“There’s no doubt we are in a difficult moment,” art advisor Candace Worth told ARTnews earlier this week. “There’s so much unpredictability. The general sentiment among the art-buying public seems to be that they don’t want to spend above a certain price point until they feel a little more confident about what’s going on, globally, financially, politically.”
Worth noted that the market environment is influenced also by what came before it—as in, the boom in buying that accompanied the years just before and after the pandemic. The unstable economy is a factor, but there is also a buying “hangover.”
“People bought so much art at such a steady clip over the last five to seven years,” she said “Now they are looking at, in some cases, dropping values, rising storage costs. And they start to ask themselves, ‘What am I doing with all this? Do my kids want this art? Am I donating it?’”
