To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The Headlines‘DEALERS ARE MEANT TO BE DISCREET.’ In yesterday’s Breakfast with ARTnews, I noted that Kenny Schachter (in his Artnet News column) claimed the heirless Larry Gagosian doesn’t have a succession plan. This, despite the dealer assembling a board of directors to help him think through the future of his business a couple of years ago. Marion Manaker recently sat down with Gagosian at Puck’s Art of Influence conference where the audience (who had each forked out $1,500 to be there) heard them ruminate on the health of the art market. “We’re going through a kind of art recession,” Gagosian, said. “That’s probably the simplest way to describe it. Prices have come down for a lot of historical works, as well as living artists. And volume has come down. Auction houses are feeling quite a bit of pain. This is a normal cycle; to me, it’s nothing to get terribly alarmed about. It’s more about how you deal with it, because the cycles are unavoidable.” He added that there’s “an advantage for a gallery like mine in this kind of auction market, particularly because, notwithstanding the guarantee structure, many collectors are more inclined to sell things privately now, so you’re seeing a lot of very big private sales in the last six months. The problem is, we don’t have the megaphone of the auction house to trumpet our successes, because we’re supposed to be discreet.” IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT LUXURY. On October 1 and 2, Sotheby’s will put on a landmark exhibition in Abu Dhabi showing a collection of masterworks collectively valued at $150 million. Featuring Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, René Magritte, and Camille Pissarro, the house said the show marks a major cultural moment for the region. Hosted at the Bassam Freiha Art Foundation, this two-day event will be the first public fine art exhibition ever staged by Sotheby’s in Abu Dhabi, and the most valuable presentation of any kind the auction house has held in the Middle East. Many of the works have impressive provenance; Munch’s landscape comes from the collection of Leonard A. Lauder, a prominent American art collector and philanthropist. Paintings by van Gogh and Gauguin have been sourced from the Chicago home of Cindy and Jay Pritzker, founders of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, awarded to visionaries like Jean Nouvel, architect of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. A work by Magritte will also be on view, which comes from the collection of Matthew and Kay Bucksbaum. The DigestNew York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang has sparked controversy with his latest performance, The Ascending Dragon, staged deep in the Tibetan Himalayas. Intended as a tribute to nature, the 52-second spectacle has instead triggered debate over environmental harm and cultural sensitivity. [Ocula]The curator of an art exhibition on authoritarian regimes at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre (BACC) fled Thailand two days after it opened over fears of possible arrest and deportation. [New York Times] “Visualising the Supernatural” is now on at Kunstmuseum Basel, which charts how ghosts in artworks “reflect shifting anxieties about everything from technology to sex.” [Guardian]Sales at the latest edition of Sydney Contemporary, Australia’s largest contemporary art fair, have tanked for the fourth year in a row. [The Art Newspaper]The KickerFIVE TO WATCH. As Artnet News writes, “the art world is crowded, but some voices rise above.” The publication has highlighted five emerging, cream of the crop sculptors to keep an eye on. “These are the talents shaping culture today—and the ones to watch.” The list includes Canadian photographer, sculptor, and installation artist Lotus L. Kang, who was recently snapped up by Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin. Another is the sculptor Raven Halfmoon, who grew up as a citizen of the Caddo Nation in Oklahoma. She “inherited the coil method of working with clay from her Caddo elder, Jeri Redcorn. The surfaces of her statues are enlivened by the ripples of Halfmoon’s gestural mark-making caught in the stillness of time.” Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová also makes the grade. She “crafts large-scale, sci-fi-tinged installations that combine sculpture, performance, and elements of communist-era architecture using materials like cement and epoxy resin.” Read the full list here.