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The art market ‘trial of the century’ has transitioned from courtroom drama to bureaucratic headache

For nearly a decade, I’ve begun each year by making predictions about the art market in January that can be objectively evaluated come December. Although I end up being wrong more often than right, reasoning my way to a set of medium-term conclusions tends to unearth some thought-provoking aspects of important recent trends. Continuing the exercise feels especially fraught after the market correction of 2023, but here we go anyway.

The American mega-investor Warren Buffett has said of business that only when the tide goes out do you find out who has been swimming naked. Buffett’s maxim about the unseemly revelations of a down market has proven true in the art market multiple times since the spring of 2023. Insolvencies, civil lawsuits and criminal proceedings have exposed observers to plenty of sights they might have preferred to avoid. Blindness, like ignorance, can sometimes be bliss.

In this unfortunate peepshow, the main attractions have been the cases of alleged or confirmed art fraud.

As important as it can be for an art dealer to communicate certain works’ conceptual possibilities to collectors, that effort becomes secondary if they first need to spend a considerable amount of time explaining its absolute basics.

Nowhere in the art business has this tension been felt more acutely or more persistently than in the market for prints and multiples.

Although art professionals have been pummelled for months by reminders that 2023 marks 50 years since Picasso’s death, it’s not the most consequential golden anniversary in the art market this year. To me, that honour goes to the (in)famous auction of 50 works by living American artists from the collection of New York taxicab magnates Robert and Ethel Scull, staged on 18 October 1973 at the Madison Avenue headquarters of Sotheby Parke-Bernet (which shopping mall kingpin A. Alfred Taubman acquired and rebranded as Sotheby’s one decade later).

Longtime readers of this column know that when the next year starts peeking over the horizon, it’s time for me to uncap my red pen and grade the art market predictions I made at the start of this one.