The Art Market Podcast

For our Silver episode-iversary, Georgina and Tom sat down with Katharine Arnold, Christie's Vice Chairman of 20th/21st Century Art and Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe, to go behind the scenes ahead of Christie's major October sales during Frieze Week.

Katharine takes us inside the run-up to the sale of the Peter Simon Collection, and pulls back the curtain on the machinery of a major auction, and how she has seen the art market shift over sixteen years.

Next, the discussion moves to the importance of education, the rise of millennial and women collectors, prints as the gateway to collecting, why you should buy with your eyes, not your ears, and how speculating on art is a one-way path to losing money.

Enjoy!

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_______________________________________________________About Katharine Arnold:

Katharine is Vice-Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at Christie’s in Europe. Her areas of special interest include artists: Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Jenny Saville, Peter Doig, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, Francis Bacon, Paula Rego, Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud, Cecily Brown and Michael Andrews. Katharine works with artists, collectors and institutions advising on sales and acquisitions both privately and at auction. She is also actively involved in Christie’s Art Finance.

Katharine is closely connected to philanthropic endeavours including fundraising for Great Ormond Street Hospital, Recovery: Pinchuk Rehabilitation Centres, Ukraine, Maggie’s Cancer Centres, Camden Arts Centre, Association of Women in the Arts, TKE Studios, National Portrait Gallery, Mimosa House, South London Gallery, Gallery Climate Coalition, Blue Marine Foundation, and the Royal Drawing Schools.

Katharine began her professional career on the equities’ trading floor at Merrill Lynch in 2007. She holds a first-class bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford (2003-2006), MSc from the London School of Economics (2006-2007) and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2009-2010). She joined Christie’s in 2010.

This week, Georgina and Tom dip their feet into the massive topic of the art market in Latin America. They are joined by Maria Sancho-Arroyo, art market specialist, lecturer, and author of ¿Inversión o pasión?: Una guía para navegar por el mercado del arte, a guide to navigating the art market.

Freshly back from ARTBO in Bogotá, Maria reports on Colombia's homegrown collectors and artists, and why so much Latin American collecting happens not at home but in Miami, New York, London, or Madrid.

They explore the punishing import taxes that keep markets like Brazil largely domestic, and the national-treasure laws that stop works ever leaving Mexico. Plus, the role of Tate and MoMA's acquisition committees in building visibility.

Enjoy!

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This week, Georgina and Tom are joined by journalist Vivienne Chow, for a look at the Korean and wider Asian art markets.

They discuss Frieze Seoul after 5 editions, and how perhaps now after the boom in 2022, galleries are increasingly playing the long game, opening spaces, hiring local teams and staging pop-ups rather than parachuting in to sell.

Vivienne also reports from the Gwangju Biennale, and the row over the naming of Taiwan's pavilion that led China to withdraw.

And finally, quiet spread of Russian galleries into Korean fairs...

Enjoy!

Check out Vivienne's new Substack, Cultural Fulcrum, where she is making sense of the forces shaping art, culture and power, with Asia at the centre of the global conversation.

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Episode 22 is the the show's first city deep-dive, and Tom and Georgina chose Belgium, to answer question: is Belgium really home to more art collectors per capita than anywhere on earth?

Tom went to Brussels for Brussels Art Week to understand why through conversations with the Belgian heads of Christie's and Sotheby's, gallerists, collectors and fair organisers, he unpicks what makes Belgian collecting distinctive and the harder truths - the "lasagna" of overlapping language-based bureaucracy, a nightmare in public cultural funding.

Our conclusion. Brussels is perhaps one of the most undervalued art city in the world.

Enjoy!

Link to 'Brussels City Guide for Art Lovers'

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Episode 21 sees Georgina back from Uzbekistan, where a state-driven push is trying to conjure a cultural destination, and maybe even an art market, almost from nothing. She reports on the new Centre for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent and unpacks their ambitious plans: four new museums, a five-year partnership with Qatar, and talk of an art fair in a country with almost no galleries.

In the second half, fresh from chairing the Art Business Conference in London, Georgina reports back on the most interesting elements of the conference. From hedge-fund quant Igor Tulchinsky rumoured multi-million pound sponsorship of the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry show, and other findings the Art Business is talking about today.

Enjoy!

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It's our 20th episode-versary! This week, Georgina and Tom tackle the contentious question of how do you tell a good gallery from a bad one?

They set out what a primary market gallery is really selling collectors, and then get into the murkier territory of galleries making investment claims, the sleight of hand some galleries use to make artists seem more impressive than they are, and the sale of posthumous prints worth a fraction of their true price, and why looking at an artist's CV is perhaps the single most useful thing to check on any gallery's website.

In the second half, with Bonhams pushing its buyer's premium to 30%, they turn to the news of a senior-leadership exodus at Phillips, and tell the history of the perennial third auction house, from Bernard Arnault's costly guarantees to its dominance in watches and young contemporary markets.

Enjoy!

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In Episode 19 of the Art Market Podcast, Georgina and Tom are joined by one of the great thinkers in the art market, Tim Schneider, the journalist and author of The Great Reframing⁠, and writer of the long-running ⁠The Gray Market⁠.

Tim joins Georgina and Tom to dissect some of the dynamics of the art market today, including:

• Why the gallery world is a 'matching market', like Hollywood, Birkins, and Ferraris - not a retail market.
• Why outsiders from tech and finance keep trying, and failing, to "disrupt" the art market.
• Why the hoped-for $93 trillion Great Wealth Transfer might have been oversold.
• Whether AI is pushing young buyers towards Modern Art and Old Masters.
• And finally, the death of journalism and where good art-market information actually lives now.

Enjoy!

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✉️Email questions at [email protected]⁠

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Georgina and Tom are back from their summer break with two stories that have been bubbling away in the background all summer. First, private museums: with roughly 450 to 500 now in existence, almost all built this century, and prompted by the billion-dollar Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles deciding to charge $25 entry and solicit public donations, they ask when these institutions serve the public good and when they're simply vanity projects.

In the second half, they turn to Marc Spiegler's much-discussed New York Times piece, "Art Galleries Are Not Okay", and whether the former Art Basel chief is the right person to diagnose the problem, why art is not a luxury good, what is the right amount of price transparency, and why prints and editions may be the real future of collecting.

Enjoy!

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✉️Email questions at [email protected]

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The Art Market Podcast team are on summer holidays, so we have put together a special compilation of clips - four of the most popular and still relevant conversations from earlier in the year, for the new listeners who've joined along the way.

Our first ever topic, Art Basel Qatar and the perennial question of whether the Gulf becomes the next great art hub.

Then, why auction buyer's premiums keep climbing towards thirty percent, and the auction revenue trap that that keeps forcing them up.

Next, the new Modigliani catalogue raisonné, the hundred newly accepted works, the thirteen demotions, and the lawsuits and chilled authentication that surround it.

And finally, an edited highlight from the Venice Biennale special, focusing on the politics, and the Russia row that has just cost the Biennale a two-million-euro EU grant.

Enjoy! ________________________________________________________

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In Episode 16 of the Art Market Podcast, Tom and Georgina are joined by Julie Brener Davich, art journalist, veteran of both Christie's and Sotheby's, and author of the Substack The Appraisal, for a deep dive into the American art market beyond the coasts. Julie reports back from Aspen, where the Aspen Art Museum's new AIR festival, the Artcrush gala and a fast-growing art fair reveal a summer scene of mountaintop performances, luxury sponsors and a changing of the collector guard.

Next, Julie turn to the enormous, under-reported wealth outside New York and LA – Dallas, Des Moines, New Orleans, Palo Alto.

Finally, we revisit the Pace story, and Julie gives her verdict on whether the mega-gallery model is really broken, or whether one gallery (or its CEO) simply made some bad decisions and a very good soundbite.

Enjoy! _________________________________________________________

✉️Email questions at [email protected] _________________________________________________________

Subscribe for weekly episodes exploring the global art market, its players, and its hidden dynamics.