Author: Sam Wild

The Art World is officially cooked. In a report by Art Basel, 2024, saw a 12% reduction in global art sales. Christie’s and Sotheby’s reported a 27% decline in sales. Russian art collectors are locked out of Anglo-American art markets. The Chinese art market declined by 31%. The strongest market, the USA, is spluttering along but has periodically risen and fallen, staying stagnant somewhere between 2013 and 2018 levels. The UK art market is in rapid decline losing 5% per year.

There is also the interesting case of a recent auction of a Giacometti piece at the New York Spring Auction Week of this year. The piece on sale, Grand Tete Mince, was a major work by the artist, described by Sotheby’s as his ‘Magnum Opus’, and was tipped to sell for $70 million. The work did not have the usual price guarantee ensuring that the work wouldn’t sell for a lower price than expected. Amazingly, the piece failed to sell! Examples like this are wounding for the art world and shot by shot it is destroying confidence in the global art market.

Besides the top auction houses the museums are also facing increasing challenges. Between 2019 and 2024 Tate Modern, the brainchild of Britain’s chief cultural Blairist, Sir Nicholas Serota, and the UK’s flagship museum for contemporary art, saw a 1.5 million reduction in annual visitors despite tourism in London returning to pre-COVID levels. This is repeated for other high profile London museums including such staples as the National Gallery. State funding for the arts hasn’t done any better.. The British government has slowly been depleting the Arts Council of funds since the financial crash of 2008.

A 2025 report for The Art Newspaper found that three in five small museums and galleries across Britain fear closure amid declining revenues and footfall. It is reported that out of the 40 galleries and attractions surveyed 58% reported that interest had not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Experts are blaming the decline on ‘trade fragmentation’ and global instability. Other causes fingered by nervous administrators are, of course, Brexit and COVID. It’s the usual handy, off-the-peg reasoning. These commentators never consider the possibility that the public, either ordinary museum-goers or wealthy art collectors, don’t really want what the art world is trying to sell them. It couldn’t possibly be that art lovers are tired of the type of contemporary art and anti-colonial curation that is omnipresent in institutional culture today. It has to be these ‘dangerous trends’. 

Yet exhaustion of this culture is palpable in nearly all commentary. As even the managing director of the highly contemporary Lisson Gallery, Gary Waterson, put it recently, “People are bored of being fed what they already know, the artists and exhibitions that have been most successful have been largely the ones that have been more experimental”. How much scope there is to experiment in the found object/installation paradigm of contemporary art I will leave the reader to determine but it seems to me the art world is in a fatal bind. More on that later. 

The more substantial claim is that of fragmentation in the global economy and this claim is worth taking seriously. What we have seen over the past decade or so is the crumbling of the unipolar moment that defined the turn of the last century. Roughly from the 1980s to its slow unraveling in the 2010s, America dominated the globe as the sole superpower and in due course formed the international economic system around itself. It positioned itself as the guarantor of world stability and set out to punish ‘rogue states’ that defied the ‘rules-based international order’. It’s not within the scope or expertise of the current author to analyse the decline of this system, but merely to reckon with the fact of its existence, something I fear the men and women who run our museums, galleries, and cultural centres have not recognised yet. 

The pattern of contemporary art that emerged in the 1960s in America and Europe is intimately linked to the rise of the USA as a unipolar global superpower. The cultural cachet that this system possessed was dependent upon the iron grip of cultural liberalism over the minds of the global population. Since that time America has lost two wars in Asia intended to police the global system, the Russian Federation has annexed territory in Eastern Europe, and China has spread its economic influence across the world. At home the economic, social, and demographic policies of left-liberal elites have led to social crisis and led to ‘populist’ revolt. These revolts have even led the American public to elect one of the most notorious populists to the office of US president, twice! Against colossal opposition from establishment institutions and media. It goes without saying that the integration of social media platforms into the very heart of how we discuss and evaluate culture has also had a massive effect on the scope of how we perceive our world.  

In this period the art world has no right to decide what is ‘relevant’ or not. That is because there is no elite structure that can decide this question given current conditions. Culturally as well as ideologically our discourse is multipolar. Nobody has the power to legislate which meta-narrative, or none, is dominant. We have sets of competing sub-elites, all vying with each other over cultural hegemony. Culture today is culture war.

This leaves some of those competing sub-elites in an embarrassing position. Being the custodians of institutions owned by the state or of a civic nature, the disgusting partisanship of recent curatorial choices in these institutions and their stifling of any challenge or debate is sapping them of any secure, long term credibility. The present writer has concluded that it is this phenomenon that is affecting the decline in visitors and art sales and not some structural deficiency that is halting people from interacting with art.

The art world is cooked in terms of its cultural hegemony but it is also cooked in terms of aesthetics. The artistic scope of the practice introduced by Duchamp in the 1910s and institutionalised by the avant-garde of the 1960s has exhausted its creative potential, if it really possessed much in the first place. The method cannot outlive the fortunes of the New Left politics that engineered it. The fact that many of these artists are now resorting to a kind of ‘AI Realism’ in recent exhibitions speaks to the fact that the idea of the ‘found object’ or the purely ‘conceptual’ artwork hold little or no power over the intelligence of our age. Post-colonial propagandists are making the intentional choice to use computer-generated realism rather than the conceptually oblique works typical of those artists favoured by the likes of Tate Modern in the 00s. 

The problem with this aesthetic shift is that AI offers the artist nothing to differentiate their work from an internet meme. Log on to Tik-Tok or Instagram and you will be flooded with highly sophisticated AI imagery created by teenagers on their smartphones. From the disgusting to the hilarious these kinds of technologically manufactured images are fully available to anyone in the social media network. In this environment what distinguishes the contemporary artist from the shit-poster? There is absolutely no aesthetic distinction at all! The artist could justify themselves perhaps through the old ‘Institutional Theory of Art’ and propagate that they are more than a mere poster because they are a self-proclaimed artist and have chosen to make a statement. Yet besides institutional support literally nothing differentiates them, especially from institutions whose very hegemony is contested. The social, historical and technological conditions that made ‘contemporary art’ possible no longer exist and the conditions that do exist in contemporary society actively contradict its aesthetic and hegemonic power. Contemporary art is no longer contemporary. This is what is to blame for the falling relevancy of our art institutions and the falling of art sales. People just aren’t interested anymore. 

What are people interested in? What will replace the art world as we have known it? That remains to be seen. One thing is certain: that art needs to provide people with something other than propagandistic statements. Social media has made a world of easy statements. Art needs to provide something different. It needs to appeal to the imagination and emotions of the public in a new, or very old, way. To do this the artist requires skill and dexterity in his craft. Craft, in the broadest sense, is what makes us feel what we feel in front of work. It guides us through the imaginative landscape it creates for us. Whether it’s an A-class director such as Martin Scorsese or a highly skilled painter of portraits, the craft of film-making or painting is what draws us in. The art world as currently constituted cannot teach these crafts, let alone utilise them. It will be left to those that have cultivated these skills in spite of the prior cultural hegemony of the art world that will distinguish themselves as valuable in the current environment. Those that have mastered the craft and have something to say have everything to win in the 21st century. Until our art institutions adapt to this new reality, they will decline.

Sam Wild is an artist working in painting and printmaking exploring vitalism and perennialism in art. You can find his work here.