Brian Boucher of ARTnews on Why the Art Market “Stopped Making Sense” in 2025

In this special end-of-year episode of the ArtTactic Podcast, host Adam Green is joined by Brian Boucher, senior market reporter at ARTnews, to unpack one of the most confounding years the art market has seen in recent memory. Building on Boucher’s recent ARTnews article in which he described the year as “the year the art market stopped making sense,” the conversation explores the sharp contrasts between record-setting auction sales and softer performances elsewhere, the wildly different energy levels across major art fairs and what the wave of gallery closures might signal about deeper structural pressures in the gallery model. They also dig into the rise of increasingly fragmented micro-markets driven by individual artists and career stages, and why this makes it so difficult to draw broad conclusions about the market as a whole. The episode closes with a forward-looking discussion on how collectors, galleries, and auction houses are feeling as they head into 2026, and whether cautious optimism may finally be taking hold.