I do this every year, maybe not in public, but I try and make sense of everything I saw, and wrote, and thought about, got mad about, argued about, cared about, took extra care to see twice, or just thought altered our past, present and future when it comes to art and culture. For the most part I can admit that 2025 was kind of shit-meets-something-is-evolving, and mostly a recalibration and an ending. The gallery world is in flux. The art market is what everyone talks about but I can’t just focus on that so I like to think of the art world: the community of artists who are making, the gallerists who are patient, the activists trying to push through this new version of capitalism and censorship. We are literally in the midst of global chaos and we need these voices more than ever, a sense of bold and thoughtful and fearless thinkers. And 2025 was messy.
We lost a lot. A lot of galleries. A lot of institutional voices. Lots of curatorial chances. Part of this is Trump, part of this is genocidal war and the consequences of speaking out, part of this is the economics of running gallery spaces and the overwhelming chaos that weekly international art fairs put on finances and where collectors seem to be focusing their own attention on. We lost Blum, Clearing, Venus Over Manhattan amongst others. The Smithsonian was pressured by what was probably going to come from way above to censor Amy Sherald. There was a losing streak that has kind of kept going right into the Fair season of NYC, Paris, London and then Miami. Even Miami felt tepid, a bit safe. No one looked like they were having a good time, to be honest. It sort of felt like everyone in the middle, upper middle and lower middle of blueish-hue-chip galleries have found one of the rafts from the sinking Titanic are safe until some actual rescue boat comes and saves them. I’m saying this is happening, but it had the sense of that.
Which is a shame because there are a lot of good shows still happening, on both a gallery and institutional level that really moved me and remind you of all that is good in art. The new Studio Museum opened in Harlem, there was Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, Linder Sterling at the Hayward, Ruth Asawa at MoMA, Sargent and Paris (and Man Ray) at The Met… Amy Sherald, Rashid Johnson, Gerhard Richter, Paris Noir, Noah Davis… I’m missing a few but you get the story there. There were amazing gallery shows, too, including Lisa Yuskavage, Sasha Gordon, Jennifer Packer, Jorge Camacho, Wendy Red Star, Christine Sun Kim, Ali Eyal, Josh Smith, Lenz Geerk, Justin Williams, Zoe Blue M, Barry McGee, Studio Lenca, Brett Goodroad… I know this is a game of how many shows I can mention, but you get my direction here, there are artists making good work and shows to spend your afternoon with. This isn’t a down year in quality, it's an odd year in terms of how we go forward.
One thing that has become apparent is that this is the year that the collector took control of the narrative. I will say what started as an offshoot has become a full blown algorithmic takeover. I personally caught some shit for calling this out around the time of Frieze London, but this newfound “voice of the people” that is actually a collector showing you their trophies and personal movements in VIP spaces and through their own taste is earnest but also misleading. I am all for the systems of gatekeeping around art being broken down and reassembled to include a much larger melting pot, but the celebrity collector being courted by art fair social media content creators has left us with a void of where we find authentic stories and content. Hopefully this trend will recede and there can be a more democratic and discerning direction for 2026 that isn’t all of us getting our own “inside the interior decorating plans” of those with the right pass.
But that said, the conversation between galleries, institutions, journalists, collectors and artists needs to get better. All of us need to be better, myself included. So much of what we do in art journalism revolves in the here and now, and we have lost a bit of putting all these incredible artists into a historical context and giving room for more overarching analysis of how communities make history. Maybe the economic and political chaos will bring these conversations to the forefront. I hope so.
I keep asking myself what I am looking forward to. Maybe the quiet, safe Miami art week to close out 2025 was a precursor to the rethink, and maybe 2026 will be the year the dust settles and a new chapter emerges. I think 2025 was the year that the crater starts to be reckoned with, and to be filled with what we find his vital.
Earlier this summer, I read this quote from HIlton Als that I saved on my phone and look at from time to time: “I think that sometimes, when we look at art, we’re hoping to recapture a piece of our past—a golden time when we had a deep and unforgettable experience with a painting, a photograph, or a drawing, when we were struck not only by its beauty but by its power to make us feel included in the world, less alone.”
Yeah, this is it. I don’t want fucking snark, I don’t want a goddam reel of nothingness, I want to get into the weeds and feel something. So what was 2025? The year we realized how much we forgot to feel. Let’s get it back.
Text by Evan Pricco
