Last week, Christie’s staged its annual November spectacle, a double-header 20th-century sale that brought in roughly $690 million once buyer’s fees were added. The numbers were reported with breathless enthusiasm. Headlines announced a 42% increase over last year’s equivalent sales. The press framed the evening as a triumph and a sign that the art market was healthy again. Watching the coverage felt like watching a magic trick you have already seen too many times. A staggering figure appears on the screen, and the audience nods along. The illusion works because everyone agrees not to ask what the number actually means. It works because the number is the performance.
Auction houses rely on this sleight of hand. Their job is not to measure value. Their job is to perform it. Sarah Thornton wrote about this clearly in Seven Days in the Art World (2009), where she describes auctions as rituals rather than markets, spaces where belief is manufactured through choreography. Reading her work changed how I saw these rooms. The scripts, the coded gestures, the artificial suspense, the carefully timed applause, the way the room breathes in unison. None of it reflects the truth of what art is worth or what artists need. It reflects the truth of what the ritual requires. In that sense, last week’s evening sales looked exactly the way they meant to look: The paddles, the rhythm, the polished certainty. Everything was arranged to reassure the public that the system still works, that art still circulates as a luxury investment, cultural currency, and global status symbol.
But the $2.2 billion worth of art sold last week does not tell us what is actually happening to artists in 2025. It does not tell us about rising studio rents, unstable income, or the asymmetry between the labor required to make art and the wealth extracted from its circulation. It does not tell us that, in the United States, living artists receive none of that resale money. It does not tell us about the violence of watching one’s work used to signal a thriving market, while the artist who made it struggles to afford healthcare, or time. The headlines offer a picture of health that hides a body in crisis.
When Olav Velthuis wrote about art prices in Talking Prices (2007), he argued that prices function like symbols. They do not reflect the work’s inherent value. They reflect the desires, anxieties, and ambitions of the people bidding on it. Last week’s Christie’s sale made this clear. A $236.4 million Klimt is not a statement about art. It is a coded message within a small network of powerful actors. It signals access, taste, power, and inclusion. It allows a collector to place themselves within a narrative about culture rooted in capitalism. In that sense, the work becomes a kind of currency, and the auction house becomes another tool in the kit of those who already know how to manipulate markets, whether financial or cultural. The gestures and the numbers reveal more about who is in control than anything about the body of work on the block. When Christie’s touts a rebound, it is not describing the art world. It is announcing that the performance worked.
This is why the sale matters as we head into Miami Art Week in December. Art Basel Miami Beach has become the industry’s peak ritual of optimism, the place where the performance of market confidence reaches its loudest pitch. The auction is the prologue. Basel is the crescendo. All week long, galleries chase sales to keep their doors open, even though many are tied to a system that does not fully benefit them. They shoulder enormous financial risk to appear at the fair, hoping the right collector will stop, look, and buy, because the entire year may depend on those brief encounters. Collectors perform enthusiasm in front of their peers. Institutions signal their relevance by showing up in the right booths and being seen in the right rooms. The fairs and the auctions form a single ecosystem. The auction sets the tone. The fair amplifies it. The entire week becomes a choreographed attempt to convince the world that everything is fine, that the market is strong, that the system still works. But everything is not fine. And most of the people making the work that keeps this machine running know it.
Living artists feel the distance between the spectacle and the reality every day. When a work leaves the studio, the artist’s control ends. They cannot predict how a collector will treat the work or whether that collector is thinking about the next auction rather than the work itself. Many artists do not yet know how to read the signs of speculation, and they assume that galleries can do that work for them. Sometimes galleries can, but galleries are also navigating their own pressures, their own precarity, their own need to survive inside a system that promises visibility but rarely stability. I had to learn this the hard way, the way most artists do, by paying attention to tone, timing, hesitation, the subtle clues that tell you whether someone is committed to the work or committed to the upside. The structure is tilted toward collectors, dealers, and institutions, but artists who understand the language of the system can sometimes use that literacy as a form of protection. Scarcity, narrative, community, and visibility all influence how value is built. This is not about emulating the market’s tactics. It is about learning to see the currents beneath the surface and carving out whatever space remains for your own survival.
But literacy is not only about understanding how value is built. It is also about recognizing when someone is moving in bad faith. Artists learn to pay attention to patterns. A collector who rushes toward acquisition without asking about the work is a red flag. A collector who wants everything now, before a show even opens, may be looking for a quick upside rather than a long relationship. Someone who pressures you for studio images, or for information about how many works exist in a series, or who keeps asking whether you have sold to museums or major collectors, may be thinking about your future auction results rather than your future growth. Even the tone in an email can reveal intention. Good-faith collectors tend to ask slow questions. They want context, not leverage. Bad-faith collectors want inventory, scarcity, and certainty. They want to buy you as a stock, not as a person.
At the same time, artists have to survive in a world that treats art as a luxury rather than a necessity, even though people incorporate art into their lives every day without recognizing it as such. Most people buy art with disposable income, and they often see it as an optional purchase, whereas artists rarely do. This is one of the contradictions of being an artist in a capitalist society. We are told that art is essential to culture, yet the market treats it as optional. We are told that creativity shapes the world, yet the economic structures that shape our survival are indifferent to that truth. Artists do not have to agree with these forces to be affected by them. We are tied to them whether we want to be or not, pulled into the inevitable cycles of wealth, taste, and market confidence that determine who buys and who hesitates, who supports and who disappears. It does not feel good, but learning how these forces move at least allows us to navigate them with our eyes open.
The structure itself is tilted toward collectors, dealers, and institutions. It is not designed to support artists. But artists who understand the language of the market can sometimes turn that knowledge into a form of protection. Scarcity, visibility, community, and narrative are all tools that shape value. Artists do not need to mimic these strategies. They only need to understand how these tools are used and how they circulate. In a better world, the entire system would be questioned and rebuilt. Literacy is one of the few defenses artists have while that world remains unrealized.
Performative Support
The performance of support extends far beyond the auction room. Museums often present acquisitions as gestures of generosity toward artists, when in reality it is the artist who lends legitimacy to the museum. The language is always the same. The acquisition is framed as a milestone or an honor, but the truth is simpler. Institutions rely on artists to produce the cultural meaning they then claim to protect. Without artists, museums are storage. With artists, they become authorities. The imbalance is obvious once you see it.
Philanthropic culture reinforces the same pattern. Institutions ask artists to donate work, sometimes before ever engaging with them in any meaningful way. The ask arrives without context, yet the expectation is gratitude. The labor, time, and material investment behind the work is taken for granted. And collectors often imagine that acquiring a work once is enough to establish a relationship of care, but too many treat acquisition as a strategy rather than a commitment. They join boards, influence institutional priorities, and quietly use the language of stewardship to shape the future value of their holdings. The support is not always malicious, but it is rarely neutral.
Art fairs complete the cycle. The fair is a frenzy that galleries rely on to keep their spaces alive, even as the model strains them as much as it sustains them. A booth becomes a gamble. A sale becomes a lifeline. Galleries are tied to the system in ways that do not always serve them, yet they cannot step away from the performance because survival requires participation. Once the fair ends, the question becomes simple. What does support look like when the crowds leave? Who continues the relationship beyond the spectacle? Who disappears once the performance has ended?
All of this creates a culture in which artists are constantly asked to perform. They are asked to perform success, scarcity, charisma, expertise, and patience. They are asked to perform a sense of ease inside a system that undermines them at every turn. The fixation on spectacle harms the development of artistic careers. It discourages artists from spending time in the slow, unglamorous, contemplative parts of their practice. It privileges visibility and celebrity over depth. It privileges momentum over rigor. It turns artists into public figures before they have had the time to become themselves.
The racial dimensions of this phenomenon sit quietly beneath everything I have described. Black artists in particular know how quickly visibility can turn into spectacle and how often the market treats that visibility as a short-term opportunity instead of a long-term commitment. I wrote about this in my piece on manufacturing Black fatigue in this publication, the way the art world performs enthusiasm for Black artists while refusing to build structures that sustain them. Fred Moten reminds us that Black performance is always shadowed by consumption, and bell hooks wrote about how Black visual production is praised while the makers themselves are neglected. You do not have to look far to see how auctions repeat that logic. The market celebrates the image but rarely supports the life behind it. The spectacle grows, the person disappears, and the cycle continues.
This brings us back to last week’s evening sales. $2.2 billion is a breathtaking number. It is meant to be. It is intended to reassure collectors, institutions, the media, and the public that the system is intact, that value is stable, that art remains a reliable vessel for wealth. But a number that large has a way of flattening everything beneath it. It obscures the fact that the artists who make this world possible live in a very different economy, one shaped by rising costs, shrinking support, and constant pressure to perform value rather than receive it.
Imagining a healthier art world requires more than new rules or new policies. It requires a different understanding of what value looks like and who deserves to benefit from it. Resale royalties, wage shifting, mutual aid, community-centered models, and transparent relationships are part of that shift, but they are not the whole thing. What we need is a new imagination for how value moves, who it touches, and who it lifts.
The gavel falls. The room applauds. The ritual completes itself. But elsewhere, an artist is tending to the slow work that sustains them, the work that grows in the margins of time and energy. The market will do what the market does. It will perform its strength. It will insist on its own importance. But you do not need to believe that its rituals define your worth. Artists are the pulse that keeps this world alive. You make the objects that anchor memory, the images that hold history, the ideas that shape culture long after the headlines fade. As Miami’s spectacle rises, remember that the noise is temporary. The work is not. Your value does not come from the market. The market comes from you.
