About Visual Art
Museums, galleries and auction houses
Three kinds of institution dominate this beat and are frequently confused. Museums hold collections in public trust, mount exhibitions and generally do not sell, and their news is about acquisitions, funding, restitution claims and what they choose to display. Galleries represent living artists and sell their work, taking a share and managing which collectors and institutions a work goes to. Auction houses run public resale, and because their results are announced they supply nearly all the price information the art market ever makes visible. A story about a record price is almost always an auction story, for that reason alone.
Primary and secondary markets
The first sale of a work is the primary market, where a gallery sets the price and often chooses the buyer, with placement in a respected collection treated as more valuable than the highest bid. Everything afterwards is the secondary market, where the work is resold and the artist typically receives nothing, since resale rights exist in some jurisdictions and not others. The gap between the two explains a good deal of the friction in the art world, including why a living artist can watch early work resell for many times what they were paid while having no claim on any of it.
Attribution, provenance and doubt
Two questions decide what a work is worth and whether it can be sold at all. Attribution is who made it, established through connoisseurship, archival evidence and scientific analysis of materials, and it is revised more often than the confidence of museum labels suggests. Provenance is the documented chain of ownership, which matters both for authenticity and for establishing that a work was not looted or illegally exported. Gaps in a provenance record are the starting point for most restitution claims, and a reattribution can move a work between a minor follower and a major name overnight. Workshop practice complicates both questions, because many older paintings were produced collaboratively under a master's name, which makes single authorship a modern expectation applied backwards.