The Turn to History, and to the Hand

Taste moved in two directions in 2026, and both led away from the new. One went back in time, to Old Masters, Impressionists, and artists long dead. The other went toward the hand: the small, the woven, the fired, the visibly made. The form that used to announce where art was going, the biennale, spent the year arguing about itself.

The thesis is that these belong together. When the agenda-setting exhibition loses authority, buyers and curators fall back on what is already proven or plainly crafted. What follows tests that claim against the sales and the reviews.

The canon returns

The Old Master sales in New York in February made $185 million across Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Christie’s had its best paintings sale in more than a decade, and a Rembrandt drawing set a record at $17.8 million, the art historian Bendor Grosvenor wrote in The Art Newspaper. In London in July, Classic Week made £76.7 million, up 9.4%, and about a fifth of the buyers in Sotheby’s evening sale were new to the house, Artnet reported. A bronze known as the Hamilton Laocoön sold for £13.6 million against an estimate of £2 million to £3 million, according to Apollo.

The swing was wider than one category. Impressionist and Modern auction sales rose 133% in the first half, while the segment Bank of America calls Young Contemporary stood 88% below its 2022 peak, according to the bank’s fall update. The Art Basel and UBS report had already described ultra-contemporary art as stagnant in 2025, a year in which Impressionist and Post-Impressionist sales rose 47% and Old Masters 30%.

The second movement is harder to price and easier to see. Purchases tagged as miniature and small-scale paintings rose 66% on Artsy, a figure Melanie Gerlis cited in The Art Newspaper when she linked the taste to the title of this year’s Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys. In Venice itself, Ben Luke’s review dwelt on making: Otobong Nkanga’s terraria, clay pots, and bee hotels, Guadalupe Maravilla’s woven chairs, and the Black Masking suits of Big Chief Demond Melancon. Painting, he found, was less prominent than sculpture and installation. At the Whitney Biennial, Ben Davis of Artnet read the ceramics and assemblages as personal talismans.

Museums rearranged the canon as buyers returned to it. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its David Geffen Galleries on April 19 with the collection hung by oceans and seas, not by chronology, The Art Newspaper reported. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi plans to hang Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, and Basquiat by theme beside artists from the Arab world, Africa, and Asia, according to The National.

The year’s large exhibitions were reviewed, often, as symptoms. Luke gave Venice three and a half stars and wrote that “Too often, the Central Pavilion feels aimless.” Jenny Wu of ArtReview went further and suggested that the thing being mourned in a show about mourning was the biennale form. The Whitney Biennial drew the frieze headline “An Underwhelming Show for Overwhelming Times.” In Sydney, ArtsHub’s reviewer saw an exhibition scattered into fragments. Venice’s own awards collapsed in a dispute covered in the political essay.

Fairs, meanwhile, borrowed the form. Art Basel’s first Doha edition in February had 87 galleries, each with a solo presentation, and a selection led by the artist Wael Shawky. Noah Horowitz of Art Basel told The Art Newspaper that it might look like a biennale, but everything was for sale.

The strongest objection

Two objections carry weight. The first is Gwangju. The 16th Gwangju Biennale, gathered into one venue under Ho Tzu Nyen with artist fees restructured, was called by Enid Tsui of the South China Morning Post “one of the most sensitive, nuanced and fulfilling biennale shows in recent memory.” Mark Rappolt of ArtReview was also approving. In Venice the curator Ekow Eshun, asked by The Art Newspaper for a verdict, saw a principle where others saw drift: “The West doesn’t come first.” A form that can still do this is not spent.

The second concerns the sale rooms. Auction totals record what estates release as much as what buyers want, and in May just 16 works from the S.I. Newhouse collection made $630.8 million, by Artnet’s count. The dealer Johnny Van Haeften offered Apollo a colder reading of the Old Master revival: “if you buy something at the top of the market at auction, it’s very hard to make a profit.” A turn to history that depends on a few estates and a few rooms may be a matter of supply.

The fair has built the historical turn into its floor. Survey, the fair’s historical sector, has 16 presentations from 18 galleries, with Omer Tiroche, The Bonnier Gallery, Andrew Reed, and de Sousa Galeria among the first-timers. There are 28 Kabinett presentations. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who showed paintings in Venice, is named an Art Basel Awards medalist. All of this is in Art Basel’s announcement, which does not yet list the artists in Survey.

Last year pointed the same way. The sales Art Basel chose to report from the 2025 fair leaned on established and rediscovered names: Ruth Asawa, Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, Martin Wong, Emma Amos, Eva Olivetti, and Juliette Roche, in the fair’s closing report, which gave no prices.

The museums point the same way. Pérez Art Museum Miami opens Picasso–Klee–Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen on October 29 and runs it through Art Week beside Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols and John Baldessari: The End of the Line, according to the museum’s listings. Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Gut closes on November 1, a month before the fair.

The counterweight is a short walk away. Zero 10, the digital sector described in the technology essay, shares the convention center with Survey. A visitor can spend the morning with Klee at the museum, the afternoon in Survey, and reach the generated images before the doors close. In Miami Beach the argument between the old and the new is a matter of walking distance.

Museum shows during Art Week