Invergordon, a small town in central Scotland, could see its coffers filled following a decision by county committee to sell a marble bust made by the French artist Edmé Bouchardon in 1728 that, a quarter of a century ago, was propping open the door of a storage shed.

The bust, which was bought for roughly $6.31 in 1930, could fetch more than $3 million through a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s, which appraised the sculpture at the request of the local government last year. 

While the sculpture was originally purchased for display, a series of mysterious events led to it be placed in a storage shed “with other discarded council paraphernalia.” Former Invergordon community councilor Maxine Smith, who now serves on the broader governmental body the Highland council, told the Guardian last October that she found the bust while digging around the shed for a set of ceremonial robes that had gone missing.

“I found the robes…” she said “and also a wee white marble sculpture thing holding open the door. It could have been binned quite easily.”

According to USA today, the proposed sale had to go through a number of bureaucratic hoops before it was approved. After it was appraised last October the Invergordon Common Good Fund, pushed for the sale, arguing that the bust could provide the local community with revenue that it wouldn’t normally have access to. 

There was a lot of talk about portals earlier this month at MASS MoCA, the enormous art space in Western Massachusetts now playing home to an eye-popping, shape-shifting installation by artist Jeffrey Gibson through the winter of next year. Gibson had already been granted access to a big stage when he was chosen to represent the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the exhibition’s inauguration in 1895. But this is a bigger stage still, at least in literal terms: MASS MoCA’s storied Building 5, a vast column-free space in a former factory complex described as the size of a football field.

Gibson’s commissioned show “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” is different than his offering in Venice—more antic and animated, with an emphasis on performative gestures and an engagement with “two-spirit” states of being that figure in Indigenous LGBTQI+ culture. The exhibition is boisterous, with clubby electronic music and kinetic videos that bring life to outsize ceremonial garments hung from the ceiling above illuminated sculptures that double as dance floors.

“It was different from filling a space like in a normal exhibition,” Gibson said during a public talk at the opening. “It was more about: how do we fill this space with all the ideas of what’s happening in the work?”

While the amount of space is otherworldly (19,000 square feet in Building 5, across two floors), the art within it is earthy and homegrown. During his talk to introduce the show, Gibson said he had been inspired by the kind of collective and communal activity that he grew up with in churches and, later, dance clubs. “We talked about a disco/church,” he said of early conversations about the project. “A lot of it has to do with faith based-practices, regalia, queerness—a very welcoming space.”

Sharing the stage was Albert McLeod, a human-rights activist and director of the Two-Spirited People of Manitoba who Gibson invited to discuss notions of two-spirit identity that date back to the term’s origin within Indigenous queer activism. “Spirit-naming is a historic tradition, and usually children receive a spirit name when they’re born,” McLeod said. “The implication is that the spiritual realm is benevolent to humans, so we ask for a guide for that child throughout their life, because there’s lots of brambles and wolves with sharp teeth. You need a spirit guide to help you, and there’s power in the belief that we, individually, are never alone, because there’s a spirit that walks with us for the rest of our lives.”

Santiago Yahuarcani’s visual vocabulary is neither derivative nor dependent on Western art history. His paintings—including three of them currently starring in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale— are a testament to the consciousness, affection, and intelligence of the rainforest and its inhabitants that invite us to see beyond the parameters of settler coloniality. Through the overlapping of bright-colored figures in dense groupings that combine symbolic or descriptive references to colonial violence and spiritual worlds, they encapsulate the memories of Yahuarcani’s ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the voices of the elders, and Amazonian stories of life’s origins, all in a manner that demands attention and respect.

A self-taught painter, Yahuarcani belongs to the Aimeni (White heron) clan of the Uitoto people of northern Amazonia. His mother, Martha López Pinedo, was a descendant of Gregorio López, the only member of the Aimeni who emigrated from La Chorrera (today part of the Colombian Amazon) to the Ampiyacu River region (now northern Peru). Gregorio was one of the survivors of the Putumayo genocide (1879–1912), during which nearly 30,000 Indigenous people from the Bora, Uitoto, Andoque, and Ocaina Nations were cruelly annihilated by the Peruvian Amazon Company at the peak of the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century—a period of colonial expedition, extraction, and commercialization of rubber in the Amazonian territory of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. Although the rubber business ceased to be profitable around 1925, continued subjugation, extraction, and privatization devastated Indigenous populations and destroyed areas of the Amazon that, until very recently, did not have laws that protect Indigenous peoples.

Orally transmitted to the artist by his grandfather, this episode of ethnic cleansing and greed left a deep impression on Yahuarcani, who in the last two decades has insistently returned to this moment to reclaim justice and confront the perpetrators’ impunity. In one of his most poignant works, Amazonia (2016), Yahuarcani portrays a Uitoto person fully covered with wounds and incisions like those made in the bark of a tree to collect sap. Tears and red blood turn into white rubber as they leave his body. “Mother Earth is bleeding, Mother Earth is crying. Her tears are like the sap of the trees,” the artist said in an interview three years later. In a detailed, cartoon-like style, his anti-colonial paintings confront the long-lasting effects of the Western assaults on Indigenous minds, bodies, languages, and identities, demanding recognition of stories that, for a long time, were not heard or acknowledged.

Yahuarcani started to paint at the age of 10. In the 1980s, he made paintings and wooden sculptures to sell to tourists near his hometown, Pebas, close to the Amazon River, where he still lives and works. Although the need for economic subsistence drove many of his early creations, his layered and deeply inventive pictures progressively became a reservoir of collective memory and complex representations of Uitoto worldviews. His inspiration came from childhood experiences, such as encounters with wild mushrooms, that sparked his imagination and led him to see himself as a painter of sounds, as he called himself at a conference in Brazil in 2013:

I also research when I walk through the jungle and go to my farm. I’m looking at the trees, which are full of drawings. I approach a tree and stay two or three hours looking at it. The tree is painted; it is covered with different types of figures. That is how I go around and choose figures for my paintings. These figures coincide with a sound, for example, with the word “kbnshu.” For me, that is the sound of an animal that jumps into the water and sticks out its long tongue. I am turning the sound into a being.

With the US presidential election behind us and the marquee New York evening sales just a few days away, collectors, advisors, and all manner of art world professionals have been combing through the full list of auction house offerings, ARTnews included. 

This November, works by art historical heavyweights David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jean Michel Basquiat (of course) take the stage behind auctioneers who hope to coax out as many bids as possible from buyers in the room, on the phones, and watching online from across the globe. 

ARTnews has already revealed a number of the consignors behind this season’s biggest lots, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), courtesy of the Peter Brant’s Brant Foundation, and Yayoi Kusama’s 2018 picture Infinity-Nets (RDUEL), which has ties to disgraced art dealer and forthcoming biopic subject Inigo Philbrick.

But there is always more to learn. Further investigating has revealed more names of collectors that we believe to be unloading while interest rates are (relatively) good. And while high-net-worth individuals have cut back their spending over the last 12 months, we are in a “collector’s market,” according to many market-watchers. If the work is good enough, the bidders are sure to raise their paddles. 

The first lot at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary evening sale, Yu Nishimura’s 2020 work Pause, seems to come from the esteemed collection of Dallas collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky. The work was featured as part of the Allan Schwartzman-curated show “Open Storage: 25 Years Of Collecting” which ran from August 26, 2022 – April 29, 2023, at the Rachofskys’ contemporary art space in Dallas, The Warehouse. The Rachofsky’s did not return a request for comment, while a Sotheby’s spokesperson told ARTnews that “as a policy, we don’t comment on consignors’ identity since that’s confidential.”

A new art market report by Bank of America suggests buying conditions are improving for collectors thanks to lower auction estimates, discounts at galleries, and interest rate cuts, among other factors.

Titled “Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?,” it says next week’s New York fall auctions and Art Basel Miami in early December can expect higher collector participation as a result.

“Bidder competition at auction has slowed, meaning buyers may be able to purchase works more affordably than in recent years,” the report says. “The anticipated favorable buying conditions come on the heels of lower-than-expected art sales in the secondary market during the first half of the year – with auction prices coming in only 1 percent above their aggregated mid-estimates, the smallest increase in seven-plus years.”

One category that has declined in recent years, and therefore presents opportunities for buyers, is the emerging artist market. Sotheby’s The Now sale of “wet paint” works, which regularly saw record-breaking bidding wars in 2022, has witnessed a 55 percent fall in sales totals since.

The report points to Colombian artist María Berrío’s La Cena (2012, mixed media collage on canvas) as an example. It sold for $1.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2022 before Christie’s offered the work again in 2024 for an estimate of $350,000 to $450,000. It sold for $441,000, marking a 71 percent decline in just two years.

However, on the flip side, the Latin American artist market is on the rise “as international collectors increasingly seek diverse and historically significant work,” the report says. Sotheby’s reported that sales of works by LatAm artists (both historical and contemporary) have risen by more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic years, topping $250 million between 2020 and 2023.

Dealers face a ‘critical choice’

“Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?” says the current market correction, which started last year in the wake of high inflation and interest rates – and global geopolitical unrest – “has spilled into 2024.”

“Less marquee estate property in the May sales potentially also dampened bidders’ confidence and enthusiasm. Fewer masterpiece works are being offered in what has widely been viewed as a ‘buyer’s market,’” it reads.

As Drew Watson, Bank of America’s head of art services, told ARTnews, these conditions give collectors the upper hand when negotiating with dealers.

“Heading into 2025, we see two themes emerging across the art market,” he said. “First, there is good news for buyers. The 2023 market correction carried over into this year, creating a favorable buying environment for collectors. As the primary market adjusts, galleries are tasked with navigating pricing inventory. Collectors now have more room to negotiate and secure favorable transaction terms.”

The report says that galleries “face a critical choice: adapt to the new market reality or risk accumulating unsold inventory.” “Collectors are more discerning than ever,” Watson continued. “They know that galleries continue to sell A+ works, but that terms are more negotiable on everything else. Collectors are using that knowledge to secure more favorable transaction terms: including skipping waitlists, eliminating resale restrictions and ‘buy one gift one,’ and of course, price discounts.”

Younger collectors and art as a wealth strategy

The second theme, Watson explained, is collectors increasingly incorporating their art holdings into their overall wealth strategy. “We expect interest to grow among younger generations too,” he said. “In fact, Bank of America Private Bank published a study this year showing 56 percent of collectors now consider their art as a part of their wealth management strategy, including 98 percent of younger collectors (millennials and Gen Z).”

“Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?” says the estimated value of art and collectibles is predicted to top $2.8 trillion by 2026 and comprise more than 10 percent of ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ portfolios.

How will Trump’s win impact the art market?

As the report explains, in the past two presidential election years, the fall marquee sales “contracted sharply,” so concern about next week’s auction “is understandable” given Donald Trump’s recent victory.

“Today’s market is already vulnerable, with auction totals in the first half of 2024 coming in at their lowest number since the pandemic shock of 2020,” the report explains. “Uncertainty on the direction of fiscal and monetary policies that may affect art transactions and collectors’ ability to move and pay for art could complicate things further. And while auction houses seem confident on the number of consignments coming to market this fall, some argue that the outcome of the election — including the potential for an indeterminate or disputed result — may distract or cause hesitancy on the side of the buyer. It may also bear on the willingness of savvy buyers and sellers to transact until the policies of a new administration are clear.”

“If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size. Because of that, Beuys believed they could disseminate his radical notions of art as a transformational social force far and wide—even when he wasn’t present to facilitate that process. 

Of the nearly 600 multiples he produced, some 400 are included in the Broad’s forthcoming exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” opening November 16. Assembled in this show are found objects, sculptures, paintings, oil sketches, photographs, posters, films, and materials related to his political actions, like fliers and office supplies—a massive grouping of artworks that amount to “the whole Beuys,” as the artist himself once called his multiples.

“For him, all manner of things mattered,” said Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, who organized the show along with Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibition manager of the Broad. “He put great effort into enshrining simple base materials with value, preserving their longevity as art objects.”

Despite the diversity of material forms, the multiples share a conceptual concern for restoring individual wellness and transforming the conditions of social reality. Beuys once said art was “the only genuinely human medium for revolutionary change … completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one.” These ideas were borne out in his editions, as well as his large-scale sculptures, performances, and political actions.

Capri-Batterie (1985), one of his best-known editions, features a yellow light bulb plugged into a socket stuck in a freshly picked lemon. The work requires continuous replenishment—the lemon gradually rots, which means the fruit needs to be replaced regularly. Replacing the lemon elicits a form of social participation, something Beuys actively encouraged, and suggests a kind of regeneration that the artist embraced. Moreover, the piece marries the artificial and the organic, implying a reconciliation between humanity and nature.

Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism. These are among the many -isms of early 20th-century European modernism, an artistic lineage that’s chock full of movements appended with that suffix. But Orphism? That’s not likely one discussed much today outside academia, and perhaps for a good reason: it barely existed.

This, at least, is something one could draw from the Guggenheim Museum’s sprawling Orphism survey, a wonderfully nerdy exhibition about one of the more unfashionable modernist styles. It’s tempting to say the show, titled “Harmony and Dissonance,” makes the case for why Orphism matters, but it doesn’t—not that that’s a count against its curatorial thesis. Instead, this Guggenheim blockbuster, which surveys work made between 1910 and the early ’40s, proves that Orphism was less a movement than a pivotal transitional moment in Western art history.

What, exactly, was Orphism, then? Well, the answer to that is sort of complicated. For the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, its inventor, Orphism was an artistic tendency that sought to offer “a more internal, less intellectual, more poetic vision of the universe and of life,” as he wrote in 1913. That’s a pretty squishy definition, but Apollinaire knew Orphism when he saw it. And he saw it specifically in the work of Paris-based artists such as Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia, both of whom were, at the time, painting highly stylized images composed of fractured forms that appeared to dance around their canvases. Apollinaire claimed that these works translated sounds into images and in that way embodied the spirit of Orpheus, the Greek mythological hero known as a preternaturally talented musician.

Both Delaunay and Picabia appear early in the Guggenheim show, grouped together in a gallery that suggests the many forms Orphism took. Delaunay is represented by a circular painting in which the moon shatters into an amalgam of variously colored disks; Picabia by the wonderfully weird Edtaonisl (Ecclésiastique), from 1913, which looks like an explosion of machine innards. The harsh, industrial look of Picabia’s painting shares very little in common with the opulence of Delaunay’s highly saturated colors, yet Apollinaire brought the two together and called it a movement.

He also lumped in František Kupka, whose Localization of Graphic Motifs II (1912–13) is here at the Guggenheim alongside Edtaonisl. The Kupka painting likewise borders on total abstraction, with an angel-like figure at its center whose wings emit pulsing black, purple, and green forms. Those forms ripple across the canvas, as though they were visualizing an echo.

The British Museum has been gifted one of the world’s most prodigious collections of Chinese ceramics, worth £1 billion ($1.27 billion), in what is likely the highest-value donation of art ever received by a UK museum.

The 1,700-piece collection—including a wine cup painted with chickens from the Ming Dynasty—was donated by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation and has been on long-term loan to the London museum in a dedicated gallery since 2009. Such a high-value donation of art is uncommon in the UK; the last headline-making gift received by the British Museum was a bequest from a late trustee worth £123 million, or $156 million.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, called the Percival ceramics an “incomparable private collection.”

He added: “These celebrated objects add a special dimension to our own collection and together offer scholars, researchers and visitors around the world the incredible opportunity to study and enjoy the very best examples of Chinese craftsmanship anywhere in existence.”

Percival David was born in 1892 in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) into a wealthy Jewish family with ties to Iran. He was a baron by way of inheritance, as well as the owner of his family’s lucrative textile and banking business. In 1914, at age 22, he moved to London and after a first purchase of three Chinese ceramics became a passionate collector of Chinese art and literature.

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