🔥 The Dumas Playbook + Rebecca Ness

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HEY Y’ALL!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the Cristina BanBan piece I shared last day!

🔥 ICYMI – Catchs from the Last Weeks:

1. Ad Minoliti, Teteritas, 2021 - priced at £21,500

2. Roby Dwi Antono, Hanan, 2016 - priced at £1,050

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

Today we have Rebecca Ness, pre-auction buzz, post-Yale clarity, and priced at 80% below peak. Plus museum loans are ads, and Zwirner’s Dumas glow-up just set a new record.

-Today’s Catch-

Rebecca Ness

💭 My 2 Cents: Rebecca Ness isn’t cheap anymore, and that’s probably a good thing. This 2020 piece, Drawing Party, sits at £45k. Yes, it’s five figures for a table full of hands and clutter. But that’s the point. Ness was fresh out of Yale when she painted this, and it already screams her full vocabulary: crowded composition, story-layered detail, and a hint of pre-lockdown screen-life. It’s textbook Ness before her prices got spicy, the kind of work museums like SFMOMA (who already picked up a Ness piece) have eyes on. Unlike the newer stuff, this still has a bit of accidental pandemic prophecy baked in.

🔑 Key Numbers: 127 x 152 cm = big enough to own a wall. Painted early 2020, just before her auction breakout. Top lots hit $250k+ in 2022, but those were noisier canvases. This one's comparatively quieter, smarter. Oh, and it’s priced about 80% below her peak hammer prices. Market’s calmed, but collector demand’s still sticky.

🧠 Why It’s a Smart Pick: This is Ness before the flippers, before the fair buzz, before Jessica Silverman cleaned up her placement. It’s a narrative anchor from the early playbook. Buy it if you want to own the blueprint, not the merch drop.

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-In a Minute-

🔥 Words I Like: rigged, airlift, comp-stacking

The Dumas Playbook

Most collectors still think value comes from waiting, Sotheby’s $51.8 m Saunders Old Masters sale crawled along at 62 % sell-through last Wednesday .
That’s adorable.
In 2025, value is engineered, not earned.
You don’t “hope” for a price curve anymore.
You build one.

Start here: private sale to a friendly for a comp-stacking +15 % over the last public result, logged on Artnet for eternity.
Twelve months later, boom - auction consignment with a third-party guarantee; Sotheby’s Modern sale lined up 26 guarantees (24 external) even while a $70 m Giacometti tanked on the block.
That’s your new floor, already paid.

If you’ve got museum wall time, even better NGA’s “Across the Nation” tour proves loans are free nationwide billboards for lenders .
Wall-time is the new credit score, so airlift your piece into a mid-tier institution and demand a juicy wall text.

Next stop: blue-chip halo: David Zwirner’s “Circa 1995” opened 7 May and two weeks later Dumas’s Miss January cleared $13.6 m at Christie’s, a fresh living-female record.
Halo fades fast; use it to goose investor optics before the hammer hits.

Then nudge the house’s private-sale desk to leak whispers.
Scarcity plus visibility equals aggression, and database packaging means price engines recite your script.

Skip the choreography and you’re raw meat, Artnet’s numbers show dozens of guaranteed lots still hammered below estimate despite the safety net.
Museum loans are ads, guarantees are floors, private trades are comp hacks, run the system or bankroll the shark who does.

Stop “collecting” like it’s 2012.
This is arbitrage dressed in linen.

-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.