Grading my 2024 art industry predictions
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The Gray Market is a twice-weekly newsletter mapping the forces shaping the business of contemporary art, from inside and out. If you like this post, consider forwarding it to someone else who might too—or upgrade to a paid subscription for full access. Grading my 2024 art industry predictionsChristmas Day is over, but TGM's annual Judgment Day is here
Welcome back to the Gray Market, where it’s time once again for a long-running holiday tradition: my year-end evaluation of my year-opening predictions for the art industry. If you already know how this exercise goes, feel free to jump ahead. If you’re new to this space, here’s how it works. Since 2018, my first post of each year has been a set of prognostications specifically written so that they can be objectively judged as right or wrong in my final post of the year. The number and types of predictions change year to year, but the underlying exercise doesn’t. It’s partly a means to keep myself accountable and partly an opportunity to evaluate how circumstances in the art business, my thinking about them, or both have changed in the intervening 11.5 months. Although my notes below will resurface some of the logic that led me to make some of these predictions in the first place, you can find the full post from January here on my archive site (or at The Art Newspaper, if you have a subscription there and would prefer cuter formatting). And in case you need more fodder to plausibly claim to your in-laws that you’re working today, here are my 2023 predictions and corresponding eval for good measure.
OK, back to the business at hand… 1. Worldwide fine art sales at auction in 2024 will land within 4% of the equivalent total in 2023On review: Sheesh, way offBelieve it or not, it didn’t take a supernatural effort to find respected minds willing to say on record a year ago that the art trade would bounce back admirably in 2024. Relative to these bullish calls, estimating that global fine art sales under the hammer might decline by as much as 4% positioned me as a pessimist who might be over-indexing on less-than-great signals about interest rates and economic growth projections in the art trade’s three biggest regional markets. Knowing what we know now, some auction professionals might have been willing to opt into a real-life Squid Game for the chance to take a loss of less than 5%. Instead, a year-end report from the London-based art market analytics firm ArtTactic projects that worldwide auction sales of Old Master, Impressionist, postwar, and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips in 2024 reached only $4.1bn, down a stomach-churning 29.3% year over year. (The comparison to the equivalent total in 2022 was even grimmer: a drop of 47.9%.) Data and sentiment alike reflect that auction sales improved markedly in the second half of 2024, putting some actual momentum behind wishes for a brighter 2025 in the trade. If that continues, then this past year will be more reason for the longevity of the old adage that it’s always darkest before the dawn. But man oh man was it darker than I expected… 2. At least one blue-chip artist will split with a gallery over fallout from the Israel-Hamas warOn review: Negative, as far as I knowTensions over the war in Gaza precipitated a slew of splits, cancellations, and recriminations between artists and nonprofit organizations throughout 2024. The examples ranged from Indiana University scrapping a career survey of the renowned Palestinian artist (and Indiana University alum) Samia Halaby in January, to Nan Goldin alleging in November that a statement of support for the people of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, and Lebanon had been removed from her solo show at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. (The institution denies it.) Yet the artist-dealer relationship was uncorrupted by tensions over Israel and Palestine. It’s not as if the blue chippers were uniquely resistant to professional breakups on this account, either. To my knowledge, there were also no Gaza-induced splits within the emerging, midlevel, or mid-major tiers of the gallery sector—or at least none that found their way into the press. I suspect that some of this stability owes to the fact that 2024 was such a struggle for the trade overall. Just as workers are more likely to change jobs the hotter the labor market gets, major artists are more likely to change galleries the hotter the art market gets. Even modest disagreements can be enough to convince an in-demand talent to bail on a dealer when their new works are selling out before the paint dries and competing galleries are making juicy counteroffers for their services. But since sales activity stayed lukewarm throughout the year, I expect that even the most popular artists felt more inclined to work through any non-urgent tensions with their existing representation than to take the hand of any devils they didn’t know (whose poaching pitches were probably weakened by financial strains, too). That’s just speculation on my part, though. What we know for sure is that this prediction anticipated a crack that never materialized. 3. Patrick Drahi will sell a minority stake in Sotheby’s to a private investor by October 1On review: Got it (with almost two months to spare)News broke on August 9 that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, had struck a deal with Drahi to inject $1bn into the auction house in exchange for an equity stake that would leave the French-Israeli telecoms tycoon as the majority shareholder. (Although Drahi also contributed new capital to propel the investment to the full $1bn figure, a Sotheby’s spokesperson said at the time that ADQ was responsible for most of the amount.) The transaction closed in November. On one hand, the ADQ investment solved an increasingly urgent problem for Sotheby’s. The great Anny Shaw at TAN reported that “a large chunk” of the money “has been used to pay off some of the $1.65bn of fixed debt tied to Sotheby’s auction business.” On the other hand, that financial morsel was only a sidebar amid her larger story on the auction house’s latest round of layoffs, which encompassed more than 100 of Sotheby’s previously 1,800-strong staff—and which were understood, more importantly, to be part of a cost reduction “promised as part of Sotheby’s deal with Abu Dhabi.” Traversing seniority ranks, departments, and geographical borders, the cuts seem to be predicated on leadership’s vision of Sotheby’s as an even more streamlined, more luxury-focused, and therefore less art-dependent auction house. Does making that vision a reality constitute a winning strategy at the top of the auction and private sales sectors? That’s a question for 2025 and beyond. 4. Neither Endeavor/Frieze nor MCH Group/Art Basel will acquire any more regional art fairsOn review: On pointFor context, I made this prediction only a few months after Frieze shocked the art trade by announcing in July 2023 it had agreed to acquire the Armory Show and Expo Chicago, arguably the two largest and most important regional art fairs in the US. A number of smaller players (led by Masterpiece London) had shut down for good earlier in the year, while Art Basel was gearing up to stage the latest edition of the grand Paris fair it had just launched in October 2022 (mercifully renamed this year, from the très awkward Paris+ par Art Basel to simply Art Basel Paris). Not surprisingly, these contractions and expansions triggered a wave of speculation about further consolidation in the fair sector, with many in the industry expecting Frieze (and its parent company, Endeavor) and/or Art Basel (and its parent company, MCH Group) to roll up even more of the sub-apex expos. But this outcome never made any sense to me based on the growing pressures on the fair sector amid the art market’s larger struggles, so I voted against it the only way I could. Obviously, I feel even better about my logic 11.5 months later. It isn’t just that the business year has ended without Frieze/Endeavor or Art Basel/MCH Group announcing any more acquisitions of smaller fairs; Endeavor also made it known in October that it’s exploring a possible sale of Frieze itself (along with the Miami Open and Madrid Open tennis tournaments) as a part of the conglomerate’s deal to be acquired in full by private-equity colossus Silver Lake. I’ll have more to say about the machinations surrounding a potential Frieze sale in the weeks ahead. For now, I’m going to just take this win and move on. 5. One or more brand-name artists will strike a licensing deal with the maker of an AI-powered image generatorOn review: Nope, not this yearThere are three main possibilities as to why this prediction crashed and burned in 2024. The first is that the best-known contemporary artists all recognized that generative AI is the most divisive technology produced during our lifetime, and they believe co-signing any algorithm from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, or another top tech firm would be more trouble than it’s worth. The second is that Big Tech’s leaders don’t see contemporary artists as being influential enough in the realm of public opinion to warrant approaching them about endorsements in the first place. The third is that I was just too early. At the risk of ego tripping, I think door number three is probably the closest to the truth. Stars in nearly every other creative discipline have been championing (or at least, seriously experimenting with) generative AI for the past 18 months or so in the most powerful way they could: by putting the technology front and center in their work. Robert Zemeckis, the director of Forrest Gump and some of the other most beloved blockbusters of the past 40 years, made algorithmic visual effects central to his latest film, Here. Marc Jacobs used ChatGPT to write the show notes, the designer-penned explanation of the looks and ideas the crowd is about to see, for one of his runway shows last summer. Drake infamously used gen AI voice filters to make it sound like Snoop Dogg and the late Tupac Shakur were taking lyrical shots at Kendrick Lamar on Taylor Made Freestyle, an ill-fated diss track released this past April. (The song disappeared from all of Drake’s official online channels after Shakur’s estate threatened to sue, but it’s not hard to find rips still floating around YouTube.) And then there’s generative AI’s intensifying entanglement with contemporary art itself. OpenAI launched an artist residency this past year; although the first occupant, Alexander Reben, is far from a household name, I have every reason to believe the company’s ultra-ambitious co-founder and chief executive, Sam Altman, will go big game hunting with the program if he can. OpenAI also tapped hundreds of visual artists to alpha test Sora, its just-released generative video software. (The move briefly backfired when a disgruntled group of said testers leaked the API in protest.) Google Deepmind, the tech giant’s AI-centric subsidiary, shipped its own generative video algorithm, Veo 2, ahead of Sora and appeared to close the gap on its competitors in AI-conjured static images via updates to its Imagen 3 engine. The upshot is that the heads of these tech giants are incentivized to seek out every advantage they can to push their own gen AI products ahead of their competitors in the public consciousness. That makes A-list co-signs valuable, whether in visual art or any other creative medium. (Case in point, the impulse led to OpenAI’s ongoing Scarlett Johansson mess.) Art’s biggest names and algorithmic image generators are going to find one another in an official capacity one way or the other soon, whether it’s through licensing or (more likely) some other form of team-up. It just didn’t happen soon enough to keep this particular prediction from glitching. Better luck to me next year. 2024 grade: 2 correct, 3 incorrect = 40% rightYou’re currently a free subscriber to The Gray Market. For more posts, more access, and the good karma of supporting a 100% independent operation, click below to…
© 2024 Tim Schneider
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