Christie's is closing its digital art department and has parted ways with Nicole Sales Giles, the auction house's vice president of digital. The decision comes over four years after Christie's record-breaking $69.3 million sale of Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" (2021), which ignited the NFT boom. Christie's stated it will continue selling digital art within its broader 20th- and 21st-century art category.
A juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur fossil sold for $30.5 million at Sotheby’s natural history sale on July 16, far exceeding its high estimate of $6 million. The auction featured a six-minute bidding war among six bidders, making it the third-highest price ever for a dinosaur at auction. Other top lots included a Martian meteorite that sold for $5.3 million, a Pachycephalosaurus skull, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex foot, each fetching $1.758 million. All four top lots accepted cryptocurrency payments.
The article covers several art market stories, including Melanie Gerlis's Financial Times piece on the big three auction houses increasingly relying on luxury sales amid a market downturn, with no clear solutions in sight. It also reports that the ADAA canceled its Art Show fair, citing a 'strategic pause' to reassess support for members in an evolving landscape. Additionally, the article details a controversy in Tasmania where a planned A$64.6 million art park at Macquarie Point, backed by Mona and aimed at addressing Aboriginal genocide, was scrapped in favor of a 23,000-seat AFL stadium. Finally, it notes that Darth Vader's lightsaber from Star Wars is heading to auction via Propstore, estimated at $1–3 million.
An original C-3PO head prop from the 1980 film *The Empire Strikes Back* sold for $1 million at a Propstore auction in Los Angeles. The piece, the only original head remaining on the collector's market, features functional lighting eyes and was created from molds of actor Anthony Daniels. It exceeded its high estimate of $700,000.
The National Museum of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh has launched "Bedayat: Beginnings of Saudi Art Movement," a landmark survey exhibition documenting the evolution of the country’s art scene from the 1960s through the 1980s. Curated by Qaswra Hafez and commissioned by the Visual Arts Commission, the show features a vast array of paintings, sculptures, and never-before-seen archival materials. The exhibition is organized into three sections that explore the foundations of the movement, the influence of modernization on daily life, and the specific contributions of four modernist pioneers: Mohammed Al-Saleem, Safeya Binzagr, Mounirah Mosly, and Abdulhalim Radwi.
Nifty Gateway, an early NFT marketplace founded in 2018 and acquired by Gemini, will shut down on February 23 after entering withdrawal-only mode. The platform, which once reported $300 million in gross merchandise value in 2021 and partnered with Sotheby's for a $17 million NFT drop, is closing amid a sharp decline in NFT trading activity. Users must withdraw their assets by the deadline, after which they can no longer list, buy, or sell NFTs on the site.
France returned an extremely rare 70-million-year-old Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton and 30 other paleontological finds to Mongolia on Monday. The fossils were looted from the Gobi Desert by a European trafficking network, smuggled via South Korea, and confiscated by French customs in 2015. At a ceremony in Paris, French Public Accounts Minister Amelie de Montchalin handed the items to Mongolia’s Culture Minister Undram Chinbat. The cache includes dinosaur eggs and the prized skeleton, worth over $800,000 at the time of seizure and now valued two to three times higher.
A Tiffany Studios stained-glass window, the Goddard Memorial Window, sold for $4.2 million at Christie's Design Sale on June 12, 2025, exceeding its high estimate of $3 million. Commissioned in 1909 by Mary Edith Jenckes Goddard for St. Luke's Episcopal Church in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, the window features a pastoral landscape with an apple blossom tree, symbolic of youth. The sale follows a surge in the Tiffany window market, including a record $12.4 million sale at Sotheby's in November 2024 and recent acquisitions by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum.
A booming stock market and increased disposable income among the ultra-wealthy have fueled a $2.2 billion fall auction season in New York, led by Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer," which sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby's. Other major sales include Frida Kahlo's "El sueño (la cama)" setting a record for a female artist at $55 million, and Mark Rothko's "No. 31 Yellow Stripe" fetching $62 million at Christie's. The surge is attributed to a convergence of high-quality estates coming to market—including those of Leonard Lauder, Robert and Patricia Ross Weis, and Jay and Cindy Pritzker—and renewed confidence among wealthy buyers after a stagnant period for art prices.
British painter William Monk is presenting a new series of paintings at Pace Gallery's solo booth at Frieze London 2025. The works, created during a residency at the Neuendorf House in Mallorca, feature obsessive cactus forms and a sentinel figure evolving from his earlier Ferryman series. Monk's studio visit reveals his meticulous process of controlling every detail, with paintings that recall Seurat and Bonnard in their dense, rhythmic brushwork.
Sotheby's will launch its first luxury marquee auction series in Abu Dhabi this December, called Abu Dhabi Collectors' Week. Running from December 3 to 5 at the St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort, the sales will feature cars, watches, jewelry, and real estate, alongside a museum-quality art exhibition spanning Old Masters to contemporary works. The auctions are organized in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and coincide with major regional events like the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and Abu Dhabi Finance Week. Headline lots include The Desert Rose diamond (estimated $5–7 million), a rare Rolex Daytona watch ($500,000–$1 million), and a 2017 Pagani Zonda 760 Riviera ($9.5–10.5 million).
China's private museum sector, which boomed in the 2010s with hundreds of new institutions often tied to property developments or vanity projects, is now contracting. Notable closures include Guangzhou's Times Museum (shuttered in 2022, later relaunched as a project space), OCAT Shanghai (closed indefinitely in 2021), and Qingdao's TAG Museum (suspended operations in 2024). Other prominent museums like Sifang Art Museum, Yinchuan MoCA, and Shanghai MoCA have scaled back, while Long Museum's future appeared uncertain after its owners auctioned part of their collection. The downturn follows the collapse of China's property sector, Covid-19 restrictions, and a broader economic slump.
Designboom has published its monthly roundup of must-see art exhibitions around the world for May 2026. Featured shows include Nick Doyle's 'Collective Hallucinations' at Perrotin, Nicola Turner's 'Time’s Scythe' in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art at YSP, and Katharina Grosse's 'I Set Out, I Walked Fast' at White Cube. The article also includes a tribute to Georg Baselitz, the influential German painter who recently passed away at 88, and a guide to the 61st Venice Art Biennale 2026.
Sotheby’s recently concluded its spring marquee auctions in Hong Kong, generating a combined total of HK$711.8 million ($91.2 million). The sales were anchored by the success of Joan Mitchell’s 'La Grande Vallée VII,' which sold for $17.6 million, and achieved a nearly 100 percent sell-through rate by value. The performance was bolstered by the auction house's new 'Maison' headquarters, a dual-level retail and exhibition space that attracted over 44,500 visitors in the lead-up to the sales.
The article examines the current state of the art market, which is in its third consecutive year of contraction. It traces how low interest rates fueled speculative price inflation, leading to a boom in ultra-contemporary art that has now burst, with collectors shifting toward Old Masters. Dealers like Larry Gagosian are now advocating for lowering primary market prices, while private sales stall due to sellers' 'anchoring' to peak valuations. The piece highlights the disconnect between high prices and long-term value, using examples such as auction records being manipulated (e.g., Patrick Drahi's anonymous bidding on a Francis Bacon triptych) and the reality that most artworks in even celebrated collections depreciate.
London gallerist David Juda of Annely Juda, one of the city's longest-operating dealers, shares his strategies for keeping a gallery open amid a wave of closures. He emphasizes staying small, avoiding expensive art fairs for newcomers, and planning succession—handing responsibilities to co-director Nina Fellmann as he approaches 80. The gallery is moving to a new space on Hanover Square, inaugurating with new paintings by David Hockney.
The contemporary art market in 2025 is experiencing a paradox: traditional indicators show cooling, but online sales are booming and attracting new, younger collectors. According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, online sales now account for 22% of dealer transactions, with 46% of online sales in 2024 going to first-time buyers—up from 35% the previous year. High-net-worth individuals increasingly prefer purchasing through digital channels like dealer websites or Instagram, and established collectors are also buying sight unseen. This shift is driven by greater access to authenticated limited editions and prints by blue-chip artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst, offered by galleries like Calder Contemporary in London with transparent pricing and provenance.
Hong Kong's major auction houses—Christie's, Phillips, and Sotheby's—held their seasonal modern and contemporary art evening sales over the past weekend, with total turnover lingering at an eight-year low. Despite the overall downturn, a handful of records and last-minute withdrawals improved the success ratio, and several lots drew vigorous bidding, such as Salvo's "Mattino di primavera (Spring Morning)" which sold for HK$4 million (five times its low estimate) and Firenze Lai's "Basic Knot" which fetched HK$477,300 (nearly four times its low estimate).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening a major exhibition titled "Man Ray: When Objects Dream" on September 14, 2025, featuring 64 rayographs and about 100 other works by the artist from his most productive period in the late 1910s and 1920s. Curators Stephanie D'Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson aim to separate fact from the artist's own mythology, while the exhibition's centerpiece is "Le Violon d'Ingres" (1924), the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, purchased by museum trustee John Pritzker for $12.4 million at Christie's in 2022. The show also includes a previously unannounced promised gift of 188 artworks by Man Ray and his Dada and Surrealist cohort from Pritzker.
Two new galleries specializing in digital art have opened in New York's Lower East Side: Offline, a physical marketplace launched by the NFT platform SuperRare, and Heft Gallery, founded by curator and artist Adam Heft Berninger. Offline debuted in April with the exhibition "Mythologies for a Spiritually Void Time," featuring works by artists like Neal Cashman, while Heft Gallery focuses on artists using AI, code, and algorithms, with works such as Margaret Murphy's AI-generated photograph. Both spaces aim to bridge Web3 and traditional art venues, offering physical experiences for digital art.
Clearing, the influential New York and Los Angeles gallery that launched the careers of many prominent artists, will close both locations. Founder Oliver Babin announced the closure on August 7, citing crushing overhead costs—rent, shipping, and art fair expenses—that outpaced declining revenue. The gallery opened in 2011 in Bushwick, later moved to the Bowery in Manhattan in 2023, and expanded to Brussels and Los Angeles. Babin described the decision as inevitable, noting that the gallery had been kept alive by hope but now faces no viable path forward. The closure follows a wave of US gallery shutdowns this summer, including Kasmin, Venus Over Manhattan, and Tim Blum’s spaces.
MCA Chicago director Madeleine Grynsztejn outlines the museum's guiding principles of championing revelatory art, fostering social belonging, and aligning internal practices with community ethics. The museum's collection is treated as a living resource rather than a static treasure, with exhibitions like "Descending the Staircase" and "City in a Garden: Queer Art Activism in Chicago" reflecting evolving narratives. The MCA Art Auction, held every five years, is highlighted as a values-driven fundraiser; the 2025 edition honors Ed Ruscha with a new commission and features works by artists including Rashid Johnson, Sanford Biggers, and Sarah Sze.
Administrators' filings for Stephen Friedman Gallery reveal a total debt of £7.8 million following its closure in February. Three prominent artists—Alexandre Diop, Deborah Roberts, and Kehinde Wiley—are among the unsecured creditors owed a combined £795,000, expected to recover only eight to nine pence per pound. The largest secured creditor is Coutts & Company, owed £3.1 million, followed by Pentland Group with £1.4 million outstanding. The gallery also owes £505,113 to the Pollen Estate for its Cork Street lease, £550,000 to HMRC, and significant sums to shipping and storage firms, including Crozier (£256,470) and Gander & White (£86,772). Art fairs Frieze and Art Basel Qatar are owed £71,227 and £18,763 respectively.
SANTIAGO YAHUARCANI: EL PRINCIPIO DEL CONOCIMIENTO
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) is hosting "El principio del conocimiento," the first solo exhibition in Brazil for Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani. Curated by Amanda Carneiro, the show features approximately 35 paintings on llanchama (tree bark) that explore the Uitoto worldview. The exhibition is organized into five thematic sections that navigate the sensory experience of the Amazon, the spiritual significance of sacred plants like coca and tobacco, and the brutal historical memory of colonial extraction.
Christie’s two-part auction of William I. Koch’s Western art collection realized $84.1 million with fees, more than tripling the previous record for a single-owner Western art collection and setting five new artist records. The sale, reported by the Observer and covered by ARTnews, stands out in a category that has struggled since the 2008 financial crisis, as collectors have shifted focus to postwar, contemporary, and ultra-contemporary work. Specialists attribute the success to structural changes in how American art is presented, growing cultural interest in the American West fueled by popular culture like Yellowstone, and the rare concentration of masterworks in the Koch collection.
A Star Wars painting by illustrator Tom Jung, used as the original half-sheet poster for *Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope* (1977), sold for $3.88 million at a Heritage Auctions sale of Hollywood memorabilia in Dallas. Consigned by the family of film producer Gary Kurtz, the work first appeared in national newspapers on May 13, 1977, and later became the film’s official promotional image. The sale broke the previous record for a Star Wars object, surpassing the $3.6 million paid for Darth Vader’s lightsaber prop.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco presents 'Bay Area Then,' an exhibition running from August 1, 2025, to January 25, 2026, that surveys the Northern California art scene between 1990 and 2005. Guest curated by Eungie Joo, the show features works by nineteen artists or collaborations, including Manuel Ocampo, Margaret Kilgallen, Bill Daniel, Ruby Neri, and Carolyn Castaño, mixing historical pieces with recent productions by artists who emerged during that era.
Phillips auction house has launched a selling exhibition titled "Crossing Borders" at its Berkeley Square location in London, featuring 64 South Asian Modernist artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Huma Bhabha, Rasheed Araeen, and Nilima Sheikh. The show, organized in collaboration with Grosvenor Gallery, includes major market figures like S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza alongside lesser-known names such as Ahmed Parvez and Viswanathan. Prices range from £5,000 to £1.5 million, with works jointly consigned and profits shared between Phillips and Grosvenor. The exhibition marks Phillips' most significant entry into the South Asian art market, a sector long dominated by Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonhams.
Designboom has published a comprehensive guide to the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, featuring a curated list of must-see exhibitions, installations, and events across the city. Highlights include Miet Warlop's "IT NEVER SSST," Michael Armitage's "The Promise of Change" at Palazzo Grassi, and DRIFT's "Shy Society" at Palazzo Strozzi, alongside works by Lotus L. Kang, Lida Abdul, and Kan Yasuda. The guide also points to collateral shows in Pietrasanta and Berlin, offering visitors a broad itinerary beyond the main Biennale venues.
Museum - Art, Collections, Exhibits
This comprehensive overview traces the historical evolution of the museum from its origins as private royal collections and 'cabinets of curiosities' to the modern public institutions of the 21st century. It details the emergence of landmark spaces like the Ashmolean, the British Museum, and the Louvre, while examining how the 'museum boom' of the 20th century expanded these institutions globally across the United States, Asia, and Africa.