The art market is on the up again — at least at the top end. After a two-year slump, global art sales increased 4 percent to an estimated $59.6 billion last year, according to the latest annual Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, published Thursday.
The improvement was mainly driven by auction sales, said Clare McAndrew, the founder of the Dublin-based research company Arts Economics, who wrote the 245-page report. New York’s marquee week of auctions in November raised a bumper $2.2 billion and eight-figure sales of modern and contemporary masterworks were achieved at the Art Basel Paris fair in October.
“The performance of the high end tends to shape the overlying trend,” McAndrew said in an interview. “People felt more confident,” she added. “But it’s not the cutting-edge contemporary that’s doing well. It’s the established artists.”
The report also noted that the recovery remained “modest” and “uneven,” with aggregate annual sales still below the $67.8 billion achieved in 2022.
The annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report is the only comprehensive survey of this specialist business sector that covers both auctions and dealer sales. Its auction data are sourced from the public domain, while dealers’ private sales are estimated using survey responses from gallerists, this year numbering 1,650. Although it is considered the sector’s most authoritative economic survey, the use of self-reported information from a relatively small sample of dealers has led some experts to question the findings of previous reports.
In 2025, total auction sales rose 9 percent to $20.7 billion, the report said. Dealer transactions were up 2 percent, to $34.8 billion year-on-year, while auction houses’ private sales contributed a further $4.2 billion.
Despite the uncertainties created by President Trump’s steep tariffs, the United States remained the dominant national market, generating 44 percent of sales by value, followed by Britain at 18 percent and China at 14 percent, according to the report.
The consignment of prestige collections, such as that of Leonard A. Lauder, drove a 30-percent increase in auction sales of works worth more than $10 million, whereas sales for works under $50,000 at auction declined 2 percent.
All 10 of the highest-priced works at auction were sold in New York, led by a Gustav Klimt portrait at $236.4 million, the second-highest price ever achieved at a public sale. Impressionist, modern and postwar art dominated the international auction market, generating an aggregate 74 percent of the value of its sales. Contemporary art contributed 14 percent.
The report said that while ultra-contemporary works were at the forefront of the art market’s immediate post-pandemic recovery, sales at contemporary art dealerships last year were “stagnant.” Despite a spate of high-profile contemporary gallery closures in 2025, the report said there was “no evidence that closures outweighed openings.”
After two successive years of declining sales, 19 percent of the dealers surveyed expected further decline in 2026. But the report described last year as a “turning point” in the international art market and said that 43 percent of dealers expected sales to improve, an increase of 10 percent over the previous year.
Part of the optimism stems from a dynamic known as the Great Wealth Transfer, in which more than $80 trillion is expected to pass between generations over the coming decades. For example, Christie’s says it plans to sell a $450-million cache of 20th-century masterworks from the estate of the media magnate S.I. Newhouse in New York in May.
“It’s not just the money coming down,” McAndrew said, adding, “There will be big collections of blue-chip works that will boost sales.”
But won’t the art market be affected by geopolitical volatility and war? “Everyone is saturated with bad news,” McAndrew said. “People carry on regardless. You just become slightly immune to it.”
Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets.
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