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Reference dossiers to help you understand fine art auctions, collecting, valuation and the market. Considered reading, free of jargon, to guide how you buy and sell.
The Provenance Premium: When Ownership History Adds Real Money
A documented chain of ownership is priced, and the market has measured how much. Catalogued pedigree, exhibition history and literature references carried hammer-price premiums of 36.86, 49.74 and 56.08 per cent across 2,257,485 painting sales between 1957 and 2016.
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Three dossiers
Each dossier gathers the themes and the articles that answer one question a collector actually asks.
The Saleroom
A collector-grade guide to how to buy and sell art at auction: how a timed online sale runs, how an estimate is built, what the buyer’s premium adds to a hammer price, and how provenance, attribution and condition are verified before a paddle is raised.
Ways of Seeing
Learning how to appreciate art understanding paintings is a discipline, not a gift: it is the difference between a collector who sees a price and one who sees a picture. This catalogue-essay guide connects close looking, movement literacy, thematic reading and catalogue analysis into one collector-grade way of looking.
The Market in Motion
Art market trends arrive as headlines, but the signal sits in the data, the calendar and the sale mechanics behind them. A collector's guide to reading the market, timing a sale, and the path from valuation to consignment.
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Single-Owner Collection Auction: How the Premium Is Built
The single-owner collection auction has become the format the saleroom leans on hardest. Christie's and Sotheby's spent August 2026 competing for the collection of Herbert Lust, roughly 300 works valued in the region of 60 million dollars, ahead of the November sales in New York.
Great Wealth Transfer, Art Market Reality: What Inherited Collections Change
Roughly one trillion dollars of art is expected to change hands over the next ten years. What the headline arithmetic gets wrong, and what rising estate supply actually asks of a collector.
What Happens to Art Prices When an Artist Dies, and What Actually Changes
Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August 2026 at 97, ten weeks after David Hockney died at 88. The measured evidence on posthumous prices is conditional, and what reliably changes is the machinery around the work rather than its price.
Auction House Buyer's Premium Comparison: What Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips Now Charge
Between September 2025 and April 2026, Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips each rewrote the schedule of fees a winning bidder pays on top of the hammer price, and the season now opening runs entirely on the new rate cards.
Vendre et acheter une œuvre d'art aux enchères : du premier avis au coup de marteau
Vendre une œuvre d'art aux enchères suit une séquence documentée : estimation, mandat de vente, exposition, adjudication, puis règlement sous deux mois. Entre le prix marteau et la somme virée au vendeur s'intercalent la commission, les frais de la maison et le droit de suite.
What Is My Art Worth: Indicative Estimate Versus Formal Appraisal
Owners who type what is my art worth into a search engine are usually asking two questions at once, and the market answers them with two different documents. An indicative auction estimate is a free, non binding opinion of the range a work might reach in a stated sale. A formal appraisal is a paid, signed report that carries evidentiary weight with an insurer, a tax authority or a court.
How to Consign Art for Auction: From Enquiry to Settlement
Sellers who search how to consign art for auction meet house marketing that stops at the pleasant part. This article follows the path in the order a seller lives it: valuation enquiry, estimate and reserve, the agreement, cataloguing, the sale, and settlement.
What Happens to Unsold Lots at Auction, and What a Bought-In Teaches You
Roughly one lot in three offered at public auction does not sell. Artprice recorded an unsold rate of 32% in 2025 across 1.28 million works offered. What happens to unsold lots at auction is ordinary saleroom arithmetic: the lot is bought in, and a negotiating window opens.
After the Sale: How to Pay for Art After Auction and Read the Results
A results table is the most honest document an auction house publishes and the least read. Learning how to pay for art after auction is the first half of reading one; the second half is statistical, because a sale total means little without the sell-through rate beside it.
Reading a Catalogue: How to Research an Artist Before Buying at Auction
A sale catalogue is written by the party selling the work, which makes it a technical record and a marketing document at once. Knowing how to research an artist before buying at auction means testing that document line by line, before the first lot opens.
L'année du collectionneur : calendrier des foires et salons d'art
L'année du collectionneur suit un rythme fixe : foires de printemps, Biennale de Venise, semaine de Bâle, double semaine d'octobre entre Londres et Paris, ventes de fin d'année. Voici comment lire ce calendrier et en tirer un itinéraire tenable.
Paris as an Art Capital: Reading the City's Collecting Season
Paris concentrates its collecting year into a small number of weeks, and the calendar of art events Paris 2026 turns on one of them: the third week of October, when Art Basel Paris occupies the Grand Palais and a dozen satellite fairs, museum openings and auction previews cluster around it.
Fairs, Biennials and Gallery Weekends: What Each One Is For
Four formats organise the contemporary art year, and each answers a different question. A commercial art fair is a marketplace with a price list held behind the desk. A biennial is a curated exhibition with wall labels and no invoices. A gallery weekend opens a city's dealer programme on one date.
Art urbain marché de l'art : lire les chiffres sans confondre prix et valeur
Le marché de l'art publie chaque printemps des rapports annuels qui ne mesurent pas le même périmètre et n'aboutissent pas au même total. Savoir lequel recouvre quoi, et quel indicateur mesure une demande réelle, sépare la lecture d'un marché de la lecture d'un titre de presse.
What a Record Price Actually Tells You, and What It Hides
A record price is the most quoted number in the art market and the least informative one. It marks the ceiling of one evening; the bought-in count, the sell-through rate and the median mark the floor, and the floor is where most of a collection trades.
Primary vs Secondary Art Market: the Two Markets Every Collector Straddles
Every contemporary work is sold twice: first on the primary market at a price a gallery states, then on the secondary market at a price bidders determine. The primary vs secondary art market distinction governs who sets the price, who may buy, and what an exit costs.
The Women Surrealists Market: Reading a Revaluation
Frida Kahlo's 54.7 million dollar record put the women Surrealists market in the headlines. Here is what drives the surge, why the masterpieces are unbuyable, and where a disciplined collector actually enters.
Buying Art Under $50,000: Why the Accessible Online Segment Is Where Collections Get Built
The 2026 Art Basel and UBS report says online art sales are retreating. For the collector buying art under $50,000, the opposite is true: online consolidated around exactly the accessible band where real collections get built.
How to Buy Blue Chip Art Prints as the Market Flies to Quality
How to buy blue chip art prints has become the practical question of a market that spent 2026 rewarding proven names over novelty, while ultra-contemporary speculation cooled and editions became the transparent, accessible entry to contemporary collecting.
The Andy Warhol One Dollar Bill: What a $12 Basel Raffle Reveals About Price and Value
In June 2026, a single banknote turned a charitable evening in Basel into a lesson in market literacy. The Andy Warhol one dollar bill at the centre of the story was never sold. It was raffled at about twelve dollars a ticket, a figure that says almost nothing about its worth.
When the Louvre Runs Dry: The Museum Funding Crisis Art Market Signal for Collectors
When the president of the Louvre tells the French Senate the institution is running out of resources, a collector should read it as market intelligence, not only as cultural policy.
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