Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
With all of the disorienting and often dismaying events of 2024 finally behind us, it’s time to look towards the new year. Even though 2025 will be without a Whitney Biennial or a Venice Biennale, the year isn’t likely to be any quieter than last. As Senior Editor Alex Greenberger wrote in his preview of the year, 2025 is beset with new biennials on multiple continents and high-profile museum openings. And that’s without getting into how the prospective policies of the incoming Trump administration, which might affect an already tenuous economy and slowly recovering art market. If the market woes of 2024 continue, expect 2025 to winnow the field of art fairs, auction houses, and galleries. Lest we forget, the art world has expanded greatly in the last decade. This year will likely decide how much of that new infrastructure the market can actually support.
Below, we asked a roster of art world insiders to give us their view of what’s coming in 2025, both in the US and abroad.
Alex Glauber, art adviser and president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors: The outlook for 2025 is largely optimistic, but tinged with increasing ambivalence. Republican administrations typically have a binary effect on the art world. While the policies have historically done little to foster or support cultural development, the greatest beneficiary of their fiscal policies tend to be wealthy individuals who are the lifeblood of the market. With greater clarity and confidence on where the market stands at the end of 2024, there should be increased demand and participation among collectors in 2025. The ambivalence stems from a slew of policy variables such as interest rates, tariffs, and taxes that are all the more unpredictable given the mercurial nature of the next president.
Gabriela Palmieri, founder of Palmieri Fine Art and former Sotheby’s chairman of Contemporary art, Americas: There’s a comfort and a security that come with great trophies, regardless of if they are Old Masters, Picassos, or Basquiats. But when you look closely at the overall breadth of works that came to auction in 2024, you get the impression that there are some markets that are going to be revisited in 2025. Don’t call it a comeback, but perhaps it wouldn’t be shocking for the market to realize how relatively inexpensive great examples by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Ellsworth Kelly feel in addition to other great Minimalist and conceptual artists. Maybe we’ll see Christopher Wool’s market come back in a meaningful way, because there is a major delta between auction results and private sales. Collectors, I believe, will keep a tighter focus on what interests them. Due to the amount of auctions, fairs, and overall market speculation, the savviest collectors have had to adapt and say, “I’m