Last week Loïc Gouzer announced on social media that his art auction app Fair Warning would no longer submit auction results to Artnet, and that new results will henceforth only be viewable on the Fair Warning platform. He offered no explanation for this decision.

It's important to note the potential disservice that this willful opacity does to the reliability of art market services. While many of us follow the offerings and results of Fair Warning and have general knowledge of what has sold there, it is also reasonable and appropriate to expect that auction sales of significant works of art will be reported on the major third-party price databases such as Artnet and Artprice. Such reporting is part of running an auction venue.

While appraisers and other art market participants frequently have reason to cross-reference auction-house websites for analysis of certain details, it is nonetheless an expectation among us that realized auction prices will be published in the databases to which we subscribe and upon which we rely.

Fair Warning's refusal to submit price results to third-party price databases presents significant risk for errors in valuations. As one example, in November 2024, the all-time auction record for Elizabeth Peyton was set on Fair Warning with the sale of "Blue Liam" for $4,071,000, topping the artist's previous auction record of $2,645,000, also set at Fair Warning, with the sale of "The Age of Innocence" in December 2023. Had these results not been submitted to Artnet, and had someone relied only on the results published in Artnet without assiduously checking Fair Warning's app to see if a Peyton had sold there, that person could have missed the auction record and mistakenly thought that a lower price of $2,470,000 was her all-time record.

This failure to report auction sales results erodes confidence in the art market, and it undermines the one bastion of transparency that we have. Since private sellers have no legal obligation to disclose data about realized sales, we rely on auction data as the major market measure, and we expect it to be transparent and reasonably complete. Fair Warning has only made slightly over 50 sales to date. When their sales history grows, so too will this problem.

One can also consider whether the burden should lie at all on the business model of the auction price databases. As customers we pay significant fees to use their services, and we justifiably expect thorough reporting of results. Should there be any expectation that the price databases collect freely available data from an app like Fair Warning that refuses to report results?

In his January 2025 market recap in the Art Newspaper, Scott Reyburn called René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières, which sold for $121.6 million at Christie’s, the “one out-and-out masterpiece on offer in New York” in the November sales. Reyburn’s comment might be correct if his words were to be edited a bit: The Magritte was the one out-and-out masterpiece in the stratospheric market for highest-end trophies.

But the concept of a masterpiece should be understood as something that is exceptional within its own context. On the same date that the Magritte sold for $121.6 million, by far an all-time record for the artist, a record was also shattered at Christie’s for a Magritte work on paper (of the same title and subject as the painting); which fetched $18.8 million, over double its high estimate. This too could be considered a masterpiece within the context of his works on paper. On the same date, the second highest price for a Magritte work on paper was realized as well.

Sales such as these complicate the narrative of decline that many art market writers have used as a journalistic framework – and such press may even serve a self-fulfilling prophecy, scaring both prospective sellers and prospective buyers, as I have witnessed firsthand.

Without question there has been contraction in some markets in the past two years (e.g., as for many emerging artists), but in a truly recessionary period (or “slump” in Reyburn’s words), sales such as these simply would not be taking place.

One has to wonder, furthermore, what Reyburn has in mind when he says of the $121.6 million Magritte:

“[G]iven that this world-famous image was billed by the auction house as the greatest Surrealist painting to have ever appeared on the auction market, should it have made more?”

The Magritte sold for a price far higher than that of any Surrealist painting at auction or, to the best of my knowledge, any marketplace. It is hard to imagine how much more the painting could have realized on another date – and what that date might have been, given the obvious present taste for Surrealism, which could also be seen in the record-shattering top two sales of Leonora Carrington at Sotheby’s in 2024, including Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), which made over $28 million in May.