🔥 Estimate Game Over + Izumi Kato

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HEY Y’ALL!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the Jordy Kerwick piece I shared last day!

🔥 ICYMI – Catchs from the Last Weeks:

1. Cristina Banban, Mariana, 2020 - priced at £24,000

2. Rebecca Ness, Drawing Party, 2020 - priced at £45,000

3. Yoshitomo Nara, Girl in a Box, 2001 - priced at £22.500

Seen similar names in your own collection? You can now get an instant price range for your piece - just type the artist’s name in the chat to start.

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-Today’s Catch-

Izumi Kato

💭 My 2 Cents: Kato’s big-eyed spirit on paper at £25k looks like pocket change next to the six-figure canvases clogging Hong Kong salerooms. Felt cute, might flip later, and I’m happy to front-run the crowd before they notice small formats still count as “real” Kato.

🔑 Key Numbers: Average sold price this year sits at $94.5k, median $53.6k, so this sheet of pastel and fabric trades at roughly half the market’s midpoint. Sub-50k lots made up 36 % of historical turnover, yet 2025 hammer ratios slipped to 0.91 after a 2021 high of 3.2 - sellers are finally blinking. Year-over-year growth is down 2.5 %, i.e., the cool-off most flippers hate and value buyers love.

🧠 Why It’s a Smart Pick: Liquidity stays high, supply of 2017 pastel-fabric hybrids remains thin, and Perrotin provenance wraps it in institutional Teflon. Upside rides the next Western museum survey; downside is capped by floor demand from Asia’s folk mystic crowd. If the market tanks, you’ll still own a hand-rubbed spirit in a vintage frame - beats cash rotting at 4 %.

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Recent seller feedback:

-In a Minute-

🔥 Words I Like: hammer-ratio, Trump-slump, guarantee-bloat

Auction Gods Stop Taking Your Bids

I’ve spent enough late nights squinting at live-bid tickers to know when the room loses its nerve. This May in New York the specialists read their scripts, the paddles stayed limp, and the three big houses limped away with $1.26 billion - nine percent lighter than last year and barely half the sugar high of 2022. The aggregate hammer/low-estimate ratio? 0.89. That’s code for “we missed—and we missed big.”

Everyone wants a villain, so pick your poison. The Fed held rates above 5 percent all through 2024; leverage that once greased eight-figure bids now costs real money. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff tantrum nuked global risk appetite in April and had National Guard boots on Sunset Boulevard by May. Even the Soloviev Foundation’s Giacometti (dangling at a $70 million reserve) couldn’t clear. When a bronze Diego bust can’t find a single phone bidder, the party’s over.

But the rot is older and deeper. Guarantees ballooned again (Christie’s locked in $357 million of them) because consignors want upside without downside. Backers demand fat spread, so houses goose the estimates. Result? Reserves too high, tension too low, bidding peters out at the first climb. Call it guarantee-bloat: lots ship pre-sold, audience claps politely, the scoreboard still looks sad.

Meanwhile the buyer pool is aging out. Art Basel’s own data shows median collector age creeping past sixty and millennials treating “ultra-contemporary” like last season’s NFT drop. They’ll binge an AirBnB in Lisbon before they wire $10 million for a Color Field painting their dad already bought in 1998. Gallery overheads keep climbing, so they shove higher prices at a shrinking crowd - then tweet disbelief when the market yawns.

Could rates fall and lift all boats? Someday. Could a new wave of AI-crypto-bio-whatever billionaires decide Warhols are the ultimate flex and restart the machine? Maybe. But right now liquidity lives in private loans and back-room discounts twenty-five percent below the printed estimate. Sellers who still price like it’s 2021 are discovering it’s actually 2016, and the taxi meter is running.

So yes, the art market isn’t collapsing; it’s repricing to reality. If that feels like a downturn, that’s because the last one was papered over with zero-percent money and pandemic boredom. The new law is simple: bring A-material at a B-price or be ready to haul it back to storage.

-Whenever You Are Ready-

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See you soon!

-Alvaro (@theartmarketguy)

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Not financial advice. Frame&Flame is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions.