{"id":1597073,"date":"2025-11-12T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?post_type=listicle&p=1597073"},"modified":"2025-12-01T11:22:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T16:22:13","slug":"art-power-index-2025","status":"publish","type":"listicle","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/list\/art-power-index-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer’s 2025 Art Power Index: The Art Market’s Most Influential People"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

POWER WILL ALWAYS BE THE REAL COIN OF THE ART WORLD<\/strong>, regardless of how many dollars enter a gallery’s ledger. It takes a remarkable amount of power to become the kind of person who collects art, and it takes immense power of a different kind to convince an artist that you should be the person to sell their work. When this kind of buyer and this kind of seller meet, it’s always a power play, a complicated dance of negotiation and competition. As Patrick Radden Keefe reminded us in his 2023 New Yorker profile of Larry Gagosian<\/a>, “for much of Gagosian\u2019s clientele, he is less a peer than an aspirational figure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A small number of galleries closed this year\u2014each for reasons so idiosyncratic that no narrative could be assembled from these developments one way or the other. I imagine that Tim Blum<\/a> is comfortable in his retirement, having relinquished the throne as Los Angeles\u2019s top dealer. Meanwhile, the young Angeleno Matthew Brown proved that savvy up-and-comers can still make a splash with a recent expansion to New York, where, this year, he stole living legend Carroll Dunham from Gladstone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hauser & Wirth had a good year, not that they’ve ever had a bad one. This spring, several of their artists opened exhibitions at three of New York’s top museums, including Amy Sherald at the Whitney Museum of American Art<\/a>, Jack Whitten at the Museum of Modern Art and Rashid Johnson at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum<\/a>. That’s a rare accomplishment, even for a gallery with pockets as deep as Hauser’s\u2014shoutout to Marc Payot. Next year, the gallery will open a space in Palo Alto, following Marc Glimcher and Pace in their quest to determine whether or not tech guys will ever collect anyone besides Alec Monopoly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issy Wood impressed a certain set by rebuffing Gagosian in that New Yorker profile, but absorbing young artists has become a trend for the blue chippers, in part because their lower price points represent the amount of money that collectors today want to spend. David Zwirner has recently absorbed Yu Nishimura, Sasha Gordon and Emma McIntyre, and the gallery’s space at 52 Walker feels like a farm team. In Mexico City, where young artists abound, kurimanzutto takes the opposite approach, distinguishing itself by staging museum-quality exhibitions with the biggest names possible, which can be confirmed by anyone who saw their Haegue Yang survey<\/a> during ZONAMACO this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this iteration of our Art Power Index are a number of auction-world personalities, and here again, we must talk about the New Yorker, because the auction world is a duopoly, and the story of Christie’s success is also that of Sotheby’s failure. Sam Knight’s recent profile of Patrick Drahi<\/a>, who purchased the house in 2019, implies that the owner is less concerned with success than with lining his pockets and giving his children jobs. Hong Kong rainmaker Patti Wong left in 2022 after Drahi put his son Nathan in charge of the formerly successful office. Now, “literally half of the H.R. department\u2019s job is trying to manage Nathan\u2019s damage.” At least Guillaume Cerutti and Alexander Rotter have been having a good time\u2014at the auction previews in the spring, Rotter could be seen palling around with his former coworker Lo\u00efc Gouzer<\/a>, who brought his Fair Warning startup venture to Christie’s that season. The two were so ebullient you would have never suspected that, according to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report<\/a>, public auction sales were down 19 percent, or $25.1 billion\u2014the steepest fall since 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clare McAndrew, author of that report, appears on this power list because it remains authoritative despite recent forays into the space by outlets such as Artnet and Artsy. This is, perhaps, a testament to the Art Basel brand. Honcho Noah Horowitz and Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs Vincenzo de Bellis must be doing something right; everyone who’s anyone went to Art Basel Paris this year. On the other side of that particular duopoly sits Ari Emanuel, who took personal ownership of the Frieze fairs (via new venture MARI) from his agency Endeavor, which went private this year. Even when sales at the fairs are down\u2014and they are down, representing just 31 percent of annual sales for galleries from a pre-pandemic high of 43 percent\u2014the fairs themselves always seem to make money through their booth fees and ticket sales. Who doesn’t like it when the circus comes to town?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all that power pales in comparison to the kind exercised by museums. This year saw the loss of Agnes Gund<\/a>, the patron par excellence, and the continued rise of MoMA’s young board president, Sarah Arison, deemed “her generation’s Agnes Gund” by Town & Country. Max Hollein remains his generation’s Max Hollein, ubiquitous as New York gallery-opening scenester despite moonlighting as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year’s opening of that institution’s refreshed Rockefeller Wing shows its dedication to new ideas<\/a>, and they’re already on to the next project: a new wing that promises 50 percent more gallery space for the museum’s 20th- and 21st-century collections. Across the country, construction has nearly been completed on Michael Govan’s brand-new LACMA<\/a>, which was designed by Peter Zumthor and promises to reshape the social fabric of the city. If that isn’t power, what is?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep reading for more insight into the people whose actions, tastes and endorsements move the needle on valuation and the people who decide who gets in and what gets seen (and what gets left off the gallery wall). Each year, our Art Power Index spotlights the figures shaping how capital and vision move through today\u2019s art world. It turns out that the reports of the art industry\u2019s demise were premature, but it is changing, and our 2025 honorees are the ones reinventing its structures and steering its evolution into unexpected new territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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