The Baer Faxt Podcast

Twelve hours after the Phillips and Sotheby’s evening sales, Josh Baer sits down with Anika Guntrum, Managing Director in Europe for Gurr Johns. She spent 28 years in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department before crossing to the other side of the paddle. Does priority bidding actually make a room more competitive? If the guarantee has become the market price, is anyone still bidding against it — and is a guaranteed sale a real price at all? Does an Ellsworth Kelly mean the same thing in Doha, London or Shanghai as it does in New York? All this and more, after the jump. We’ll be back next week for the Paris sales — watch this space.

The morning after Christie’s London evening sale of Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection and the 20/21 Evening Sale, Josh Baer sits down with London dealer Timothy Taylor to unpack the results. They cover why collectors of a certain age are deaccessioning and starting over, Hurvin Anderson’s £4.6m hammer, and why the de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly might have underperformed. The conversation then turns to the UK market: the collector base Saatchi and Serota helped build, the wealth that left Britain returning for Frieze week, Tim’s 15 years of building in China, and why the real crisis in the gallery world is expenses, not sales. The Baer Faxt Podcast: art market intelligence from inside the room. Want to know who bought what, and who tried to? Subscribers to The Baer Faxt Newsletter receive our post-sale reports during marquee sales in New York, London and Paris including buyers and bidders. Head to www.thebaerfaxt.com to subscribe.

When Mary Stanley started her Young Collectors Club in Atlanta in 2006, it had two members. It now has 300, around 75 of them serious collectors. Josh Baer, who ran a New York gallery forty years ago, recalls having maybe one client in the entire city. Recorded on the opening day of Atlanta Art Fair, this is a conversation about how a collector base gets built from nothing, and what it takes to keep artists in a city rather than lose them to the coasts. Stanley's definition of a collector: somebody who can't not buy art. Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded October 1, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair. 00:00 What a New Yorker needs to know about Atlanta 00:45 Institutional support, MOCA GA, and Idea Capital 01:40 The art schools, and why artists are staying 02:33 Building a collector base: two members to 300 03:24 What a collector is, and what patronage looks like here 04:59 Inside the club: collectors' homes, art trips, and networking 06:37 Are galleries treating people better now? 09:43 Wearing several hats, and the artists she's watching

Mark Bell is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Family Office Solutions at Balentine, which manages around $9.5 billion for 300 families, and for a long time has taught a course at Emory on art as an emerging asset class. He thinks art is a financial asset. Josh Baer, forty years into watching collections get built and dispersed, does not. Recorded on the opening day of Atlanta Art Fair, this is a conversation about what art is worth and what kind of thing it is. Bell makes the case for a complex asset with a consumptive component — nobody loves their Microsoft stock, but almost nobody buys art without loving it. Josh's answer is that the loving is exactly what makes it something other than an asset. Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded October 1, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair. 00:00 Atlanta on the fair calendar, and what it means for the Southeast 04:10 Buying without seeing: PDFs, the pandemic, and Teterboro airport 06:07 Is art a financial asset? 07:59 Fractionalization, and why nobody wants one-eighth of a Ferrari 10:02 Where the returns actually are: Basquiat, British Rail, Yale 13:03 Buy what you love — and what wealth management missed for decades 16:21 Store of value, transaction costs, and the case for an opaque market 19:52 AI, authentication, and the artists he'd point you to

Sarah Higgins has curated more than 40 exhibitions for institutions like MOCA Georgia and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and led Art Papers, the country's longest-running nonprofit art journal, since 2018. This year, Higgins is the guest curator of the Atlanta Art Fair, where she's brought together three Georgia artists who work through absurdism and irreverent humor. She joins Josh Baer to talk about what happens to criticism when the authority to assign value moves (a crisis for some, democratization for others), why negative reviews now get aimed at institutions rather than artists, and why a city with this much art has so little to show it in. Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded in partnership with AAF on September 28, 2026. 00:00 Intro: regional art fairs, and Printed Matter at PS1 02:10 Artist books, Nexus Press, and the return of the object 03:25 Criticism in crisis — or democratization 08:15 Greenberg, the glossies, and writing for an audience of three 09:15 Atlanta's institutional gap and Art Papers ending after 50 years 10:45 The state of the Atlanta market 12:45 The plane crash the city can't stop explaining itself by 13:30 Spelman, the AUC, and Black art in Atlanta 17:35 Two artists worth knowing: Jill Frank and Sergio Suárez 19:50 Special projects: Dada, absurdity, and the three artists for Atlanta Art Fair's Special Projects