Cash-Strapped Hong Kong Arts Hub Saved—Plus a Rundown of the Latest in Asia’s Art World
Hong Kong's financially struggling West Kowloon Cultural District, a major arts hub, has been rescued from its cash crisis. This development was part of a broader Asia art world update that also included leadership changes at Japan's Art Collaboration Kyoto and the announcement of a new art fair in Shenzhen.
Cecily Brown is preparing for her first major museum exhibition in her native London at the Serpentine Gallery, titled 'Picture Making'. The show features new and old paintings, monotypes, and drawings inspired by Kensington Gardens, marking a significant return for the artist who left for New York in the 1990s. Despite her commercial success with Gagosian and inclusion in major museums, she expresses nervousness about the critical reception.
Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 has introduced significant changes to its floor plan, including a shift in shared booth arrangements. In the Nova section for young galleries, only two galleries—Isabel Aninat and Espacio Valverde—are sharing a booth, while the main sector now features multiple pairings, such as Andrew Kreps with Anton Kern, March with Parker, and Galatea with Isla Flotante. The Positions sector for solo presentations has moved to a regular gallery booth area, replaced by the new Zero 10 initiative for digital art. The map reflects a reduced footprint for the main sector, possibly responding to a volatile market for contemporary art.
The 23rd edition of Frieze London opens next Wednesday with its VIP preview in Regent's Park, featuring 168 galleries from 43 countries. The fair arrives amid a subdued art market, with dealers favoring conservative, recognizable works by established names rather than betting on younger artists. Notable presentations include Modern Art showing Sanya Kantarovsky's stoneware sculptures, Lehmann Maupin presenting Do Ho Suh's translucent installations, and Gagosian featuring Lauren Halsey's sculptural tribute to South Central Los Angeles. Hauser & Wirth highlights rising star George Rouy alongside other artists, while White Cube focuses on the natural world with works by Marguerite Humeau, Howardena Pindell, and Sara Flores.
Christie’s held two evening sales on Monday—the S.I. Newhouse collection and a 20th-century art sale—that together generated $1.1 billion across 64 lots. The Newhouse tranche alone made $630.8 million, bringing the cumulative total of the collection to over $1 billion, making it likely the most expensive collection ever sold at auction after Paul Allen’s $1.7 billion blockbuster. Top lots included Jackson Pollock’s *Number 7A, 1948* at $181.2 million (the fourth most expensive painting ever sold at auction), Constantin Brâncuși’s *Danaïde* at $107.6 million, and a Mark Rothko work at $98.4 million.
A rare 5.5-carat blue-green diamond known as the 'Ocean Dream' sold for $17.3 million at Christie’s Geneva jewelry sale, setting a record for a fancy vivid blue-green diamond at auction. The sale far exceeded its presale estimate of $9 million to $13 million after a 20-minute bidding battle. In other auction news, Sotheby’s New York sold over $433 million worth of art in its contemporary art sales, including 11 pieces from the Robert Mnuchin collection. Meanwhile, London’s Wellcome Collection agreed to return around 2,000 sacred Jain manuscripts to the Jain religious community under a new restitution framework, acknowledging they were acquired unethically. Several art fairs were announced, including Zero 10 curated by Trevor Paglen at Art Basel in Switzerland, CAN Art Fair Ibiza’s fifth edition, and Art-o-rama’s 20th edition in Marseille. Notable gallery news includes the bankruptcy and closure of French gallery Air de Paris after 36 years, and Carine Karam becoming director of Opera Gallery’s New York outpost. Hong Kong’s M+ and Paris’s Centre Pompidou announced a multi-year strategic alliance, and New York’s Frick Collection entered a three-year partnership with Louis Vuitton.
The May 2026 New York auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips will feature 20 high-value lots priced at $30 million or more, including works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and others. The sales are staggered around the Venice Biennale and Frieze New York, with Sotheby’s holding its contemporary evening auction on May 14 and Christie’s its 20th-century sale on May 18. Notable consignments come from the estates of S.I. Newhouse, former MoMA board president Agnes Gund, and dealer Marian Goodman.
Christie’s New York will auction 16 masterpieces from the collection of late Condé Nast magnate S. I. Newhouse on May 18, with an estimated total of $450 million. The highlight is Pablo Picasso’s Cubist painting *Homme à la guitare* (1913), estimated at $35–55 million, which Newhouse acquired in 2000 for $10 million after MoMA sold it from its collection. Newhouse, then a MoMA board member, violated museum policy by buying the work and subsequently resigned from the board.
The 15th edition of Expo Chicago, scheduled for April 9–12, marks a significant transition as the fair's first outing under new director Kate Sierzputowski and its third since being acquired by Frieze. The upcoming edition features a streamlined roster of approximately 130 galleries, a 25 percent decrease from previous years. While blue-chip giants like Gagosian and Zwirner are absent, the fair maintains a strong lineup including Karma, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, and local mainstays like Monique Meloche, complemented by satellite events and a high-profile benefit directed by Maurizio Cattelan.
Blink and You’ll Miss It! 3 New York Shows With Painfully Short Runs
Three notable New York gallery exhibitions are operating on exceptionally short timelines, defying the current standard of month-long runs. These include "Ryan Foerster: Going Green" at Kerry Schuss Gallery, a presentation of Robert Mnuchin's collection at Mnuchin Gallery, and a show by the Japanese artist collective ME at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, each on view for only a matter of days.
The art market is gearing up for a high-stakes spring season with major estate collections from S.I. Newhouse and Robert Mnuchin slated for auction at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, collectively valued at over half a billion dollars. Meanwhile, London’s spring marquee sales showed strong momentum, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s reporting significant year-over-year increases in their evening sale totals, despite a more modest performance from Phillips.
Frieze Los Angeles 2026 opened amid concerns over the city's cooling art market, following a wave of gallery closures and a shift toward nomadic dealer models. Despite the economic downturn and the lingering shadow of previous regional fires, the fair week saw a resurgence of energy with 32,000 attendees and significant blue-chip sales, including a $3.75 million Ed Ruscha at Gagosian and a $2.8 million Njideka Akunyili Crosby at David Zwirner. The week was characterized by a mix of high-end commerce at the Santa Monica Airport and grassroots vitality at satellite events like Felix and the newly launched Post-Fair.
The Los Angeles art scene is navigating a complex recovery as it prepares for Frieze Los Angeles 2026. The city is grappling with the lingering trauma of devastating wildfires that destroyed significant private collections, alongside economic instability caused by massive layoffs in the entertainment industry and recent political unrest. This combination of environmental and financial crises has led to a notable market downturn, resulting in the closure of several high-profile galleries including Blum, Tanya Bonakdar, and Sean Kelly.
louise nevelson sculpture long island synagogue for sale
Temple Beth El, a synagogue in Great Neck, New York, has announced the sale of a monumental 55-foot-long Louise Nevelson sculpture titled "The White Flame of the Six Million." Commissioned in the 1960s as a Holocaust memorial and functional Torah ark, the white-painted wood installation has served as the centerpiece of the congregation's sanctuary for over 50 years. Due to dwindling membership and a decision to sell the synagogue property, the congregation is seeking a new home for the massive work.
The New York art scene was bustling with events this week. The New York Botanical Garden held its annual Orchid Dinner at the Plaza Hotel, featuring elaborate floral designs and guests like Martha Stewart and Sigourney Weaver. Meanwhile, Sotheby's hosted the Art for Water benefit auction for the Waterkeeper Alliance, with works by Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha, and the New Museum celebrated the opening of a major Raymond Pettibon exhibition.
Thousands of documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice reveal that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was the hidden architect behind billionaire Leon Black's multi-billion dollar art investment and financial strategy from 2012 to 2017. Epstein managed Black's vast collection, valued at $2.7 billion in 2016, setting up LLCs, negotiating loans and commissions with major auction houses and galleries, and deploying the art for tax and estate planning.
Larry Gagosian has opened a major exhibition of Jasper Johns's crosshatch paintings from 1973 to 1983 at his Upper East Side gallery in New York. In a forthcoming Gagosian Quarterly interview, Gagosian explains his motivation simply: he wanted to look at the works. The show features key pieces including all six versions of "Between the Clock and the Bed" (1981), borrowed from top-tier collectors and museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Gallery of Art. Gagosian recounts first encountering the crosshatch paintings in 1976 at Leo Castelli's gallery, before he had met Johns, through his connections with Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
This week's art industry roundup covers major developments across auctions, galleries, and institutions. Christie's will auction René Magritte's 'Les grâces naturelles' (ca. 1961) as the star lot of its Art of the Surreal evening sale in London on March 5, with an estimate of £6.5–9.5 million. Zona Maco in Mexico City has announced 241 exhibitors for its 22nd edition, including a new section called Forma. The London Art Fair reported strong sales for British women abstract painters, while Vienna's Spark Art fair canceled its 2025 edition for a strategic pause until 2027. In gallery news, Amy Sherald signed with Creative Artists Agency, and several other artist-gallery representation changes were announced. The U.K. government pledged £1.5 billion to support cultural organizations from 2025 to 2030, and Tarek Atoui was named the next Turbine Hall commission artist at Tate Modern.
Artnet News staff reflects on the most impactful stories of 2025, covering a wide range of topics from institutional shifts and devastating wildfires to market sensations and conceptual art. Key pieces include Ben Davis's analysis of the art world's 'post-woke' turn, Sarah Cascone's report on Los Angeles artists losing homes in the Eaton Fire, Katya Kazakina's tale of a David Hockney painting yielding a 7,000 percent return at Christie's, Andrew Russeth's coverage of Richard Prince's seven-hour deposition video, Kate Brown's profile of Friedrich Kunath, and Annie Armstrong's introduction of the 'red-chip' art market driven by hype and crypto.
Several international curators and museum directors, including Connie Butler of MoMA PS1, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Julieta Gonzalez of the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Madeleine Grynsztejn of MCA Chicago, selected artworks that they believe define 2025. Highlights include Ayoung Kim's video installation 'Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver' (2024), Beeple's 'Regular Animals' premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach, and Kerry James Marshall's painting 'Haul' (2025) from his retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. Julieta Gonzalez also pointed to a broader constellation of practices emphasizing collectivity, ecological thinking, and Indigenous cosmologies rather than a single emblematic work.
Artnet News has published its annual roundup of art world figures who died in 2025, honoring a diverse range of individuals including museum directors, painters, curators, philanthropists, and an archaeologist. Among those remembered are Julia Alexander, former director of the Yale Center for British Art; Sylvain Amic, recently appointed to lead the Musée d'Orsay; philanthropist Wallis Annenberg; abstract painters Timothy App and Jo Baer; curator Leonid Bazhanov; and Tony Bechara, painter and former director of El Museo del Barrio.
The article analyzes the chaotic and contradictory state of the global art market in 2025, a year marked by extreme volatility following President Donald Trump's return to office. Key events include strong sales at Frieze Los Angeles in February, a record $13.8 million sale of a painting by M.F. Husain at Christie's, and a sharp downturn after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on major trading partners. Major auctions in May fell far short of expectations, with only $837.5 million hammered against estimates of up to $1.6 billion. Meanwhile, Art Basel expanded with a new Qatar fair, but sales at Art Basel Switzerland dropped over 35% from 2024. The year also saw a wave of gallery closures, including the sunsetting of Blum & Poe.
Artnet News published a roundup of five rising artist profiles that defined 2025, highlighting interviews with Alexandra Metcalf and Chase Hall. Metcalf, a British-American artist, blends 1960s psychedelia, 2000s pop music, and Victorian literature in her multimedia works, and debuted at Art Basel with London's Ginny on Frederick. Chase Hall, a painter who uses hot coffee on cotton, explores race and fatherhood, with a solo exhibition "Momma's Baby, Daddy's Maybe" at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Vienna.
Artnet News published a year-end roundup of the worst artworks of 2023, as selected by its writers and editors. The list includes Meta's AI-art chatbot experiments on Instagram, which cloned celebrity likenesses into cringe-worthy avatars like Snoop Dogg's 'The Dungeon Master' and Kendall Jenner's 'Billie,' alongside Refik Anadol's 'Unsupervised' at MoMA, criticized as shallow tech spectacle. Other entries include a poorly received Picasso-themed exhibition and additional works deemed ill-conceived or badly executed.
Artnet News published its quarterly list of the most exhibited living artists in U.S. museums for December 2025, compiled by tracking temporary exhibitions across hundreds of institutions. The list ranks artists based on the number and type of shows they appear in, prioritizing career retrospectives, dedicated exhibitions, and biennial appearances. Among the top artists featured are Marie Watt, whose touring print exhibition "Storywork" and numerous group show appearances earned her a high ranking, and Jeffrey Gibson, known for his installation at MASS MoCA. The article notes that Watt also won the $250,000 Heinz Award in September 2025.
Art Basel Miami Beach opened its VIP preview on Wednesday with strong early sales, including multiple seven-figure deals. Major galleries like Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, Gladstone, and Pace reported significant sales, with a $3.9 million George Condo painting leading the pack. The fair introduced a new digital-art section called Zero 10, featuring works by Beeple, which drew large crowds. Collectors such as Craig Robins, Mera and Don Rubell, Norman Braman, and Beth Rudin DeWoody were among the early attendees, and the event featured high-profile works by Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan.
The Affordable Art Fair opened its latest New York edition on March 30 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, featuring 72 galleries from six continents. The fair, now in its 15th year in New York, offers artwork priced between $100 and $10,000, with at least half of each booth's inventory under $5,000. Highlights include Lucy Sparrow's felt grocery items for $100, Orson Kartt's mixed media prints for $250, and Yann Guitton's oversized $20 bill artwork. The fair also offers themed tours such as “Female Voices” and “Finds Under $500.”
The article reports on the upcoming Art Basel in Miami Beach and the improved mood in the art market, driven by strong auction results. Sotheby's emerged as the clear winner over Christie's in the fall 2024 auctions, achieving over $2.2 billion in total sales across Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips. Key consignments included the Leonard Lauder Collection, featuring a record-making Klimt, a Frida Kahlo that became the highest-selling work by a woman artist, and Maurizio Cattelan's golden toilet. The article credits Sotheby's move into the Breuer building—formerly home to the Whitney, the Met, and the Frick—for enhancing the presentation and aura of the previews.
Artnet News reports on the rising market for African American painter Bob Thompson, who died at 28 in 1966 but produced thousands of works in a five-year span. His vibrant, narrative paintings—inspired by Old Masters, Greek mythology, and Modernism—have long influenced artists and curators, yet only recently commanded high auction prices. In 2024, all 16 lots offered sold, totaling $4 million, with a record $1.26 million for *Music Lesson* (1962) at Christie’s. The article traces his career from Louisville to Europe, his estate history with dealer Michael Rosenfeld, and current interest from collectors and institutions like the Whitney Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
German artist Gerhard Richter has opened a major monographic exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, titled simply “Gerhard Richter.” The show features approximately 270 artworks, making it nearly three times larger than his 2020 retrospective at the Met Breuer in New York. Curated by former Tate director Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz, former director of Zurich’s Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the exhibition is arranged chronologically to trace the evolution of Richter’s diverse oeuvre—from photo paintings and abstractions to Strip artworks and recent drawings. Highlights include early works like *Tisch (Table)* (1962), his first photo painting, and *Verkündigung nach Tizian (Annunciation after Titian)* (1973), created after his Venice Biennale debut.