Could the art world be entering its mindful era? After a challenging year in which international galleries, auction houses and museums have been forced to scale back their operations and make redundancies on an alarming scale, what is emerging is a slower, more considered approach to business: longer, more in-depth exhibitions and bespoke events concerned with authentic connection over flashy spectacle. Artists, too, are saying no to gruelling production schedules, while both dealers and collectors are becoming choosier about the art fairs they attend every year.
This big slowdown has been some time coming—and was first reported by The Art Newspaper last summer in relation to US museums—but the phenomenon is now being felt around the world, across all sectors of the art industry.
“The times are demanding us to be different, to work in different ways,” says Leonie Bell, the director of V&A Dundee, which opened in 2018 when the world was “a different place”. Back then there was an expectation, Bell says, that the museum would host two or three major exhibitions each year. But in 2024 Bell reduced that number to just one large-scale nine-month show per year.
A report sent last year by V&A Dundee to the Scottish government cited “a volatile operating environment” that had forced the museum to protect its future programming and staff by paring back the number of shows it does. But Bell sees the new model as a positive step. “I wouldn’t use the term cost-cutting,” she says, noting that there have been no redundancies at the institution. “We’ve remodelled to be deeply attuned to the context that we’re now working in.” Alongside the main gallery Bell has created a second space for shorter, complementary shows. “The programme is much more dynamic, and we’ve increased the free offering significantly,” she says, adding that the new production schedule has a much lower environmental impact.
Operating in a small city with a population of 150,000, Bell is aware of being able to repeatedly engage those who live in Dundee as well as appealing to overseas museum-goers on one-off visits. “It’s about pace and how your seasons develop,” she says. “TV is really good; cinema is also having a renaissance. So, what we do must be so good that people are going to come off their sofas and away from their phones to do it.”
Leonie Bell, the director of V&A Dundee, has reduced the number of major shows the museum stages to one a year.“I wouldn’t use the term cost-cutting”, she says Photo: Julie Howden
Pacing shows, developing seasons
It was both audience and staff engagement that motivated Eric Crosby to gradually dial back the number of exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, going from ten a year before the pandemic to five shows in 2024. “It was too much. It felt like a grind for museum staff, and it also felt like more than our audience could absorb,” says Crosby, who was a curator at the Carnegie Museum between 2015 and 2020 before being appointed its director.
Crosby acknowledges that financial constraints were a consideration in scaling back programming, but he believes there is something more fundamental at play. “What is a museum for?” he asks. “Art is a slow, intentional experience. We experience works of art in multiple emotional registers, sometimes all at once. And that takes time to process. So why would we create a fast museum experience for our visitors?”
In 2017 researchers found that visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago spent on average 28.63 seconds looking at individual works of art, a seemingly short span, though Crosby believes it is a matter of perspective. “I don’t have an expectation about how much time someone spends with a work,” he says. “Rather, we are thinking about what is allowed, what is provided, what is encouraged in the museum.”
As part of this bid to create a more considered visitor experience, the Carnegie’s entire collection of around 100,000 works is being reconsidered for display. Previously installed chronologically, over the next two years galleries will periodically close and reopen with new installations. “We’re developing new modes of display and engagement, and new avenues for the critique of art and historical narratives,” Crosby says. “We wouldn’t be able to pursue this if we were on that churn of ten special exhibitions a year.”
Even the biennial model is being rethought at the museum, which has hosted the Carnegie International since 1896. Initially held annually, the exhibition reappeared as a triennial in 1982 and has been held every three to four years since. “There is a similar churn within the biennial format that creates a kind of urgency. I’m curious about what happens if we can reset some of those expectations and think about how best to support artists in the context of that work,” Crosby says.
For institutions without collections, the task of operating at a slower pace is arguably more challenging. In Berlin, funding for arts and culture was slashed this year by around 12%, to €130m. Institutions such as Gropius Bau have been able to slow their exhibition turnover, but Emma Enderby, the director of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, which does not have a collection, is facing a tough decision. Her institution usually has three seasons a year with three shows per season. “The question is, can we do three seasons next year, or can we reduce the number of shows per season? Either way, there will be a reduced exhibition programme,” she says, adding that by cutting a whole season, the institution stands to lose 30,000 visitors per year.
The main driver of the trend for fewer exhibitions, according to Adrian Ellis, a director of AEA Consulting and the chairman of the Global Cultural Districts Network, is the “reduction in both direct and staff costs”. However, he points out that, although “common sense suggests the number of exhibitions a museum puts on adversely affects attendance and ancillary visitor spend”, staging fewer shows will have a relatively modest impact on a museum’s overall operating budget, because “outside of the major blockbuster territory, exhibitions that generate a surplus are very much the exception rather than the rule”.
Nonetheless, falling visitor figures have coincided with mass layoffs. At the end of last month it was reported that up to 60 roles may be axed at the Royal Academy in London, which has struggled to return to pre-pandemic visitor numbers. In New York, 20 staff are being let go at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and 47 are being laid off at the Brooklyn Museum. All three institutions cite budget deficits in the face of rising costs and falling footfall.
Aside from a decline in attendance, slowing down could also lead to a reduction in memberships, a key source of revenue for a museum. One Tate member who pays £132 for her annual membership and prefers not to be named, says the protracted exhibition runs have led her to consider cancelling her membership. “[The Tate’s] exhibitions are now on for so long, I’m not sure it is such good value for money. I ended up seeing the same show [Zanele Muholi] three times last year because it was on for nearly seven months.”
Collectors’ changing habits
The commercial sector is also taking a less-is-more attitude, in response to both a depressed market and changing habits among collectors. Auction houses have been particularly hard hit by the downturn, notably by the absence of trophy works on the market. At the end of last year, Sotheby's laid off more than 100 staffers as sales slumped.
In a bid to adapt to the times, there has been a distinct shift to reduce costly live sales in favour of online auctions, which collectors can dip in and out of from the comfort of their homes. At Bonhams last year, twice as many items were sold online as were in live sales, although the auction house’s UK managing director, India Phillips, notes that “the experiential element” of viewing and buying art in person remains crucial to business.
“Fair-tigue” became a buzzword in the run up to the pandemic, when the number of global art fairs peaked at 408 in 2019. After a sharp dip in 2020, that figure has slowly climbed back up, reaching 377 last year. But collectors are becoming pickier about the art fairs and other live events they attend. According to a recent survey of Art Basel VIPs, attendance dropped 40% to approximately 51 events a year on average in 2024 from a high of 89 before the pandemic. Some fair and other event organisers are attempting to reinvent the wheel. Last year the Basel Social Club invited dealers to exhibit (and sell) on 50 hectares of farmland in the Swiss countryside, while boutique offerings such as New York's Esther and Place des Vosges in Paris are becoming increasingly popular.
Julia Scher's owl sculptures at Basel Social Club Photo: © Gina Folly
As art fairs become increasingly expensive, and their impact on the environment a growing concern, dealers are also choosing to focus on local events and those with the best returns. In the years leading up to the pandemic, as much as 46% of annual gallery sales were made at fairs, but that share fell to 29% in 2023, according to the latest Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report.
Some dealers are eschewing art fairs altogether. After deadly wildfires devastated parts of Los Angeles in January, Various Small Fires decided not to participate in any fairs in 2025. The gallery’s founder Esther Kim Varet says the events are not going to provide the financial “quick fix” people are hoping for—nor are they sustainable for the climate. “We need to become local again, to think about the spaces that we already have that house really important exhibitions, not in a four- or five-day pop-up, but in four, five, six weeks,” she says. “That is the investment that artists want from us to adequately and thoughtfully display their work.” (The gallery’s shifting priorities may also be in part due to Kim Varet running for US Congress.)
The dealer is using the roughly $100,000 she would have spent exhibiting at Frieze Los Angeles to rent a gallery in Orange County for two years, where she will focus on giving a platform to Southern Californian artists.
The mom-and-pop gallery
The global mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth appears to be returning to a more mom-and-pop way of operating in its Somerset location, where the gallery recently scaled back its opening hours and the number of exhibitions it hosts. At the end of last summer, the gallery reduced its public opening hours from six days a week to four in favour of a more bespoke set-up geared towards school, university and patron visits. Subsequently, shows have become longer and arguably more ambitious. Its Phyllida Barlow exhibition, curated by former Tate Modern director Frances Morris, ran for seven months.
Jeremy Epstein, who has gradually reduced the number of shows at his London gallery Edel Assanti from six a year to four in 2024, says: “The idea that all galleries must follow the path established by the dealers that set the pace in the generation before has come to an end.” As for collectors, he thinks they are now more likely to travel for unique opportunities: artist residencies and other one-off meetings. “People seem to be less interested in the glamour of the art world than they used to be; the obsession with being at the most socially exclusive event feels quite passé now,” Epstein says. “Increasingly, we find that many major collectors avoid those experiences in favour of something more authentic—a genuine moment or an intimate encounter with an artist.”
The question now for dealers is how to create a space that can compete with the time pressure that drives the commercial success of the art fair environment. “The answer for us has been to go deeper and work harder on producing exhibitions that are both singular and irrefutable,” Epstein says.
This approach is undeniably attractive to artists, too. Alexis Soul-Gray, who was stung when London’s Simon Lee gallery folded in 2023 just as she was about to have a solo show there, says she has now settled into a slower, more sustainable pace of working. After a difficult time financially, the British artist was picked up by the Somerset-based gallery Bo Lee and Workman and now plans to make ten “successful” paintings a year.
Nonetheless, art-world habits die hard, and Soul-Gray is aware that she may yet be called on to produce more works. “I sometimes wonder about the pressure of knowing that there’s such a demand that maybe you’ll be asked to make 20 paintings a year,” she says. “My paintings take a long time. They go through journeys and processes of change, just like I do. So if someone asked me to be in a group show in a huge gallery in four weeks’ time, I’d really have to think about it.”
For some, those relentless days might just be over. As Epstein says: “We’re finally in an era where there’s an appreciation that this model can be defined by a variety of approaches. And that’s a positive thing. It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all hierarchical system.”
