I just skimmed this list of the “top 50 most powerful people in art” and what a load of self-aggrandising, hyperbolic, back-patting manure it is – served up by the Observer, a newspaper that likes to imagine itself as rigorous and progressive. So instead of quietly rolling my eyes and moving on, I want to unpack why this kind of thing bothers me – as someone who works with artists and collectors at the coalface, not in the VIP lounge.
This isn’t a forensic fact-check of every individual. Some of the people on the list do genuinely good work. Many are probably charming at dinner. What interests me is the story being told about power in art, and what is conveniently edited out. Because the way we narrate power in this world shapes how artists, collectors and smaller galleries think they are supposed to behave.
First, let’s be clear: power lists are PR, not diagnosis. The Observer pitches its “Art Power Index” as a map of who really makes the art world spin. The tone is breathless. Everyone is “transformative”, every initiative “bold”, “radical”, “barrier-breaking”. We are told about people “reimagining ecosystems”, “building resilience”, “democratising access”. It’s the same vocabulary you’d use for a tech founder just before an IPO.
The wider context looks rather different. According to the latest Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report, global art sales fell by around 12% in 2024 – the steepest drop since the post-Covid sugar high wore off. Public auction sales declined even more sharply, with the top end, those eight-figure trophies, hit hardest. We’ve had major galleries closing branches, mid-tier galleries struggling to survive, and multiple waves of layoffs at platforms that only a couple of years ago were being sold to us as The Future. So you have a shrinking market, a lot of people quietly losing their jobs or burning out, and simultaneously a glossy list telling us that the people in charge are “reimagining everything” and “delivering resilience”. That disconnect is, to my mind, the real story.
Take the online platforms. The narrative around their leaders is almost always the same: data plus access plus transparency equals revolution. The reality has looked a lot more like growth plus venture capital plus layoffs when the music stops. Artsy, for example, has had several rounds of redundancies over the last few years. In mid-2023 it reportedly cut about 15% of its staff. In early 2025, industry reporting revealed that the entire secondary-market sales team – around 15 people – had been let go. None of that surfaces in the celebratory tone about Artsy’s leadership and their clever analytics and “democratising” tools.
Of course companies restructure. They’re not charities. But if you’re going to sell yourself as the force “redistributing opportunity” and “opening the market”, then the people actually making and selling the art – and the employees doing the grind – deserve to exist in that narrative. At the very least, power lists that lionise “visionary leadership” should acknowledge that those visions often have human costs. Layoffs are not just “strategic rebalancing”. They are people being told to clear their desks.
Something similar happens around art fairs. Art Basel’s leadership features prominently, and understandably so. The Basel fairs remain one of the biggest stages in the game, and now they are expanding into Qatar, which is being marketed as opening new “cultural dialogues” in the Gulf. But zoom out. The same Art Basel & UBS report that the fair sponsors is the one telling us that 2024 sales declined 30%, with top-end deals falling hardest. Meanwhile, fairs remain structurally tilted towards the organisers and the very largest galleries. Booth fees are high, shipping and staffing costs are even higher, and buyers are more cautious than they were in 2021–22. For many mid-tier galleries, fairs have morphed into expensive branding exercises they hope to break even on at best.
When the Power Index celebrates Basel’s executives as “reimagining the global fair ecosystem”, it would be more accurate to say: they have built a very profitable machine that extracts rents from galleries in a contracting market, and are now looking for new regions to expand into. That is not inherently evil; it is business. But it is not the altruistic cultural service the copy suggests.
One of the more revealing subplots of the last year has been the story of Tim Blum, who closed his Los Angeles and Tokyo galleries after three decades. The spin is that he’s “transitioning to a more flexible, project-based model” – language the Power Index is very fond of. Blum himself has been less euphemistic. He has talked openly about burnout and described the current system as something that “hasn’t worked in years” for him. Reporting around the closure suggests that some staff only found out from the news, and others in a hastily convened meeting; Tokyo staff weren’t even in the room because of the time zone. The Power Index version is: visionary dealer bravely invents the future. The less romantic version is: a gallery that helped shape the contemporary market is stepping off because the system has become grinding and unsustainable – and employees and artists are left to absorb the shock.
If we are going to talk honestly about power, that is the angle that matters far more than the PR line about a “new chapter”.
Then there is the soft-power layer: philanthropists, royals, former mayors and billionaires whose cultural spending is presented as pure civic virtue. Take Qatar Museums and Sheikha Al-Mayassa. The Power Index story is of a visionary patron building a bridge between cultures, commissioning stunning museums and now co-hosting Art Basel in Doha. Alongside that, you have long-running reporting by human-rights organisations on the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, including deaths and unpaid wages linked to the building boom that supported both the World Cup and museum infrastructure. In the political press, there is near-universal acknowledgement that Qatar’s museum and sports projects form part of a soft-power or “sportswashing” strategy designed to reshape the country’s global image.
The institutions themselves can be impressive, the exhibitions illuminating. But when your list is explicitly about power, it feels disingenuous not to at least nod to the geopolitical game being played.
The same selective amnesia appears closer to home. The Bloomberg era of New York City politics, which the cultural world often remembers as a golden age of philanthropic largesse, also involved policing and planning decisions that reshaped the city in ways that were fantastic for real estate and high-end cultural districts and much less fantastic for poorer communities. Aggressive stop-and-frisk policing, later ruled unconstitutional, disproportionately targeted Black and Latino residents. A wave of rezonings facilitated large-scale development and gentrification. None of this features in the Power Index profiles. Instead, we get the purest version of the arts patron as civic saviour.
Another funny tic in the piece is the way nepotism and inherited access vanish into thin air. Several second-generation mega-gallerists are presented as plucky entrepreneurs “expanding into new frontiers”, with only passing reference – if any – to the fact that they grew up inside the very empires they are now “reimagining”. A younger generation of dealers is hailed as a radical “alternative” to the mega-galleries, while their CVs run straight through Gagosian, Pace, blue-chip LA spaces and elite MFA programmes. There is nothing morally wrong with being born into the game; you do not choose your parents. But if you want to talk about power, you cannot erase lineage and pretend this is a story of scrappy outsiders outsmarting “old systems”.
It matters whether the ladder was climbed or handed over. It matters whether you had to build your network one studio visit at a time, or whether you inherited a Rolodex of billionaires and museum directors along with the family gallery.
Then there is the auction world, which gets its own share of praise in the list as a wise steward of “blue-chip value” and a centre of innovation in a “challenging market”. What tends not to appear in these profiles is the increasing use of irrevocable bids and third-party guarantees, which can make an evening sale look buzzy while many of the lots are effectively pre-sold offstage. Nor is there much discussion of the shift towards private sales. In 2024, public auction values fell sharply while private sales through auction houses actually rose – meaning more of the real action now happens in sealed rooms, off public record, between a shrinking number of extremely rich people and their advisers.
The rhetoric is all about transparency and “market intelligence”. The reality is that the public-facing auction is increasingly a shop window for deals structured elsewhere and protected by NDAs. Again, none of this is scandalous in itself if you accept that auction houses are commercial entities, not public utilities. It becomes problematic when a supposedly critical publication frames this as radical openness rather than an ever more opaque form of financial engineering.
You might reasonably ask: why does any of this matter? It is, after all, just another list. Who really cares if a glossy magazine tells us that a handful of art-world insiders are world-historical geniuses?
I care because the story we tell about power shapes how collectors, artists and even smaller galleries understand their own position. If you only ever see billionaires framed as benevolent saviours, mega-galleries framed as nurturing families, online platforms framed as neutral “infrastructure” and new fairs framed as cultural exchange rather than market expansion, you start to internalise a very simple idea: the people in charge basically know what they are doing, and if you are struggling, the problem is probably you.
Once you put the marketing language alongside the actual conditions – falling sales, burnout, closures, layoffs – a different picture emerges. The system is wobbling, not just at the edges. A handful of players are trying to hold onto control, not “share” it. The most flattering language often attaches to the most extractive parts of the structure.
If you are a collector, this matters because you are constantly being asked – implicitly or explicitly – to buy into narratives. This artist is “the next X”. This fair is where “serious people” go. This new partnership “redefines” something. Sometimes those narratives are directionally true. Often they are just clever packaging around a balance sheet.
I am not going to pretend I stand outside the system. I make a living in it. I run an advisory, I place works, I talk to collectors about price and potential upside. But precisely because I spend my time at the coalface, not the columnist’s desk, I would like us to be more honest about power.
If you are going to publish an Art Power Index, a few basic things should be non-negotiable. Show both sides of the ledger. If you are praising someone for “democratising access”, mention if they have just sacked a chunk of their staff. If you are celebrating aggressive expansion, mention the closures and consolidations that sit in the background. Acknowledge inherited power. Say when someone is second- or third-generation in the game. It is not an insult; it is simply context. Place soft power in its political context. If a major fair hooks up with a state whose labour or human-rights record is widely criticised, say that out loud. And include people who actually carry risk: the mid-tier gallerists, project spaces, artist-run initiatives and critics who shape the conversation and bear its brunt but rarely control the chequebook.
Most importantly, be honest about the market itself. If the same year your list celebrates an unstoppable wave of visionaries, your own data partners are telling you the market shrank by double digits and public auctions fell by a quarter, those sentences should sit next to each other, not on separate pages.
At NADA, we work with collectors trying to build thoughtful collections, not trading cards; and with artists who are not yet in the glare of the mega-gallery spotlight but whose work is serious, intelligent and, I believe, durable. My job, as I see it, is to be honest about risk – artistic and financial – to resist the temptation to dress everything up as “historic” or “groundbreaking”, and to keep reminding myself (and my clients) that a painting or sculpture is a long-term relationship, not a quarterly product.
That does not make me morally superior to anyone on the Power Index. But it does make me suspicious of a format that can only speak the language of triumph. If you are a collector or artist reading the Observer list, by all means use it as a map of who currently has the loudest microphone and the biggest chequebook. That is useful information. Just do not confuse power with virtue, or PR with truth.
Behind every visionary paragraph, ask three simple questions: who pays for this, who benefits, and who got left out of the photo? Once you start asking those questions, the Art Power Index reads less like a neutral map of reality and more like what it really is: a beautifully designed, well-written piece of advertising for the people already sitting nearest the tap.
Daniel/NADA