The auction market for fine art in the first half of the year has fallen by 10 per cent according to the analyst firm ArtTactic, reports the Financial Times. Sales across Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips were $3.2 billion in the first half of 2024. This year they raised $2.9 billion. The decline is a relative improvement on the 27 per cent fall that took place this time last year. One bright spot is the market for Old Master paintings which saw growth of 36 per cent over the same period. Christie’s sold the highest value single artwork: Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue (1922), which sold for $47.6m; in May 2022 Christie’s sold Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) for $195m.
Phillips auction house in New York is taking the film producer and art collector David Mimran to court for failing to honour a guarantee worth $14.5m that he placed on a painting by Jackson Pollock’s Untitled (1948), reports Artnet. Guarantees are the mechanism by which art collectors agree to buy a work of art at auction if it fails to reach an agreed price. Typically, guarantors receive a percentage of the upside, should there be one. Some participants consider this practice to muddy the purported transparency of an auction. Phillips has filed its claim in the New York Supreme Court asking for summary judgement compelling Mimran to pay the agreed sum plus interest and legal fees. Mimran has said, ‘I love the painting and will buy it just a little late which happens often in this market.’
Yale University Art Gallery has withdrawn two federal grant applications for an exhibition of African art. The Connecticut Insider reports that the exhibition, about the migration of the Nguni peoples across what is now South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, will still take place in autumn 2026, but the museum will raise the funds for putting it on itself. Roland Coffey, director of communications for the Yale University Art Gallery, told the Connecticut Insider that the museum decided to withdraw its applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as it objects to the new requirement that ‘“the applicant does not operate any programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”’.
More than 150 artists and cultural figures have signed an open letter criticising the Pompidou-Metz for cancelling an exhibition of contemporary French-Creole, Caribbean-French and Guyanese art. ‘Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions from the Maroon and Creole Americas and Amazonia’ was planned for October 2026. Le Monde reports that the show’s curator, Claire Tancons, expressed her concerns by text message in May to the museum’s director, Chiara Parisi, that it would overlap and share space with an exhibition of Maurizio Cattelan’s work. She subsequently received an email from Parisi in June announcing the cancellation of the exhibition for budgetary reasons. Tancons has described this as ‘unbelievable’ since the show had already raised funds from other sources, including a grant of $500,000 from the Ford Foundation.
Ann Philbin, former director of the Hammer Museum, is this year’s winner of the Getty Prize. The award comes with a $500,000 grant for a non-profit of the winner’s choice and Philbin has selected National Public Radio (NPR) and its California-based affiliates, KCRW and LAist. The announcement came before Friday’s vote by Congress to cut federal funding, worth about $500m, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS. ‘I wanted to shine a light on one of the most pressing issues of our day,’ Philbin told the Los Angeles Times. ‘And that’s freedom of speech and freedom of the press.’
