After standing on the scales, feeling the chilly steel of the stethoscope on its chest and going, “Ahhhhh,” the global art market’s annual health check is complete. It arrives in the form of the yearly Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, authored by Clare McAndrew, published yesterday and examined further at last night’s live event at The Royal Academy of Arts in London.
The evaluation, taken from sales data offered by global dealers and auction houses, is much anticipated in an art world ever keen to know if its sun tan and gleaming teeth are a sign of rude health or are obscuring underlying health concerns. So how’s the patient faring?
Dream scenario: Kahlo’s ‘El sueño (La cama)’ sold for a record €47m (Image: Guy Bell/Shutterstock)
Overall, global sales increased by 4 per cent in 2025 to an estimated $59.6bn (€51.6bn), marking a return to growth after two years of contraction. Auctions did the best with a notable 9 per cent rise, driven by strong sales for works sold under the hammer for more than $10m (€8.7m). Dealer sales rose by 2 per cent. These are modest figures overall, though, considering the market was valued at $67.8bn (€59bn) in 2022. So the patient’s celebratory drink after receiving its results might be more a glass of sauvignon blanc than a magnum of Krug.
While “ultra-contemporary” work drove the market out of the pandemic slump, the report shows that sales by contemporary dealers were stagnant in 2025. The numbers also indicate “a structural rebalancing toward established artists and older sectors”, according to the survey. Despite Frida Kahlo’s “El sueño (La cama)” becoming the most expensive work by a female artist when it sold at Sotheby’s last November, the rest of the top-10 auction sales were all paintings by men – the list headed by three Gustav Klimt works – and all sold at Sotheby’s in that same, rather lavish, week.
Does this mean the market looks generally dependable but increasingly conservative? “The big action was the older, established artists that seem to be selling the best,” says McAndrew. “As it happens, because of historical biases, that means there are a lot of male artists in those older sectors.” She notes that auctions and dealers leaned similarly trad, a trend that, she adds, “probably suits the times, in that people are a little bit risk averse. There’s so much rubbish going on around the world that if you want something more certain, you’ll go for those established names.” It seems then that the world’s bellwether collectors are currently in a battening-down-the-hatches mood.
For dealers the highest and lowest price points did the most business, while the middling – “works priced in the five or six figures” – proved “more difficult”, according to McAndrew. Big names at big galleries and the tiddlers with attitude and curatorial cleverness seem to have won through.
Other than the big-money Klimts and Kahlos going under the hammer, many of the art world’s headlines in 2025 concerned the closure of some big-name galleries including Blum, Sperone Westwater and, last month, the Stephen Friedman Gallery. “In no way do I want to diminish these often irreplaceable galleries going but generally this is a world of real resilience compared with the lifespan of other businesses,” says McAndrew.
An encouraging note on which to end is the fact that in-person sales continued to increase because, as McAndrew concludes, “you’re not just buying an item, you’re buying a whole world around it. The art world is, in fact, much more of a service industry than a goods industry.” The diagnosis? Maybe stick to sorbet for pudding – and do keep up the exercise.
Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more from Bound, read:
– Team of rivals: Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable exhibition shows us two ways of seeing the world
– After seven decades of creativity, David Gentleman shares advice for aspiring artists
– Topless cars are still the most fun you can have with your clothes on
