The Baer Faxt Podcast

The morning after the Christie’s Durand-Ruel and Sotheby’s Schulmberger sales in Paris, Josh Baer sits down with art advisor Liz Sterling, who spent 15 years at Christie’s and Sotheby’s before going independent.

Why are collectors reaching for fresh, easy-to-live-with Impressionist pictures, and have some of them been burned by the primary contemporary market? What does a 45-minute, 250-bid fight over a Monet tell you about where the auctioneer thought the price would land?

At 00:03:25 the work Josh refers to is Claude Monet's 'Iris' (1924-25) which hammered for €43m (€50m with fees) at Sotheby's on an estimate of €20—30m, and at 00:15:01 he refers to Claude Lalanne's 'Lit 'Singerie', pièce unique' (1997) at Christie's, which ended up passing on an estimate of €1.4—1.8m.

All this and more in this week's episode of The Baer Faxt Podcast: art market intelligence from inside the room.

Want to know who bought what, and who tried to? Subscribers to The Baer Faxt Newsletter receive our post-sale reports during marquee sales in New York, London and Paris including buyers and bidders, straight from the saleroom. Head to https://www.thebaerfaxt.com to subscribe.

Twelve hours after the Phillips and Sotheby’s evening sales, Josh Baer sits down with Anika Guntrum, Managing Director in Europe for Gurr Johns. She spent 28 years in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department before crossing to the other side of the paddle.

Does priority bidding actually make a room more competitive? If the guarantee has become the market price, is anyone still bidding against it — and is a guaranteed sale a real price at all? Does an Ellsworth Kelly mean the same thing in Doha, London or Shanghai as it does in New York?

All this and more, after the jump. We’ll be back next week for the Paris sales — watch this space.

The morning after Christie’s London evening sale of Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection and the 20/21 Evening Sale, Josh Baer sits down with London dealer Timothy Taylor to unpack the results.

They cover why collectors of a certain age are deaccessioning and starting over, Hurvin Anderson’s £4.6m hammer, and why the de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly might have underperformed.

The conversation then turns to the UK market: the collector base Saatchi and Serota helped build, the wealth that left Britain returning for Frieze week, Tim’s 15 years of building in China, and why the real crisis in the gallery world is expenses, not sales.

The Baer Faxt Podcast: art market intelligence from inside the room.

Want to know who bought what, and who tried to? Subscribers to The Baer Faxt Newsletter receive our post-sale reports during marquee sales in New York, London and Paris including buyers and bidders. Head to https://www.thebaerfaxt.com to subscribe.

Mark Bell is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Family Office Solutions at Balentine, which manages around $9.5 billion for 300 families, and for a long time has taught a course at Emory on art as an emerging asset class. He thinks art is a financial asset. Josh Baer, forty years into watching collections get built and dispersed, does not.

Recorded on the opening day of Atlanta Art Fair, this is a conversation about what art is worth and what kind of thing it is. Bell makes the case for a complex asset with a consumptive component — nobody loves their Microsoft stock, but almost nobody buys art without loving it. Josh's answer is that the loving is exactly what makes it something other than an asset.

Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit https://theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded October 1, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair.

00:00 Atlanta on the fair calendar, and what it means for the Southeast
04:10 Buying without seeing: PDFs, the pandemic, and Teterboro airport
06:07 Is art a financial asset?
07:59 Fractionalization, and why nobody wants one-eighth of a Ferrari
10:02 Where the returns actually are: Basquiat, British Rail, Yale
13:03 Buy what you love — and what wealth management missed for decades
16:21 Store of value, transaction costs, and the case for an opaque market
19:52 AI, authentication, and the artists he'd point you to

When Mary Stanley started her Young Collectors Club in Atlanta in 2006, it had two members. It now has 300, around 75 of them serious collectors. Josh Baer, who ran a New York gallery forty years ago, recalls having maybe one client in the entire city.

Recorded on the opening day of Atlanta Art Fair, this is a conversation about how a collector base gets built from nothing, and what it takes to keep artists in a city rather than lose them to the coasts. Stanley's definition of a collector: somebody who can't not buy art.

Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit https://theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded October 1, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair.

00:00 What a New Yorker needs to know about Atlanta
00:45 Institutional support, MOCA GA, and Idea Capital
01:40 The art schools, and why artists are staying
02:33 Building a collector base: two members to 300
03:24 What a collector is, and what patronage looks like here
04:59 Inside the club: collectors' homes, art trips, and networking
06:37 Are galleries treating people better now?
09:43 Wearing several hats, and the artists she's watching

Sarah Higgins has curated more than 40 exhibitions for institutions like MOCA Georgia and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and led Art Papers, the country's longest-running nonprofit art journal, since 2018. This year, Higgins is the guest curator of the Atlanta Art Fair, where she's brought together three Georgia artists who work through absurdism and irreverent humor.

She joins Josh Baer to talk about what happens to criticism when the authority to assign value moves (a crisis for some, democratization for others), why negative reviews now get aimed at institutions rather than artists, and why a city with this much art has so little to show it in.

Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit https://theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded in partnership with AAF on September 28, 2026.

00:00 Intro: regional art fairs, and Printed Matter at PS1
02:10 Artist books, Nexus Press, and the return of the object
03:25 Criticism in crisis — or democratization
08:15 Greenberg, the glossies, and writing for an audience of three
09:15 Atlanta's institutional gap and Art Papers ending after 50 years
10:45 The state of the Atlanta market
12:45 The plane crash the city can't stop explaining itself by
13:30 Spelman, the AUC, and Black art in Atlanta
17:35 Two artists worth knowing: Jill Frank and Sergio Suárez
19:50 Special projects: Dada, absurdity, and the three artists for Atlanta Art Fair's Special Projects

If anyone can speak to the rising interest in art among sports stars, it's art advisor Gardy St. Fleur, whose education-first, community-centric approach has made him the person athletes call first. Over the course of his career, he's built a practice around studio visits rather than showrooms, working from a conviction Josh Baer heard about years ago from client John McEnroe: the artist alone with the work is in the same position as the player at center court, all the lights on you and nowhere to hide.

Gardy joins Josh ahead of the Atlanta Art Fair to talk about what players see in artists, what happens when preview PDFs stop working, and what they're each hoping to find on the ground in Atlanta.

00:00 Intro: Josh Baer and Gardy St. Fleur, ahead of Atlanta Art Fair
00:22 Who the new collectors are
01:45 John McEnroe: all the lights on you, nowhere to hide
02:50 Why galleries still make people feel unwelcome
05:00 Education before the transaction
08:00 Price points, and blowing past your own budget
10:35 Women and Black collectors reshaping the market
12:12 Keith Rivers and the same energy
13:33 Artists taking control of their careers
18:55 "Don't send me the PDFs"
20:15 One lunch a week, fifty a year
21:30 What they're looking for in Atlanta
22:15 Most galleries have a finite life
24:55 Amoako Boafo, and the mistake Josh says he made
29:05 See you October 1st in Atlanta

Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit https://theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded September 16, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair.

Art Galleries Are Still Not OK—Now What? In the latest episode of The Baer Faxt Podcast, Josh sits down with Marc Spiegler, Cultural Strategies Consultant, former CEO of Art Basel and author of the New York Times piece that set the art world talking, along with Amy Cappellazzo, one of the most respected art advisors in the business and founder of Art Intelligence Global. Between the three of them, there's over a century of experience in the art world—and they're not here to commiserate. From the structural failures that predate the current crisis, to price transparency, to a student's idea that might actually save galleries money, this is an honest conversation about the gallery model that has struggled to adapt to changing conditions. Is FOMO a business model? (No.) Is hope a strategy? (Also no.)

Out now on all major podcast streaming platforms. This episode is brought to you by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

Artist Trevor Paglen joins host Josh Baer at Art Basel Basel to talk about his curatorial vision for Zero 10 (co-curated with Eli Scheinman), Art Basel's initiative reframing what "digital art" actually means, and why the answer might surprise you. They dig into why most art made in the last 20 years is already digital art, what it was like for an artist to wear a curator's hat for the first time, and why Trevor approached the show like making his own work rather than proving a thesis. Plus: AI's inability to fail (and why that matters), the terrifying worldview of Mark Zuckerberg, why artists need a bigger role in the future of the art fair, and what the art world could learn from Jimi Hendrix.

This episode of The Baer Faxt Live was recorded on Wednesday, June 17th, 2026. This edition of The Baer Faxt Live is sponsored by Manuela New York by ArtFarm, a neighborhood restaurant and bar in the heart of SoHo, which celebrates the best of New York’s seasonal produce and has art at its heart. For more information, visit manuela-nyc.com.

Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz joins host Josh Baer on the opening day of Art Basel Basel to talk about how the organization is adapting its platform fair by fair—from the Basel Exclusive initiative (withholding marquee works from preview PDFs to re-energize opening day) to the evolution of Zero 10 and the push to better integrate digital art communities with the institutional art world. They also get into the return of high-value consignments to the fair floor, what the May sales data signals for collector confidence, the artist presence question, and why a "meet the artist" moment on the weekend might be the key to unlocking new collectors. Plus: Knicks in five.

This episode of The Baer Faxt Live was recorded on Wednesday, June 17th, 2026. This edition of The Baer Faxt Live is sponsored by Manuela New York by ArtFarm, a neighborhood restaurant and bar in the heart of SoHo, which celebrates the best of New York’s seasonal produce and has art at its heart. For more information, visit manuela-nyc.com.

David Schrader—the S in PDS (Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries)—joins host Josh Baer on the opening day of Art Basel Basel, his first fair as an exhibitor after decades as a collector and head of private sales at Sotheby's. They cover what surprised him about being on the selling side, the "elephant in the room" of Basel vs. Paris, where the American collectors went, and why the 1–5 million range remains the market's sweet spot. Plus: pricing transparency, the cost reality of running a fair booth, the advisor economy, and why Schrader thinks the market bottomed last September, but has been moving in the right direction ever since.

This episode of The Baer Faxt Live was recorded on Wednesday, June 17th, 2026. This edition of The Baer Faxt Live is sponsored by Manuela New York by ArtFarm, a neighborhood restaurant and bar in the heart of SoHo, which celebrates the best of New York’s seasonal produce and has art at its heart. For more information, visit manuela-nyc.com.

Art advisor Erica Samuels joins Josh Baer on the floor at Art Basel for a candid conversation about how the best advisors actually work — from building client PDFs and curating "mini collections" to navigating conflicts when two clients want the same piece. They dig into the difference between buying with your eyes versus your ears, the debate over storytelling as a sales tool, fee structures (retainer vs. commission vs. combination), and the ethics of working only with sellers who control the picture. Plus: a spirited round of "top five living American artists," starter art, and why there's always more art — but maybe not always more great art.

This episode of The Baer Faxt Live was recorded on Wednesday June 17th, 2026. This edition of The Baer Faxt Live is sponsored by Manuela New York by ArtFarm, a neighborhood restaurant and bar in the heart of SoHo which celebrates the best of New York’s seasonal produce and has art at its heart. For more information, visit manuela-nyc.com .

Love art, AND sport? Well, we have a doozy for you. The Baer Faxt Podcast is back with two icons: artist Jonas Wood and tennis legend John McEnroe, on the occasion of Jonas' exhibition of tennis paintings at Gagosian Beverly Hills. What do a painter and a tennis legend have in common? More than you'd think. Tune in to hear about paintings inspired by professional tennis courts, their shared experience of putting themselves on the line in front of an audience, and more.

This episode, recorded on April 25th, 2026 at Gagosian Beverly Hills, is brought to you by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

Host Josh Baer talks with Purat “Chang” Osathanugrah, a collector, business leader, educator, and founder of Dib Bangkok, Thailand's first major international art museum. Tune in to hear about Thailand's artistic landscape, the transformative role Dib plays within it, and what it takes to bring a multi-generational vision to life. First Dibs on Contemporary Art in Thailand is out now on all major podcast platforms.

This episode, recorded on April 23rd 2026, is brought to you by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

Host Josh Baer is joined by storied gallerist, Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, as the gallery celebrates its 30th year in business. Tune in to hear about her early days in Lausanne, a saucy Jeff Koons show, how the gallery has evolved and adapted in three decades, and what the future may hold. From Idyllic Switzerland and Beyond with Rachel Lehmann is out now on all major podcast platforms.

This episode, recorded on March 21st 2026, is brought to you by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

Host Josh Baer is joined by preeminent contemporary Saudi Arabian artist, Ahmed Mater in Doha during the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar to discuss everything from artistic and cultural expression in the region, Mater’s return to painting, and more than one exciting new project. To the Stars with Ahmed Mater is out now on all major podcast platforms.

This episode, recorded on February 4th 2026, is brought to you by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

On the occasion of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, The Baer Faxt sat down with a bevy of guests with ties to the region including Qatar's own Saud Alkhater, a young collector.

Alkhater tells us about the fateful exhihibition organized by Qatar Museums that inspired his collecting journey and what he thinks of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar.

Other guests on The Baer Faxt Live from Doha include Mariët Westermann, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation; Princess Alia Al-Senussi, PhD; and Jean-Paul Engelen, Director at Acquavella.

Thank you to The Ned Doha for being our host. This conversation was recorded on the 4th of February, 2026.

On the occasion of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, The Baer Faxt sat down with a bevy of guests with ties to the region including Jean-Paul (JP) Engelen, Director at Acquavella and former Americas president at Phillips auction house.

Before spending a decade as Phillips' president for the Americas and worldwide co-head of modern and contemporary art, Engelen was the Director of Public Art and Exhibitions for Qatar Museums (previously Qatar Museum Authority), where he oversaw the installation of major public artworks by Richard Serra and Damien Hirst. Now working with Acquavella gallery, Engelen tells us about the gallery's booth of Jean-Michel Basquiat's and his experience in the region.

Other guests on The Baer Faxt Live from Doha include Mariët Westermann, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation; Princess Alia Al-Senussi, PhD; and Saud Alkhater, Qatari collector.

This conversation was recorded on the 5th of February, 2026.

On the occasion of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, The Baer Faxt sat down with a bevy of guests with ties to the region including Princess Alia Al-Senussi, PhD, a cultural strategist, art world advisor, academic and lecturer with Libyan roots.

Alia has long been an advocate for the region. She shares with us her enthusiasm for cultural and artistic initiatives across the Middle East—for example, the Sharjah Biennial in the UAE and the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia—as well as some of the key differences.

Other guests on The Baer Faxt Live from Doha include Mariët Westermann, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation; Jean-Paul Engelen, Director at Acquavella; and Saud Alkhater, Qatari collector.

Thank you to The Ned Doha for being our host. This conversation was recorded on the 5th of February, 2026.

On the occasion of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, The Baer Faxt sat down with a bevy of guests with ties to the region including Mariët Westermann, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, who have world class museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and soon to be Abu Dhabi.

Here, Mariët shares with us her thoughts on developments in the region, including education and her experience in the region as the Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, Art Basel Qatar, and the significant role of women in the arts.

Other guests on The Baer Faxt Live from Doha include Princess Alia Al-Senussi, PhD; Jean-Paul Engelen, Director at Acquavella; and Saud Alkhater, Qatari collector.

Thank you to The Ned Doha for being our host. This conversation was recorded on the 5th of February, 2026.