01First, the work itself
Before I look at a single market signal I want to know whether the practice is going anywhere. Is there a body of work rather than a successful picture repeated? Has it developed over time in a way that suggests the artist is answering their own questions rather than the market's? Can I look at five years of it and see a line of thinking?
This is the least quantifiable part of the job and the part I would defend hardest. An artist whose work is genuinely developing survives a cooling market. An artist producing variations on whatever sold last season generally does not.
Then, who is standing behind it
Representation tells you what a serious professional was willing to stake their own reputation on. A gallery that has supported an artist through several shows, placed work thoughtfully and invested in production is making a long-term bet, and that bet is informative.
Institutional interest is the slower and stronger version of the same signal. Museum acquisitions, curated group shows at credible venues, inclusion in serious public collections and critical writing by people with something to lose all take years and are hard to manufacture. I weight them heavily precisely because they cannot be bought quickly.
- Depth of gallery relationship, not just the gallery's name
- Museum and public-collection acquisitions
- Curated inclusion at credible institutions
- Substantive critical writing, not press releases
- Whether the artist's placements suggest a considered strategy
The market signals, read carefully
Auction data is the most available evidence and the most frequently misread. A handful of strong results does not establish a market; it establishes that a few specific works found competitive bidders on particular days.
What I actually look at is depth and consistency. How many works have sold publicly, across how many years, in what range, and with what proportion failing to sell? A record that is thin, very recent and rising steeply is a risk indicator, not a credential — it usually means demand has outrun the supply of good examples, and the correction arrives when supply catches up.
I also look at who is selling. A wave of works from the same recent period hitting the block together generally means people who bought early are exiting, and that tells you something about what the informed money thinks.
What I ignore
Social following, in isolation. It measures reach, not the depth of the collector base that determines whether a market holds.
Waiting lists, as evidence of value. A list is a sales instrument as often as it is a fact, and its length is not independently verifiable.
And the argument that an artist is undervalued relative to a peer. Two artists are rarely as comparable as a pitch needs them to be, and the comparison is usually assembled after the recommendation rather than before it.
The last question
At the end I ask myself one thing: if the market for this artist went quiet for five years, would my client still be glad they own this work?
If the answer is yes, the market question is a secondary one. If the answer is no, then what is actually being bought is momentum — and momentum is the one thing in this market that reliably reverses.
