{"id":1834531,"date":"2026-03-19T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1834531"},"modified":"2026-03-19T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T09:00:00","slug":"sothebys-and-gagosian-veteran-publishes-history-of-art-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1834531","title":{"rendered":"Sotheby\u2019s and Gagosian Veteran Publishes History of Art Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gagosian-Trading-Beauty-Valentina-Castellani-e1773850328531.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhen Valentina Castellani was invited to teach a class at New York University on the history of the art market from the Renaissance to today, she came up against one obstacle in her preparation of the syllabus, even despite her expertise in the matter, with longtime art market experience at both Sotheby\u2019s and Gagosian.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI couldn\u2019t find a book that actually covered all this span,\u201d she said in a phone interview. \u201cThere are excellent books and academic studies on many of these periods, but I couldn\u2019t find one that gave the whole panorama.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAiming to fill that gap is her forthcoming book Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery<\/em>, to be published by Gagosian itself. (The book was complete by the time Gagosian made the offer, Castellani said, and the gallery and the dealer had no input on its contents. According to Castellani, the book hardly mentions the gallery\u2019s famed founder, Larry Gagosian.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFeatured on the cover is a new artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, and inside is an introduction by New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni. It will be available from the Gagosian Shop for $40 on May 1 and will be distributed by Rizzoli in the fall.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the earliest times described in the book, the Catholic Church and the aristocracy drove the art market. She then ranges over subjects including the birth of the first free market in 17th-century Holland, followed by the establishment of state-supported and -controlled academies and royal manufactories under France\u2019s King Louis XIV. Alongside the birth of Impressionism came the inception of the gallery system, conceived by the early Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. That system has grown by leaps and bounds ever since, even to the degree that art galleries stage museum-caliber exhibitions. The growth of markets in China and the Middle East come under consideration, as do changes to the market after the Covid-19 pandemic, including the rise of digital technologies and demographic and generational shifts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Valentina Castellani.<\/span>Courtesy Valentina Castellani<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tKey historical developments in the auction world also come under consideration, such as the sale of Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s Salvator Mundi <\/em>at Christie\u2019s New York in 2018 for $450.3 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction, as well as auctions from the Goldschmidt Collection at Sotheby\u2019s London in 1958 to Damien Hirst\u2019s auction of his own fresh-from-the-studio works in the sale \u201cBeautiful Inside My Head Forever\u201d at Sotheby\u2019s London in 2008.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe author was deputy director at Sotheby\u2019s in London and New York, followed by 11 years as senior director at Gagosian in New York, where she spearheaded exhibitions devoted to artists including Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, and Pablo Picasso. Since 2019, she has been on the faculty at Steinhardt School at New York University as an adjunct professor in the master\u2019s program in visual arts administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne essential book for her approach, she said, was Arnold Hauser\u2019s 1951 book The Social History of Art<\/em>. \u201cI studied it at university, and it goes into the economic and social circumstances in which art was produced,\u201d she said. \u201cThroughout the different market models, each was the result of distinctive economic, political, social, and religious circumstances, and each market model changes how we value a work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile today we tend to think of artists as individual creative geniuses, she said, she aims to give examples of how they were often, especially in earlier eras, very much driven by the desires and dictates of their patrons. For example, she includes the story of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, featuring Giotto\u2019s famed cycle of paintings. \u201cThe paintings were commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni to atone for the sin of usury,\u201d says Castellani. \u201cEnrico\u2019s father was a usurer, and Dante had placed him in Hell, and Enrico didn\u2019t want to follow in his footsteps, so he asked Giotto to paint this chapel. You see him among the blessed to Christ\u2019s right, holding the model of the chapel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Castellani doesn\u2019t necessarily get into the month-to-month ups and downs that fascinate art market reporters, she does make some observations about today\u2019s world, in which collecting has been changed by factors like social media and changing generational tastes\u2014but she brings a historical lens to them. For her, one striking factor about the rise of the Middle East patronage, for example, is the way that the model there looks backward to the state and royal patronage that was key in the earlier periods she discusses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s interesting to see how history repeats itself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/vet-sothebys-gagosian-book-history-art-market-1234777759\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gagosian-Trading-Beauty-Valentina-Castellani-e1773850328531.jpg?w=1024″] When Valentina Castellani was invited to teach a class at New York University on the history of the art market from the Renaissance to today, she came up against one obstacle in her preparation of the syllabus, even despite her expertise in the matter, with longtime art market experience at both Sotheby\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1834531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1834531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1834531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1834531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1834531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}