The price is right? Galleries would ‘rather not say’

Marc Spiegler, the director of the Art Basel fairs, believes that art dealers may need to be more transparent about pricing if they are to compete with the auction houses. In a presentation prepared for the Talking Galleries conference in Barcelona in early November, Spiegler said that the fact that auction houses provide the only publicly available prices for art means that the market is “at [their] mercy”. In this way, the auction houses have been allowed to “define what is a