, established near the Barbican for fourteen years, and Sid Motion, ten years in business, announced their closure in 2026. Pace Gallery, one of the world's largest galleries, cut its global staff by 20% and stopped representing fifty artists. The mechanism runs in a circle: poor auction results for a living artist cool off collectors, who then buy less in galleries — which deprives that same artist of the sale that would have supported their market value.

On this front, France holds a particular position. According to Artprice, it remains the European Union's leading art market, helped by a regulatory stability that Brexit has weakened in London and by an event that has become unmissable, Paris+ by Art Basel. But the Paris market remains structurally a mid-range market: in 2025, only 2% of the 74,270 lots sold at auction in Paris exceeded €61,000, and the €100,000-to-€1 million bracket has become, over a decade, the true center of gravity of the French market — not the nine-figure trophies that make New York or London records. Yet in 2025, global auction sales grew 9%, while gallery revenue grew only 2% — and art fairs now account for 35% of dealers' revenue, up from 31% a year earlier. France is therefore exposed exactly where the fracture is widening.

The global art market, all categories combined (auctions and galleries), grows 4% in 2025, to $59.6 billion, according to the annual Art Basel & UBS report — a calm figure that hides two opposing realities within it. Several milestones in the coming months will tell whether this fracture closes, or settles in for good: