This week, one letter seemed to be at the center of almost every major story in the industry... 

When is a $20 million compensation package not really a $20 million compensation package? When 90 percent of it consists of stock awards for a company swan-diving into the abyss on your watch. 

This week in the industry, boundaries were smudging everywhere, for better and for worse...

From Chelsea to the Los Angeles Arts District, the past few years have seen a rising wave of real estate costs push sub-blue chip galleries out of key neighborhoods in art capitals on both American coasts. But with evidence now mounting that the Bay Area is (finally) enticing high-end out-of-town dealers to dive in, could the real-estate market there actually get turbulent enough to wash lower-tier galleries away from the entire city of San Francisco, if not the whole region? 

This week, four reports on the climate of art fairs and fair play...

Just as bad things sometimes happen to even the best people, bad circumstances sometimes threaten even the most worthy artistic plans. This was my first thought a few days ago, when I read that Lahore, Pakistan would open the city's inaugural biennial exhibition in November 2017.

This week, a bundle of stories that call for a little balanced handling...

Every March, The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) releases its Art Market Report on the previous calendar year in the industry. For the 12 months afterward, that report gets elevated to the status of "gold standard for current art-market data" by transparency-starved analysts worldwide. But every year, I think that the study's most useful insights are the unintentional ones lurking in its methodology and distribution. Just as I expected, 2016 is no different. 

This week, a set of stories about numbers and the dark side (in more ways than one)...

With the 2016 editions of multiple art fairs––The Armory Show, Volta, Pulse, and Spring/Break––now all running like mad in New York through this weekend, we're about due for my favorite part of the industry news cycle: the deal reports from the art-fair floors. But before we digest the pricing and piece-specific details the various media outlets will offer up over the next few days, let's first examine them from a perspective that's too-often abandoned when dealers' data is (finally) within reach. And that perspective is one of healthy skepticism.