After a quiet winter in the art market, I headed out to Frieze week in Los Angeles not expecting
much. That’s mainly because we’ve had so little public evidence of where the art market stands lately. Still, I was hoping Frieze L.A. would provide at least a glimpse of the state of the market at the moment. And it did, despite the lack of a trend to give the whole market coherence.

Of course, there’s a dark cloud hanging over the fair about the fate of Frieze, itself, now that Endeavor has committed to selling it. Word is, the auction is proceeding slowly because, while the fair is
profitable, there’s not much prospect for growth. Also, Ari Emanuel has already signaled an interest in bidding, potentially scaring off those only interested in a bargain.

Then there’s the uncertain future of the global economy: Conventional wisdom still views Trump as good for
business, but the administration’s sweeping plans to remake global trade and potentially roil the debt markets still loom. Don’t expect the world’s wealthy to remain so sanguine if/when things end up in a quagmire. Art buyers spend money they believe they can easily replace, and as soon as that sequence falters, art sales will slow even further. In brighter news, I did coax Mrs. Wallpower into joining me in L.A.—in line with the old saying that if you want to travel fast, go alone; if you want
to travel far, go together.

An art fair can often seem like a long trek up a steep mountain—there are a lot of galleries to see. You’ve got to keep a pace, hit your waypoints, and push through to the summit. It’s grueling. This is particularly true in Los Angeles, where the venues are spread out across the city and traffic can push travel times up to 45 minutes or an hour, making it logistically impossible to hit too many galleries without careful planning. Luckily, this was not our first
Frieze L.A., and our logistics game was on point. Still, I knew I would need to fortify my co-pilot and sherpa with a Hailey Bieber smoothie, so as soon as Mrs. Wallpower and I arrived in the city and dropped off our things, we headed straight to Erewhon for a liquid dinner.

Tuesday started early. We fueled at Maxine’s with breakfast burritos and honey buttered
biscuits, then headed downtown where, at Hauser & Wirth, Georges Rouy held forth on the second part of his very successful show of abstract paintings and explained his own take on figuration. He is continuing his show from London’s Frieze week, last October, when Hauser raised his primary prices and sold out the studio. Hauser is a well-oiled marketing machine, and their success was pretty much to be expected. So we needed to press on to find the real market story.

Pat Lipsky at James Fuentes, Frieze Los Angeles, 2025

Next we headed to the clutch of galleries on North Western Avenue, where we stopped at James Fuentes to see the octogenarian New York color field painter Pat Lipsky, whose work is accomplished and decorative. (Alas, promoting once-overlooked women abstract painters isn’t as novel as it was a few years ago.) Fuentes was just up the street from Lisa Yuskavage’s first L.A. show in 30 years, held at David Zwirner. Now an unquestioned presence in the
art firmament, Yuskavage took advantage of a press conference to hold forth on the freedom afforded to her by so many years spent out of favor. Down the block at Clearing, meanwhile, was a historical work by Larry Stanton, including a short film of David Hockney making his famous paper pools series.

We ran into some friends outside Zwirner, so we asked them what was worth seeing and were told: the Mike Kelley show. Advisors Vivian
Brodie and Alex Perweiler had collaborated with Hauser & Wirth, who represent the Mike Kelley Foundation, to feature Kelley’s disturbing re-creations of high school yearbook photographs. The show inaugurated the duo’s new space—with spectacular views, by the way—in a Wilshire Boulevard office building developed, so we were repeatedly told, by pornographer Larry Flynt. A large statue of John Wayne on horseback stands out front. Brodie
and Perweiler are part of a trend on the secondary market where we’re seeing new ways to present art for sale. And anything new and even mildly innovative is a sign of art market health.

Following that theme, we made our way high up into Beverly Hills to visit Jack Siebert, who was holding a portraiture show he called Modèle Vivant—an opportunity for the twenty-something curator to show off his interesting taste in a setting aspirational enough to
justify the trip. Buck Ellison, the bard of preppy privilege, had created an installation in a spare bedroom. In the living room, Siebert mounted works by Violeta Maya, Olga de Amaral, Emmi Whitehorse, Joan Semmel, Chloe Wise, and many others, a surprising and appealing set of offerings. We left feeling all art should be sold this way. After all, half of the joy in art is the story behind the
purchase.

From there, it made sense to drive down into Beverly Hills’s business district to visit the Alex Israel show at Gagosian and Christie’s, where Darius Himes and Matthieu Humery were giving a talk on the Pinault Collection’s interest in photography. We capped off the day with a Persian dinner at Toranj in Westwood, where we took stock: We’d seen signs of a positive
mood, but nothing that overtly confirmed a real appetite in the market.

Wednesday’s main event was the Felix art fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The fair is
split into two sections—one poolside and the other in the hotel’s tower, where two floors are emptied of furniture and fairgoers sidle past each other to enter and exit each hotel room. Actor Henry Winkler got in early and eagerly investigated every one. This was something of the sweet spot in the current market: a wide range of artists at affordable prices, and lots of ceramics. Down among the cabanas, we saw Adam Cohen selling 100 small rondo portraits of
figures from art history in a hallway. At least one high-volume collector and dealer I know had expected Felix to be the week’s high point in terms of interest and energy, but when we left, at least, the pool area had yet to develop into its usual raucous scene.

Gwyneth Paltrow at Frieze Los Angeles 2025

There are more than a dozen galleries not far from the Roosevelt. So after a quick lunch, we headed to Jeffrey Deitch to see his Nina Chanel Abney show and stopped right next door at Lisson for Kelly
Akashi. Not being Angelenos, we walked West to Karma to see Woody De Othello’s sculptures (all bathed in an otherworldly yellow light) and paintings hung around the perimeter of a room filled with sand. Further on, we made it to Matthew Marks’s show of Jacqueline Humphries paintings. Then we trucked it back to Deitch’s second space, filled with work by Tschabalala Self, Regen Projects’s Doug Aitken show, and Tanya
Bonakdar’s Shilpa Gupta show, passing through the gallery Various Small Fires before stopping in to see Terran Last Gun’s modern take on Indigenous ledger drawings and Julian Stanczak’s early work from the ’60s to the ’80s at Diane Rosenstein’s gallery.

Diane herself took us in the back room to give us her insight on the consistent trend of galleries selling ceramic works—as well as on how the fires had devastated so many
on both sides of L.A.’s art equation. As Diane put it, she had been hearing from collectors on the Westside who had lost work by her artists and wanted to let her know. Meanwhile, work from recent shows had headed west from the Eastside, back to artist’s studios, where some of it perished. Diane was excited about her opening, but couldn’t quite say that everything was fine in the L.A. market for contemporary art.

We had dinner with some of my colleagues at Puck who were in town to do a
little business before heading to Silverlake to check in with the Basic.Space boys, who were having a party for Frieze week at a local bar.

Finally, on Thursday morning, whatever doubts we had about the market were dispelled. A bright,
clear day had dawned, and inside the fair, the mood got even brighter. The aisles were bustling but not overcrowded. Some galleries brought a representative selection from their stable of artists; others showed off discoveries like Greta Schödl, a 95-year-old still working in text, at Richard Saltoun. Karma had work by Norman Zammitt showing nearby more Gertrude Abercrombie works, including a tiny Abercrombie in the booth’s “back room.” Almine Rech had a showstopping booth of work by Tomokazu Matsuyama, including one that had been bought by the Centre Pompidou and another by a museum in Japan. Artist Rebecca Ness bravely toured the fair, helping her dealer, Jessica Silverman, make a sale.

Tomokazu Matsuyama at Almine Rech, Frieze Los Angeles, 2025

There were even some big names in attendance,
including former Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain. I ran into collectors Don Kaul and Barbara Bluhm-Kaul talking up their support for a new event in Aspen. And on my way out of the fair, I flagged down Puck superfan Katie Couric making the rounds. We even encountered that big collector who had predicted all the energy would be at Felix. He had decided to make the trip at the last minute and was happily surprised to be proven
wrong by how vibrant Frieze was this year.

Escaping the fair, we stopped at Ghisallo for a late lunch in the garden refuge and took stock once more. Throughout the fair, the mood was carefree and surprisingly focused on the art, but the current art market lacks a narrative. There’s no central driver of the story that situates the individual artists into a broader theme. There are rediscovered artists, and historical works, and artists with novel life stories, but no real tie among all of
these. That can make the art market seem directionless or lacking in excitement.

In the usual art cycle, right now collectors would be going back to recent art history, buying solid names with strong market track records. I did see a very nice 1999 work by John Currin at Zwirner’s booth, and Gladstone had a good portion of their booth devoted to Keith Haring, which seems to have sold well. But those are just two names of what should be many more. Maybe
that will come, but an extended season of chaos in D.C. and beyond won’t help get us there.

Notably, what we did not see or hear at Frieze was grousing or complaints. A lack of excitement isn’t the same as a gloom or dejection. These days, that may be the only victory we can hope for.

The cat’s out of the bag on the Len Riggio consignment. (I told you it was already over.)
The New York Times reported yesterday that Christie’s had won the bake-off between the two top auction houses. The Times piece also included an unnecessary but highly suggestive statement from Riggio’s widow, Louise, averring that the family had a “longstanding relationship with Christie’s” and that
“the financial aspects of the deal were more appealing” than what Sotheby’s had offered.

Why would the consignor feel compelled to say she took the better deal? Because there’s been some talk that the opposite was true. And because Sotheby’s, as the Times acknowledged, partnered on their bid with Pace Gallery, which also had a longstanding relationship with the Riggios, Louise Riggio may have felt she needed to explain herself.

For both Sotheby’s and Pace, a joint bid was
a very smart move. Pace had previously helped pull off the Donald Marron sale where three galleries—Pace, Acquavella, and Gagosian—had outbid the auction houses for the best parts of the Marron estate. A public-private partnership, if you will, with Pace selling some of the works into its network, would have given Sotheby’s the benefit of a relationship with the family. If Christie’s did indeed offer a lower upfront guarantee, the Riggios’ legal advisors surely structured the
deal to their advantage if everything goes better than expected. At least, I hope they did.

That’s it for today. Julie will be back on Sunday with gallery shows, a follow-up on sales, and a preview of the mid-season numbers in New York.

M