Opinion Columns

Modern & Contemporary May 2026 New York auctions did not prove that the art market had become healthy again; they proved that investments have become more selective. Across Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips, the season produced roughly £1.56 billion in evening-sale turnover and about £1.86 billion including day sales, but the real story was a split between trophy liquidity and a much thinner market for contemporary art of emerging artists. Trophy Names, Uneven Demand The win

Artist Tja Ling Hu’s work look increasingly mispriced relative to the depth of her contemporary artistic profile. Born in 1987, the Dutch Chinese contemporary artist builds her practice around memory, diaspora and intergenerational identity; official artist and museum biographies consistently return to her family’s migration history from China to the Netherlands as a foundational narrative. That grounding matters, because Hu is not producing decorative figuration alone. She i

Reading Charles FitzRoy’s “The Rape of Europa” sharpens a familiar but still under-discussed truth: major collections are rarely formed by taste alone; they are consolidated by geopolitical power and art market progress. Titian’s The Rape of Europa , painted in Venice around 1559–62 for Philip II of Spain as part of the poesie cycle, is not just a masterpiece of movement, sensuality and danger. Its later passage through French aristocratic hands, an English private collecti

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan occupies a paradox in today’s contemporary art landscape: institutionally established, critically regarded, yet still conservatively priced relative to her visibility. Born in Istanbul in 1984, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice that examines memory, architecture, ecology, and erasure—showing how personal and collective narratives are shaped by displacement, rupture, and the slow violence of urban change. Her profile is not emerging in the usual

In the last couple of years, major auction houses have seemed to rely more heavily on auction guarantees to keep top-tier sales moving in major art hubs like New York and London. For the contemporary art market, the guarantee has started to look less like an exception and more like infrastructure—closer to structured finance than pure price discovery. But, why would the art market guarantees be rising now? An art market guarantee—whether underwritten by the house or a third

Chen Ching-Yuan is the kind of emerging artist markets notice late: technically exacting yet emotionally oblique, narratively rich but commercially underexposed. His work’s quiet volatility—and a still-modest public profile—signals a gap between artistic significance and art market recognition, a gap that spells opportunity. Constructing the Unseen Chen builds reality out of blur. Figures float between conscience and the unconscious, dream amnesia and deliberate behavior; fa