Inside the November Marquee Auctions: What the Market’s Biggest Week Really Revealed

Megan Fox Kelly recently spoke with the Observer on the tone beneath the November headlines and what this season reveals about collector psychology, provenance, global demand as well as the shifting balance between primary and secondary markets.

I would describe the tone as confident but selective. The strength we saw wasn’t a sudden “rebound”—it was the market responding to truly exceptional material. If there’s one signal that matters, it’s that demand for great works never disappeared. The narrative of a weakening market over the past six months came from a lack of supply, not a lack of buyers. When collections of this caliber appear—works with impeccable provenance and real art-historical weight—the bidding tells a very different story than the headlines.

The performance of these collections reinforces something we’ve known but often forget in the noise of the market cycle: provenance is a form of value. Collectors will stretch for works that come from thoughtful, well-built collections where the quality is consistent and the story is compelling. The Lauder sale in particular demonstrated that provenance can create its own gravitational field—buyers trust it, institutions trust it, and the bidding reflected that. It also tells us that confidence is still highest in artists with deep scholarship behind them. When a collection presents the very best examples by historically important artists, buyers step forward regardless of the market mood.

Read the full interview with the Observer here.