🔥 Fair Game + Stik

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HEY Y’ALL!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the Chico da Silva 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

Today we have Stik, clean street cred at sensible prices. Plus, Art Basel’s ruthless math: mega-galleries flex, mid-tier dealers struggle to survive.

-Today’s Catch-

Stik

💭 My 2 Cents: I love when street art goes full capitalist, especially when it plays coy about it. Take Stik’s Onbu (Piggyback) (Blue), a quietly fierce piece from 2013, hand-crafted in Japan and loaded with charm. Fine, it’s just two minimalist stick figures getting cuddly on rice paper, but the woodgrain texture alone makes most recent street-art prints look like overpriced inkjet jobs. Stik hits that sweet spot: street cred with blue-chip finesse.

🔑 Key Numbers: You're looking at edition 5 of only 15, priced at £17,000, still sensible compared to other Stik hits like Liberty, where full sets fetch north of £160k. Plus, turnover for Stik’s prints dropped 75% from the 2021 peak (£786k) by 2024, thinning the herd of speculators and leaving better value on the table.

🧠 Why It’s a Smart Pick: You’re snagging premium street art in an undersupplied segment, not some cookie-cutter Banksy postcard. If you trust genuine scarcity (edition size: 15) and historic market corrections (like this 75% print-market reset) this piece hits the sweet spot of collectability without overpaying for hype.

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-In a Minute-

🔥 Words I Like: grind, flashy, survival

Fair Game

I’ve been scrolling through Art Basel Paris 2025’s exhibitor list, and honestly, it feels like staring at two completely different realities.

On the one hand, you’ve got mega-galleries—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Zwirner—rolling into Paris like a Formula 1 team: polished, well-funded, flashy. For them, this fair is pure optics, a chance to flex muscle and maintain their market dominance. Booth costs are marketing expenses; actual sales are secondary.

Then there’s everyone else—the mid-tier dealers, for whom fairs are becoming an exhausting grind. These galleries are trapped in a brutal math equation. The recent Art Basel & UBS report puts it bluntly: 43% of galleries reported declining profits last year, with fairs swallowing a jaw-dropping 27% of their operating budgets.

Privately, mid-tier dealers admit the obvious: they attend because missing out means losing relevance, yet attending means risking financial disaster. They hope for just enough sales to cover their bills, but they know margins vanish with every hidden cost—shipping, lighting, last-minute flights.

And here's the rub: the floor price per booth doesn’t discriminate. Mega-galleries comfortably absorb overhead and write it off as global branding. For mid-tiers, that same overhead is existential.

Collectors need to recognize this split reality, because it directly affects deal-making. Smaller dealers will arrive hungry, stressed, and ready to negotiate aggressively. Meanwhile, the mega-gallery booths will be largely performative—stocked with pieces priced for prestige, not rapid turnover.

With the exhibitor list now out for Art Basel Paris, keep an eye on who vanishes from next year’s circuit—that absence will reveal exactly how unsustainable the fair model has become for mid-sized galleries. The market’s flashy side might dominate headlines, but underneath, it's pure survival mode.

-Whenever You Are Ready-

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See you soon!

-Alvaro (@theartmarketguy)

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Disclaimer

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.