2026
Essay It Should Feel Like Arrival — I have been writing to you about everything wrong with this industry for over a year now. The fair model under pressure. The coaching industrial complex. The galleries that charge representation rates for listing service value. The institutional apparatus that hands collectors language to justify what their instincts already told them, as if the feeling […] → Essay Art as Pedagogy — Good morning. This edition of The New Art World Order is a little different from our usual material. It’s shaped by a series of philosophical and existential questions I’ve been sitting with lightly. Less dense with data than my usual musings, but no less relevant. If anything, more so. This series is written for those who like […] → Essay The bank is fine. Please don’t withdraw your money. — This is one of my favorite parts of the job being right on analytics. So without further delay, as I write this at almost 11pm Friday night, let’s get into the reality of what is going on, because as the many posts on Instagram will tell you, everything is going great. Back to growth after […] → Essay Who Actually Controls the Artist? — Good morning and happy spring, we made it! It has been a busy and exciting start to the season here at Lion & Lamb. If you aren’t already a member of the Salon, that’s where the deeper work lives; available works from the gallery, industry analysis that doesn’t fit neatly into a single essay, and the kind […] → Essay You Can’t Tell By Looking, Can You? — Alexis MATA – Encrypted Dreams 2023| Oil on canvas | 70.9 × 59.1 inches Welcome back to At the Studio Table. Last week the Salon received an early look at available work by Alexis Mata alongside the argument for why this particular moment, and this particular practice, matters to collectors. This is the expanded version of […] → Essay What Does Success Mean to You? — Spring has officially sprung, and with it I will be leaning heavily on metaphor. Seasoned readers of this Substack will know I have a long and committed relationship with water metaphors, particularly when explaining the complicated mechanics of how art moves as an economic good. This piece will be a bit different but similar in […] → Essay Why People Buy Art at Turning Points — She didn’t come in looking for art. She came in three weeks after her mother died, wearing the kind of quiet that grief puts on people, composed on the outside, completely untethered underneath. She walked the space without urgency, without the usual performance of someone trying to look like they know what they’re doing in […] → Essay The Art Coaching Industrial Complex — I‘m writing this from a place of frustration. I work with full time working artists all day every day. The kind who are painting in their living rooms at midnight, fighting for commissions from clients who might say no, rebuilding after shows that didn’t land the way they hoped. I see what it actually takes. […] → Essay Tarot-Inspired Paintings Encapsulate the Latinx Pulse of LA — → Essay 2026 Predictions — People Will Gravitate Toward Fewer Worlds, But Engage More Deeply With Them → Essay The Work of Choosing in the Messy Middle — Why People Are Outsourcing Judgment in an Age of Abundance → Essay Selling Art Is a Human Problem — At the Studio Table → Essay The End of Free Distribution — What actually changed in online distribution and how the market is reorganizing around trust → Essay When Growth Becomes Real: L&L Case Studies — At the Studio Table → Essay The Return of Human Intermediaries — From Attention Economies to Interpretation Economies → Essay When Money Looks for Shelter — What Gold, Burnout, and the Art Market have in common → Interview Meet Moncho1929 (Dan Monteavaro) — → Market Art Basel HK 2026 | The performance vs. reality — The Gap Nobody Wants to Name I can’t even begin to count the fairs I’ve been to over the decades. Easily in the hundreds by now. Every iteration, as a dealer and as a collector, across more countries than I can count on two hands. And for the last year, every major fair arrives with the […] → Market The Venetian Problem — Venice opens May 9. The week it opens, almost everything that would normally govern it, the artist selection process, the press, the institutional frameworks, becomes visibly broken at once. I have been to the Biennale many times, as a director, as a dealer, as someone who builds and runs the machines. If you have never […] → Market Withheld Resolution — There is a painting type circulating right now that I keep stopping at and so, it seems, does everyone else. Not because it asks something of me, but because it already knows something about me. The face caught mid-scream that reads more like a laugh. The figure blurred at the edges, as if glimpsed through […] → Press The Whitney Biennial That Won’t Pick a Fight — The 82nd edition. 56 artists, duos, and collectives, co-organized by curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer. Whitney Museum of American Art Running March 8 through August 23. Every Whitney Biennial arrives with the expectation that it will take the cultural temperature of the moment. The 2026 edition, opening to the public on March 8, does reflect […] → Press What Is Holding Up — During the first two hours of Scottsdale Art Week’s opening night reception, a painting by Justin Bua sold through MRG Fine Art for $1,000,000. Indigenous figures in a landscape. Trees, water, a ship in the background. The fair posted the sale itself. A million dollars. Second-year fair. Two hours in. That number has context. Art […] → Press When the House Takes the House — There’s a sentence buried in a recent Financial Times report about Sotheby’s that I keep coming back to. An art adviser mentioned that their client, someone who had consigned an entire collection to the auction house, received payment eight months later than anticipated. Eight months. And the reason, per Sotheby’s own contract language, was that the […] → Press The Art Market That Built Itself Without You. — A note from the editor: Most collectors have never heard of SP-Arte. That is not a reflection of its significance, it is a reflection of how deliberately Brazil has built its art market on its own terms, without waiting for international validation. While New York remains the undisputed center of gravity, the stress tests of the last […] → Press From Fracture to Form: 2026 Fair Season Opens — What Zona MACO and the Gulf tell us about the moment →2026
Essay It Should Feel Like Arrival — I have been writing to you about everything wrong with this industry for over a year now. The fair model under pressure. The coaching industrial complex. The galleries that charge representation rates for listing service value. The institutional apparatus that hands collectors language to justify what their instincts already told them, as if the feeling […] → Essay Art as Pedagogy — Good morning. This edition of The New Art World Order is a little different from our usual material. It’s shaped by a series of philosophical and existential questions I’ve been sitting with lightly. Less dense with data than my usual musings, but no less relevant. If anything, more so. This series is written for those who like […] → Essay The bank is fine. Please don’t withdraw your money. — This is one of my favorite parts of the job being right on analytics. So without further delay, as I write this at almost 11pm Friday night, let’s get into the reality of what is going on, because as the many posts on Instagram will tell you, everything is going great. Back to growth after […] → Essay Who Actually Controls the Artist? — Good morning and happy spring, we made it! It has been a busy and exciting start to the season here at Lion & Lamb. If you aren’t already a member of the Salon, that’s where the deeper work lives; available works from the gallery, industry analysis that doesn’t fit neatly into a single essay, and the kind […] → Essay You Can’t Tell By Looking, Can You? — Alexis MATA – Encrypted Dreams 2023| Oil on canvas | 70.9 × 59.1 inches Welcome back to At the Studio Table. Last week the Salon received an early look at available work by Alexis Mata alongside the argument for why this particular moment, and this particular practice, matters to collectors. This is the expanded version of […] → Essay What Does Success Mean to You? — Spring has officially sprung, and with it I will be leaning heavily on metaphor. Seasoned readers of this Substack will know I have a long and committed relationship with water metaphors, particularly when explaining the complicated mechanics of how art moves as an economic good. This piece will be a bit different but similar in […] → Essay Why People Buy Art at Turning Points — She didn’t come in looking for art. She came in three weeks after her mother died, wearing the kind of quiet that grief puts on people, composed on the outside, completely untethered underneath. She walked the space without urgency, without the usual performance of someone trying to look like they know what they’re doing in […] → Essay The Art Coaching Industrial Complex — I‘m writing this from a place of frustration. I work with full time working artists all day every day. The kind who are painting in their living rooms at midnight, fighting for commissions from clients who might say no, rebuilding after shows that didn’t land the way they hoped. I see what it actually takes. […] → Essay Tarot-Inspired Paintings Encapsulate the Latinx Pulse of LA — → Essay 2026 Predictions — People Will Gravitate Toward Fewer Worlds, But Engage More Deeply With Them → Essay The Work of Choosing in the Messy Middle — Why People Are Outsourcing Judgment in an Age of Abundance → Essay Selling Art Is a Human Problem — At the Studio Table → Essay The End of Free Distribution — What actually changed in online distribution and how the market is reorganizing around trust → Essay When Growth Becomes Real: L&L Case Studies — At the Studio Table → Essay The Return of Human Intermediaries — From Attention Economies to Interpretation Economies → Essay When Money Looks for Shelter — What Gold, Burnout, and the Art Market have in common →2026
Market Art Basel HK 2026 | The performance vs. reality — The Gap Nobody Wants to Name I can’t even begin to count the fairs I’ve been to over the decades. Easily in the hundreds by now. Every iteration, as a dealer and as a collector, across more countries than I can count on two hands. And for the last year, every major fair arrives with the […] → Market The Venetian Problem — Venice opens May 9. The week it opens, almost everything that would normally govern it, the artist selection process, the press, the institutional frameworks, becomes visibly broken at once. I have been to the Biennale many times, as a director, as a dealer, as someone who builds and runs the machines. If you have never […] → Market Withheld Resolution — There is a painting type circulating right now that I keep stopping at and so, it seems, does everyone else. Not because it asks something of me, but because it already knows something about me. The face caught mid-scream that reads more like a laugh. The figure blurred at the edges, as if glimpsed through […] →2026
Press The Whitney Biennial That Won’t Pick a Fight — The 82nd edition. 56 artists, duos, and collectives, co-organized by curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer. Whitney Museum of American Art Running March 8 through August 23. Every Whitney Biennial arrives with the expectation that it will take the cultural temperature of the moment. The 2026 edition, opening to the public on March 8, does reflect […] → Press What Is Holding Up — During the first two hours of Scottsdale Art Week’s opening night reception, a painting by Justin Bua sold through MRG Fine Art for $1,000,000. Indigenous figures in a landscape. Trees, water, a ship in the background. The fair posted the sale itself. A million dollars. Second-year fair. Two hours in. That number has context. Art […] → Press When the House Takes the House — There’s a sentence buried in a recent Financial Times report about Sotheby’s that I keep coming back to. An art adviser mentioned that their client, someone who had consigned an entire collection to the auction house, received payment eight months later than anticipated. Eight months. And the reason, per Sotheby’s own contract language, was that the […] → Press The Art Market That Built Itself Without You. — A note from the editor: Most collectors have never heard of SP-Arte. That is not a reflection of its significance, it is a reflection of how deliberately Brazil has built its art market on its own terms, without waiting for international validation. While New York remains the undisputed center of gravity, the stress tests of the last […] → Press From Fracture to Form: 2026 Fair Season Opens — What Zona MACO and the Gulf tell us about the moment →Thank you! Your message has been sent.
