Paris gallerist Jocelyn Wolff is always stressed before Art Basel, he told me over the phone from a café in the French capital earlier this month. In fact, by his calculation, he has suffered 20 years of pre-Basel stress, less from worrying about the vicissitudes of the art market, than from the high participation costs for his small 8th arrondissement gallery. This year, however, he is feeling a bit less anxious than usual, thanks to some fortuitous pre-sales. That bodes well for the flagship Art Basel fair, opening to VIPs at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz on Tuesday.
“What’s special about Basel in Basel is its unique college-campus-like atmosphere,” art advisor Jelena Kristic told ARTnews. “There are no other distractions like there are in Miami or Paris, and this forces everyone there to see, talk, drink, and eat art. There’s nothing else to do.” As for the oft-repeated question about Art Basel Paris — launched in 2022 — outshining its older and larger Swiss sibling, Kristic deemed it a non-issue. “Art Basel still presents the richest depth and quality of works from both modern and contemporary periods of all the Art Basel editions,” she said. “Art Basel Paris is certainly close, but it’s not nearly as diverse and distinctive.”
With 290 participating galleries from 43 countries and territories, this week’s Art Basel is also the last major fair before the summer kicks off, when the art trade tends to slow significantly. For many galleries, a strong showing at the fair can be the difference between a good and a bad year. That makes Tuesday’s VIP preview, when most major transactions tend to take place, a very big day.
This year is a particularly interesting edition to watch from a market perspective, because the industry is attempting to steer its way out of a roughly three-year correction period in the wake of the post-pandemic speculative burst. There are certainly positive indicators. The momentum from a strong auction season last November carried into the May sales, led by Christie’s $181 million sale of a Jackson Pollock painting. And, according to the Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report, released in March, art sales returned to growth—4 percent—after two years of decline. It hasn’t all been clear skies and strong winds: ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran, high shipping and operational costs, unfavorable interest rates, and shifting collector habits have all left their mark on an art market increasingly split between the very high end, marked by museum-quality historical work, and everything else. Dealers consistently spoke of a certain “shyness” toward ultra-contemporary art; sources interviewed for this story said they believe this can be traced to a broader sense of mistrust in primary market prices, whether merited or not.
All told, Wolff’s relatively lower anxiety speaks to a cautiously optimistic mood spreading across the trade, and to a growing sense that the market is steadily but surely regaining confidence.
“The backdrop [to Art Basel] is the most positive we’ve seen in possibly three or four years. We’ve seen it steadily build—not that we’re in euphoria territory,” said David Schrader of Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries (PDS), which is debuting its new gallery devoted to secondary-market sales at Art Basel this year.
In an email to ARTnews, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz cautioned against interpreting shrinking sales in the ultra-contemporary category as a sign that collectors have lost interest. “What has cooled is the speculative part of the market,” he said. During the May auctions, he went on, “the appetite was still there, with a new record for Yu Nishimura and active bidding around artists such as Salman Toor and Joseph Yaeger. Collectors are looking harder at quality, pricing, context, and the depth of a gallery’s commitment to an artist. That tracks with what we’re seeing across our fairs. Genuinely distinctive, well-contextualized positions are being rewarded over quick consensus trades.” He added that rather than showing “safe” classical works, galleries are presenting “a show of discipline in this market,” but that’s “not the same thing as caution.”
Similarly, Kristic said that many galleries are “returning to their roots,” and this does not necessarily mean exhibiting “safe” art, as one may be inclined to think given the growing interest in historic works. “Instead of asking, ‘What is going to sell the best?’ They’re trying to present the gallery’s identity,” and for some, “this has meant opening up their treasure chests,” she added.
A painting by Marcell Cahn included in Jocelyn Wolff’s Kabinett presentation at Art Basel 2026.
Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
At this week’s fair, Wolff will present a solo Kabinett display of historic works he has been researching and passionately collecting for years: paintings by the modern European geometric abstractionist Marcell Cahn. Born in Alsace, Cahn lived from 1895 to 1981 and was one of the few women artists in the avant-garde, interwar Paris scene. The works coming to Basel are modestly priced, between €15,000 and €160,000 ($17,000–$185,000).
“The fact that times have been a bit hard encouraged me not to wait any longer,” Wolff said of showing Cahn, an early artistic love he discovered while growing up in Alsace. “It’s time to show our very solid, not-overpriced historical artists in our roster.” None of the Cahn works were available for pre-sale ahead of the fair, because Wolff said the work has to be experienced in person, and he wants to meet those interested. “I’m always curious to show a great, forgotten artist, and see the reactions—that’s always extremely exciting,” he said.
Paula Cooper is also showing works that harken to the gallery’s roots, including a Jackie Winsor rope sculpture and a Claes Oldenburg sculpture from 1960. The gallery’s senior director, Simone Subal, told ARTnews that for every fair they conceive of their booth as an exhibition “trying to define what is the core essence of the gallery.”
As collectors increasingly turn to art history, secondary-market works are often considered more secure and valuable. That is good for PDS, whose co-founder Schrader said, “We feel we are exactly in the right sweet spot.” Newer mid-career collectors have been seeking out the gallery, co-founder Emmanuel Di Donna added, as have several older clients, including Asian collectors who had pulled back in recent years.
“Let’s not call it hot, but people feel stronger, and ultimately, the animal spirits are back,” Schrader said.
Not present in our Zoom interview was the third PDS partner, Pace CEO Marc Glimcher. One day after my interview with PDS, Glimcher announced that he was cutting about 50 staff and dropping about 50 artists from the gallery roster. He blamed an art world system bent on competitive expansion, driving up unsustainable overhead costs—which include attending expensive international fairs—as a reason for the drastic downsizing.
Di Donna and Schrader also discussed this very topic. The PDS dealers pointed out that in contrast to the mega-gallery model, their strategy was to focus on a specific segment of the market and create “a more boutique model with global reach.” Schrader added, “There were models that were built 15 years ago that were real estate grabs, and the world has changed. I think people are viewing and interacting with art in a different way that maybe needs a bit of a smaller, more boutique model — not being everything to all people.” “Less is more; focus and quality are key,” Di Donna added.
Claude Lalanne’s Pomme de Londres (2007), which will be on view in Pace Di Donna Schrader’s presentation at Art Basel 2026.
Courtesy Pace Di Donna Schrader
When asked about Glimcher’s stance that the high cost of participating in fairs around the world was putting unsustainable stress on galleries, Horowitz responded that Art Basel “takes that pressure very seriously.” He pointed out that the fair has undertaken several measures to support exhibitors, including freezing booth prices for this year, instituting sliding-scale pricing, and introducing flat pricing for special sectors like Statements and Premiere. He added that the fair has increased its “step-up” discounts to 25 percent for first-year exhibitors and 15 percent for second-years.
In terms of artwork pricing, PDS said that entry-level prices were declining for quality secondary-market, historic works, making this an ideal time to acquire pieces that were previously far less accessible. For the primary market, things are more complicated. Sources interviewed for this story said that broadly speaking, prices remain high for contemporary works, despite the fact that comparable works can often be found for considerably less at auction. This stark discrepancy—akin to selling a Hermès bag at a 60 percent discount in one location while attempting to sell it at full price at a nearby store—has exacerbated mistrust in the art system’s attribution of prices and value.
As Kristic explained, during the speculative post-Covid market, many galleries failed to consider the longer-term repercussions of raising the prices of ultra-contemporary works. Because galleries are reluctant to lower an artist’s prices, there is now a “logjam” as works on the secondary market trade for as much as half of the primary market price.
“There seems to be a lot of shortsightedness operating, broadly speaking, and we’re definitely in a time of correction for that,” she said.
Belgian collector Alain Servais noted that despite his far greater preference for buying from galleries, he has more than doubled his spending at auction relative to the primary market because of those price differences. This points to a phenomenon in which auctions are increasingly competing with galleries for collector sales.
“The success of the auctions doesn’t mean that people will be ready to pay primary prices at Art Basel, because prices are still too high,” Servais said. “There are still some massive clouds in the sky… As soon as you shake up trust a little bit [in the art system]— n the fact that an artwork is not only fairly priced, but that it’s also genuine—then, suddenly, the entire system starts to shake.”
That is why even small galleries like Jocelyn Wolff’s, which say they have never raised their artists’ prices, suffer from the inflated pricing of non-established, young, or emerging artists. It “damages the whole market,” Wolff said. “It’s not fair. All the people who were quite conservative have been affected by the policies of dealers who created speculative bubbles. And we didn’t benefit from those bubbles, but we will suffer from their deflation.”
To build trust and meet the market where it is, “my armor is to be content-driven,” Wolff said. He and others said that dealers must be proactive and work harder than ever to cultivate meaningful bonds with their collectors, who in turn feel they can trust them. This is also a way in which Art Basel has a competitive edge over auctions: by creating the art-focused, in-person community that Kristic observed has no real equivalent elsewhere.
Christophe Gaillard, founder of the eponymous mid-sized French gallery, said that he sees the trust he has established with his collectors as “also counting as money, because we have built credibility with them. They know that we are profoundly engaged with our artists — even those who don’t sell as easily—and in six months, we won’t kick out an artist that isn’t performing.” He is bringing a booth curated around the theme of hybrids and metamorphosis, with a mix of contemporary and historic works, per the gallery’s identity. Artists include Germaine Richier, César, Anita Molinero—a new addition to the roster—Folkert de Jong, and Hélène Delprat, among others.
While Gaillard said he expects a strong collector turnout at Basel, including many from Asia, he agreed the current market is unpredictable, and things “don’t happen as they normally would.” By that, he meant that in order to be competitive, dealers must go out of their way to meet with collectors and find creative ways to cultivate those relationships.
“The days of just waiting in the gallery for collectors to come see you are over,” Gaillard said.
