In November 2024, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $6.24 million at Sotheby’s to purchase Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the iconic banana duct-taped to a wall. Nine days later he ate said banana during a press conference in Hong Kong.
If that reads like an inside joke with no punchline, you aren’t wrong. Mischievous Cattelan must have been laughing that day as the bids rolled in, but who was laughing to the bank? Sotheby’s, definitely.
The financialization of art has been a steady, miserable tour de force since the 1980s, a time when Americans—downtrodden by relentless recession and endless war—traded protest signs for COEXIST bumper stickers and let the narcotic rush of yuppie prosperity wash over. Art was not immune to late capitalism in full bloom. As once-public auction houses were absorbed into luxury-goods portfolios and acquired by media moguls, the art market became the playground of the ultrawealthy. Speculative purchases of works by promising art stars reached fever pitch during the pandemic, with high-value paintings promptly stuffed into storage in hopes of flipping them later for profit. And NFTs… let us not speak of those.
But art isn’t like a house or a stock. The art market peaked on November 20, 2024, when the gavel struck the auction block and the last trace of art’s soul departed from the fleshy mesocarp of a 23-cent piece of fruit.
In 2025 it all started to collapse. Christie’s quietly shut down their Digital Art and NFTs department in September. Blue-chip and mid-tier galleries alike have been shuttering left and right. As the market in Asia cools, Art Basel, Frieze, and other art fair conglomerates have flocked to the Middle East in search of the last untapped collector. Everyone is in on the joke, of course: The highlight of Art Basel Miami Beach this past December was Beeple’s robotic dogs with the faces of Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. They literally crapped reams of AI slop.
But satire loses its luster after a point. The banana has gone bad. In 2026, art is having an identity crisis; what does art after extractive capitalism look like?
One upside of Seattle being a second-tier art city—not because we’re lacking in art, but because our market power and visibility are less established than in other places—is that we aren’t hit as hard when a K-shaped economy starts to have its revenge on the market. That’s not to say artists outside New York and LA don’t feel the sting. They do. But operating on the decentralized fringe has its benefits. It also doesn’t hurt that our city has a deep-rooted sense of anti-authoritarianism that extends to doing art our own way. In that way, we’re kind of recession-proof.
I came up in Seattle’s art scene on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. There were a lot of folks like me who had never been to art school and didn’t have MFAs—artists just raw-dogging the art world, making, showing, and seeing art wherever we could. Which was literally wherever, in part because there’s never been sufficient commercial galleries in town to match the amount of good art, but also because that DIY mentality really shines when
the economy slumps.
And that’s what I love about recession-era art. Circa 2009 and beyond, everything was fair game: a studio apartment on Capitol Hill transformed into one of the city’s hottest galleries for one night each month (or whenever—there were no rules!). Also an old sweater factory in Ballard, a decommissioned BMW dealership on Pike, a cubby under a stairwell in the Central District, the back of a U-Haul on the street, an I-5 underpass at dusk. All you had to do was make a press release and it could be a thing.
It’s something Sammy Skidmore and Zoë Hensley have figured out. The organizers behind ONCE REMOVED: Art in Vacant Spaces, Skidmore and Hensley are both gallerists with day jobs at commercial galleries. Skidmore (also a singer/songwriter and guitarist for Dining Dead) is the gallery manager at Traver Gallery, and Hensley (who has a background as a visual artist) works at Foster/White. “Galleries can be really intimidating, we all know that,” says Skidmore. “People think they have to act a certain way in a gallery. We’re interested in flipping expectations of what it means to enter an art space.”
After brainstorming in the summer, they began cold-calling developers in search of decommissioned spaces where artists could play—specifically, artists whose work doesn’t neatly fit in a commercial gallery. Their first yes was a small bungalow in Greenwood. They received the keys five days before the reception on February 21; in that short time, five artists raced to transform each room. The result was a labyrinthine web of semi-interconnected installations threaded through the building, including video work by Ali Meyer projected onto a darkened bathroom window, Gaeun Kim’s delicate graphite rubbings made against a series of broken doors, and Nadia Ahmed’s beeswax-drenched reliquaries encasing found detritus like knobs, tiles, handles. Rachael Comer used cornstarch to harden a bedsheet around the shape of her own huddled body, creating a ghostly carved-out space in one of the bedrooms. Visitors peering under the covers watched as a string of Google searches (for porn, sourced from 100 friends and strangers) traced a poetic interrogation into the nature of collective eroticism, longing, and trauma. In the basement, Jenikka Cruz created the scene of a different kind of haunting: lifelike figures clustered in one corner of the subterranean dark while a droning soundscape filled the space.
“We want to act as a little eddy in the stream of gentrification for these houses that are going to be demolished,” Skidmore says, “give them one last burst of life.”
ONCE REMOVED deftly straddles both the world of the white cube and the underground—they don’t list the event address on their website; you have to email or DM for details. They foresee the project continuing as a series, each location inspiring a unique response. “You just have to be able to take no for an answer,” says Hensley about the challenge of getting handed keys to a stranger’s place. “There’s always a way to do something. Don’t talk about it, just do it.”
Another moment in recent history when art came out from under the shadow of commodification unfolded in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Arte Povera and Fluxus took hold. These movements—rooted in commonplace materials, music, and poetry—were not only a pragmatic response to global recession, but a revolt against the centering of (primarily white male) Abstract Expressionist painters in New York as the de facto lifeblood of the art world.
Arte Povera (“poor art”) and Fluxus (which embraced humor and process over product) were both intrinsically political, purposefully pushing against the commodification of art. In the age of AI—where ideation at the most basic level is becoming filtered through corporatized pipelines of prescriptive thought—imagination itself is political.
In other words, it’s time to make the art world weird again. Mess and typos make us human. Flesh and blood experiences in abandoned houses are proof of life.
It’s also a time for imagining new models of patronage in the art world. For the past four years, artist Lars Bergquist has crowdsourced funds to raise money for Free Blanket February, a project to purchase wool blankets for the unhoused. Each day in February—the coldest month in Seattle—he stocks the blankets in repurposed newspaper boxes set up across downtown. An extension of his street-art practice, or just one human caring for another? Bergquist shows how easily it can be both.
Right now there are a lot of things stirring in the fresh recession air, even in terms of commercial spaces that are bucking against the norm. Last month, 27-year-old attorney Elizabeth Hawley took over the lease at 85 Yesler Way to breathe new life into the bones of Davidson Galleries, giving its artists a new next chapter as Gallery No. 85. Next month, designer Michelle Dirkse and artist Jeremy Prim are opening Dirkse/Prim Gallery in Madrona, where they will be representing a roster of emerging and mid-career artists like Joey Bates, Mya Kerner, and Zak Helenske, whose epic, large-scale flora made of black walnut, ash, lilac, and brass will be debuting in April.
What is art in 2026? Detached from the imploded market, art is able to find its center elsewhere, a place where imagination, collaboration, and new ways of doing things are paramount. When everything is broken, including the rules, anything is possible. We are here now.