Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.The fall art season may have kicked off last week, but it’s not the openings, or even the fairs, that are generating the most talk about the market. Instead, it’s a debate over the coverage of the market. On Sunday, as the Armory Show wrapped up, Artnet News released its mid-year intelligence report, led by a Katya Kazakina analysis titled “The Storm Hits the Art Market: Who’s Getting Swept Away.” The headline was alarmist, and so was the copy. “Not a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties,” Kazakina wrote. Last time I checked, no major galleries closed last week. And all of the galleries she cited had a New York presence—no major closures have been reported outside the city, though she didn’t clarify that. She did, however, note that in nearly 20 years of covering the art market, she has “never heard people as down as they have been this summer” and declared that the “bubble has burst,” with speculators now “off flipping meme coins.” One collector warned that before the market recalibrates, “blood will flow in the streets.”It bears mentioning that Kazakina is a well-sourced reporter, who has broken numerous consequential scoops. So, it seems clear then that a number of sources did tell her how down the market is—as some dealers have told us.Still, pushback came quickly—and from inside the house. Kenny Schachter, artist, dealer, provocateur, and Artnet columnist, posted the headline to Instagram, slashed through with a thick red X. “Enough!” he wrote. “I’ll save you the subscription cost: the art market is fucking fine today, yesterday, 1,000 years ago and 1,000 years from now.” For Schachter—who formerly wrote a column for ARTnews—the rhetoric was just another example of coverage baiting clicks with an “onslaught of negativity.”The exchange raises a broader question, one that art worlders often skirt but never ask: Is art-market reporting fair, and what responsibility does the press bear at a fragile moment for the market?Earlier this week, Schachter told me that for him, the problem wasn’t just one story, but the drumbeat of coverage that trades in crisis. “We’ve reached the saturation point,” he said. “Reporters have a responsibility to tell the truth, not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy—even when it’s boring, even when it doesn’t generate the boldest headline. You can’t just harvest negativity because it makes for clicks. It’s not the case, and it’s not the whole story.”Here is where it is important to point out that Schachter, unlike Kazakina, operates in the market: as a collector, an artist, and a seller at auction. Still, he maintains that his point is less about defending the market than about the narrative surrounding it. Negativity, he said, becomes a kind of perverse entertainment: a performance that rewards fear over proportion. The problem is that such theater doesn’t stay confined to the page. It reverberates across booths and back offices, shaping how dealers, collectors, and artists behave in real time. “We’ve all had enough of sensational headlines, and fear mongering,” he said. “Everything is fueled by fear in our society, but just look back at articles from the ’90s recession. Between 1991 and 1995, hundreds of galleries closed, and there were thousands less [galleries] than there are today.”The idea of negative coverage as a self-fulfilling prophecy comes up a lot when reporting on the art market. While few dealers in their right mind would say that selling art is hunky-dory in the mid-2020s, numerous dealers told me recently that we are living through a rectification, not Armageddon. Yes, the cost of doing business is up, but conversations are more genuine. Seven-figure deals are still going through—I know of at least three that occurred last week alone. And more importantly, the lower end of the market, the segment that the future depends on, is growing.Gordon VeneKlasen, partner at Michael Werner Gallery, put it bluntly: the market has “many structural problems.” Rising costs across the board—rent, shipping, staff, and particularly art fairs—have made business harder to sustain. The fairs didn’t respond quickly enough to those pressures, he said, noting that participation fees and production costs have ballooned, even as sales have slowed. And yet VeneKlasen resists the fatalism of the headlines. For him, these are not symptoms of collapse but overdue corrections.My colleagues at other outlets have already made these points—Olivier Babin of Clearing made these same claims to Kazakina, who ran an invaluable, in-depth interview with him. But VeneKlasen also points to a generational shift that we journalists often miss. The younger collectors he works with don’t necessarily want what their predecessors wanted.“They don’t want to buy the hottest thing available just because it’s in demand,” VeneKlasen said. He sees echoes of an earlier moment: “What followed after 1990 and the crash was an opposition to those big machismo personalities of the ’80s.”Just as that downturn produced a different kind of collecting, today’s turbulence is fostering interest in overlooked artists, historical rediscoveries, and categories that feel less like a mirror of their parents’ taste. In other words, while the top end may wobble, the base of the market—the part that ensures its continuity—is alive with new energy.For historical ballast, I called Georgina Adam, who has been covering the art market since before many of today’s millennial and Gen Z art dealers were born. (She began in the early 1990s.) Adam wrote multiple books on the market, penned a long-running market column for the Financial Times, and was a longtime staffer at the Art Newspaper, where she remains editor at large. Adam didn’t sugarcoat the present.“The market really isn’t good at the moment,” she told me. “But the downturns of the early 1990s and of 2008 were far worse.” Perspective, she argued, is what’s missing in coverage today. A failed $20 million lot may say less about systemic collapse than about a seller getting greedy. “There’s just a lack of nuance everywhere.”She also lamented the sameness of art market reporting: “Everyone’s writing the same story and reporting the same figures from art fairs and auctions.” And when consensus hardens, the internet accelerates it. Scoops last “maybe three seconds,” Adam said, before they ricochet across half a dozen platforms. What readers want now, she argued, is not just to know what happened but analysis of it: What does it all mean? But too often, readers get the opposite, she said: speed without nuance, headlines without depth.That gap between nuance and noise has been filled by a different breed of commentator. Anonymous meme accounts now feed on market catastrophe, pushing the same melodrama as the trades do while also offering some cutesy irony that journalists don’t.But, just as in politics, people rally around these voices. Jerry Gogosian quickly cheered on Kazakina’s reporting and said “the storm is here, the contagion is global.” Jeff Magid, the collector-turned-Instagram influencer, took a different view in a video that featured his chummy walk-and-talk style. He declared that he’d had an epiphany: “I get it. People who write about the art world and art market professionally feel so unwelcome in the elite, walled-off world of wealth that they resent it and root for its downfall.”Magid has done some astute commentary, but this kind of tidy reduction falls into the same trap as the very headlines he’s been skewering lately. Reporters mostly relay what dealers and the numbers tell them; it’s the speed and fractious nature of our current media environment that creates—and encourages—context collapse. The louder the headlines and the memes get, the more they drown out the obvious: we’ve been here before.2009 was a cataclysm. Collectors vanished. Auction houses saw paintings once fought over suddenly passed in with no bids. Blue-chip names were halved in value. And yet, by 2011, the market was back to pre-crash levels; by 2014, it had surpassed them. Those doomsayers of 2009 looked foolish just five years later.That wasn’t an isolated incident. The Japanese speculative bubble and Wall Street’s love affair with excess of the late 1980s drove prices to absurd heights; when it burst in the early 1990s, the air went out of the entire market. Again, the funeral rites were performed. Again, the patient lived.In 1990, the New York Times ran with a headline that would be considered sleepily nuanced today. “The Art Boom: Is It Over, or Is This Just a Correction?” The two most interesting things in that story were the measured observations. Milton Esterow, then the publisher and editor of ARTnews, wrote at the time, “What has crashed in the art market is all the speculation.” Amy Page, editor of Art+Auction magazine, was even more measured. “People are saying we’ve gone back to 1988 prices, but that’s still extremely high, that’s not a crash,” she wrote. Go back farther. In the 1970s, amid oil shocks and stagflation, some New York galleries shuttered. Yet the art world endured, adapted, and emerged stronger.Jeff Poe told Artnet News recently that the difference between 2001 or 2008 and today is that “the art market was smaller then so there was less to climb.” A bigger, more global market will take longer to recover. And the size itself is part of the problem: too many galleries tried to grow too fast, and some shouldn’t have grown at all.(Here is where ARTnews Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas, herself a market reporter for years before leading this publication, insists I add a note: To her mind, a particular mix of international conflicts and the recent policies of the Trump administration have created an environment that—at least in her memory—is unique and unprecedented, and that is inflecting the art market in ways that defy quantification.)And yet: markets breathe. They contract and they expand. They pause, then lurch forward. We can only assume that this one will, too. Trevyn McGowan, cofounder of Southern Guild gallery in Cape Town, told me she finds the cycle of doom coverage not just misleading but stale. “There’s this danger of clickbait reporting,” she said. “It’s lazy to scoop everything up together and do something dramatic just for the reaction. But isn’t it a bit boring now? We’ve been hearing the same thing for two years.” For a mid-sized gallery like hers, the effect isn’t abstract: every dire headline dampens collector confidence and makes the business harder.McGowan argues that the negativity has outlived its usefulness. Yes, times are tough, but she sees change creating space for new voices, fresh programs, and a younger collector base eager for alternatives. “Isn’t it more interesting to be talking about that,” she asked, “than recycling another end-of-days story?”Bob Chase, who runs Hexon Gallery in Aspen, texted me while he was en route from New York to Colorado. What frustrates him is the way sloppy reporting lumps together unrelated problems. “Collectors read it, get concerned, hold off on acquisitions, and the cycle takes on a downward spiral,” he said. Chase likened it to the old news broadcasts that crammed 29 minutes of calamity into every half-hour, with a single feel-good story tacked on at the end.Many artists he knows, Chase said, are having their best year yet—not because the market is “fine,” but because they’ve combined quality, patience, and long-term thinking.“At the end of the day, I want to support an ecosystem where the flywheel keeps spinning,” he told me. “Artists make work, galleries show it, collectors support it, and the money flows back so creativity can thrive.”What he wants to see is more reporting about those “ingenious things”—stories that might inspire artists, dealers, and collectors alike to think differently. (Again, I have to give credit to the art press: most of us did cover the U-Haul Art Fair, Exhibit A under Ingenious Things.) Reporting the challenges is essential, Chase acknowledged, but it shouldn’t define the market. “The stories that aren’t being told,” he said, “are the ones that could change the trajectory.”