The Great Unraveling: When the Storm Hit the Art Market
To My Fellow Warriors
Greetings Warriors!
Every empire thinks it will last forever — until the storm comes.
You can hear it before it hits: the quiet panic in polished halls, the nervous smiles at champagne-soaked openings, the sound of art dealers whispering prayers to the gods of liquidity.
But storms don’t come to destroy. They come to cleanse.
To strip away the rot.
To remind us what is real.
And now, in 2025, the storm has arrived for the global art market.
What began as murmurs in Basel has become a roar across every gallery, auction house, and collector’s den.
What we’re witnessing is not just a financial correction — it’s a spiritual reckoning.
This is the age of unraveling, my friends. And from the wreckage, something purer will rise.
The Villa Before the Fall — A Gallery Named Clearing
In early June, as the elite prepared to descend upon the Swiss city of Basel for the annual Art Basel fair, a quiet act of rebellion took shape.
New York-based Clearing Gallery decided to do something unthinkable — something suicidal, by traditional art-world standards.
Instead of renting a booth inside the colossal Messeplatz convention center — the sacred temple of commerce where the world’s collectors make or break reputations — Clearing rented a four-story villa eleven minutes away.
They called it Maison Clearing.
A house, a refuge, a last stand.
Inside, they filled the attic and basement with art from forty-six artists. They hosted dinners under the trees, barbecues, music, laughter — a kind of artistic rebellion against the cold sterility of fair booths and velvet ropes.
But what looked like defiance was, in truth, desperation.
Clearing had been bleeding cash for two years — $150,000 a month to keep its New York and Los Angeles spaces alive.
Its founder, Olivier Babin, once an artist himself, knew the numbers didn’t lie.
“More of the same wasn’t going to move the needle,” he said. “It was all about survival.”
Instead of spending $100,000 for a small booth at Basel, he gambled on the villa — more space, more intimacy, more freedom.
But freedom doesn’t always pay the bills.
By August 7, 2025, Clearing announced it was closing.
“We gave it our best shot, and we missed,” Babin said.
Bankruptcy. Lawsuits. Silence.
And thus began the year’s first thunderclap — the sound of a modern gallery empire collapsing under the weight of its own marble ambitions.
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The Empire Shakes — And Others Begin to Fall
Babin was not alone.
By midsummer, names once synonymous with success — Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, Kasmin — had also fallen.
The causes were the same across continents:
Overhead bleeding cash faster than sales could refill it.
Collectors tightening wallets.
Younger generations disengaged, burned out, or broke.
Dealers chasing prestige instead of purpose.
Every week, another obituary for a gallery. Every month, another building emptied.
Belgian collector and commentator Alain Servais said what many feared to admit:
“It’s not cyclical. It’s structural. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
This wasn’t a storm you could wait out.
It was an earthquake shifting the very ground of the art world.
In my earlier reflection — The Collapse of Empire-Style Galleries & the Rise of Community-Driven Spaces — I spoke of this coming shift: the fall of the marble towers, and the rise of art communities rooted in authenticity and collaboration.
Now, that prophecy is no longer metaphor.
It’s happening in real time.
The Numbers That Broke the Illusion
Art Basel’s and UBS’s latest market report confirmed the tremor in cold, financial language:
Fine-art auction sales fell to $4.72 billion, down 8.8 percent year-over-year, and a staggering 40.9 percent lower than 2022.
Dealer sector sales declined 6 percent, landing at $34.1 billion — the lowest in years.
Soho Art Materials, a once-thriving supplier, saw its sales collapse from 1,000 canvases a year to barely 200.
Across London and New York, regulatory filings told similar stories: razor-thin margins, near-zero profits, debt stacking like unsold inventory.
Sadie Coles HQ, one of London’s most respected galleries, dropped from £59 million in 2023 to £28.6 million in 2024.
After-tax profit? A fragile 0.7 percent.
The illusion of endless growth — shattered.
The fantasy of infinite collectors — gone.
The art market, once the playground of the elite, was suddenly naked before the mirror of its own greed.
The Malaise — The Soul of Art Lost in Translation
I’ve spoken to many Warriors of creation — artists, curators, dreamers who bleed color into the world — and the tone this summer was different.
No one pretended everything was fine. The champagne tasted bitter. The smiles at Basel were tight.
“The energy is not positive,” one dealer confessed. “There are fewer and fewer collectors who are actively buying.”
The problem, as several advisors noted, wasn’t just economic — it was existential.
Art had been sold as an asset class, a portfolio supplement, a status symbol. The sacred was traded like stock.
But when the speculative fever cooled, when the NFTs crashed, when the quick-flip buyers moved on to meme coins, the hollowness was exposed.
“Art isn’t an asset class,” a weary gallerist said. “And if you’ve been collecting like it is, you’ve done something that’s not productive.”
The truth is, the art world became a mirror of the broader sickness: consumption without connection, display without devotion.
It forgot the language of awe.
And yet, this malaise — this exhaustion — may also be the beginning of healing.
Because sometimes a culture must lose its illusions before it can rediscover its soul.
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The Return to Earth — New Models, New Landscapes
Even amid collapse, there are those who adapt — artists and dealers who move not upward, but inward.
Leo Koenig, a veteran gallerist, has reshaped his business threefold:
A small, humble space in New York.
A seasonal gallery in Palm Beach.
And a wild experiment in the Catskills village of Andes — population 1,114.
There, surrounded by mountains and quiet rivers, collectors come not for spectacle but for experience — art paired with hiking, conversation, and connection.
“Our dollars go farther here,” Koenig said. “And people are more excited to explore a different landscape.”
This is not retreat; it’s realignment.
It’s the return of art to human scale.
Other dealers echo the same sentiment: stay small, stay flexible, stay authentic.
Robbie Fitzpatrick, once running grand spaces in Paris and L.A., now moves nomadically — exhibitions as pilgrimages.
“Don’t buy into the growth model,” he warned. “It can get very tricky, very fast.”
Even mega galleries like Pace, locked into twenty-year leases and multimillion-dollar overheads, now face whispers of strain. The marble palaces are trembling.
And yet, among the rubble, younger galleries — Matthew Brown, Karma, Sebastian Gladstone, King’s Leap — are quietly thriving, precisely because they stayed nimble, grounded, communal.
It’s not just economics. It’s ethos.
A new generation is rejecting empire logic for tribe logic — the same truth I explored in The Collapse of Empire-Style Galleries: the art world’s evolution from hierarchy to humanity.
The Mirror of the Collector — The Fall of the Gods
Even the collectors — those modern demigods of taste — are retreating to their fortresses.
Beth Rudin DeWoody, whose $5 billion fortune and 10,000-piece collection once set trends from Palm Beach to New York, has slowed her buying.
“I’ve gotten a few things by young artists,” she said, “but I’m holding back. I didn’t go to Art Basel. The market got crazy.”
When icons like DeWoody step aside, ripples become waves.
The herd pauses. Confidence trembles.
Other collectors like Dean Valentine, co-founder of the Felix Art Fair, now openly call the market broken.
“People can’t afford a house, let alone a painting,” he said. “The market has become separated from the fundamentals.”
And he’s right.
Art became a mirror for inequality — where a single sculpture could cost more than an entire neighborhood.
But perhaps this pause, this recalibration, is mercy in disguise.
It forces both creators and collectors to ask: Why do we buy? Why do we make?
If the answer is profit, then art dies.
If the answer is purpose, then art lives.
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After the Storm — The Dawn of Something Honest
So here we are, Warriors — standing in the quiet after the storm.
The sky still smells of ozone. The marble towers still crack.
But through the debris, you can already see shoots of green.
The art market is bleeding, yes — but bleeding can also mean purging.
The excess, the speculation, the spiritual decay — all washing away.
Smaller galleries are rising. Artist-run collectives are forming. Online communities, local exhibitions, workshops in abandoned warehouses — these are the new temples.
We are witnessing the decentralization of beauty.
Art is returning to the hands of those who love it — not those who merely leverage it.
Olivier Babin of Clearing said something prophetic before his gallery closed:
“Dinosaurs were wiped out. That was the rise of the mammals.”
He didn’t mean extinction. He meant evolution.
The old guard must fall so that new life can breathe.
And that, my friends, is what this storm truly is:
A correction. A cleansing. A call to rebirth.
The empire galleries may collapse — but from their ruins, community-driven spaces will bloom.
Collectors may hoard less — but what they buy will mean more.
Artists may struggle — but those who survive will own their voice again.
The storm didn’t come to destroy art.
It came to remind it who it was before the money, before the marble, before the madness.
Because art is not a market.
Art is a pulse.
And the pulse still beats — steady, stubborn, holy.
So keep creating, Warriors.
Keep painting in the dark.
Keep sculpting truth out of chaos.
Because when the storm clears, it won’t be the empire that remains —
It will be us.
