Welcome back to Wall Power. It’s preview week for the big show: the May sales in New York. I’m Marion Maneker, and I’ll be your guide.

If you haven’t been following along, the art market exploded during 2021 and 2022, fueled by the pandemic-era sugar high. It contracted last year, although there were surges of excitement surrounding the never-before-seen private collections of Harry and Linda Macklowe, Paul Allen, and others. Last year, we saw Emily Fisher Landau’s formidable collection sold, too.

This season, however, we’re going to get a chance to see the art market “naked.” Without the freight train of a multi-hundred-million-dollar single-owner sale, the specialists at the auction houses have had to pursue the works they believe will attract enough bidders to build meaningful competition. The results of these sales, in turn, will give us much more raw data about the direction of the market. More on that below the fold.

• Arne’s latest discovery: In 1960, Arne Glimcher founded Pace Gallery at 125 Newbury Street in Boston. His initial success as an art dealer was built upon a number of different artists, many of them abstract painters, like Mark Rothko, and a number of them women, including Agnes Martin. A couple of years ago, long after handing over the reins of his now-international multi-space gallery to his son Marc, the 86-year-old returned to his roots by opening 125 Newbury as a “project space” in Tribeca. Most of the shows have had an elegiac quality as Glimcher looks back on his exceptional career at the center of what seems, at times, to be a fading culture of modernism.

  On Friday, he opened a show of bright, mind-bending abstract paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Quin. Lauren Quin: Logopanic, as the show is styled, is her first New York gallery show. She has already had out-of-town success at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles two years ago, and in Tokyo last year. Like Ilana Savdie and Lucy Bull, Quin composes her images out of vivid, almost garish colors and novel abstract forms, and the appetite for her work lit the auction market on fire even before her New York debut. Two years ago, while she was making the transition from showing with Friends Indeed, the San Francisco gallery, to showing with Blum & Poe, her auction market saw a handful of sales around half a million dollars. That’s heady stuff even for a 32-year-old with a Yale MFA and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

As so often happens when an artist’s markets jump the gun, Quin had yet to even find her footing as a painter. When Glimcher entered the story two years ago, he was visiting Los Angeles and stopped in to speak with Jeff Poe on his way to the airport. (The relationship between Pace and Blum & Poe galleries has long been the subject of art market speculation.) Arne says he asked his friend if he had seen anything interesting lately. Poe was getting ready to put on a small show of Quin’s art, and showed Glimcher three of her works. Impressed, Glimcher asked where Quin’s studio was. It turned out she worked just around the corner from Blum & Poe’s gallery. “Despite the vast difference in our ages,” Glimcher told me, recalling the moment he walked into her studio in L.A., “something went click. I was swept off my feet. One rarely has that happen. That’s the thing I’m always looking for, seeing something I’ve never seen before. I said I’d like to give her an exhibition. She had no idea who I was.”

Over the intervening two years, Glimcher started traveling back to L.A. to see her studio. “I liked the trajectory of what was happening,” he said approvingly. His show will present six of Quin’s new paintings for the first three weeks, and then change out for another six paintings for the second three weeks. For a gallerist whose career has been so deeply invested in abstraction, Quin’s work has come as an unexpected jolt of excitement for Glimcher, who feels that there is little novelty in art today. “It’s a very nostalgic period,” he said, though it is unclear whether that’s a description of Contemporary art or Glimcher’s own mood. Nevertheless, he said, “Novelty is something that I’m very interested in.” And Glimcher thinks Quin has the potential to do something truly original all on her own. “She knows the history of art like the back of her hand,” Glimcher continued, citing Quin’s broad learning and deep knowledge. “She has her own new language of abstraction. I think she has the potential for greatness.”

• Gagosian’s Cattelan strategy: Maurizio Cattelan, the conceptual artist whose work often appears to be an elaborate put-on, just had his first gallery show in 20 years, at Gagosian in New York. The show consists of two works, and neither is very funny. In one, sitting in the center of a vast, empty white room is a white marble figure of a man in disheveled clothes lying on a bench. He appears to be sleeping (his hand covers his eyes), but white marble doesn’t display nuance very well. The figure’s pants are open, and one hand clutches his penis as the sculpture dribbles water in the tradition of innumerable fountains that portray urinating boys and men. Declaring himself a deeply political artist in the exhibition’s press materials, Cattelan and curator Francesco Bonami see the marble fountain, titled November (2024) as a “monument to marginality.”

Opposite the fountain is a glistening, gold-plated wall that measures 68 feet wide and 17 feet tall. The wall is composed of 64 individual steel panels which have been plated in 24-karat gold and modified—to use the artist and the curator’s preferred verb—by gunfire. Like a screen across the apse in a great cathedral, Cattelan’s wall of golden panels makes the gallery space into a quasi religious one. Perhaps that’s the reason the piece is titled Sunday (2024). But you don’t have to buy into Cattelan’s Catholic imagery or his commentary on American society’s tolerance for violence and inequality to appreciate the simple beauty of the panels. It’s legitimate to debate whether the work is art or the commentary is trenchant. Plenty are doing that right now on the great commons of our time, Instagram. But it’s also worth recognizing the obvious retail strategy here.

Much of the talk in the art market over the past several months has been that few works are trading above $1 million. In part because of the inherent satire in much of his work, Cattelan’s primary prices were never extravagant. At the height of his fame and currency as a contemporary artist, Cattelan’s work regularly traded on the secondary market in the seven-figure range. At one point, eight years ago, his sculpture of a diminutive Hitler kneeling in prayer titled Him (2001) sold at auction for $17.1 million.

Instead of creating a monumental piece in Sunday, Gagosian is selling the panels individually. Each panel is a little more than 4 feet by 4 feet, a good “domestic” size for collectors to live with. You can easily see one of the panels hanging in an expensive house denuded of its religious effect, its social critique reduced to cocktail chatter. The asking price is $375,000 per panel, making what’s on the wall at Gagosian right now a $24 million work (addition panels may be created). But it will be sold in pieces to make the work more easily displayed and owned. Early reports suggest the panels have been selling well.

• Independent by the numbers: The Independent art fair, which opens Thursday at Spring Studios in Tribeca, is a favorite of collectors. It’s also renowned for providing exhaustive information on the artists who will be shown. For this edition, they’ve published a breakdown of the 720 works that will be on display from 89 exhibitors and 172 different artists. Interestingly, 36 percent of the works have been made for the fair itself, while almost half (46 percent) were created by artists who would describe themselves as persons of color.

  As far as the market goes, 2024 is seeing a different set of price points from 2023. Last year, 45 percent of the works shown at Independent were priced at $5,000 or below, and 86 percent of the works were priced below $20,000. The Independent’s organizers speculate that might have been a reflection of the kinds of work artists were making during the pandemic lockdown—smaller scale, works on paper, limited materials, etcetera.

  This year, the price structure at Independent has shifted dramatically. Although 65 percent of works are still priced below $20,000, a full 30 percent are priced between $20,000 and $50,000. That’s the largest single price category at the fair. Organizers point to two possible explanations: One is that galleries and artists are pricing in the inflation of the last two years. The other is that artists have begun to produce more ambitious work in materials and sizes.

While we wait to see how it all plays out, I’ve downloaded the lot data from my friends at LiveArt. What it shows is a continuing migration in the art market, with some of that change coming from the overall market downshift.

The highest-value work of art in this season’s sales is a Jean-Michel Basquiat with an estimate of $40 million. Last year, already a down year from the season before, there were three lots over $40 million: a Basquiat, a Gustav Klimt, and a Pablo Picasso painting. Last year’s sales had a clearly dominant artist, Picasso, whose work accounted for nearly 12 percent of the presale estimate value. In other years, the market share might be even higher for dominant artists like Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Gerhard Richter, or Basquiat.

This season, Basquiat is also the top artist by presale estimated value, with $96.7 million dollars. Monet is a close second, at $95.5 million. Picasso is a distant third, at $69 million. Unlike last year, not one of these major artists breaks above 8 percent in presale market share. Does it augur well for a future market based upon a broader number of artists? Or is this just a temporary feature of a market lull?

Of course, the cycles can have brutal consequences once buyers exit any individual artist’s market. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the appearance of María Berrio’s La Cena (2012), which is being offered in Christie’s day sale with a $350,000 estimate. That’s not cheap. Except this particular work was sold two years ago at Sotheby’s for a record price for the artist of $1.5 million. That price was eventually slightly surpassed by another work later in 2022. Altogether, 11 of the the Colombian artist’s works sold for prices between $900,000 and $1.6 million between November 2021 and December 2022. After that, her sales didn’t stop, but they trailed off to prices below half a million.

This particular consignor must need the money. Why else perfect the loss after only two years? Could the work, a very good example of her earlier collage paintings, make a big price close to the previous one? Sure. Does that seem likely in today’s market? Not really.