Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Happy Friday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.
Industry Moves
- Will Cary Promoted to EVP and COO of the Barnes Foundation: Cary will oversee new revenue initiatives, the Calder Gardens partnership, and a newly formed Brand department unifying communications, design, and marketing.
- Bukia Vakhania Gallery to Open Berlin Location Amid Rebrand: The Tbilisi-based gallery—formerly known as Gallery Artbeat—will open a second space in Berlin on January 15 with a solo show by Nina Kintsurashvili.
- Heritage Reports $2.2 Billion in Sales for 2025: The Dallas-based auction house said that was its highest-ever annual total, driven by strong results across categories like coins, comics, sports memorabilia, and illustration art.
- Antenna Space to Open Hong Kong Outpost in March 2026: The Shanghai-based gallery will launch its first overseas space in Wong Chuk Hang with a group show to coincide with Hong Kong Art Week. The director of the new space is Jeff Li.
The Big Number: 50
That’s the percentage of non-bank art lenders that experienced loan defaults in 2024, according to Deloitte Private and ArtTactic’s recently published Art and Finance report. In 2023, that figure was just 17 percent. While the defaults are no doubt a reflection of the state of the art market (and the global economy), it’s nothing compared to 2020. That year, over two-thirds of lenders experienced defaults.
Read This
Perhaps the greatest irony of last year’s headline-grabbing heist at the Louvre is that the museum itself was built on robbery and plunder. Much of its encyclopedic collection was assembled through wars of conquest and colonial extraction. In a new interview in the New Yorker, staff writer Julian Lucas reckons with that history—and its lasting consequences—in conversation with French art historian Bénédicte Savoy. Appointed to the Chaire du Louvre in September—a kind of ceremonial public intellectual role—Savoy has made a career of interrogating the histories of the Louvre and other encyclopedic institutions. While the interview ranges widely across questions of restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy’s most provocative claim may be that universalism, a core French republican ideal, functions as a totalitarian ideology. Each year, the Chaire du Louvre delivers a series of public lectures; Savoy’s are likely to be explosive in a country still smarting from the wound of the heist.
