Time has become a strange and elastic thing in the post-Covid era. Since President Donald Trump reentered office on January 20, his administration has “flooded the zone” with executive orders, outlandish statements, and social media posts both aggressive and digressive. The cumulative result is a year in which each week has seemed to last, for some for an eternity.

So, looking back on 2025, it is exceptionally challenging to boil down what happened in the art market. There were so many mixed, contrasting, and difficult-to-interpret signals that it might be most accurate to quote the Talking Heads and say, this was the year the art market stopped making sense.

“Everyone has a slightly different take,” said Natasha Degen, chair of the art market studies department at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (and taking up a new post in January as director of the New York campus of Sotheby’s Institute). That’s an understatement. In November, Gray Market columnist Tim Schneider went so far as to diagnose a metaphorical case of body dysmorphia among art market observers, saying that it’s incredibly hard to get an accurate read on its shape and size.