Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Happy Wednesday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.
Industry Moves
Marianne Boesky Gallery Now Represents Aubrey Levinthal: The gallery, which is working in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Ingleby and Berlin’s Haverkampf Leistenschneider, will feature the Philadelphia-born painter’s work at Art Basel Miami Beach ahead of her debut solo exhibition in spring 2027.
Chanel Opens Contemporary Art Library in Shanghai: The French luxury brand has unveiled Espace Gabrielle Chanel, an 18,000-square-foot library at the Power Station of Art—China’s first public library devoted to contemporary art.
Mennour to Represents Brooklin A. Soumahoro: The gallery will present a new painting by the Paris-born, Los Angeles–based artist in its Art Basel Miami Beach presentation in December.
Diane Lima to Curate 39th Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM São Paulo: The 2026 edition of the biennial, titled “Depois que tudo foi dito” (After It’s All Said), will explore Brazil’s racialized aesthetic regimes and challenge conventional readings of Brazilian art history.
Management Gallery Adds Alva Stux and Charlie Utz to Leadership Team: Stux, formerly a director at Lehmann Maupin, joins as partner; Utz, most recently at Perrotin New York, comes on as director.
Big Number: 16.1 M.
That’s the sale price, in dollars, for a rare sapphire necklace known as the “Royal Blue,” which sold at Christie’s Hong Kong this week. The headline lot of the auction house’s “Magnificent Jewels” sale, the necklace features 16 Kashmir sapphires totaling 104.61 carats, including a 13.37-carat center stone. The sale follows another major jewelry moment just weeks earlier, when Christie’s Geneva sold art collector Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon’s famed blue diamond pendant—the Mellon Blue—for $25 million.
Read This
Gallerist Marc Straus’s proactively titled recent op-ed in Hyperallergic —“Art Market Reporters Are Getting It All Wrong”—begins by assuring readers that my reporting is “factually accurate,” before scolding me and my market-watching colleagues for looking at “only a restricted subset of data.” This is a genteel way of saying: Don’t trust the numbers, trust my vibe. Yet his corrective amounts to a handful of anecdotes that, paradoxically, reinforce the very point he thinks he’s refuting. Straus insists the market is “far worse” than writers like me suggest, then presents evidence of … a market behaving rationally for the first time in half a decade. Speculators have evaporated (good). Primary prices are cooling (necessary). New collectors are learning to look. Seasoned collectors are returning. In any other industry, this would be called stabilization.
The one thing he doesn’t mention—the most important macro factor shaping the economy of the last decade—is that interest rates were held artificially low for nearly 14 years. A wise man recently told me that when capital is mis-priced, asset classes are mis-priced. The ultra-wealthy were essentially being handed free money. So they spent it. The frenzy of 2019–22 was built on that mirage. Straus wants to call the patient terminal while describing the symptoms of recovery. What he mistakes for collapse is simply the end of the pandemic-era sugar high—and the reemergence of a market behaving like a market, not a casino. —Daniel Cassady, Art Business Reporter
