Local Markets, Global Clashes, and Art Justice

Artnet News is looking at what Germany’s art market reveals about the limits of localism, and it starts with dealers literally following their buyers. Art Cologne revived a satellite edition in Palma de Mallorca, running April 9 through 12 at a beachfront congress center, while Art Düsseldorf opens next week with a record 119 galleries. That expansion is happening alongside a slumping market: the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report shows average dealer sales rose 2 percent across E.U. markets from 2024 to 2025, but Germany’s sales contracted by 4 percent. A tax fight did end with art sales tax lowered back to 7 percent from 19 percent, and Thomas W. Rieger of Konrad Fischer Galerie said “we can all see and feel recovery.” Still, dealer Daniel Wichelhaus of Société said the cut “is not transformative,” and structural costs like the Künstlersozialkasse levy remain a thorn.

Hyperallergic’s “Trump’s Clash of Civilizations” frames the week with a blunt political jolt: it notes that just days ago, the president of the United States threatened to annihilate Iran’s “whole civilization,” and says that when the cannons finally go silent, Americans may ask which civilization should worry more about its future. From there, the roundup moves through art and institutions: Ed Simon considers Salvador Dalí’s “Nuclear Mysticism,” and John Yau reflects on Jasper Johns’s decades-long career. It also flags a fiery rebuttal by Aruna D’Souza to an essay by artist Josh Kline that made noise in the New York scene, plus an interview by staff reporter Rhea Nayyar with the duo behind Hilma’s Ghost. On the news front, it reports that Melissa Chiu will join the Guggenheim Museum as its new director this September after 12 years at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.

ARTnews reports that the 13th edition of Expo Chicago is “buzzing” this week, with museum directors, curators, and collectors descending on Navy Pier. The fair is smaller than in past years, with 130 exhibitors from cities including New York, Tokyo, Memphis, London, Buenos Aires, and Lagos. John Corbett of Corbett vs. Dempsey said the scaling down “allowed for a raising of the bar” and made it “a more manageable size.” Among ARTnews’s five standout presentations: Patel Brown shows Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, with small works offered for as little as one thousand dollars. Les Enluminures brings the Grammont Missal, a 1500s Belgian illuminated manuscript priced at five hundred seventy five thousand dollars with details shared by founder and president Sandra Hindman. Bockley Gallery shows Pao Houa Her’s portraits, editions of three priced twelve thousand dollars to seventeen thousand five hundred dollars rooted in Hmong histories tied to Laos and the Vietnam War.

ARTnews is reporting that Celeste Dupuy-Spencer died at her home in Los Angeles on Friday. She was 46. Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which is set to open a Dupuy-Spencer show in LA next week, announced her death on Saturday morning but did not state a cause. The obituary describes a painter who moved between unflinching political scenes and tender intimacy, saying she painted “things that are meaningful to me.” In 2021, she was profiled by multiple magazines for painting the January 6 insurrection; the resulting work, Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2021), depicts a chaotic crowd before the Capitol, includes Sigmund Freud, and takes its title from a line in Interpretation of Dreams. She told Artnet News she was thinking about how outside disturbances enter dreams—and about the dream as a critique of the American Dream. She was born in New York in 1979; her father was novelist Scott Spencer.

That’s it for today’s download—links to every story are waiting in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use, and until then, Chinga la migra

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