From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
August is always a funny time in the art world. Most European countries embrace a seasonal holiday, just as their US counterparts find time for a break to Europe or the Hamptons, or both. It is not normally the time that slowly building trends suddenly become impossible to ignore.
Last month, a number of galleries announced that they were ceasing trading. This is the clearest sign yet that the model that has underpinned the art market for the past two decades, of increasing expansion and relying on a coterie of rich clients, is no longer viable. Nearly every director of a gallery that has closed has said they are looking for a new way of doing business. To date there is no sign of what this should be. Perhaps the summer holidays will have been an opportunity for those who work in the art market to devise one.
In the meantime, we are entering the second half of 2025 with a very much not-new way of working. The autumn will see the regular spate of art fairs; the auctions in London and New York will try to spin records wherever they can to shore up confidence and the commercial galleries will continue to present what they hope is the next hot ticket. Amid all this, it is possible that something genuinely new will emerge and it is this hope that perhaps keeps the whole thing spinning around.
It is not just the commercial world facing challenges, however. Tate Modern is famously the most popular museum in the country. Its visitor figures have not revived in quite the way everyone hoped they would after the pandemic. In particular, the Tate has been struggling to attract teenagers and younger adults from the EU.
Does this mean that we now have a generation of young people who are uninterested in the arts? Possibly, but it could mean lots of other things. It might not be generational ennui so much as geographical inconvenience: perhaps young people just don’t want to come to London for a holiday any more. If that’s the case, then it will fall to the museum to broaden their appeal. But then being both broadly appealing and a serious resource is a tricky balancing act. It’s one that Apollo wrestles with every day.
Design always has the potential to divide people: one person’s perfect plasterwork is another’s vulgar vaulting. Min Hogg, the founding editor of The World of Interiors, said of David Hicks’s loathing of chintz, ‘He killed every flower in his soul’ – which gives some indication of what’s at stake in matters of appearance.
A little over halfway through Apollo’s centenary year, the magazine is dealing with similarly serious matters by unveiling a redesign. No editor of a magazine undertakes a redesign lightly. Of course, when we take on such a job we hope that the result is more like the Louvre’s restoration of Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves – allowing the brightness of both background and face to shine more clearly – than the removal of definition from the spandrel of Jesse, Solomon and David in the Sistine Chapel in the 1980s. Not wishing to do things by halves, we have also refreshed our website. Our hope is that, like the best restorations, we have made things clearer – and can welcome more people to our magazine in print and online.
This commitment to broadening access to art lies behind another of Apollo’s centenary initiatives. Over the summer, Apollo announced that it would provide a full scholarship to the Royal Drawing School, based in Hackney, London. This year-long, fully funded place will, in the school’s words, allow the recipient to dedicate themselves to ‘creative exploration and critical enquiry, and discover how drawing can further enrich their practice’. We will be following the work of this year’s cohort carefully and look forward to seeing a new generation of artists flourish.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
