Happy Wednesday!
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
- Jessica Silverman Now Represents Trevor Paglen: The gallery will debut a solo show in January featuring prints from four major series, including works that explore drone surveillance, computer vision, secret military bases and UFO photography.
- Nicelle Beauchene Gallery Takes on Ann Toebbe: Following a show this fall at the gallery’s project space, the Chicago-based artist will have a solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center in February, ahead of a solo exhibition at the gallery in 2027. Toebbe is known for diaristically exploring domestic space and autobiographical environments in paintings and works on paper.
- Heidi Lau and Wong Ping Win 2025 Sigg Prize at M+ Hong Kong: The artists share the biennial honor for outstanding contributions to contemporary art from Greater China. Each winner received a prize of approximately $38,000.
- AIPAD Names 2026 Exhibitors, Honors Deborah Willis With Award: The photo fair’s next edition will debut a new solo-presentation section, Focal Point, and present its annual award to artist, scholar, and NYU professor Deborah Willis.
- Kochi-Muziris Biennale Opens Sixth Edition Across 29 Venues in Kerala: Curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, the 2025–26 edition opened on December 12 and runs until March 31. It features 66 artist projects from 25+ countries and places “friendship economies” and embodied histories at the heart of South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition.
Big Number: $13.2 B.
That’s Sotheby’s and Christie’s combined total in global sales for 2025, a healthy jump from 2024’s 11.8 billion. Both houses released their full-year results on Wednesday, with Christie’s reporting $6.2 billion and Sotheby’s $7 billion. The story for both is one of diversification—across both categories and geographies—as they court clients in the Gulf and expand into high-end watches, cars, handbags, and other collectibles.
Read This
There are many reasons to love New York, as the editors of New York would love to tell you this week. (More than a few of those reasons are art related.) But, as the New York Times’s Eliza Shapiro reported on Monday, there are plenty of trade-offs to living in the city too, particularly for artists. As Shapiro lays out, the cost of living in the city has skyrocketed of late, with the creative workforce shrinking dramatically. According to a recent report, the number of artists in New York has shrunk by 4 percent every year since 2019, after experiencing a 35 percent growth from 2004 to 2019. There is a domino effect happening, as industries that artists rely on to pay rent—including advertising and design—getting hollowed out, while rents, insurance, and other costs surge. One thing is clear: come January, Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani has his work cut out for him
