| Hi, I’m James Tarmy. Of the many conversational tropes I encounter as an arts columnist, “Do you know X artist in my collection?” followed by some variation of “They are very important, please agree with me” is probably the one that makes me cringe (internally) the most.  Leonora Carrington’s Sueño de Sirenas (Mermaid's Dream) from 1963 will be offered at Di Donna gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland for $9.5 million. Source: 2025 Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Not because I’m unused to speaking enthusiastically about art and certainly not because I care that someone’s proud of what’s on their wall. They should be! (Usually.) My problem—and to be fair, it’s a “problem” with the same gravity as a melting ice cream cone—comes from having to dance my way through the conversation without saying the quiet part out loud: The artist in question isn’t as universally important as you think. Yes, they might just have had a solo museum show and gotten glowingly reviewed, and there’s no doubt that they’ve been the subject of a large, glossy new book filled with scholarly essays, but even then, they’re probably nothing more than a hometown hero. I’ve watched British collectors stunned to discover that artists they consider epochally famous (Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas) are afterthoughts in New York. And Los Angeles collectors might be mystified that their extremely expensive paintings by Mark Grotjahn continuously disappoint at auctions in New York and London. Art might be universal, but the markets for the makers of it tend to be regional. The logic for this isn’t particularly mysterious. Artists are represented by dealers; dealers tend to have a limited scope of clients; those clients tend to buy what their friends buy, which leads to a localized homogeneity. As anyone who goes from Dallas to San Francisco to New York visiting living rooms can attest, taste is a subjective, varied thing.  New York auctions in May weren’t great (this Magritte just cleared its low estimate at Christie’s), but dealers are hoping the fair next week in Basel jump-starts a sputtering trophy market. Source: Christie's This is top of mind as Art Basel in Switzerland is about to begin. (The Unlimited sector opens to VIPs on June 16; the main fair opens to VIPs on June 17; public days are June 19–22.) Overall, the market has been in a rut for years now. In this climate, every sale, no matter how small, can have a material impact on a gallery’s economic viability. Meanwhile, there’s been some chatter about how Americans are skipping the fair this year and saving their time and money for Art Basel’s Paris edition in October. If that’s true (and we won’t know until the fair opens), it would mean that sales will be heavily skewed to art favored by Europeans. That’s good news for galleries that have brought work tailored to that clientele, and potentially very bad news for the ones that didn’t. We’ll find out soon! Connect with James via email. | 
