THE ART JOURNAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, ART HISTORY, AND THOUGHT

The Hierarchy of Trust

De Kooning’s London record reveals a market that commits capital selectively. What matters is who can reduce uncertainty, and what that reassurance costs.

STRUKTUR + MARKTWERT

Hans Struberger

10/16/20265 min read

Two art handlers in white gloves hold a painting beneath a headline announcing a record. Sotheby’s understands how to give a price a public image. On 15 October in London, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled, painted in 1977, fetched approximately £9.8 million including fees, the highest price paid for his work at a European auction. That geographical qualification matters. It takes nothing away from the achievement, but it defines its reach. To see this as evidence that the entire art market has been released from restraint is to ask more of a single painting than even a de Kooning can deliver.

What interests me first is the coexistence of commitment and hesitation. A market can mobilise millions while remaining cautious. It can pursue one work with conviction and decline another of comparable standing. This is more than a passing mood. It brings us to a question often obscured by the search for the next winning artist: what kind of reassurance must a work provide before a buyer is prepared to give up liquidity?

The global economy offers no uniform backdrop. In its October outlook, the International Monetary Fund describes continued resilience alongside increasingly uneven conditions, with energy prices, trade tensions and financing risks weighing on prospects. These pressures do not translate directly into bids. They do affect the circumstances in which art is bought, stored, transported and financed. Committing money to a painting for years means weighing alternatives. Interest-bearing assets provide income; a painting initially brings expenses. Any eventual financial gain depends on a future buyer. The London result offers no grounds for declaring art a dependable hedge against inflation.

For buyers with substantial wealth, however, the calculation may take a different form. An acquisition need not justify itself solely through an expected return. It may complete a collection, fulfil a longstanding personal ambition or change the collector’s position within a cultural circle. From a sociological perspective, these are central features of the transaction. Part of what the price purchases is a relationship to a particular history, and recognition by others as someone qualified to participate in it.

De Kooning offers a powerful form of reassurance here. His art-historical significance does not have to be established anew at every sale. Decades of scholarship, exhibitions and collecting have created a shared point of reference. Bourdieu’s account of cultural and symbolic capital helps explain how that accumulated recognition can become economic value. Yet the explanation becomes too convenient if the painting disappears from it. In Untitled, yellow, pink, white and blue press into one another; suggestions of the body emerge and dissolve. Its restless organisation is no interchangeable wrapper for a famous signature. Institutions have helped establish and communicate de Kooning’s importance. They did not paint the picture for him.

Even within this established historical framework, the terms of the individual transaction matter. Sotheby’s catalogue identifies the painting as guaranteed property carrying an irrevocable bid. Some of the risk had therefore been contractually allocated before the public auction began. This neither makes the price artificial nor allows us to read the evening’s bidding as an unqualified measure of demand. Guarantees can help secure important consignments. They also reveal how much negotiation may precede what appears to be a spontaneous moment of price discovery. Any serious discussion of market confidence must consider the arrangements that make it possible.

Nor can one sale establish a sustained rise in an artist’s market. That requires comparable works across a longer period, an account of unsold lots and a clear distinction between hammer prices and totals including fees. A geographical record is not a price index. Equally, the difference between two published sale prices is not the owner’s return. Buyer’s premiums, selling charges, insurance, financing and inflation all affect the calculation. A high sale price is an observable fact. Financially successful ownership is a separate proposition that requires separate evidence.

The London sale itself challenges the idea that an established name can override these distinctions. Alongside de Kooning’s result came an unsold Georg Baselitz work on paper and a Yayoi Kusama that sold well below its estimate. Neither outcome supports a sweeping verdict on the artist concerned. Both demonstrate the limits of the name as an explanation. Period, format, condition, provenance, the asking level and what a collector already owns can all change a decision. The language of “safe names” gives too little credit to buyers’ discrimination and too much to the assumption that one work’s success transfers to another.

The broader evidence is similarly resistant to a simple account. Clare McAndrew’s Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026 estimates worldwide sales in 2025 at $59.6 billion, up four per cent. Public auction sales rose nine per cent, while dealer sales increased two per cent. Below those totals lies an important complication: dealers with annual turnover below $500,000 recorded double-digit growth in average sales, while those turning over between $1 million and $10 million experienced a slight decline. Average operating costs across the dealer sector rose five per cent. An account built entirely around a flourishing summit and struggling small galleries would miss these differences.

This is where the structural question becomes sharper. A smaller gallery with manageable fixed costs and committed collectors may have more room to manoeuvre than a business supporting staff, an international presence and an ambitious exhibition programme at once. That is a possible explanation for divergent results, rather than a general promise of security for small businesses. Scale creates access and reach. It also creates obligations. In a more selective market, the amount a gallery must sell to sustain its work of interpretation and advocacy becomes a decisive variable.

The renewed importance of buying in person deserves to be understood in this context. The report puts art fair sales at 35 per cent of dealer turnover in 2025, up from 31 per cent. Fairs bring comparison, conversation and direct encounters with objects into the same place. A digital catalogue can reproduce only part of that experience. Such encounters can reduce uncertainty, although a larger share of turnover does not, by itself, establish a better return for exhibitors. Booths, transport, travel and preparation must all be paid for. The demanding test for an international fair is whether it enables relationships with enough economic and intellectual substance to outlast the event. Repeat purchases matter, as does a collector’s willingness to engage with work whose standing is still unsettled.

That willingness has not disappeared. The day before Sotheby’s sale, Christie’s sold Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic of 1918 for £7.64 million, setting an auction record for the artist. This complicates any account of a wholesale retreat into fixed hierarchies. Historical recognition can shift; markets can register and financially amplify those shifts. Whether a result sustains a wider reassessment or primarily rewards the rarity of one particular work becomes clear only later. That unresolved question is precisely what makes the case worth following.

I would therefore read de Kooning’s London record as a specific and bounded achievement. Significant capital was available for a particular painting under particular conditions. The larger question concerns the mobility of that confidence: can it also develop where decades of agreement have yet to accumulate? A market needs shared standards if prices are to be more than arbitrary demands. It also needs people prepared to revise those standards before others have endorsed the revision. Its deeper strength lies in whether it can afford an informed judgement before that judgement acquires the reassurance of a record.