The Groove 244 - Receipts, Not Rituals: The Truth About Art Pricing
Welcome to the 244th issue of The Groove.
I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.
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Receipts, Not Rituals: The Truth About Art Pricing
A living room installation replicating how some of the works and design pieces were displayed in the London home of Pauline Karpidas. Sotheby’s London. September 8th, 2025. (c) Guy Bell.
Art pricing has never been simple, but now it’s no longer sacred. The information is out there, the auction results are public. Bidding is global, digital, and trackable. So why are so many people still walking around with price expectations that are completely untethered from reality?
I see it every week. A collector or another advisor comes to me and says, “The gallery told me this is worth $XX.” Then I look at comps from the last two auction cycles - not the peak and anomaly of 2022, but the concrete data from the past two years - and the math doesn’t add up. The piece is 30% overpriced, minimum. When I tell them the real number, they either get angry or they go quiet. Then I ask if they’ve tried to sell it back through the gallery who gave them that inflated estimate. The answer is usually yes: they tried for months, with no luck.
Here’s the brutal truth: not because you own it, people will pay more for it. Unless it’s a masterpiece. Or if your name is Yves Saint Laurent, or Paul Allen, or Pauline Karpidas. Provenance matters, but ego doesn’t.
Pricing in today’s art world is not some mystical force; it’s a combination of facts, patterns, and market psychology. Let’s break it down.
A Masterpiece Holds in Any Market
A great work — truly great — sells in any market. I’ve seen it again and again.
When something is best-in-class from the artist’s body of work, institutionally supported, rare, and priced right, it doesn’t sit around. In fact, it often triggers a bidding war even when everything else is soft.
That’s because real collectors know when they’re looking at something special. They know what a masterpiece looks like, and they know what it costs to get one. When you find a work that’s been shown in a major museum, published in 10 books, has clean provenance, and represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s trajectory, you buy it. Because those are the pieces that hold their value over decades, not just auction seasons.
Provenance Still Drives Madness
The recent Pauline Karpidas Surrealist sale at Sotheby’s London is all the proof you need that provenance is undervalued until it’s the thing that matters most. Yes, the works were good. But the reason bidders went crazy and the reason it was a white-glove sale (meaning every lot sold) is because they were hers.
Collectors love a story. A mirror that sat in Pauline’s London bedroom is sexier than the exact same piece from an unknown storage unit. And the market rewards that. The Lalanne mirror, estimated at £400,000, sold for £3.8 million. That’s not just demand. That’s demand plus narrative. The Magrittes, the Picabias, they weren’t just Surrealism 101. They were part of a collection that shaped taste for decades.
So yes, provenance matters. Especially now, when buyers are more cautious, and pedigree helps them feel both safe and aspirational.
Everyone’s an Insider Now
There was a time when auctions were for dealers, full stop. New collectors didn’t know how to register, they were intimidated, they didn’t know where to look up historical pricing. That time is over. Anyone with a phone, a wifi connection and a credit card can bid now.
Apps and websites like Artnet, LiveArt, Invaluable, even the auction houses’ own platforms - they all offer public access to past and upcoming sales. That’s why it’s absurd when a gallery tells a collector a piece is “worth” $195,000 when something similar just sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for $100,000 — and the buyer paid all-in $128,000 with premium. Those numbers are public. Anyone can look them up in seconds. This isn’t 2006. There is nothing hidden under the sun.
Still, galleries push these false benchmarks because they feel they have to “protect” their artists’ markets. And I get it…to a point.
But we’re now at a stage where that protection is creating massive distortion. A collector buys based on false info, then can’t resell. They become angry at the gallery and come to me even when I didn’t help them buy that artwork in the first place. But I’m not a magician. I deal in reality.
True Story: The One That Got Away and Came Back
A man once approached me with a medium-size painting by Alex Katz (an artist whose work I have sold and bought for clients more than a dozen times). It wasn’t the best Katz I’ve seen, but it wasn’t bad either. This was 2021 - still in the throes of the pandemic and one of the strongest years for the art market on record. I told him he could sell it for $500,000.
He refused. He wanted $650,000 or nothing. He believed the Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim would take the market to a new level. I didn’t push and moved on.
Fast-forward to last month: he finally sold it for $400,000, that’s $100,000 less than I told him he could get in 2021. But there’s more: After 17.06% inflation between 2021–2025, that $500K would be worth $585,300 in today’s money. In real terms, this seller saw a loss of $185,300 and the opportunity cost of sitting on a stagnant asset during years of high inflation.
There are thousands and thousands of stories like this.
That’s the price of magical thinking: it looks like faith but ends like fiction.
It’s Not Emotion. It’s Economics
Pricing in art isn’t just a reflection of taste. It’s a system. It reacts to:
• Supply and demand
• Artist trajectory
• Auction comps
• Dealer strategy
• Narrative
• Timing
And most importantly: truth.
Price isn’t what a dealer or a collector tells you. Price is what someone else is willing to pay today. Not what they paid in 2022. Not what a show might do next year. Not what you want to believe because it hurts to admit the value changed.
The good news is that when you understand this, you get clarity. You make smarter acquisitions. You pass on hype. You buy quality. You sell correctly. And in the long run, you win.