Inside the art market - Summer artist spotlight

This week’s edition of Behind the Practice is dedicated to the work of Yasna, a Swiss artist who has turned her practice into something close to alchemy - a way of transforming pain into beauty, and sublimating it in the process. What makes her case worth studying, though, is what comes next: that same transformative force has become the engine of her market.

I started this week with a video call with a Swiss artist named Yasna. I called her, and she was in her home-gallery, surrounded by her paintings and keeping company with her big dog, who every now and then demanded attention and wanted to play.

A luminous woman, strong, proud, who fills with energy the field of communication separating us - physically, at least. Hers is a story of courage and pain, sublimated into art and love.

I linger on her space, called “14.41,” which is not just a gallery but a shared piece of life. The 14 takes us back to when young Yasna, fourteen years old at the time, guilty of having broken one of her father’s strict rules - eating an egg without his permission - was left outside the house. So began her life on the street: fear, loneliness, the dangers of that existence, until, after a few months, a family of African origin took her in.

Twenty-seven years later, at the age of 41, the egg returned to her life, this time becoming part of the material itself - the beginning of what she would later call MatièreMémoire.

What had seemed a past of destruction became the foundation of a future of construction. Her artistic journey began: the exploration of the power of transmutation, pain becoming life, shadow becoming light.

Over the years, her artistic work became the economic engine that allows her to finance support projects in Africa - building schools, supporting women who are survivors of violence. She lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for three years, working directly alongside children living on the streets, creating educational initiatives and later developing a construction project with them.

She is now organizing a trip to Togo, again to bring support to local communities, accompanying them from legal identity and education through training and, ultimately, autonomy by building a complete ecological village.

The Interview

GZ: You work with what you call “matière mémoire” - pigments, raw stones, deliberate cracks in the surface. How does a piece take shape technically: do you start from the story you want to tell and then look for the matter that expresses it, or does the stone itself (a raw garnet, a tanzanite) suggest the direction of the painting?

YK: I never know exactly what a painting will become when I begin. Sometimes a story is already present; sometimes it is a stone, a colour or the material itself that opens the way. I let the work reveal itself through the process.

I know that suffering exists everywhere and touches everyone. But I very quickly learned to look at hardships with gratitude, knowing that a door of hope and light always ends up opening. I do not work from despair, but from this positive, luminous force that I want to pass on through my works.

GZ: Let’s talk about commissioned work. Several of your works are made “thinking of” a specific person, almost like emotional portraits made to order. How does your process change when a piece is born for someone in particular, versus when it comes from an urgency entirely your own?

YK: Works created on commission are actually quite rare, and it is an exercise that requires much more time and energy than when I create in total freedom. People sometimes ask me to integrate very personal stones or elements, but I have learned to be cautious. Since I put so much of myself and my meaning into it, if the person does not fully see themselves in the final result, it can create a disconnect or a conflict. That is why I only take on commissions when the bond of trust is absolute, and with people who promise to give me total creative freedom, without demanding to know in advance what the piece will end up looking like.

GZ: You’re currently exhibiting in Venice within the exhibition “Fissures of Light”, running alongside the Biennale. How did this participation come about, and is it having an impact on your path in terms of visibility, contacts, or even just how you think about your work going forward?

YK: I am extremely honored to have been selected for an official collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale, under the title we chose, Fissures of Light. It is a turning point that undeniably changes my visibility as an artist, and I am very grateful for this opportunity. Yet, the genesis of this project reads like a novel! Nothing was planned. I was then consumed by other priorities: my projects in Africa, acquiring land, my fundraising studies, and my vision for a large humanitarian project. It all shifted following a collaboration born after an exhibition in Geneva. One day, this person calls me from France and says, "Sit down, I'm taking you to Venice, you're going to exhibit there." I thought it was a joke until she read me a text. I was in shock: these were my exact words, my vision, and my way of talking about my art. Those words came from Koyo Kouoh. Wow. The challenge that followed was titanic: putting together a book, finding a host structure, facing registration fees and massive administrative complexities, all wrapped up one minute before the deadline, between mid-August and September 19! Fortunately, through intuition, I had painted intensively all summer before leaving for a study trip to Togo for raw earth construction. A large part of that production was ready. In hindsight, this journey has certainly been complex, but I choose to keep only the best of it. Today, I embrace every opportunity that comes my way, because I see how this visibility in Venice can become a magnificent lever for my labor-of-love actions and for calling beauty into everyone’s life.

GZ: You show your work primarily at home rather than through galleries or conventional exhibition spaces. Is that a matter of control - over how the pieces are seen - or is it that the work itself demands a particular kind of space to exist properly?

YK: I primarily look for adequate walls to exhibit my works. At home, I am lucky to have large walls and an extraordinary space that lends itself to this perfectly. I have sometimes been invited to exhibit in other places, but I never truly felt comfortable there because the environment did not suit my canvases. Until now, I also hadn’t taken the time to dedicate myself fully to searching for galleries, because my energy was going elsewhere. But my participation in the Venice Biennale is changing the game today and evolving my position.

GZ: Part of the value of your works is tied to rare materials (precious stones, gems cut by specific artisans) and to a very strong humanitarian narrative. How do you explain to a collector where the value lies: in the material, the story, your hand, or the fact that the purchase also supports the UnYk project?

YK: The value of my works lies above all in my work as an artist and in the creative gesture. It does not come from the precious or semi-precious stones I integrate: whether cut or raw, these stones have an inestimable, symbolic value to me as the creator of the artwork, but that is not what makes the price of the painting. As for supporting the humanitarian project, I do not mix everything together. I often work with diptychs: there is a work that carries a specific mission. When a collector chooses to acquire that particular painting, the portion exceeding the price of the work - plus 10% - is entirely donated to a specific field action, such as obtaining birth certificates for children, buying a machine, or covering a medical emergency. It is a conscious choice, where the buyer commits directly to the mission and can follow it if they wish.

Visit artist's website

What strikes me most in talking with Yasna is how little her commercial model resembles anything conventional - and how coherent it is, precisely because it wasn’t built as a strategy.

Her path has developed outside conventional gallery structures so far, without being shaped by the usual codes of market positioning. Just walls at home, a diptych structure that quietly routes value toward a mission, and a Biennale collateral event that arrived, by her own account, almost by accident. And yet it works, because every layer - the stone, the crack, the price above the price - points back to the same source. Venice doesn’t change what she makes; it changes who gets to see it.

For a market that spends so much energy manufacturing scarcity and narrative, Yasna’s case is a reminder that sometimes the story doesn’t need engineering.

What it really needs is authenticity and presence.

Greta Zuccali

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Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, on view at Museo del Mar Santa Pola.

The exhibition is accompanied by a complete digital catalogue, which you can view at this link.

The show runs through September 21, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Inside the art market - Summer artist spotlight

This installment of Behind the Practice moves to a young artist’s practice and philosophy, and to how much an artistic career exists beyond the making of the work itself - something formal education rarely prepares anyone for.

Chan Alvarez works between Manila and Madrid, in a practice built from a fairly dense philosophical framework: identity, phenomenology, the ongoing construction of the self.

Alvarez was a protagonist of “Human Cosmos,” an exhibition staged in Hub/Art Barcelona, bringing the work Six Degrees of Separation: Act III - a piece plucked from the pantheon of Alvarez’s work that ruminates on the subject parted from itself. In this series of meditations on existential thought, Alvarez paints humanoid figures and leaves them full of holes, each black punctum a deliberate front, rendering them unrepresentable. Act III stands apart, as the assonance of innards across its three figures puts what matters most at stake. Jean-Luc Nancy, in Corpus, reminds us that any talk of the subject - the ego, the self - is always talk of the body: “the ontology of the body is ontology itself.” It no longer suffices to say we are who we are because we think, but rather because the body is the bottom line - as Nancy put it, “mouth and mind are the same, it’s always the body.”

For Alvarez, the philosophical framework, identity, phenomenology, the ongoing construction of the self, is a point of departure, not something translated literally onto canvas. The “self” is never stable, but continually produced through perception, memory, context, and relation, and the medium becomes part of that thinking process itself: phenomenology pushes the work past representation, toward how close a viewer must stand, what happens to the surface as they move, how scale and material produce a bodily response. That same interest in instability - layering, fragmentation, repetition, traces, things partially withheld - extends into the humanoid figures that recur through the work, left empty and perforated. Their incompleteness wasn’t a theoretical decision from the outset; Alvarez kept returning to these hollowed bodies instinctively, and only later found the language to explain why the form felt necessary.

The Interview

GZ: Beyond being an artist, you’re also a curator, writing essays for galleries and independent spaces. How much does your curatorial practice influence your work as an artist, and vice versa?

CA: There is a constant movement between the two. Curating teaches me to look outward, toward context, relations, and systems of meaning, while making continually brings me back to the individual encounter, to materiality and lived experience. One gives me distance from the other. What curating has made me particularly conscious of is context - how an artwork, when situated in a particular space, is never encountered in isolation but shifts meaning according to what surrounds it, where it is shown, who encounters it, and the historical or cultural conditions of that encounter. I think much more about how my work occupies space, what happens when it is placed beside another, and how its meaning can exist not only in its visual form but in its relationships around it. Doing both also makes me a better curator - I try not to approach another artist’s work as material that simply serves a curatorial thesis, and remain interested in entering the internal logic of their practice first.

GZ: As a young artist, after studying art, what did you expect from the market that art school never taught you?

CA: What formal education did not fully prepare me for was how much an artistic career exists beyond the making of the work itself.

While studying, there is a tendency to imagine that if your work is rigorous enough, it will somehow find its place - I probably expected the art world to operate more meritocratically than it actually does.

In reality, it’s an ecosystem. The work matters enormously, but so do relationships, visibility, timing, geography, galleries, institutions, collectors, and the ability to articulate what you are doing. I am still learning how to sustain the practice financially without allowing those structures to determine my work.

GZ: What tools do you think are useful for a young artist starting to engage with market players - galleries, dealers, advisors?

CA: I believe that relationship-building is the most crucial.

Studio visits, exhibition openings, artist talks, fairs, publications, residencies, and even social platforms can all create encounters, but the important thing is not to treat every encounter transactionally. The art world is ultimately an ecosystem of long-term relationships - a conversation today may become a collaboration years later, or lead somewhere completely unexpected. It’s also equally important to learn how to position yourself within the art world without constructing yourself entirely according to what you think the market wants. You need enough awareness to understand the system, but also enough independence to allow the practice to keep changing.

GZ: The Philippine market operates with very different logic from the gallery, fair, and collecting ecosystem in Spain/Europe. Where does demand for your work come from primarily?

CA: My own position complicates that distinction because I live and work between Manila and Madrid. I don’t really think of my audience as belonging exclusively to one market. At this stage, the network around my work is still developing, so I wouldn’t want to claim that demand comes predominantly from Philippine or Spanish collectors. What I’m seeing instead is the gradual formation of a more transnational context around my practice, through exhibitions, galleries, curatorial relationships, digital platforms, and encounters across different cities.

GZ: How do you set your price - do you compare notes with other artists at your stage, look at market data, or is it more trial and error?

CA: Pricing is something I usually discuss closely with my gallery rather than determine entirely on my own. There are practical factors such as scale, medium, production costs, and the consistency of prices across a body of work, but the market context also matters quite a lot. At this stage of my career, consistency is particularly important, because once my work enters the market, its price also becomes part of its history. I do pay attention to artists working at a similar stage and to how comparable practices are positioned, but I don’t necessarily treat market data as a formula. What the gallery has set is more important, as they have a much more immediate understanding of their collectors and of the market in which my work is being placed.

Visit the artist's website

What runs underneath all of it - the hollow figures, the movement between curating and making, even the transnational market position - is the same premise Alvarez opens with: that identity, and by extension a practice, is never a finished object. It’s something built continually, one decision, one relationship, one incomplete figure at a time.

Greta Zuccali

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Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, on view at Museo del Mar Santa Pola.

The exhibition is accompanied by a complete digital catalogue, which you can view at this link.

The show runs through September 21, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Inside the art market

A break from the in-depth analyses on artists and the market. A “quick” edition, but not a light one: I want to share my Ferragosto day - mid-August holiday - with you, and leave you with a few thoughts to reflect on.

Yesterday, August 15th, I was walking through Barcelona.

A little worn out by the heat, by my thoughts, by the silence hanging over the empty streets of my neighborhood, I stepped into Load Gallery, where I immersed myself in the digital works of niceaunties.

There’s something striking in the way the artist, originally from Singapore, uses artificial intelligence to imagine the body and to explore the concept of aging.

In her work, the body becomes geological: it stratifies, accumulates time, moves through cycles, transforms alongside the environment surrounding it. It isn’t a fixed entity, but matter in continuous transformation, inseparable from the world that generates it.

After the gallery, I took the metro toward the city center, with no fixed destination - just the need to walk and clear my head a little. And it was precisely by wandering without purpose that I arrived where, perhaps, I was meant to arrive: Carrer de Santa Anna, in the Gothic Quarter. I walked into the courtyard in front of the beautiful Sant’Anna Romanesque church, and found myself listening to Don Luigi, head of the Italian Catholic Community of Barcelona.

He was speaking about the need to preserve our humanity, even where it would be easy - and expected - to say that everything is bad, that things are always getting worse, that there’s no hope.

In his talk, he spoke precisely about the elderly - the same figures depicted by niceaunties - and their struggle to keep pace with the revolutions that have followed one another over the past decades: from the economic boom, to the internet, to AI today. He spoke of the feeling of having become obsolete, with fragile bodies no longer able to produce, and minds no longer sharp enough to keep up with digital change.

In his talk, he referenced the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIV.

It was an image that brought me back to one of the central questions of the encyclical: what does it mean to remain human in the age of artificial intelligence?

In the text, the human being is described as the image of the Trinitarian God: a being constitutively relational, whose identity is fulfilled in relationship with others and with creation.

Human dignity doesn’t depend on performance or efficiency. It precedes us. It is born with us.

It is precisely here that the two experiences lived within the span of an hour - discovering niceaunties’ digital work and listening to a priest - found their point of connection and their meaning.

Artificial intelligence can generate bodies that seem to go beyond the human body but in niceaunties’ images, this transformation doesn’t lead to a more perfect or more efficient body. On the contrary, it makes it more fragile, layered, temporal, connected: a body that doesn’t try to free itself from its limits, but incorporates them.

A body that - in the paradox of the artificiality of the tool that creates it - wants to remain human.

That doesn’t try to erase our limits, but frees up the time we have left to turn it into relationship, exchange and community.

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Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, a group exhibition featuring 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a deceptively simple concept: kindness.

Spanning painting, sculpture, video art, and photography, the exhibition highlights kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming, especially amid today’s profound crisis of human values.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Inside the art market - Summer artist spotlight

Part two of Inside the Art Market’s summer series on artists who run their own market. This week looks at a case of zero intermediation: direct-to-collector sales, and pricing built as an infrastructure of trust.

Blair Russell is a Canadian-American painter working exclusively in oil, built up through successive layers, without a predetermined image or composition at the outset. A starting point can be a handful of colors that instinctively pull his attention, or - more often than one might assume - one of the hundreds of small abstract studies he’s accumulated over the years and returns to when developing larger works. Some pieces originate in a physical, urban memory Lower East Side, for instance, carries impressions from walking through Manhattan rather than a depiction of the place itself.

For Russell, surface isn’t technique, it’s content. Brushstrokes and palette-knife marks stay visible as a kind of temporal layering, a record of the decisions made while building the painting - something he says is largely lost in a photograph and only recovered in front of the original.

Every work is one-of-one, never repeated. What holds together a constantly expanding body of work isn’t a formula but an instinct built over decades of practice, a vocabulary that over time has narrowed, not expanded: less technical demonstration, more focus on color, movement, balance, texture, emotion.

It’s a profile relevant to this series not for the poetics themselves, but because that same logic - building a coherent, legible, repeatable system over time - is exactly what Russell has applied to his own market.

The Interview

Pricing as infrastructure

The first market fact that stands out in Russell’s case is the decision to anchor price primarily to a work’s size, with a consistent structure across the whole catalogue, not case-by-case valuation, not pricing tied to a piece’s perceived importance.

The stated reasoning is explicitly anti-hierarchical: he doesn’t want his own opinion of which works are “more important” to enter the relationship between collector and painting. And he admits something an artist rarely puts in writing - that time spent making a work isn’t, for him, a value criterion: some pieces come together in one session, others take months, but it’s the finished piece, not the process, that determines what the collector is actually acquiring.

The stated benefit is transparency as a trust lever: a collector who enters his market with a smaller work understands from day one how pricing will move if they later decide to acquire a larger format. It’s a system designed for the collector’s progression over time, not for maximizing any single piece.

The signals that will eventually shift the model

Russell doesn’t tie a future pricing revision to a sales count. The lever is more systemic: consistent demand, collectors actively seeking available work, exhibition requests, gallery relationships, growing interest from curators or institutions. He describes a system that observes these signals but doesn’t actively orchestrate them - price growth as an organic consequence of a growing collector base, not a mechanism of engineered scarcity.

Logistics as a market decision

A detail that in most interviews would get a single throwaway line becomes, here, a genuine strategic choice: works ship unframed - smaller pieces without stretching, larger canvases rolled for transport. Behind the choice isn’t simple cost-cutting but a reasoning about accessibility: a stretched, framed canvas is more expensive and more complicated to ship, especially internationally, and it’s one more barrier in a market that runs almost entirely through his own website and a handful of selected online platforms.

The result is a specific collector profile: one who enjoys being part of that final step, chooses their own frame, works with a local framer, adapts the presentation to their own space. It’s a model that selects its audience as much as it widens it.

Self-Representation: what you gain, what you give up

Here Russell is explicit about the trade-off. What’s gained is a direct, unfiltered relationship with the collector: the conversation about why a work resonates, where it will live, how a collection evolves over time. It’s also, openly, more work: without a gallery, the artist absorbs roles that would normally be distributed - storytelling around the work, relationship-building, the business side.

What he recognizes he lacks is the access a gallery builds: established collectors, exhibitions, institutional connections - territory hard to replicate independently. But he doesn’t frame it as either/or: he sees direct sales and gallery representation as potentially complementary models, not competing ones.

To date, Russell has never entered a formal gallery arrangement - no consignment, no exclusive representation. He’s had conversations with a number of galleries over the years and remains open, but sets a clear condition: mutual trust and a shared vision for the direction of the work, not simply an offer of representation for its own sake.

Visit the artist's website

What makes the Russell case worth attention isn’t that it’s a purer alternative to the gallery-centric system, but that it shows a market can hold together on simple, stated rules without giving up room to grow over time.

The underlying question it leaves open is the one running through this whole series: who ultimately decides what a work of art is worth - and how much of that decision an artist is willing to give up or hold onto.

Greta Zuccali

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Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, a group exhibition featuring 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a deceptively simple concept: kindness.

Spanning painting, sculpture, video art, and photography, the exhibition highlights kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming—especially amid today’s profound crisis of human values.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Inside the art market - Summer artist spotlight

This is the first episode of a new recurring series here on Inside the Art Market - not artist portraits, but market case studies told through the artist's own voice. Each piece will look at how value actually gets built for a working artist: pricing, representation, scarcity, buyers. This week: GILDA.

In 2012, a painting sold for $20,000. The same artist, the same body of work and last month, a piece made in 2014 changed hands for $100,000.

That’s not a spike. It’s roughly 5x over a decade, quietly, without a single evening sale headline attached to it. And it tells you more about how value actually gets built in the American mid-market than most of the data coming out of the majors this summer.

The artist is GILDA, represented not by one gallery but by two art advisories, Chrissy Moore Art Advisory and Silvia Art Advisory simultaneously. That’s worth pausing on. The traditional gallery model runs on exclusivity: one artist, one primary representative, one controlled narrative. What GILDA has instead is a dual-advisory structure, each presumably working different collector relationships, different rooms, different logic - and both, by her account, setting prices with only “a small amount of negotiation.”

Then there’s the waitlist. GILDA controls it herself: which paintings get released, and when. Not out of strategy, she says, but necessity: she’d keep everything if she had the studio space to store it. Intentional or not, the effect is the same one every advisor recognizes: scarcity by design keeps demand ahead of supply, and prices keep climbing without a single museum acquisition or press cycle forcing the issue.

None of this, notably, is being driven by institutions. GILDA’s buyers are private collectors with substantial existing holdings. In a market where so much of this year’s headline growth has come from trophy lots at the ultra-high end, this is a useful reminder that there’s a second economy running in parallel: private collector networks, word of mouth, waitlists, advisories doing quiet, sustained work with a single artist over years. It doesn’t make the auction results. It’s also, arguably, healthier.

Who is GILDA

GILDA has been painting for five decades, moving between Pop-inflected canvases and monumental collaborative mosaics, a visual language she calls Neo-Expressionistic Pop Art. Animals recur throughout the work not as motifs but, in her framing, as sentient presences with their own gaze. Her current studio focus, the Strangely Beautiful Animals series, is deliberately capped at one hundred paintings, one portrait per animal, no repeats.

Alongside the studio practice, she produces large-scale mosaic murals built through collaborative processes involving children, families, and underserved communities, work she describes as inseparable from the studio side of her practice, not a separate philanthropic track.

She is currently showing eight large-scale paintings, at LinKong Contemporary Museum of Art in Beijing - part of a relationship that began two years ago, when she was invited to the museum’s opening international exhibition and has since grown into an ongoing loan arrangement. For that opening, she created a seven-foot painting, Spring Panda, which has since appeared across several publications and on the cover of Sol Luxury magazine.

Showing in Beijing, in a museum situated within the city’s tax-free zone alongside collections of ancient art, has also given her a window into a different collecting culture altogether. It fits a broader thread running through her work: paintings built around finding calm within a restless world through nature - a quality that may explain part of their appeal to collectors, who describe living with her work as something closer to a quiet, playful presence in a room than a conventional acquisition.

The Interview

On where the market places her vs. where she places herself

“I’ve never been comparing myself to where the art market places me to determine if my art works have any ‘asset value’ or not - it never mattered much to me if my art works sold or not. The art works I create are about a conversation I’m having with myself and the universe. They are about the story of my life.”

On pricing

A painting made in 2014 recently sold north of $100,000. In 2012, she sold a piece for $20,000. She says the decision to make work has never been driven by how it will sell: “I never make art work to sell - if I had a much larger art studio I’d keep all my own art works forever.”

Prices themselves are set almost entirely by her representatives: “The gallery sets the prices pretty much with a small amount of negotiation. But I think that’s very different with each gallery.”

On representation

She’s represented simultaneously by two advisories - Chrissy Moore Art Advisory and Silvia Art Advisory - a structure she describes as working well for her. Before this, she spent years with Loveed Fine Arts on Park Avenue, until the gallery closed when its owner reached his nineties. What would prompt her to leave a gallery today: representation that didn’t understand or value the Neo-Expressionistic Pop style, or that represented no other artists working in a similar vein.

On the waitlist

There is one, and she controls which pieces get released. Less a market strategy than a practical constraint: “I wish I could just keep all my own art works, but sometimes out of lack of having enough storage space left I then have no choice but to let a few go to sale.” She hasn’t yet turned down a sale.

On buyers and what’s next

Her collectors are, by her account, private individuals with substantial existing collections - a mix that hasn’t shifted much over time. If either advisory relationship ended, her plan is straightforward: find new representation immediately. The next milestone isn’t a price point or an institution, it’s technical: continuing to push new approaches within each new painting, rather than repeating a formula. She has, she notes, enough finished work for a museum solo show.

What’s striking, reading this back, is the gap between the story GILDA tells about her own practice - art as private conversation, indifferent to sale - and the very deliberate market mechanics running underneath it: controlled scarcity, dual representation, five-figure-to-six-figure appreciation. It’s not a contradiction so much as a reminder of something this newsletter keeps circling back to: value in art is never just aesthetic, and it’s rarely fully authored by the artist alone - even when the artist genuinely believes it is.

Greta Zuccali

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Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, a group exhibition featuring 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a deceptively simple concept: kindness.

Spanning painting, sculpture, video art, and photography, the exhibition highlights kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming—especially amid today’s profound crisis of human values.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Summer edition of Inside the Art Market

Are you an artist or an art professional with a story worth telling?

I’m gathering voices for the summer deep dives - your path, your practice, your take on the art system. If you’d like to put yourself forward, just reply to this email.

Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, a book by Valentina Castellani that I’d recommend, sets out precisely to dismantle that dualism - not to desacralize the artwork, but to restore its historical, social and institutional truth. As Massimiliano Gioni has put it, every object we venerate today was also once “a line in a contract,” a geopolitical move, a bet on the future of taste: the history of art has always been a history of exchange.

It’s worth holding onto that awareness when looking at an art object that is, at its core, certainly a vehicle for beauty and philosophical aspiration, but one destined to run up against a system of rituals and infrastructure, roles and practices, that exist to validate it. Or not.

It’s with that awareness in mind that we should look at what follows: a data-driven look back at H1 2026 revenues in the art market.

The global auction houses’ first-half figures tell a mostly positive story - though one worth reading carefully, since not every corner of the market is growing at the same pace. As reported by Artribune Incanti, Christie’s leads the pack, closing its best first half in five years: $4.5 billion in total, driven by a 71% jump in auction sales alone, worth $3.5 billion. Sotheby’s isn’t far behind, with $4.4 billion overall and 58% growth over the same period in 2025. Phillips posted a more modest but still solid performance, up 60% in sales for a total of $507 million - of which roughly $260 million came from art alone (per Artnet), up 36.4%, though within a narrower range: it’s missing the trophy lots and historicized masterworks that give its two rivals the edge.

The signal is clear: after two years of caution, confidence has returned to the world’s major saleroom shores. Buyers and sellers are back in the game with real enthusiasm. But - and it’s an important but - that enthusiasm is concentrated almost entirely at the top of the market.

The first half delivered a string of records to the fine art segment, fueled by American and European masterworks with impeccable pedigree hitting the market. The multimillion-dollar deals at New York’s evening sales and the booths of Art Basel say a lot about the renewed confidence of global collectors - but honestly, they also say that these record-breaking numbers stay confined to the ultra-high end.

One level down, the art ecosystem looks a lot less healthy.

Mid-size galleries, with their mid-range works, now seem to be moving on a parallel track to the majors’ secondary market. Mid-career and ultra-contemporary artists have hit a real slowdown - partly a natural correction of the speculative bubble that built up over recent years, but also a mirror of a deeper crisis: contemporary art production, internationally, is struggling to be genuinely picked up and given value by institutions and the market alike.

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The causes are well known, and they compound each other: the crisis in criticism has unraveled the web of curatorial and institutional relationships that once made the protagonists of postwar art famous; globalization has made national identities more fragile; contemporary biennials and museums have multiplied across every continent, and new cultural regions - from Africa to the Middle East, from Southeast Asia to Latin America - have become permanent fixtures in the international conversation. The market, for its part, plays a decisive role: major fairs, alongside biennials, are now where most of an artist’s reputation gets built. And while galleries remain relevant on the international scene, their rosters still lean heavily on artists who are already historicized.

To close on a high note, with a touch of well-earned pride: two Italian appointments at the helm of major institutions: Eugenio Viola, the new director of Madre in Naples, and Massimiliano Gioni, now director of the New Museum in New York.

And in August?

No real pause: the newsletter keeps going, just at a different pace. All month, expect deep dives on artists and art professionals - slower reads, meant to be savored, maybe under a beach umbrella. We’ll be back in September with the usual analysis, but the newsletter will keep you company in the meantime.

Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

There is still time to visit “La gentileza del gesto”, a group exhibition featuring 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a deceptively simple concept: kindness.

Spanning painting, sculpture, video art, and photography, the exhibition highlights kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming—especially amid today’s profound crisis of human values.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Summer edition of Inside the Art Market

Until a few years ago, a luxury hotel distinguished itself through design, spa, kitchen. Today the added value, more and more often, is a collection, a curatorial programme or an artist residency.

The question I kept circling back to while writing this: is it marketing dressed up as culture, or an actual segment of the art market? The answer, spoiler, is both, which is exactly why it’s worth unpacking.

Worth noting: neither the Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report nor the sector’s other institutional benchmarks track this phenomenon as a category of its own. A handful of generalist market-research firms have started putting figures on it, numbers in the billion-dollar range, growing, but without the methodological rigour of the reports we’d normally cite here, so treat them with caution.

The fact that no consolidated measurement exists yet is, in a way, the story: the phenomenon has outpaced the tools meant to track it. This is no longer an interior design line item. It’s a structural spending category, with dedicated consultants, specialised logistics, bespoke insurance. An ecosystem, just not yet catalogued as one.

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The conceptual shift is this: art in hotels stops being backdrop and becomes cultural proposition. Three examples make the case well.

The Fife Arms, located in the village of Braemar, Scotland, is owned by Artfarm, the hospitality company of Hauser & Wirth’s founders. Rooted in Celtic tradition, The Fife Arms has been a Braemar landmark since its inception in 1856. It houses over 16,000 artworks and objects, including pieces by Picasso and Lucian Freud. This isn’t an isolated case of collectors furnishing their own house: it’s the natural extension of a business model the Wirths already apply to their galleries and their residencies (Menorca, for anyone following this newsletter, is instructive here).

Arguably Cape Town’s most iconic modern hotel, The Silo is the result of an incredible architectural reinvention. Rising above the V&A Waterfront, the hotel is housed in a historic grain silo complex that was built in the 1920s, and was once the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. The hotel occupies the upper floors, while the lower floors are home to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA). Art is also central to the Silo experience, with works by contemporary African artists throughout the hotel, blurring the lines between gallery and guest spaces, and reinforcing the connection to the museum below.

La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, remains the founding case: Picasso, Miró, Calder paying for their stays with works, building, almost by accident, a collection that’s impossible to replicate today. It’s the genre’s founding myth, but also proof that the mechanism itself isn’t new: it’s simply become scalable.

What’s happening, in short, is that hotels are simultaneously occupying four positions that were historically separate within the art market.

They’re buyers, with budgets often comparable to corporate collections. They’re patrons, commissioning site-specific works and entering a direct relationship with artists that used to be almost exclusively gallery and institutional territory. They’re exhibition spaces, as bars, corridors and courtyards become genuine curatorial surfaces, with temporary shows and rotating programmes. And, increasingly, they’re intermediaries: connecting artists, collector-guests, and an international audience that wouldn’t otherwise have access to that work.

It’s this last role that gets the least airtime and is perhaps the most interesting from a market perspective. For many emerging or mid-career artists, a hotel commission today carries as much weight as an institutional show. It offers visibility, a cosmopolitan audience, and - not to be underestimated - an audience that buys. A guest at a hotel with a serious collection is, with fairly good odds, also a potential collector.

There’s movement on pricing power too: a handful of operators built explicitly around the art-hospitality integration, 21c Museum Hotels is the most cited case, reportedly command higher average rates than competitors in the same segment.

What it means for the market?

The point isn’t whether art “works” inside a hotel, no doubt there, the immersive experience sells.

The point is that hotels are becoming a parallel primary market channel, with their own logic: less gallery mediation, more direct contact between the property - often a collector itself, see the Wirths - and the artist.

For galleries, it’s a signal worth taking seriously: another competitor for collectors’ attention, and budget, but also a potential ally if handled as a curatorial partnership rather than a threat.

For artists, it’s a visibility channel that matters twice as much during a slow summer market: while fairs pause, hotels stay open, continuing to put work in front of an audience that travels, and buys, all year round.

Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

The group exhibition “La gentileza del gesto” has opened, bringing together 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a concept of deceptive simplicity: kindness.

Through painting, sculpture, video art and photography, the exhibition addresses kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming at a moment of deep crisis for humanity and its values, one we’re all living through right now.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Summer edition of Inside the Art Market

This week’s newsletter is landing a few hours later than usual. Saturday is normally my writing day, but yesterday I was on a train from Alicante (where we just opened the exhibition “La gentileza del gesto”) heading to Barcelona. The trip took longer than it should have: a wildfire near Tarragona came dangerously close to the tracks before firefighters managed to contain it.

And it was on that train, watching the Mediterranean go by, that the idea came to me: a map of art “islands” scattered across the Mediterranean, an artistic pilgrimage of sorts, one that ties together wild landscapes, geographic isolation, and works of art worth the journey it takes to reach them. Here we go.

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Hauser & Wirth on Menorca (Spain)

On Isla del Rey, facing the ruins of a 6th-century paleo-Christian basilica, the Wirths have built one of the most striking spaces in their gallery empire, and it’s probably no accident it happened here, on an island whose wildness and quality of light seduced them from the start.

The center occupies a former naval hospital built in the 18th century, during the British occupation of the islet in Maó’s harbor. The restoration, led by architect Luis Laplace in close collaboration with the Fundación Hospital de la Isla del Rey, leaned entirely on sustainability and traditional building materials. What emerged is over 1,500 square meters spread across eight galleries, a shop, and a restaurant, housed in the building known as Lángara.

What strikes me most about the project is its commitment to community: Hauser & Wirth has built partnerships with local institutions from the Menorca Preservation Fund to the Escola d’Art de Menorca to the Museu de Menorca, weaving art together with education and environmental stewardship. Outside, landscaping by Piet Oudolf foregrounds native species and frames a sculpture trail featuring names like Eduardo Chillida, Franz West, and Louise Bourgeois. And since good food is its own art form on Menorca, the on-site restaurant, Cantina, run by local winery Binifadet, works exclusively with zero-kilometer produce.

Through October 25, the center is showing “Directionless,” a group exhibition curated by artist Rashid Johnson that starts from an uncomfortable premise: we’re living through a moment of deep disorientation and exhaustion, of political certainties, of shared narratives, of the very systems of meaning that once oriented us. The show asks what’s left of thought and artistic practice once the compass is gone.

Fondation Carmignac on Porquerolles (France)

Porquerolles is a sliver of land covered in maritime pines off the coast of Hyères, on the French Riviera. Here, collector Édouard Carmignac has built something closer to a pilgrimage than a museum visit: an art center that sits almost entirely underground.

The foundation occupies a former Provençal farmhouse - famous as the set of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers - and because the island is a protected national park, the whole structure was developed underground, leaving the landscape above untouched. At the entrance, visitors take off their shoes: the whole visit happens barefoot, meant to create a more direct connection with the space. The ceiling is a transparent, water-filled aquarium that lets natural light filter through. Inside: works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Roy Lichtenstein. Outside, in the surrounding park: site-specific installations by Jaume Plensa, Nils-Udo, and Ugo Rondinone.

This summer’s program includes “Sea, Pop & Sun” a tribute to the freedom and energy of the 1960s and ‘70s through the lens of Pop.

DESTE Foundation Project Space, the old slaughterhouse on Hydra (Greece)

Cars are banned on Hydra: you get around on foot or by mule. For more than fifteen years, Cypriot collector Dakis Joannou has turned the island, every summer, into one of the touchstones of the international contemporary art calendar.

The municipality granted the DESTE Foundation the island’s old slaughterhouse, a small stone building perched on a cliff over the Aegean, which still carries the rough traces of its past, hooks, unfinished walls. Every summer, the foundation forgoes a group show in favor of handing the entire space, inside and out, to a single artist, asking them to engage with the site’s raw history and with Greek myth. On the roof, a fixture year-round, Jeff Koons’ golden, rotating sun, Apollo, keeps turning.

This summer the space is showing “Until That Day,” an exhibition by Jamaican artist Nari Ward, known for sculptural installations built from discarded materials gathered in his own neighborhood. By recontextualizing these found objects, Ward creates juxtapositions that press on questions of race, poverty, and consumer culture.

Summer as a time to slow down, to make room again for contemplation: these three places pushed me toward the idea of an actual artistic pilgrimage. The fact that seeing these works requires a physical journey - catching a ferry, walking, sometimes taking your shoes off - primes the mind for a much slower, more intimate way of experiencing art than the one we’ve grown used to in the museum-tourism circuit of major cities.

But there’s another thought I’m bringing home from this trip, and it’s probably the one that interests me most. These “far-flung” places aren’t an exception to the art market - they’re very much part of it, running on the same logic of positioning, capital and international visibility.

And yet they tell the story of a different kind of collecting - one that can afford the luxury of retreating, for a few months a year, to enchanted places, far from the fairs, the crowded openings, the compulsive rhythm that governs the rest of the calendar. It’s a form of collecting that doesn’t step outside the market, but allows itself to watch it from a distance - from an island, quite literally. And maybe it’s exactly that distance, geographic as much as mental, that makes a slower, truer way of being with art possible at all.

Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

The group exhibition “La gentileza del gesto” has opened, bringing together 11 artists selected by Hub/Art to explore a concept of deceptive simplicity: kindness.

Through painting, sculpture, video art and photography, the exhibition addresses kindness as a universal value worth reclaiming at a moment of deep crisis for humanity and its values, one we’re all living through right now.

The show runs all summer, through September 20, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, Castillo Fortaleza, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 am–1:00 pm and 6:00–9:00 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Summer edition of Inside the Art Market

This summer edition of Inside the Art Market is a little less holiday-minded than the last one, where I took you through Sardinia and its ties to contemporary culture.

Instead, I want to use this newsletter to flag a scam I was almost caught in, and to warn artists and gallerists who may be next.

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In early June, I was contacted by email by a man claiming to follow Hub/Art, who said he needed 13 artworks to furnish a large apartment owned by an organization supporting women and minors escaping abuse.

He left his contacts, phone number, website, and we spoke. He walked me through his requirements in detail: dimensions, colors, the “feeling” the works needed to convey to the apartment’s guests warmth, welcome, balance. I got to work immediately, reaching out to several artists in my network whose practice fit the brief.

I drafted quotes covering framing options, costs, and timelines for any commissioned pieces, while the artists prepared catalogues of available work.

Hours of work went into this.

I finally packaged everything into a formal proposal and sent it, inviting him to schedule a follow-up call once he’d reviewed the materials and selected the works he preferred.

Twenty-four hours later, this arrived:

Dear Greta,

Thanks for your email. I am happy to let you know that I have decided to use your artwork for my guest house. I will pay you fully in advance using a certified bank cheque, but before I do so, I want to make a humble request.

Three lines in, three alarm bells went off.

First: he was ready to commit to “my artwork” but which pieces? I’d sent him a catalogue of over 50 works after he’d asked for 13.

Second: he was offering to pay everything upfront (always a red flag) via certified bank cheque.

And then came the “humble request”:

I have contacted a private shipping agent for the shipment of the artwork with the furniture and other home decor I bought for the new guest house. I have already concluded an arrangement with him pending the receipt of his fund, and unfortunately, I am not able to transfer this amount to him due to my present sailing location and his numerous other engagements.

On this note, I have resolved to send you a single certified bank cheque containing the total amount. On receiving the cheque, deposit it in your bank account for crediting, which normally takes between 3 and 7 working days.

I stopped to think. The pattern reeked of fraud. Not only was he vague about which works he wanted, he was proposing to pay more than what would actually be owed. And there was the real mechanism, laid bare:

When the money finally arrives in your account, all you have to do is deduct and keep the total cost of your artwork, and transfer the remaining balance to the shipping agent via a swift bank transfer. I will provide you with the agent’s bank account information for the transfer.

He was asking me to wire money on his behalf to a supposed shipping agent - almost certainly his partner.

Remember, all the taxes, bank charges, and transfer commissions will be deducted from the total amount of the cheque, therefore, you will bear no financial cost charged to your bank account for cashing this cheque. An invoice from the agent to you is also available if needed for your accounting records and country tax policies. If this is feasible, please provide me with your details for the payment in the following order:

(1) Full name (cheque header):
(2) Valid address, city, postal code, and country (for delivery of the cheque):
(3) Office or mobile telephone number (for easy communication):
(4) Estimated total cost (including VAT/Tax charges):

And finally, note that the certified bank cheque is certified and well accepted at any European financial institution. I will highly appreciate your prompt response, and I look forward to receiving resplendent artwork from you. If there are other decorative items that you have for sale, kindly let me know.

Thank you for your assistance and understanding with this purchase.

He even tried to reassure me: the “certified cheque” would be accepted at any European bank.

Nothing new under the sun!

Frustrated, mostly at the hours lost coordinating, selecting works, and drafting quotes in the middle of a Milan heatwave, I replied that my company only accepts bank transfers, for an amount to be confirmed once the works were finalized.

No response came. The scam was clear, and it’s one that has targeted artists, photographers, galleries and online sellers for years.

A word to anyone reading this, especially the younger among you: stay open to opportunities, but keep your eyes open too.

If a buyer offers to send more money than owed, asks you to forward funds to someone else, wants you to cover expenses upfront, pay commissions, or ship before payment actually clears, walk away immediately!

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Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Museo del Mar Santa Pola - Alicante, Spain

On Friday, 10 July, we will meet in Alicante, southern Spain, at the Museo del Mar Santa Pola, where Hub/Art, together with Divulgarti, has organized the group exhibition La gentileza del gesto.

An invitation to sow seeds of kindness through art.

Opening: Friday, 10 July 2026, 8:00 p.m.

Venue: Museo del Mar Santa Pola – Castillo Fortaleza

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Summer edition of Inside the Art Market

A quick heads-up before we dive in

Open call “Art & Nature”

Submissions are officially open for my latest Open Call, dedicated to creatives exploring the relationship between art and the natural world.

I’m seeking artists, sculptors, photographers and multidisciplinary creators who transform nature, raw materials and environmental awareness into powerful artistic expressions.

Submission guidelines

• Who can apply: Open to artists and creatives worldwide, from any discipline.

• Themes: I strongly encourage projects that utilize natural pigments, reclaimed materials, or recycled elements, as well as works that delve into the connection between humans, nature, and environmental change.

• The opportunity: Selected artists will have the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Corals Gallery in Milan.

Key Dates

• Exhibition period: 9 – 30 September 2026

• Application deadline: 6 July 2026

How to Apply

Send your portfolio along with your bio/CV to hello@hub-art.org.

📩 Subject Line: Please use “Application Open call Art & Nature” for your email submission.

For this issue, I wanted to try something a little different. Summer changes the rhythm of things, the art market slows down, and even our appetite for reading shifts toward something lighter. So, I thought of a ‘seasonal’ edition: a series of geographic focuses, telling the story of different places, regions, and cities around the world through the art that inhabits them.

We start with Sardinia, in Italy.

Think of Sardinia, and what usually comes to mind are its endless beaches, crystal-clear sea and ancient rites rooted in Mediterranean folk tradition. In addition, places like Porto Cervo have fed Italian gossip columns for years (and not only Italian ones). But the island’s truest value lies elsewhere, in its remote, silent hinterlands, in the rugged shapes of its mountains, in the nuragic complexes: extraordinary examples of prehistoric micro-society and architecture.

Legend has it that Sardinia was the last piece of land created by God, who gathered stones from the sea, compacted them with his sandal, and brought them to life by scattering wheat over them. An almost mythological image, and one that captures the mystery still surrounding the island today, along with the fertile soil, both literal and human, from which brilliant minds, artists, and intellectuals have sprung. A vocation that, over time, has fueled increasingly ambitious cultural initiatives. Here are three of them: different from one another, yet bound by a common thread.

Le Dune Piscinas

Located in the west, on the Costa Verde, in the municipality of Arbus. This is where Le Dune Piscinas stands, today a five-star resort, but once the mineral warehouse of the Gennamari-Ingurtosu mine. To understand the place, you have to go back to the late 1800s, when the Italian State granted mining rights to international companies: ore came down from the shafts, passed through the wash-houses, whose ruins are still there, spectacular, and was loaded onto boats. When the boats could no longer keep up, this warehouse was built right across from the pier.

After the war, road transport made the whole system obsolete. The building became a summer camp for miners’ children until 1965, then fell into abandonment. In the 1990s, after an initial restoration, it turned into one of Sardinia’s most legendary hotels: reachable only by a dirt mule track, set within one of Europe’s tallest dune systems, offering near-total privacy. Actors and industry captains made it their secret destination.

Ownership changed hands in 2011: Luigi Caccamo, an engineer and longtime regular of the place, decided to take it over with his partner Marcella Tettoni, fearing that someone else might betray its magic. Since 2015, the two have run it entirely on their own, and in 2020 they began three years of philologically rigorous restoration, carried out under the watchful eye of Italy’s heritage authority (the Soprintendenza). In 2024, the resort reopened: a handful of rooms, a restaurant, a bistro, an American bar, a pool, a spa, and a wonderful library devoted entirely to Sardinia.

But the true soul of the place is art. For about a decade, Caccamo has been running Piscinas Art, a genuine artist residency: every year, one artist is invited for a week, with everything covered, travel, food, accommodation and given the chance to work immersed in this singular landscape. In return, they leave behind one or two pieces that become part of the hotel’s collection, in dialogue with the common areas and the rooms.

The connection to the land is at the heart of the project: dunes, sea, sunsets to the west, mining memory, the hidden vegetation along the Rio Naracauli. The most recent resident, Milena Sgambato, who completed her residency at the end of May 2026, focused precisely on that seemingly absent green, which is in fact a quiet protagonist of the landscape.

There’s also a selection mechanism I find particularly elegant: each resident artist chooses their own successor. A handover that keeps the project alive and personal, almost a self-generating artistic chain. Launched in 2016 with Vanni Cuoghi, it has since seen Mirko Baricchi, Lorenzo di Lucido, Giulio Catelli, Elisa Filomena, and now Milena Sgambato pass through.

Beyond the residency, Le Dune holds its own collection, curated with real dedication by Caccamo. Names in the collection include Alessandro Papetti, Medhat Shafik, Fathi Hassan, Gianfranco Guerzoni, Enzo Esposito, Crisa (responsible for a major installation in the restaurant), Moritz Waldemeyer, Lucio Fanti, Renzo Crociara, Fausto Salvi, Francesca Frau, Lois Anvidalfarei, and Ruth Beraha. Not always the market’s hottest names, but often works made specifically for this place, accompanied by thoughtful captions and videos in which the artists themselves talk about their work. An intimate approach, almost like that of a private collector, which has turned the hotel into a genuine experiential gallery.

The Normann Village

You can’t tell the story of Sardinia without confronting its scars too. In Sulcis, in the south-western part of the island, industrialization has left behind red mud landfills, the Portovesme industrial complex, and RWM’s weapons manufacturing. Out of this context comes Obscene, a photographic and performance project by the collective Giuseppefraugallery together with Mistress Belle, Jane Grey, and Sonia Nowak, weaving together political ecology and industrial memory.

The question at the heart of the work is as simple as it is uncomfortable: why does a sexualized body cause scandal, while landscapes devastated by pollution or tied to weapons production are so often met with indifference? The artists position themselves as political figures within these wounded territories, flipping the usual gaze. This isn’t provocation for its own sake, it’s a precise indictment of what truly offends life.

What struck me most, though, was the setting itself. The work is staged in Villaggio Normann, one of the mining villages built to house workers and their families during Sulcis’s industrial boom, modest houses laid out around the mine, designed as much to contain a workforce as to shelter it. Today around twenty families still live there, refusing to let the village fade into yet another industrial ruin. They’ve come together as a heritage community, committed to protecting, promoting, and reviving the mining villages scattered across Sulcis, keeping alive not just the buildings, but the memory and identity of the people who built this corner of Sardinia's industrial history.

Mont’e Prama

We move to the Sinis peninsula, in Cabras, where the Mont’e Prama Grand Project continues - one of Sardinia’s most significant cultural investments. The site was discovered by chance in 1974, during ploughing, and yielded the famous “Giants of Mont’e Prama”: freestanding nuragic statues (9th–8th century BC, possibly even older), up to 2.5 meters tall, carved from a single block of sandstone. Archers, warriors, boxers, monumental figures in dialogue, across time, with the smaller nuragic bronze statuettes.

In June 2026, the implementation phase of the Integrated Territorial Investment was unveiled: €26.45 million, earmarked not only for the archaeological site itself but for the entire Sinis area. Archaeology, landscape, community, sustainable tourism, training: an ambitious project aiming to turn Sinis into a cultural hub of national and international standing.

Read one after another, these three projects actually tell three different stories about caring for the same land. There’s a first, private and luxury level: Le Dune Piscinas, where a single entrepreneur-collector invests his own vision, and capital, to turn a forgotten place into an exclusive cultural outpost, capable of drawing artists and an international audience. Then there’s a second, still private but communal level: Obscene at Villaggio Normann, where it isn’t a single patron but a group of residents, organized into a heritage community, keeping a place’s memory alive through their everyday lives, turning it, almost by accident, into a stage for contemporary art. And finally, an institutional level: Mont’e Prama, where public money, European and regional, sustains a territory-wide project built to last, returning an archaeological heritage to the whole community.

Three different scales, three kinds of capital, economic, social, public, but a single goal: to breathe new life into a land already rich with history and beauty, so that art can remain what it should always be: living material, in constant dialogue with the place that hosts it.

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Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Corals, Milan

Beyond the surface. Between visible and invisible

On view until June 30, the exhibition Beyond the Surface features works by artists Michele Maria Canditone, Giulia Papetti, Gaia Coals, and Julia Ciulek.

The exhibition explores the theme of water from an unusual perspective: water as a vessel of memory, and as a force that fascinates us through its remarkable capacity for adaptation and plasticity.

Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 3:00–7:00 pm
Corals Gallery, Via Evangelista Torricelli 21, Milan

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Market watch

For reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market

We’re in Basel, the last big stop of the season before the summer break.

I smiled reading a piece by Farah Nayeri in the New York Times asking: “What are art collectors looking for now?” Simple question, right venue. This week, in Basel, galleries are trying to find out.

Art Basel remains the most important observatory of the international market: 290 galleries from around the world, thousands of collectors and a concentration of work that, every year, offers a fairly accurate snapshot of what the market wants.

Wandering the booths, two examples stood out as a good summary of the moment we’re in.

On one side, Georg Baselitz. Thaddaeus Ropac is showing several works by the German master, who passed away last April. One of them, Ach, Mädchen Grün (2010), sold for €1.2 million, more than double the price it fetched at auction just a year ago.

On the other side, Torkwase Dyson, a living American artist, currently featured In The Minor Keys exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Her gallery, Pace, built much of its Art Basel presentation around exactly that institutional presence. For Pace CEO Marc Glimcher, being selected for the Biennale is essentially one of the most powerful cultural stamps of approval available today.

So: on one side, the absolute scarcity of death. On the other, institutional recognition. The market clearly knows what to do with both.

But what happens in between?

How should we think about emerging and mid-career artists, the ones who haven’t made it into the major biennials yet, don’t have a foundation managing their legacy, and, more than anything, are still in the process of building their own language?

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This is where it gets interesting.

For the big international galleries, the game is often about managing supply. An artist’s death, control of an archive, the ability to regulate access to the work, these are the tools that sustain value over time.

Emerging and mid-career artists don’t have access to any of that. If anything, they’re dealing with almost the opposite problem.

When a young artist has a strong show or gets a sudden burst of visibility, the market machine switches on immediately. Collectors, advisors and intermediaries start hunting for available work. And the vocabulary shifts. Less talk about research and technique, more about allocation, exposure, availability, waitlist management.

That’s exactly where the risk shows up.

If the gallery ramps up production to meet demand, it risks undermining the work’s future value. If it limits availability instead, there’s a real danger that the few available pieces end up in the hands of buyers only interested in a quick flip.

When one of those works hits auction and posts an anomalous result, disconnected from where the artist’s career actually stands, the damage can be serious. The big galleries have the resources to step in, buy back work, and manage its circulation. Small galleries rarely do.

For mid-career artists, the situation is even trickier.

They’re no longer a novelty, but they’re not yet classics either. They’ve already burned through the initial excitement and now face the hardest stretch: the slow work of building a reputation.

That’s a segment of the market that demands time, continuity and conviction. Three things the contemporary system seems to reward less and less.

Watching Art Basel, I keep coming back to the feeling that the real question isn’t what collectors are looking for today.

In a market where 2025 sales volumes are back down to levels last seen in 2009 and 2020, maybe it’s time to talk about collecting again, before we talk about the market.

A collector who buys from an artist working in their own city, who visits the studio, who keeps following the work through the less brilliant stretches of a career, that person isn’t buying an asset to flip at the first opportunity. They’re investing in a relationship, a possibility.

Maybe the market isn’t struggling because we moved too fast. Maybe it’s struggling because we stopped visiting studios and started reading only sales reports.

For emerging and mid-career artists, salvation won’t come from one more fair or one more auction record. It will come from galleries, collectors and artists themselves learning to accept some costly “no’s” in the short term.

Because art only keeps its value as long as someone, somewhere, decides that some things can’t be settled immediately by a price tag.

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Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Corals, Milan

Beyond the surface. Between visible and invisible

On view until June 30, the exhibition Beyond the Surface features works by artists Michele Maria Canditone, Giulia Papetti, Gaia Coals, and Julia Ciulek.

The exhibition explores the theme of water from an unusual perspective: water as a vessel of memory, and as a force that fascinates us through its remarkable capacity for adaptation and plasticity.

Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 3:00–7:00 pm
Corals Gallery, Via Evangelista Torricelli 21, Milan

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Dedicated to artists and everything that surrounds the art of curating

For years, the art world has been portrayed as an ecosystem built on talent and the power of ideas, a meritocratic system, at least in the collective imagination. But there is a far more concrete question that rarely enters the conversation: who can actually afford to be present?

This year, Art Basel and Airbnb announced an initiative that, despite its apparent simplicity, sheds light on one of the art world’s deepest inequalities.

In 2026, 200 grants of $2,000 each were awarded to professionals selected by the fair directors of Basel, Miami Beach, and Paris, to attend international fairs, biennials and residencies.

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The figure, taken in isolation, does not revolutionize the art market. But it is the principle behind it that interests me because travel is one of the great invisible costs of the market.

For a gallery, participating in an international fair means facing expenses that can exceed tens of thousands of dollars: booth rental, artwork transport, insurance, accommodation, flights, staff. For an emerging artist, it means buying a plane ticket, paying for a visa, finding a place to stay, taking time away from production. It often means choosing between investing in your practice or investing in your presence.

And this applies at every level. Even a system that once seemed immune to crisis is showing its cracks: Pace Gallery, one of the most powerful mega-galleries in the world, recently cut 50 staff members and dropped 50 artists from its roster. If even the biggest players struggle to sustain the costs of a global presence, it is worth asking what that means for those who are just starting out.

And yet it is precisely that presence that makes the difference. Professional relationships are born in front of a work, over dinner, in a conversation with a curator encountered by chance. A residency can open the door to an exhibition; a biennial can become an international collaboration; a fair can mean meeting the collector who changes the trajectory of a career.

Mobility, then, is not logistics, it is access.

This is also why I always advise the young artists I work with to plan travel, when not prohibitively costly, to attend fairs, art events, and especially exhibitions where their own work is on view. The work alone is not enough. The artist’s physical presence matters: the ability to explain it, to show something of themselves, whether shy or extroverted, is what opens the door to new possibilities for collaboration.

It is telling that the cultural world is beginning to acknowledge this more and more explicitly. The Airbnb and Art Basel initiative is not an exception, but part of a broader trend. The European Union, through the Culture Moves Europe programme, has allocated tens of millions of euros to the mobility of artists and cultural professionals, covering travel, accommodation, and incentives for more sustainable journeys. Foundations such as the Prince Claus Fund have long supported international exchanges among creatives from countries with limited access to global networks, providing financial support so that birthplace does not determine the boundaries of a career.

Public entities, private companies, philanthropy: very different actors are arriving at the same conclusion. If we want a genuinely open cultural ecosystem, it is not enough to fund the production of artworks. We must also fund the possibility of crossing the borders that allow those works to be seen and discussed.

This is why initiatives like this one deserve attention. They do not solve the problem but they, at least, change the language with which we approach it. To speak of travel as cultural infrastructure means acknowledging that the art system is not neutral: it favours those with financial resources, established networks and powerful passports. Those who stay put, more often than not, stay invisible.

Democratising art does not simply mean lowering museum ticket prices or expanding audiences. It means asking who truly has the possibility of entering the global conversation. Who can afford to be there.

In this sense, the real value of those $2,000 is not the reimbursement of a hotel room. It is the message they carry: talent should not depend on geography or on the cost of a flight.

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If the twentieth century taught us that access to art runs through education and institutions, the present reminds us that it also runs through mobility. Because in an increasingly global art world, the future of cultural democratisation may depend on something surprisingly simple: the ability to board a plane. And no, virtual presence alone is not an option.

The question today is not only who produces art, or who invests to bring it to market. The real question is: who has the possibility of being seen?

Greta Zuccali

Events of the month

Corals

Beyond the surface. Between visible and invisible

Opened on Wednesday, June 10, and on view until June 30, the exhibition Beyond the Surface features works by artists Michele Maria Canditone, Giulia Papetti, Gaia Coals, and Julia Ciulek.

The exhibition explores the theme of water from an unusual perspective: water as a vessel of memory, and as a force that fascinates us through its remarkable capacity for adaptation and plasticity.

Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 3:00–7:00 pm
Corals Gallery, Via Evangelista Torricelli 21, Milan

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

For reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market

Can eliminating booth fees genuinely change the art fair system? I put the question to Jyeongyeon Kim, director of HIVE Art Fair in Seoul.

But let’s take a step back!

Anyone who read my April 19 newsletter already knows what I mean when I say “fairification”: the constant multiplication of art fairs, unsustainable costs for galleries, a format that has stopped surprising anyone.

HIVE made its debut on May 21 in Seoul, attempting to respond to all of this with around 50 selected galleries, a hexagonal architecture designed to slow visitors’ footsteps, and an economic model that inverts the relationship between organizers and galleries. Here is what she told me.

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When asked whether the model she had envisioned translated into reality, the answer was unequivocal.

“The physical model we had planned was realized in practice almost exactly as we had imagined it. After seeing it on-site, we became even more convinced that this approach is one of the most reasonable ways to improve the existing art fair structure.”

The architectural element was central. The hexagonal booths, opening at 120 degrees, created a wide and uninterrupted sightline across the entire fair.

“Many galleries told us that this structure worked better than the conventional rectangular booth. They said it helped them show their identity and their artists’ work more clearly.”

The layout was not an aesthetic detail but a curatorial device. The galleries with the most compelling presentations chose to show depth rather than simply display many works.

Around 40% of the 48 participating galleries presented booths with three artists or fewer. Among the examples highlighted: A-Lounge, a young Korean gallery, used the spatial angle to present a two-artist show, drawing strong responses on-site; Lee & Bae transformed their booth into a dedicated exhibition room for media artist Hyeryun Jung, attracting the attention of museum professionals; Tomio Koyama Gallery from Japan recorded the highest sales of the entire fair, selling every work on show in Nana Funo’s first solo presentation in Korea.

“These cases are important evidence. Clear curation, a no-booth-fee structure, and sales did not work against each other. On the contrary, they worked together within a single structure.”

The decision to eliminate booth fees was one of the most radical aspects of the project. But did it genuinely reduce the economic pressure on galleries?

“The economic pressure did decrease. More precisely, it did not simply disappear: it transformed into a different kind of pressure, a question of curation. That was what we intended from the beginning.”

The case of the Japanese galleries illustrates the shift well.

“At many international fairs, it has been difficult for galleries to present young artists, because booth fees were often too high. For emerging artists in particular, whose works are not priced very high, it was hard to recover the cost of a standard booth fee. With their removal, the situation changed. At our fair, galleries had a real opportunity to present emerging international artists.”

In some cases, galleries spent more on additional booth elements and promotional programs - such as artist talks - than they would have spent on the booth fee. And yet, the director tells me, these same galleries did not feel that money was wasted.

“The costs went beyond a simple rental fee for a space. They were interpreted more as an investment in their own exhibition. This difference matters.”

The effect of the hexagonal structure extended beyond how works were presented - it also shaped how visitors moved and paused. In a conventional fair, booths are lined up along straight corridors: visitors walk straight ahead and turn their heads from side to side. At HIVE, the hexagonal layout created a circular flow, their steps became slower, and they were able to look at the works more carefully.

The visual effect was equally different. Because the booth walls were set at varying angles, visitors did not simply see the back wall of a single stand, but perceived the walls of multiple booths layering over one another, creating a depth that is difficult to achieve with traditional rectangular structures.

At the center of the fair, The Core - the curatorial space run by the HIVE team - played a dual role. On a relational level:

“By curating our own exhibition at the center of the venue, HIVE Art Fair showed that our team was not only a team of operators; we effectively demonstrated that we also had curatorial ability.”

On an experiential level, visitors could encounter exhibitions of near-museum quality within a fair context, and artists could meet the public directly, a kind of contact that is not always guaranteed in an institutional setting.

One of the most interesting aspects to emerge from this edition was the transformation of competitive dynamics among galleries. In a traditional fair, the pressure of booth fees often translates into sales pressure and isolation.

At HIVE, the conditions were different. During the installation period, once galleries finished setting up their own booth, they began walking around the fair.

“The atmosphere on-site changed. It was not a closed atmosphere, where each gallery focused only on its own sales target. Real exchange happened. Galleries looked at each other’s presentations, took notes, studied other booths.”

Concrete outcomes confirm the shift: one Korean gallery confirmed plans to organize two exhibitions for artists introduced to them by international galleries during the fair; Phil Grauer of CANADA Gallery (New York) stated that meeting the Korean art community was as meaningful as the sales results.

“Competition did not disappear - but the direction of competition changed. Galleries were still very aware of each other, but the standard was not price or sales volume: it was curation and identity. This was the shift we wanted to create.”

HIVE was born in Seoul, but the question it asks is not a local one: “Why does an art fair always have to work in the same way?”

The problems it set out to address, ever-rising booth fees, repetitive formats, a growing distance between fairs and artistic context, do not belong to a single market: “They are problems shared across the world. We simply acted a little earlier and a little more directly.”

The lesson the director draws from this first edition is both practical and conceptual.

“Format changes behavior. When the space changes, so does the way people move within it - and so does the way they perceive the value of what is on show.”

Galleries arrived with a familiar model in mind. But once inside HIVE, they experienced the concrete possibility of something different.

“They left imagining the next version of themselves. This is not simply adaptation. It is a shift in the standard.”

The second edition of HIVE Art Fair is already confirmed: May 20 to 23, 2027. And the stated intention is to move beyond the physical boundaries of the exhibition hall: “We want to create a structure in which conversations continue outside the fairground as well.” Academic seminars and forum programs are already being planned, to explore in greater depth the stories behind the works, the relationship between artists and galleries, the structure of the art market, and cultural sustainability.

HIVE does not present itself as a finished model. The director is the first to acknowledge this:

“We do not think this format is already complete. And we do not want it to become a fixed model. What we are watching now is where this first step will lead.”

As participation in art fairs becomes increasingly difficult for galleries and operators, the system is demanding new acts of imagination - new formulas to reactivate a market that can no longer sustain its own weight. HIVE is one answer worth taking seriously.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Khalif Tahir Thompson, Red Lady, 2026

Best recognized for his powerful portraiture and figuration work, Khalif Tahir Thompson incorporates painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and paper-making into his practice while exploring notions of self through the scopes of race, sexuality, and spirituality.

Events of the month

Corals

Beyond the surface. Between visible and invisible

Opening on Wednesday, June 10, at Corals Gallery, the group exhibition “Beyond the surface. Between visible and invisible” brings together the work of Michele Maria Canditone, Gaia Coals, Julia Ciulek, and Giulia Papetti.

The exhibition revolves around the element of water, which here does not manifest through its chromatic evidence but reveals itself as a subtle world, perceptible through its intrinsic properties: plasticity, adaptability, and purifying power. An invisible veil of water connects the voices of the four artists, guiding visitors through an exploration of resilience and memory.

Opening night: Wednesday, 10 June h. 18:30 - 21:00

Via Evangelista Torricelli 21, Milan

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

For artists and the professionals who shape the art world

The newsletter has a new structure. I have assigned a label to each issue so you know immediately what kind of conversation you are stepping into.

There are four recurring sections. Market watch, for reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market. The practice, for artists and the professionals who shape the art world. Unsolicited opinion, for when something happens and I say what I think. On view, the exhibitions I have visited in person, and what they left me with.

One more thing. This newsletter is entirely self-funded, no advertisers and no sponsors. Just research, time, and a genuine interest in making sense of the art world. From this edition, some issues involving deeper research and analysis will move behind a paywall. Everything else remains free.

If you find this work useful, you can support it by subscribing.

It makes a real difference.

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Hours before Christie’s hammered a Brâncuși at $107.6 million, Pace Gallery announced it had secured worldwide commercial representation of the artist’s estate. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perfect strategy? Without a doubt.

In this edition, I unpack what lies behind that impeccable timing and the bigger question it raises: how does an artistic legacy become a strategic asset worth hundreds of millions? Who decides how many works enter the market each year, at what prices and through which channels?

And what really changes when a gallery like Pace takes control?

Subscribe to read the full analysis.

Read more

For reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market

A quick update before we start.

From last week onwards, I have decided to give the newsletter a clearer structure, assigning a label to each edition so you know immediately what kind of conversation we are about to have. Not because the content changes, the perspective is always that of someone who works inside this market every day, but because I thought it would be useful to give you a thread to follow, week after week.

There are four recurring sections: Market watch, for reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market. The practice, dedicated to artists and everything that surrounds the art of curating. Unsolicited opinion, for when something happens and I say what I think. On view, the exhibitions I have visited in person and what they left me with.

On 3 March, seven hours after the second Iranian missile strike on targets in the UAE, Art Dubai announced its cancellation.

Ninety galleries from forty-seven countries. An estimated $60 to $80 million in direct revenue gone in a matter of hours. It was one of those moments that strips the art market down to what it actually is, not a self-contained world of aesthetics and taste, but a system deeply wired to geopolitical reality.

That is where I want to start this week.

Not with a calendar of events, but with two cities, two very different situations, and what they tell us about the market right now.

Think of it like spinning a globe. Your finger lands first on the Middle East, on Dubai, where Art Dubai is currently underway. A fair postponed because of war, now open in a city that is visibly hungry to return to normal. Its twentieth edition, with roughly half the usual number of participating galleries, yet with buyers present, according to early reports from Artnet.

To mark the anniversary, admission is free for the public. Galleries have had to work within a recalibrated model, lower upfront financial exposure, fewer guarantees. Both sides of the usual fair equation - risk and return, supply and demand - were reset simultaneously. And that matters, because one of the things I follow most closely is how collector behaviour shifts under pressure. Right now, it is shifting fast.

Hong Kong made that visible just weeks ago. Sotheby’s included moon jars and scholar’s rock from the Ming - Qing dynasty in its modern and contemporary evening sale. Art Basel Hong Kong introduced Zero 10 for digital art. Tracking these choices, what goes into an evening sale, what gets a dedicated section, what gets folded in, I read them as deliberate signals about where the market thinks value is moving. The old boundaries between categories are losing their hold. Collectors now move more comfortably across media, periods and references. Art Dubai, partly because of the instability it is navigating, is adapting to this faster than most.

Its new director, Dunja Gottweis, comes from gallery relations leadership at Art Basel. Alexie Glass-Kantor, now heading curatorial strategy at the Art Dubai Group, is building the fair not around fixed sections but around relationships, the way artists, galleries, institutions and audiences connect with one another. It is a structural response to a market searching for new frameworks, not just a curatorial one.

And here is what I keep coming back to when I look at Dubai right now.

It is often in moments of greatest instability, when the crack opens in front of you, that the leap becomes possible. The institutions that will matter in five years are probably the ones making uncomfortable decisions today. Adaptability is no longer a secondary virtue. It has become the model itself.

We spin the globe again, and land in New York.

I look at New York Art Week the way an analyst looks at a dashboard not to admire it, but to read what each indicator is actually saying. And this year, the picture is unusually clear.

New York Art Week 2026 is the moment when the global market becomes legible in its most concentrated form. Every segment says something about the state of the system. Frieze signals the attempt by major fairs to become more focused and less overwhelming, monographic presentations as a tool to cut through saturation and restore weight to individual works. TEFAF captures the return of historical quality and provenance. Independent works on curation and selection. NADA holds its ground as a scouting ground for emerging talent. The auctions measure the resilience of the top end and the museums remind us why New York remains central: here, the market is never isolated, it is constantly in dialogue with institutions, criticism, research and collecting.

Within this context, Sotheby’s opened the May auction season early in the middle of fair week, with Manhattan’s art world in full swing, with a modern and contemporary sale totalling $433.1 million, led by a Mark Rothko canvas that sold for $85.8 million. The same sale last year brought in just $186.1 million.

That comparison alone tells you something important about where confidence is sitting right now. “Solid and authentic,” said New York art advisor Laura Paulson as she left the room late that evening.

So what do these two snapshots, taken from different poles of the same system, actually tell us?

New York works because it does not depend on any single event. It is not Frieze, not TEFAF, not Sotheby’s, not the Whitney. It is their coexistence.

What I find most useful about studying New York as a market is precisely this: its resilience is structural. It remains the operational capital of the global art market because it concentrates capital, institutions, collecting, galleries and auction houses in one place and because that concentration allows it to absorb shocks without losing its centre of gravity. Its strength today lies in its ability to reflect, almost in real time, the transformation of the system: less euphoria, more selection; less accumulation, more context; less speculative speed, more quality of relationship.

Dubai, for its part, carries the weight of that cancellation and everything it set in motion. The losses across the full supply chain (galleries, shippers, insurers, hotels) are estimated at between €15 and €25 million. But the deeper disruption is structural. After 2022, a significant portion of the wealth held by major Russian collectors had migrated to the Emirates, one of the few jurisdictions that imposed no sanctions on Moscow. Dubai had become, in part, a repository for displaced capital. The Gulf conflict of 2026 has now displaced that refuge too.

The most recent tensions in the Middle East introduce a further element of uncertainty. More than triggering an immediate exodus, they reinforce a trend already well underway: the geographic diversification of capital, increasingly distributed across multiple hubs rather than anchored to a single centre.

Within this context, New York continues to occupy a central position, defined by institutional density and market depth. Less a neutral safe haven than a highly regulated and selective space, it attracts international capital while also filtering access through its existing legal and compliance framework.

We started this week with a globe and a finger resting on a conflict.

We return to it now, still spinning, with the quiet awareness that the geography of the art market and the geography of the world never fully coincide. But they continue, inevitably, to mirror each other.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Ding Shilun, Three Princes, 2022

Ding Shilun draws on his own background, contemporary issues and the history of world art to create large-scale, richly detailed paintings that depict the absurdity of everyday life. Rooted in pictorial references such as Gustav Klimt or Kai Althoff intertwined with interpretations of Chinese literature, Shilun’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion.

The market of this young artist is fast rising. Conservatively pegged with a $50,000–$70,000 estimate, his Three Princes ended up selling for $358,400 at Sotheby’s in New York. That was more than two times his record, which was set at Phillips in London last year, where one of his paintings sold for the equivalent of $149,600. It was not a bad showing for an artist who has never had a New York solo show.

Events of the month

Hub/Art Barcelona

"Sol de Levante" opened on Friday 15 and runs through Sunday 24 May. A group exhibition co-curated with Melania Fusaro and Federica Guida, it captures a suspended moment, fragile and charged, when light has not yet become day and night has not quite dissolved.

Hub/Art Barcelona, Carrer del Dr. Trueta 183

Monday - Friday h. 10:00 - 13:00 / 16:00-19:00

Saturday: h. 15:00 - 19:00

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

The exhibitions I have visited and what they left me with

A quick update before we start.

From last week onwards, I have decided to give the newsletter a clearer structure, assigning a label to each edition so you know immediately what kind of conversation we are about to have. Not because the content changes, the perspective is always that of someone who works inside this market every day, but because I thought it would be useful to give you a thread to follow, week after week.

There are four recurring sections: Market watch, for reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market. The practice, dedicated to artists and everything that surrounds the art of curating. Unsolicited opinion, for when something happens and I say what I think. On view, the exhibitions I have visited in person and what they left me with.

The 61st Venice Biennale feels less like an exhibition and more like a declaration of territorial ambition. With a record 100 national participations - up from 86 in the previous edition - In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, stretches across the Giardini and Arsenale and spills into the city at large, to the point where the whole system seems to have outgrown its own boundaries.

That expansion is telling. This edition arrives loaded with tension: disputes over national participations, protests in the opening days, and, most notably, the collective resignation of the jury, which shifted the Lion awards to a public vote. Whatever your take on that decision, the signal is clear: Venice is no longer just an observatoryt but it has become a site of negotiation, a space where institutional frameworks and political realities openly collide.

Within this climate, a few pavilions manage to cut through the noise - not necessarily through conventional “quality,” but through their ability to hit raw nerves and provoke genuinely polarized reactions.

Luxembourg’s pavilion, La Merde by Aline Bouvy, takes the boldest risk. An anthropomorphic excrement moves through the space as the protagonist of what the artist calls a “cinematic manifesto,” combining film, sound and installation. The initial impact is deliberately repellent, but beneath it lies a sharp inquiry into shame as a social mechanism: what is expelled and hidden becomes a lens to examine systems of control and exclusion. It’s a work that takes the risk of provocation and largely earns it.

Austria’s pavilion, by Florentina Holzinger, who recently joined the roster of the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, is probably the most divisive. SEAWORLD VENICE constructs a closed-loop system powered by the bodily waste of its audience: what is usually removed becomes the engine of an artificial ecosystem. The surface impact, nudity, fluids, discomfort, can read as pure shock strategy, but a closer look reveals a layered reflection on systemic collapse both civic and institutional. The pavilion ends up functioning as a kind of self-portrait of the Biennale itself.

Denmark’s pavilion, curated by Chus Martínez, tackles the male fertility crisis through a hybrid setup that merges biotech aesthetics with pop-erotic imagery.

In “Things to Come”, the collapse of sperm counts is not treated solely as a biological crisis, but as a metaphor for a broader civilizational breakdown. Environmental toxicity, screen addiction, cognitive exhaustion, and the erosion of intimacy mirror a society in which reproduction, relationships, and labour are rapidly changing. Whether it reads as sharp critique or dressed-up sensationalism ultimately depends on how much you’re willing to accept spectacle as a method.

These pavilions make it hard to avoid a broader question: when everything shocks, does shock still mean anything at all?

The issue isn’t provocation itself, but its normalization. When it becomes the dominant language, it loses its edge. What should open up space for thought ends up shutting it down, triggering immediate, surface-level reactions rather than sustained engagement.

The Biennale amplifies this structurally. More than an exhibition, it operates as an accumulation device: pavilions competing for attention, endless streams of images and video. The result is paradoxical: excess anesthetizes.

Works are consumed in seconds, images blur into one another and even protests risk turning into visual surfaces we pass through quickly, with the reassuring sense of having “seen.”

This is where a more radical need emerges: an ecology of art, a willingness to subtract and to slow down. The works that stay with you aren’t the loudest ones, they’re the ones that manage to interrupt the flow, to hold your attention.

In the end, that’s still the measure: not immediate impact, but resonance over time. And right now, Venice makes that kind of resonance increasingly hard to find which may be the most urgent thing it has to tell us.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Diane Chappalley, A la vie, à la mort, 2023

After the noise of Venice, I find myself drawn back into a quieter space of reflection and attention. Diane Chappalley, a Swiss-born painter, constructs imagined landscapes rooted in memory and lived experience.
Chappalley’s brushwork often moves between figuration and atmosphere, tracing forms that seem to emerge from fog, desert or dream.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

Something happened. Here is what I think.

A quick update before we start.

From this issue onwards, I have decided to give the newsletter a clearer structure, assigning a label to each edition so you know immediately what kind of conversation we are about to have. Not because the content changes, the perspective is always that of someone who works inside this market every day, but because I thought it would be useful to give you a thread to follow, week after week.

There are four recurring sections: Market watch, for reading between the lines of what is happening in the art market. The practice, dedicated to artists and everything that surrounds the art of curating. Unsolicited opinion, for when something happens and I say what I think. On view, the exhibitions I have visited in person and what they left me with.

This week we are in Unsolicited opinion mode. Let’s begin!

In the art market, the word “transparency” circulates with a frequency inversely proportional to its actual application. It is something I witness every day in my work as a consultant, as an advisor, as someone who guides collectors and artists through dynamics that from the outside appear far more readable than they actually are. It gets invoked in press releases, promised at panel discussions, deployed as a legitimizing argument whenever the industry feels the pressure of outside scrutiny. But scratch the surface and it becomes clear that transparency and opacity, in the art market, are not truly opposites. They are two different aesthetics of the same privilege.

Two initiatives from these very days illustrate this with almost didactic clarity.

The first is Basel Exclusive, announced by Art Basel ahead of its June edition. The mechanism is straightforward: a selection of participating galleries commits to reserving at least one major work - in some cases their entire presentation -from any pre-sale activity, online previews or private viewings. These works will be unveiled publicly for the first time at the fair’s VIP opening on June 16, during the so-called First Choice Preview.

The language surrounding the initiative is one of restitution: restoring centrality to the live moment, to the in-person encounter, to the act of discovery. Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer of Art Basel, speaks of a “concentrated moment of first access” and of strengthening the experience for collectors and institutions alike. The galleries involved are among the most powerful in the world: Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Pace Gallery, among others.

What Basel Exclusive makes visible is the ritual of exclusivity: the launch moment, the gallery names, the promise of discovery. What remains in the shadows are the things that actually matter: prices, the negotiations that precede the fair, the preferential relationships with certain collectors. The high-end art market has always operated through private networks of relationships that no initiative of this kind comes close to disrupting. Basel Exclusive does not open the market: it stages its opening, which is an entirely different thing.

This is scenographic transparency. It serves to legitimize the system in the eyes of the public and perhaps also to redirect attention back to the physical fair at a moment when sales are migrating earlier and across increasingly fragmented channels but it does not make the market more legible. Prices remain private, negotiations remain confidential, and access remains distributed exactly as before.

The second initiative is No Warning, the new format launched by Fair Warning, the art sales app founded by Loïc Gouzer, former co-chairman of the postwar and contemporary art department at Christie’s.

The mechanism inverts the logic of the traditional auction. A work appears for sale with a price. The buyer can either accept it immediately or submit a single binding offer, valid for 72 hours. There is no bidding war, no visibility into competing offers, no call from a specialist nudging you higher. The highest offer is submitted to the seller, who decides freely whether to accept it. In the end, the work disappears from the platform, sold or not, without leaving any public trace.

Gouzer does not conceal his motivations. The format was born explicitly in response to sellers who want to avoid the paper trail that comes with traditional auctions, where prices and failures tend to circulate and settle into the market as a history that is difficult to shake. With No Warning, there is no public record unless someone chooses to create one. Buyers and sellers receive the same discretion.

If Basel Exclusive performs transparency, No Warning performs nothing. Opacity is explicitly the product. There is almost an intellectual honesty to it and in that sense it may be the format most coherent with the deeper nature of the market it serves.

Placed side by side, the two cases seem to illustrate a genuine tension: on one side, a push toward visibility; on the other, the protection of invisibility. But this reading is superficial.

Both formats answer the same question on behalf of sellers: how do you protect the value, perceived and real, of a work, and avoid the damage that comes from a wrong price or a failed auction? And in both cases the answer is identical: by controlling the available information.

Basel Exclusive does this by managing the narrative, concentrating attention on the launch moment and drawing it away from everything else. No Warning does it through disappearance, eliminating any trace that the market might use to assess a work or the reputation of those selling it.

There is a second common element, perhaps even more significant: both formats shift power toward the seller. In Basel Exclusive, the gallery controls the context and timing of the reveal. In No Warning, the seller receives the highest offer and decides with no obligation and no public consequences for saying no.

The art market is structurally opaque by design, not by accident or regulatory negligence. Unlike financial markets, there is no disclosure obligation covering prices, buyers or actual commissions. This opacity is not a flaw to be corrected: it is, quite literally, part of the value the market sells. Those who can buy and sell in the shadows pay for that privilege. Those who cannot, remain outside.

In this sense, Basel Exclusive and No Warning are not opposites. They are two stylistically different responses to the same structural need: maintaining control over information at a moment when pressures toward greater transparency, from growing attention to provenance, to discussions about money laundering in the sector, to the expectations of an increasingly informed public, are intensifying.

One chooses the aesthetic of visibility. The other chooses the aesthetic of invisibility. But the outcome, for those who truly matter in this market, is the same.

It’s a dynamic I know well, and one I try to keep in mind whenever I work with people approaching this market for the first time. Understanding that “transparency” in the art market is often more a form of communication than an actual practice is a crucial first step toward navigating it with greater awareness. Basel Exclusive and No Warning, each in their own way, bring this into sharp focus. And that alone is worth paying attention to.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Zoe Hawk, The Grand Howl, 2017

What strikes me is how, Zoe Hawk uses oil and gouache to create scenes that initially appear idyllic, with carefully controlled compositions and uniformed young girls embodying idealized femininity. Yet, on closer inspection, these same scenes reveal something more unsettling: subtle moments of rebellion and inner conflict that introduce a sinister undertone, making the viewer feel slightly unnerved despite the apparent innocence.

Events of the month

Corals Gallery Milan

Contrary to the original closing date of April 30, the exhibition Contemporary Bodies: Between Image and Imagination with the artists Hyun Cho and Manuel Castillo has been extended. It will remain open throughout the week until Friday, May 8.

Via Evangelista Torricelli, 21, Milan | Monday to Friday, 3–7 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

An incomplete work is a compromised work, something to be restored, concealed, or in the worst case discarded. And yet, in two days, a painting will go under the hammer at Dorotheum in Vienna that seems to work in exactly the opposite way.

It is a Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi, estimated between 100,000 and 150,000 euros. The work, now fragmentary, spent many years in a private collection in Germany, where it lay rolled up in a basement. At some unspecified point, most likely during the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin, the saint’s head was cut from the canvas, leaving the painting mutilated in its most significant part.

Despite this radical loss, the quality of the work was recognized, carefully restored, and preserved by its current owner. The painting still carries that presence and authority that define Artemisia Gentileschi’s work.

The work was brought back to scholarly attention in 2011 by Roberto Contini, who identified it as an autograph replica of the Mary Magdalene held at the Galleria Palatina in Palazzo Pitti, Florence, with which it shares almost identical dimensions.

The peculiarity, however, remains as striking as it is unsettling: the painting is missing its face. Not a marginal portion, but the very center of the composition, the point where expression normally concentrates, and where the relationship with the viewer is formed.

We tend to think of contemporary art as a chronological matter, something that concerns the present and living artists. But this definition is, at its core, fragile. The contemporary is not merely a temporal category: it is a condition of the gaze - the moment when a work, however distant in time, ceases to belong exclusively to history and begins once again to produce experience in the present.

This Magdalene carries with it a real wound that today translates into an unexpected form of intensity. The void left by the missing face is not simply an absence: it becomes a surface of projection, a space that asks to be filled by the viewer’s gaze.

In the language of the market, damage should reduce value. Here, paradoxically, it transforms it. The work loses none of its historical relevance, Artemisia Gentileschi remains one of the most extraordinary figures of the Baroque, capable of asserting herself within a deeply male-dominated system and building an independent career until she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia di Firenze in 1616. That loss instead introduces a dimension we recognize as profoundly contemporary.

Art historian Riccardo Lattuada has suggested a parallel with the work of Emilio Isgrò, in whose pieces erasure does not represent a subtraction but a generative act. To eliminate, in this context, is to produce new meaning.

In a similar way, in the work of Rachel Whiteread or in the installations of Edmund de Waal, void and negative space are not secondary elements but load-bearing structures through which presence and loss are simultaneously articulated.

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub; it is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room; it is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there; usefulness from what is not there.

Laozi

In this sense, the mutilated Magdalene no longer appears merely as a damaged seventeenth-century work, but as an object that activates perceptual and conceptual dynamics of remarkable currency. The absent face interrupts the traditional reading and demands a different relationship, more unstable, less mediated, in which the viewer is called to confront what is missing as much as what remains.

And perhaps it is here that a broader question emerges, one that concerns not only art history but the market itself: what are we really buying when we acquire a work of art?

Its material integrity, the name of its creator or its capacity to generate a meaningful experience in the present?

This Magdalene, incomplete, marked by time and violence, seems to suggest that value does not reside exclusively in preservation, but in its continuous transformation. Not only in what the work once was, but in what it continues to be for those who encounter it today.

In this sense, the contemporary does not necessarily coincide with the moment a work was made, but with its ability to remain active, to keep producing meaning, even through loss. And sometimes, it is precisely what is missing that brings it closest to us.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

John Gerrard, Standard (formerly Surrender Flag), 2023

In his work, John Gerrard transforms smoke, fire and vapor into symbols of our time: the energy that has shaped the contemporary world, and the one we will inevitably have to reckon with. Through real-time digital simulations, he renders visible infrastructures and processes that usually remain hidden, slowing them down until they become contemplative images.

Events of the month

Corals Gallery Milan

Last week to visit “Contemporary Bodies: Between Image and Imagination”. The show brings together Hyun Cho and Manuel Castillo in a conversation about what it means to inhabit a body today, between ancient, archetypal imagery and the quiet strangeness of digital intimacy.

On view until April 30 at Galleria Corals, Milan. Monday to Friday, 3–7 pm. Part of the official program of Milano Art Week.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

4% of gallery budgets go to supporting artists.
15% goes to art fairs.

Source: Art Basel & UBS Report, 2026

It has become a constant: the art system keeps producing fairs. More and more of them, everywhere, at every time of year. In parallel, a chorus of complaints grows louder, from gallerists and industry insiders, about the economic and operational unsustainability of this model.

And yet, the numbers tell a less contradictory story than it might appear. According to the latest Art Basel & UBS report (2026), fairs still account for 36% of sales for mid-size galleries. A figure that clarifies one essential point: fairs are not an excess of the system: they are one of its structural pillars.

What some commentators call the “fairification” of the market is therefore not a drift, but a now deeply embedded transformation and one that is accelerating.

Historically, the role of fairs has been straightforward: to compress global market access into a matter of days. For collectors, the chance to see hundreds of galleries in a single context; for galleries, a way to expand beyond geographical constraints without opening new physical spaces. A device of efficiency, before it was ever one of commerce.

But it is precisely this efficiency that has produced the current paradox.

Fairs today are unpredictable in their results, enormously costly in time and resources, and increasingly exclusionary for the public. The cheapest non-discounted ticket to Frieze London has reached £48. On the cost side, perhaps the most telling figure is this: in 2025, fairs accounted for 15% of galleries’ operating costs, compared to 20% for physical space rental and just 4% allocated to artist support.

And it is this imbalance that deserves attention. If a gallery must allocate the bulk of its resources between physical space and fair participation, two assets that have become indispensable for visibility, what remains to support artistic research, particularly the more experimental kind?

The answer, looking at the fairs themselves, is clear: very little.

It is no coincidence that stands tend to converge toward an increasingly predictable offer. Fairs, once places of discovery, are gradually becoming environments of confirmation. Rather than anticipating the market, they consolidate it.

In this sense, “fairification” is not only a quantitative issue, but a qualitative one: it concerns not just the number of fairs, but the type of content they produce.

At the same time, the fair model has proven remarkably effective on a geopolitical level. In the Gulf, in the period just before the outbreak of war, a clear strategy emerged in which fairs like Art Basel and Frieze were integrated into state soft power policies. Fairs are no longer simply market platforms, they have become instruments of cultural positioning.

It is against this backdrop that attempts to rethink the format are beginning to surface.

In Seoul, this coming May, HIVE Art Fair will make its debut. More than a new fair, it presents itself as a statement of intent. With around 50 galleries involved, HIVE defines itself as a “boutique fair” that prioritizes curatorial quality and precision over expansion. The point of departure is clear: the complete elimination of booth fees, reframing galleries not as clients but as collaborators.

This is not merely an economic choice, it is an ideological one. The premise is simple: if galleries were freed from the burden of participation costs, they could redirect those same resources toward building more ambitious presentations. In other words, returning to the center what galleries are, in theory, best equipped to do: curate.

“Instead of a booth fee, we ask galleries to present the boldest show they’ve ever done at a fair.” Kim, Director of HIVE Art Fair

It is an intriguing inversion though not without its ambiguities. Because while HIVE eliminates the most visible cost, the booth, it simultaneously introduces new forms of monetization: client tickets purchased by galleries, paid promotional spaces, the option to select booth placement at additional cost (albeit subject to curatorial review).

The risk, therefore, is that the model does not eliminate economic pressure so much as redistribute it.

At the same time, the idea of transforming the booth into a fully realized exhibition, organized in hexagonal clusters evoking the cells of a beehive, with a shared curatorial hub called “The Core”, introduces something that many fairs conspicuously lack: a coherent exhibitionary vision.

HIVE seems to recognize something the system has progressively lost sight of: curatorial quality is not a byproduct of the market, it could be its primary differentiating value.

Yet a question remains open. Are these new models genuinely capable of altering the dynamics of the system, or do they represent simply an internal adaptation, a way of making sustainable a format that, in its current form, is showing clear signs of saturation?

And perhaps the real question is not whether fairs will survive but what kind of fair the system is still willing to support.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Nina Murashkina - Still waters run deep, 2024

Seductive and immersive works where the female figure takes on a divine yet dual nature: a balance of lust and innocence, tenderness and provocation, brutal honesty and mysterious shadows. It is a worldview that interprets reality through a mythological and deeply symbolic prism.

These are the characters brought to life by artist Nina Murashkina in her solo exhibition, “Pasiones internas,” currently on display at La Plataforma gallery in Barcelona.

Events of the month

Corals Gallery Milan

Contemporary Bodies: Between Image and Imagination brings together Hyun Cho and Manuel Castillo in a conversation about what it means to inhabit a body today, between ancient, archetypal imagery and the quiet strangeness of digital intimacy.

Castillo works with raw marks and mythic forms that feel drawn from collective memory. Cho weaves sculpture and urban iconography to examine how closeness is being reshaped by online life. The tension between the two is the exhibition.

On view until April 30 at Galleria Corals, Milan. Monday to Friday, 3–7 pm. Part of the official program of Milano Art Week.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.

In my day-to-day work, I often come across a certain confusion around the figure of the art advisor.

Artists reach out to advisors expecting help in placing their work, assuming they can act as intermediaries or open doors to the market. At the same time, I see curators referring to themselves as art advisors, treating the term as if it were interchangeable with their own role, when in reality, the two have very little in common.

These misunderstandings are not occasional. They are constant. And they point to something deeper: a general lack of clarity about what an art advisor actually is.

Everyone in the art world talks about art advisors. But if you ask what they really do, the answers tend to be vague, sometimes even contradictory.

And that’s odd, because the figure of the art advisor has become increasingly central. Many of the decisions that shape the market today, what gets bought, what enters important collections, what gains visibility, are filtered through them. Yet the role itself remains surprisingly undefined.

In theory, the art advisor is easy to describe: an independent expert who helps collectors navigate the market and make informed decisions. In practice, that definition quickly starts to blur. An advisor may act as a consultant, a strategist, or as someone who provides access to artworks that would otherwise remain out of reach. Sometimes they operate independently, sometimes they are closely tied to galleries, and more and more often, they are embedded within larger financial structures.

At the same time, if we look more closely at the actual scope of their work, the role becomes slightly clearer. An art advisor typically operates across three main areas.

The first is valorisation: proposing strategies to enhance a collection, advising on acquisitions and sales, and facilitating loans to institutions.

The second is strategic planning, which includes analysing the legal, fiscal and tax aspects of a collection, as well as supporting estate planning and identifying the most appropriate legal structures.

The third is management: overseeing logistics, insurance, conservation conditions and the ongoing maintenance and documentation of the works.

And yet, even this more structured description does not fully resolve the ambiguity.

Because the art market itself has always resisted clear categories and transparent rules. And now, something is shifting.

Recently, major financial institutions have started to expand their presence in this space. Banks like Bank of America and Citi are no longer peripheral players; they are actively building art advisory services as part of their wealth management strategies. What they offer goes far beyond helping clients acquire artworks. It includes collection management, lending against art, estate planning and tax considerations. In this context, art is no longer treated simply as a passion, but as part of a broader financial ecosystem.

And this is where the role of the art advisor becomes even more difficult to pin down.

Because once advisory is integrated into a financial institution, it inevitably takes on a different function. It is no longer just about guiding taste or building a coherent collection. It becomes part of a wider strategy, one that connects art to wealth, relationships, and long-term financial planning.

At that point, the question is no longer simply what an art advisor does. The more relevant question is who they are actually working for.

Are they representing the interests of the collector, offering independent guidance in a complex and opaque market? Are they aligned, explicitly or implicitly, with galleries and the logic of placement? Or are they operating within institutions that use art as a way to strengthen client relationships and open broader financial conversations?

In reality, these positions often overlap. And it is precisely in that overlap that things become interesting.

The art market has always been shaped by asymmetries (of information, access, or visibility). Art advisors sit right at the center of these asymmetries. They don’t just interpret the market; they actively participate in structuring it. They influence what is worth paying attention to, what is worth acquiring, and, perhaps most importantly, what is worth ignoring.

This means that advice in the art world is never entirely neutral. It is always embedded in a network of relationships and positioning.

When advisory becomes part of a bank’s offering, this dynamic becomes even more layered. The advisor is no longer simply helping to build a collection; they are contributing to a broader financial narrative. Art becomes a tool, something that can support client retention, facilitate conversations about wealth, and function as an asset within a diversified portfolio.

In this context, the idea of independence becomes more complex, if not slightly fragile.

Perhaps the issue is not that we lack a clear definition of what an art advisor is. Perhaps the issue is that the role itself has evolved beyond any single definition. Today, the art advisor operates at the intersection of cultural value, market dynamics and financial strategy. And their function shifts depending on how these dimensions interact.

So instead of trying to define the role once and for all, it might be more useful to ask a different question.

Who is actually shaping decisions in the art market today?

Because in a system where so much remains opaque, the people who guide choices often matter more than the choices themselves.

Greta Zuccali

Inspiration

Ariana Papademetropoulos - Psychic specific (intellectual property) 1, 2026

How many times, as children, did we hold a seashell up to our ear, convinced we could hear the ocean inside?

I thought about this while looking at Ariana Papademetropoulos’ work, currently on view at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris. In the exhibition, she presents iridescent, shell-shaped telephone booths, inspired by those once found in the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

At first they feel playful, almost nostalgic. But the more you look, the more they shift. It quietly suggests that what we perceive as technological magic, the ability to hear something distant has always existed in nature. We just chose to forget.

Events of the month

Corals Gallery Milan

“Contemporary Bodies: Between Image and Imagination” is currently on view at Galleria Corals, featuring works by Hyun Cho and Manuel Castillo. The exhibition is part of the official program of Milano Art Week and will be open to visitors until April 30, from Monday to Friday, 3–7 pm.

To learn more about my work, discuss collaborations, share event news, or suggest exhibitions for review, get in touch at hello@hub-art.org.