While the marquee November auctions generated a robust—and somewhat surprising—$2.2 billion total, most market watchers agreed that the real test would be Miami. The week kicked off with NADA and Untitled Art once again opening a day before Art Basel Miami Beach, both explicitly courting the mid-level and emerging tiers of the market. They offered a more accessible entry point and genuine space for discovery—as well as the clearest place to assess the market’s true health.
The openings for both fairs were packed. The atmosphere was vibrant and sales were steady—never reaching the feverish sold-out-by-noon peaks of earlier eras, but reassuring enough to suggest that this end of the market may finally be recovering, albeit at a different pace and volume than in the boom years.
New York’s LATITUDE gallery drew strong early traffic at the tent’s beachside edge, selling four to five works by Iris Yehong Mao and Liane Chu for $3,000–$8,000 in the fair’s early hours. “We are reinstalling nearly half the booth around noon to show more available works,” founder Shihui Zhou said Tuesday morning.