The art world has seen its fair share of eyebrow-raising brand collaborations in recent years. Damien Hirst made a bag for Prada festooned with bejeweled insects. Shepherd Fairey displayed his street art works on digital TVs in a partnership with LG Electronics at Frieze LA. And this spring, Takashi Murakami teamed up with Louis Vuitton to release a leather goods collection.
But here’s a new alliance that wasn’t on our 2025 bingo cards: Today, September 8, Independent 20th Century announced a partnership with Sotheby’s, marking the first such collaboration between an auction house and an art fair, two distinct models for selling modern and contemporary art.
A staple of the city’s art fair circuit for the past 15 years, Independent’s dedicated modern art show will leave its home at Casa Cipriani within the Battery Maritime Building and trek uptown into the Marcel Breuer’s Madison Avenue landmark from September 24 to 27 next year, a few weeks after the fall art season typically begins. It will also roughly double in size to include more than 50 galleries.
In a press release, Independent founder Elizabeth Dee said the fair’s partnership with the auction house and the historic venue would create a “museum-caliber exhibition experience” for exhibitors while showcasing their rosters of artists to a new group of collectors. Sotheby’s Global Head of Fine Art Madeline Lissner said the collaboration would “create new bridges between the galleries, collectors and the public.”
Both parties, they say, have much to gain from the arrangement.
Independent hopes the fair’s location change will spur programming, exhibitions, and audience enthusiasm around modern art, not to mention boost sales at a time when the economy is shaky and collector habits are changing. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, has been trying to attract younger audiences comfortable splurging on artwork at fairs and in online forums, though it’s unclear whether Independent 20th Century attracts that collector base.
“It’s sort of that uptown-downtown divide,” Andy Massad, an art advisor and private dealer with Masaad Fine Art, told Hyperallergic. “This introduces a new generation to the brand. Sotheby’s has been making a big push into other luxury items to appeal to the same generation, not just the fine arts market, so this would be a way of pulling that base up.”
The announcement comes amid reports of a lagging art market. According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, auction sales dropped by 25% in 2024, though private transactions rose, possibly a sign of increased uncertainty among collectors. Sotheby’s global sales fell 23 percent to $6 billion from $7.8 billion in 2023, while its fine art sales in particular dropped 31 percent over the same period.
Though more difficult to quantify, the impact appears to be felt by art fairs, too. The Art Dealers Association’s (ADAA) annual Art Show, an anchor of New York’s fall fairs, abruptly halted its 2025 edition this summer, insisting that the decision “was not driven by market forces, exhibitor contraction, or diminished sales,” while NADA cancelled its Paris iteration with no public announcement.
Caren Decter, a partner at the art law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, said that Sotheby’s teaming up with an art fair was not completely surprising given that the art market has been softening for several years.
“There’s always been some sort of tension between gallerists and auction houses, because they operate in competition with each other,” she told Hyperallergic. “It’s a hard time for the art market right now, but maybe this is where we’re going to see interesting new collaborations and energy injected.”
That energy is nothing new in the gallery space, where dealers have been teaming up for years now. Last year, six galleries partnered up to launch a new exhibition space, The Campus, in an abandoned high school in Upstate New York. Transmitter and Tiger Strikes Asteroid have shared a space in Brooklyn for over a decade, a communal model that’s now being embraced by others, such as Proxyco and Instituto de Visión.
Massad doesn’t believe there will be much conflict between Sotheby’s, which generates interest in order to sell a work for as high a price as the market will pay, and galleries, which manage sales but also build an artist’s career by placing their work in museum exhibitions.
But he also isn’t optimistic about the trend.
“People are wondering what is working or what will work in the future,” he said. “It could be just a thing that provides enough short-term benefit that it’s worth trying, but I don’t think it means there’s some new model evolving from this.
Valentina Di Liscia contributed reporting.
