The stainless-steel “Rabbit” created by Jeff Koons in 1986 was sold by Christie’s in New York for $91.1 million

October 10, 2025

The Collapse of the Contemporary Art Market: When Value Loses Its Narrative

For years, a fissure could be felt beneath the polished surface of the contemporary art market, an invisible yet growing crack made of excess, saturation, and fatigue. Today, that crack has become a fracture. Auctions are slowing, sales are falling, galleries are closing or even converting into non-profit spaces (to ease tax pressure and escape media scrutiny), and some are quietly selling on the side. Yet more than an economic collapse, what we’re witnessing is a narrative breakdown: the system has lost the story that once gave value its meaning.

For over two decades, the market functioned as a myth-making machine. It didn’t just sell artworks, it sold stories, symbols, projections. Every emerging artist was a promise of aesthetic yield, every collector, a protagonist of status. The value of art relied on trust, a performative, shared trust, continuously fueled by fairs, media, and publicity. Ah, publicity… and the glorious 1990s! Until, inevitably, that trust began to crack.

The numbers confirm it, but psychology preceded it. After years of uninterrupted growth, auction after auction, the entire system now appears exhausted, like an organism that has consumed its own vital reserves. Contemporary art, as a media phenomenon driven more by market dynamics than by thought, has come to mirror the very speculative logic it once claimed to critique. Artworks multiplied, but attention dispersed. Prices rose, but meaning declined.

The reasons behind this contraction are manifold and intertwined: the global economic slowdown, the withdrawal of major collectors, the inflation of sales channels, and the digital overexposure of everyone, big and small, indistinguishably. Yet at its core, the true engine of collapse is conceptual. Art has lost its status of exception, blurring into the diffuse aesthetics of the network, the spectacle of events, and the monetization of visibility. When everything is art, nothing fully is anymore, as we’ve already written in previous essays.

This text is not meant as an obituary for the market, but as an attempt to read this crisis as a symptom, and perhaps an opportunity. Because every collapse in cultural history marks a shift of state. When a system implodes, it leaves behind the conditions for a new equilibrium to emerge.

Perhaps it’s time to restore to artistic value its most fragile and essential dimension: that of time, experience, and encounter.

The Excess of Visibility, the Crisis of Rarity

or years, the contemporary art market has mistaken visibility for value. The number of eyes laid upon a work, the frequency with which an artist appeared in industry magazines, the intensity of their presence within global circuits, the endless multiplication of fairs, all seemed to translate automatically into legitimacy. It was the era when an exhibition was worth as much as its press release, and success was measured in coverage, not depth.

But every system built on endless expansion eventually collapses into saturation. Today, the very visibility that once made the market powerful and desirable has become its greatest fragility. When everything is exposed, nothing remains rare. When every artwork is documented, shared, and replicated in real time, the very act of seeing loses its value. Art, by definition, an experience of exception, becomes just another piece of content, one aesthetic stimulus among millions of others, often outpaced by media that are faster, more efficient, and more communicatively distinct.

The concept of rarity, which once upheld the entire economic structure of the art world, has been eroded by the pressure of overproduction and hyper-visibility. Artists now work at industrial rhythms (to remain visible), fairs follow one another without pause. Every month, everywhere in the world, a new opening, a new edition, a new catalog, new newsletters, new posts by the minute. The result is not cultural expansion, but perceptual inflation. To imagine this as cultural growth would be absurd, the rhythm itself denies reflection. The audience’s eye becomes desensitized, enthusiasm contracts, demand fragments.

The market has always known how to turn scarcity into desire. But when scarcity disappears, desire disperses. Art loses its aura, not because it becomes less meaningful, but because it becomes omnipresent, endlessly repeated. The proliferation of digital platforms has only amplified this transformation: artworks, photographed and shared, now live longer in the stream of content than in real space. Visibility becomes consumption, and engagement flows without ever settling.

Galleries, though aware of the paradox, are complicit in it. The need to be there, to post, to promote, to participate, has become imperative. Every absence carries reputational risk; every pause invites invisibility. Presence becomes strategy, and the time of art, which should be slow, is replaced by the time of marketing.

In this landscape, the system loses its breath. The excess of visibility leads to a crisis of rarity, and the crisis of rarity becomes a crisis of trust. If everything can be seen, nothing feels worth keeping. If everything is instantly accessible, nothing appears truly necessary.

Perhaps true luxury today is not in possessing a work, but in withdrawing it from sight, in returning it to silence. In giving art back its right not to appear.

Price Without Value, Value Without Trust

Price has always been the great language of the art market, an ambiguous, symbolic language that conceals the instability of taste behind the authority of numbers. For decades, the steady rise of prices sustained a mythology of ascending value: every auction record served as confirmation, every increase as proof of vitality. Yet a system built on infinite growth is, by definition, one destined for stagnation or collapse.

Today, the numbers tell a different story. Auctions once celebrated for spectacular results now make headlines for unsold lots. Top prices no longer disguise the general slowdown. Confidence indices fall, estimates shrink, and what until recently appeared as financial certainty now reveals itself as a fragile rhetorical equilibrium. Price has ceased to be a sign of value, it has become a residue of habit.

The crisis is not merely economic but semantic. When price no longer represents quality, when numbers lose their narrative content, the market turns into a language without syntax. Valuations swing without logic, speculation halts, and with it fades the illusion that money can guarantee the permanence of meaning. The artwork returns to what it truly is, a fragile object, suspended between matter and idea, between investment and indifference.

What deepens the fracture is the erosion of collective trust, that invisible trust which, for years, held together artists, gallerists, and collectors. Major auction houses once nurtured a sense of stability, the media propagated the image of an ever-growing economy, each acquisition seemed to affirm the intelligence of the buyer. Now that circuit of validation has broken. Collectors hesitate, dealers hold back, artists watch in silence. Trust has thinned, and with it, value.

The art market ultimately thrives on a sophisticated form of collective belief. It is an economic liturgy that requires faith more than calculation, adherence more than rationality. But like every cult, when it loses its symbolic coherence, it collapses into disbelief. Today, the public believes less, less in institutions, less in curatorial narratives, less in mechanisms of legitimization. And this disbelief, more than the drop in sales, marks the true collapse.

Without trust, price is an empty number; without shared value, the market is a theater without spectators.

Yet perhaps within this dissolution lies an opening. When price ceases to be the goal, it can once again become a means, a tool, not a destiny.

The Void of the Collectors

A market survives only as long as someone desires to possess what it produces. Yet in the world of contemporary art, desire itself seems to have run dry. The cultivated collectors, once both the engine and the measure of the system, are gradually withdrawing. Not for lack of means, but for lack of meaning.

The 21st-century collector is a figure in transition. The historic protagonists of the 2000s boom, nourished by an idea of art as status and asset diversification, are aging or dismantling their collections. The new generations, however, have not inherited the same obsession with ownership. Raised in an environment shaped by the digital, by dematerialization and unlimited access, they no longer feel the need to have in order to experience. Art is consumed, scrolled through, and shared, often with a single post, but rarely purchased, in a system where the post itself and its fleeting visibility have become the true center of discourse.

Traditional collecting was built upon three pillars: knowledge, time, and trust. One collected out of passion, but also to participate in a narrative, to build a legacy, to bear witness to an era. Today, these dimensions have unraveled. Visual education has been replaced by algorithmic intuition, the time of waiting by the tyranny of novelty, trust by a kind of informed fatigue. The artwork is no longer an encounter, but just another piece of content.

Even the geography of collecting power has shifted. Major international buyers, often backed by family wealth or foundations, now focus almost exclusively on a handful of consolidated names, turning the market into an ultra-closed arena where a few artists are traded like stocks. The rest of the system, galleries, emerging artists, local markets, remains at the margins, trapped between the impossibility of growth and the fear of disappearance.

The void of collectors is not merely economic, it is cultural. When the figure of the collector fades, so too does art’s interlocutor. The artwork no longer finds the one who will accompany it through time, who will preserve it, who will integrate it into a worldview. It remains suspended within a transitory circuit of temporary shows, ephemeral fairs, and digital content that consume it rapidly.

One might think that, in losing its collectors, the market could finally be freed from capital. But it’s not that simple. The absence of demand does not liberate art, it isolates it. Without desire, the artwork loses even the possibility of being heard.

Galleries in Collapse

Another chapter of this “delightful analysis” concerns the galleries. In the grand theater of the art market, galleries have long been the silent intermediaries, the bridges between the artist’s language and the collector’s. Today, that bridge is breaking. Not because of a lack of talent, but because of an accumulation of economic, logistical, and symbolic pressures that have eroded its foundations.

The crisis of galleries is not sudden. It is the outcome of years of forced expansion, of an operational model that confused growth with survival. Each year brought new fairs, new costs, new obligations of presence. Being part of the international circuit became a categorical imperative, a sign of vitality. But visibility, as always, comes at a price. And that price, for many galleries, has become unbearable.

Behind the gleaming image of openings lies a fragile reality: skyrocketing rents, rising transport and insurance costs, staff to sustain, endless travel. Added to this is the constant pressure of digital communication that never rests. A gallery is no longer merely a space, it has become an organism that must ceaselessly feed its online presence: updating, promoting, narrating, explaining. The time for thought has been replaced by the time for management.

Large global galleries, backed by star artists and entrenched financial networks, still manage, barely, to navigate the storm, occasionally turning it into opportunity. Small and mid-sized galleries, however, find themselves crushed between the necessity to be present and the impossibility of sustaining the costs. Many close quietly, others turn into nomadic or digital structures. It is a slow but inexorable diaspora.

The most serious consequence of this process is not economic but cultural. Galleries were, in the truest sense, laboratories of thought, spaces where a work could exist before consensus, where experimentation had room before the market intervened. Today, that autonomy has almost vanished. The gallerist has become a manager of visibility, a producer of content, a mediator between algorithms and expectations.

This transformation is not without pain. For in the loss of galleries, we also lose part of the collective memory of art. Each closure erases an archive, a dialogue, a fragment of research that will never continue. Art survives, of course, but in a more fragile, more dispersed, more isolated form.

And yet, despite everything, some galleries endure. They resist quietly, returning to a more sober economy, to a direct relationship with artists, to a real community of collectors and curious minds. Perhaps it is precisely within this reduced, almost artisanal dimension that the seed of renewal lies.

Because not everything that collapses is meant to disappear. Sometimes a system must implode, simply to breathe again.

After the Collapse, the Possibility of a New Measure

Every system, when it reaches its limit, tends to implode. Yet within implosion there is not only loss, there is also the possibility of a new form of equilibrium. The collapse of the contemporary art market, however painful, might represent a threshold, a point of return to reality after years of financial abstraction and the rhetoric of success.

For too long, art has been measured by metrics that do not belong to it. Visibility, performance, price, all indicators that have suffocated its most authentic dimension: that of experience and reflection. Now that these measures are crumbling, a space opens up to imagine another economy of value, one founded not on growth but on care, not on speed but on permanence.

The market, in its current form, has betrayed the time of art. It has imposed the urgency of the present, the acceleration of novelty, the illusion of relevance. But the time of art is slower, deeper, more resistant to simplification. To return that time to it means accepting that not everything must be monetized, that not every gesture must translate into visibility, that value can also exist within the invisible.

Even now, in certain niches, faint signs of reversal are emerging. Collectors who once chased returns now seek difficult works, not because they are profitable, but because they are necessary. Galleries scale down to recover a genuine dialogue with the public. Artists choose subtraction, slowness, intimacy. It remains a minority, but perhaps it is the only authentic laboratory of the future.

Rethinking the art market does not mean abolishing it, but redefining its parameters, transforming it from a system of extraction into an ecosystem of relation. To recirculate trust not as investment, but as an act of belief in the value of the useless, the unproductive, the unpredictable.

Perhaps collapse is inevitable. Perhaps it was even necessary. Because only when a structure empties out can we truly see what it contained.

And in that new void, fragile, yet fertile, art may finally return to what it had forgotten to be: a form of thought.

Fakewhale/Insights

The Collapse of the Contemporary Art Market: When Value Loses Its Narrative