Art News
How Auction Houses Set the Price of Art
Estimates, reserves, and guarantees: the quiet machinery behind every headline sale number.
Art News
Financial reporting on the book business: advance ranges by category, earn-out rates, royalty and subsidiary rights splits, distribution and returns, print unit costs and retail discounting. Sources are named where contracts allow. For authors negotiating terms and anyone assessing publishing as an industry.
Art News
Street Art vs Vandalism: Where the Line Really Sits
Permission, not paint quality or fame, is what separates a mural from a crime — and cities have learned to make room for both.
Art News
What That 15 Percent Agent Commission Actually Covers
The standard split is public knowledge. What happens to the money, and who keeps a claim on it after a writer leaves, is the part worth reading closely.
Art News
Collecting First Editions: The Basics
The number line with a 1, the price on the jacket, the blind stamp on the back board — the beginner's toolkit for the book collector's game, minus its expensive mistakes.
Art News
The Huntington Turns Its Library to the Moon
Stories from the Library: The Mirror of the Moon opened June 27 — centuries of artists and scientists working at the same object, from the institution's paper vaults.
Art News
Book Cover Design as Art
Jan Tschichold drew penguins in the 1940s and Chip Kidd made the Jurassic Park silhouette — the cover is publishing's most public art form, judged in seconds.
Art News
Sotheby's Book Week Returns in June
Two weeks of manuscript sales in New York, June 11–25, led by a Fine Books evening with a $25 million-plus estimate — the paper market's summer showcase.
Art News
What Literary Manuscripts Sell For — and Why
A psalm book at $14.2 million, Audubon at $11.5, a Brontë booklet the size of a matchbox at $1.25: the paper market's logic, explained from the numbers.
Art News
The Art Market Returned to Growth in 2025
The tenth Art Basel–UBS report puts global sales up 4 percent at $59.6 billion, with auctions up 9 — the cultural economy's biggest dataset, read from the writer's side.
Art News
How the NEA Funds Literature
Twenty-five-thousand-dollar fellowships, panels of working writers, and an application that runs through Grants.gov — the public money pipeline for American letters, explained.