by Rachel Corbett, VULTURE.
The racial reckoning of 2020 sent prices soaring. Now, no one’s buying. The Black Lives Matter movement provoked museums to fill racial gaps in their collections and canons. In 2024, the wider art market cooled — notching about $10 billion less in sales than its pandemic high — and younger artists were hit particularly hard.
In the first half of the year, sales of work by artists under 40 fell by 39 percent from 2023. The fervor for Black portraiture peaked and plummeted in just four years.