Trust is not merely a social nicety - it is infrastructure. Across decades of empirical research, economists and political scientists have converged on a striking finding: societies and individuals with higher levels of interpersonal trust consistently outperform their low-trust counterparts on nearly every measurable dimension of economic and institutional life.
Christie's raised a projected $2.1bn in the first half of 2025-pretty much the same as last year. Sales in the 20th- and 21st-century art category were down 2%, but luxury, significantly, was up 29%. The headline numbers were almost identical at Sotheby's, whose first-half sales raised $2.2bn, just slightly down on the $2.3bn in the equivalent period last year.