By Liam Davis
December 4th 2025
It’s the evening of Monday, December 1, and I’m sitting in an Uber on Collins Avenue, crawling forward through the kind of traffic that usually appears much later in Art Basel Miami Beach week. The VIP preview isn’t until Wednesday, the Vernissage not until Thursday, yet the gridlock has already descended. My driver gestures over the wheel and says, with confidence, “All this traffic? It’s because the big deals are going down tonight.”
I’m not convinced. That version of Miami—the one featuring late-night dinners where mega-dealers preside over collectors eager to buy before the fair—belongs to a different era. Maybe 2005, maybe 2015. But 2025 is a different economic moment, and the art market has been quietly adjusting to match it.
That adjustment became visible earlier this year. In May, a Giacometti bronze expected to reach as much as $70 million stalled at Sotheby’s before hitting its reserve. The reaction was not shock. It was recognition. A decade of exuberance had thinned out.
For years, the art market has been treated as something separate—a symbolic economy insulated by extraordinary wealth, where global instability barely registers. But the last two auction cycles have told another story. New York’s marquee evening sales, the emotional center of the American art trade, have softened in ways unseen since the early pandemic. Prices have missed their targets. Major works have been withdrawn rather than risk public disappointment. The once-unquestioned assumption that the wealthiest collectors will always chase the top lots has begun to feel less inevitable.
These tremors matter not because they illuminate the art world, but because they reflect the country’s larger mood. Auctions have become a barometer of shifting psychological weather.
In a year when many Americans say the economy feels uncertain—growth in spreadsheets, pressure in everyday life—it is telling that even the ultra-wealthy are hesitating. A Bacon portrait selling below expectations or a Warhol pulled before sale is not just a market event. It is evidence of a behavioral shift among people who usually move with unshakable financial confidence.
It raises a question: Are the highest tiers of American spenders quietly tapping the brakes?
Some long-standing narratives—that progress is linear, that wealth inevitably ascends—now feel less stable. Other forces, from higher borrowing costs to geopolitical volatility, have introduced a new calculus. The economy is thriving in some sectors and tightening in others, and the cultural narrative about the nation’s direction feels suspended between optimism and uncertainty.
Withdrawals offer the clearest window into this mindset. Brice Marden’s Event in 2024 and the Warhol Big Electric Chair removed from the 2025 catalog were not withdrawn for lack of esteem. They were withdrawn because no one wanted to test the market too publicly.
Call it prudence. Culturally, it signals something deeper. When people with extraordinary means begin hedging, it usually means the narratives that organize their worldview—about growth, momentum, and inevitability—have become less secure.
It’s a tension that mirrors the broader American economy. Prosperity at the top, unease in the middle, exhaustion at the bottom. Inflation has cooled but prices remain elevated. Surveys repeatedly show that most households feel squeezed. Yet at the very top—fueled by equity markets, corporate profits and unprecedented inherited wealth—confidence has not faded. In fact, it has consolidated.
Art auctions turn those tensions into numbers. Hammer prices cling to the low end of estimates. Guarantees prop up sales that might otherwise falter. Advisors talk about “selectivity,” a gentle phrase for diminished appetite. Works under $100,000 continue to sell briskly, but the top tier—the sphere most associated with unshakable optimism—has tightened.
This bifurcation mirrors the country itself: strength in everyday economic activity, hesitation in symbolic, future-facing realms.
None of this means the art market is predicting recession, nor that the wealthy are withdrawing from public life. The United States remains dynamic, innovative, culturally certain of its place in the world. But something has shifted—a subtle recalibration of belief.
Markets are expressions of a collective psychology. They reveal what people sense before they articulate it. When collectors hesitate to chase a Giacometti or decline to test a Warhol at auction, they are not merely making financial judgments. They are expressing a mindset in which ambition coexists with caution, abundance with unease, and wealth with the faint suspicion that the future may require a new story.
The soft auction results of 2024 and 2025 are not a verdict on the economy. They are a clue about the national mood: an acknowledgment that even at the top of the income pyramid, confidence is no longer automatic.
And then came the 2025 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.
The fair opened this year with an unfamiliar calm. The aisles were looser, the crowds more measured, the typical crush of international visitors thinner. Yet beneath the subdued surface was something more consequential: a market reorganizing itself around institutional authority, generational wealth and the search for cultural grounding in unsettled times.
Despite the quieter tone, anticipation was high. One collector entering the fair said, “I haven’t seen it this busy in years and the fair hasn’t even started yet.” Her enthusiasm captured the afterglow of New York’s recent $2.2 billion auction season. Advisors spoke of a “positive attitude” among buyers approaching the fair “in the best possible light.”
By mid-afternoon on VIP day, the gallery had surpassed 40 percent of last year’s total. “Christmas came early,” its president said. A George Condo painting nearly hit $4 million; two Louise Bourgeois works sold for $3.2 million and $2.5 million; Ed Clark and Henry Taylor paintings each found buyers at $1.2 million. These were not speculative purchases. They were expressions of confidence in artists whose reputations are anchored by scholarship and museums.
Zwirner’s booth reinforced this shift toward cultural solidity: a $5.5 million Gerhard Richter, a $3.3 million Alice Neel, two Josef Albers compositions in the low $2 million range, and a Ruth Asawa sculpture for $1.2 million. A new Dana Schutz painting sold to an American museum. It was a portrait not of adrenaline but of alignment—a market moving in step with institutions.
Other galleries echoed this pattern: Almine Rech with sales of Picasso and Turrell; White Cube with de Kooning, Hirst and Emin; Pace with Sam Gilliam and Lynda Benglis. Interest was strongest among American and Latin American collectors.
For years, Art Basel Miami Beach has functioned as a stabilizing signal—a place where, in uncertain times, buyers reposition themselves around artists fortified by history, scholarship and cultural legitimacy. The sociological engine behind this is straightforward: cultural capital becomes a refuge when financial capital feels less predictive. The most sought-after works this year—Asawa, Neel, Bourgeois, Condo, Gilliam—fit this pattern precisely.
Even the middle tier reflected renewed seriousness. Perrotin sold out its Lee Bae presentation. Templon reported “remarkable momentum.” Matthew Brown sold a major Carroll Dunham ahead of the artist’s retrospective and described a “sense of relief and optimism.”
Some works revealed shifting narratives: a two-inch Frida Kahlo self-portrait priced at $15 million drew intense attention, while a rediscovered Martin Wong mural was acquired by a U.S. museum, underscoring Wong’s expanding place in American art history.
Yet many described the mood as calm, even restrained. “There’s no urgency,” one advisor observed. Another said the fair felt “quieter and more serious.” Sarah Gavlak, the longtime Palm Beach dealer, captured the essence: “It’s all emotional. People come here, they have an experience, they start collecting.”
If the dealers’ accounts hold true, what made this edition notable was how decisively it succeeded against a backdrop of national economic anxiety. Many Americans expect their financial situations to worsen in 2025. Consumer sentiment has slipped. Middle-income spending is tightening as savings shrink and borrowing costs rise.
In Miami, the top tier moved with confidence and conviction. While many brace for a more uncertain year, the fair’s wealthiest buyers funneled millions into artists validated by institutions and scholarship.
Art Basel Miami Beach’s success isn’t a contradiction of the nation’s unease. It reflection a divided economy—one in which cultural capital becomes a stabilizing refuge for some, and a public display of confidence for the small segment of Americans whose fortunes continue to shape the art market’s direction.
Liam Davis is a curator and artist who lives in New York City.