Welcome to the WC, wherein you’re trapped in my mind for eight to twelve minutes weekly. Probably closer to 20 today.
As promised last week, today you’ll find below my breathless review of TEFAF Maastricht.
The preview days at TEFAF Maastricht felt more like a summit of global cultural power than an art fair.
Museum directors brush shoulders with hedge fund managers. European aristocrats nod politely at Asian tech billionaires.
Everyone’s wearing either old money loafers or new money sneakers that cost the same as a decent laptop.
And they’re all here for the same reason: 7,000 years of human creativity curated into what might be the world’s most selective shopping experience.
What’s on the menu today:
Table of Contents
How TEFAF reinvented itself for a new era
TEFAF wasn’t always this way. A decade ago, it was primarily the domain of Old Masters dealers and antiques specialists. If you wanted a 17th-century Dutch still life or a medieval tapestry, TEFAF was your North Star. If you wanted Basquiat, you looked elsewhere.
But markets evolve, and TEFAF evolved with them.
The numbers tell the story. In 2025, galleries specializing in Modern and Contemporary art actually outnumbered those focused on traditional fine art paintings—55 to 52. This would have been unthinkable even ten years ago.
This shift wasn’t without resistance. Some old-guard dealers grumbled about TEFAF losing its identity. But the fair’s organizers understood a fundamental truth: adapt or die.
The art market had moved decisively toward contemporary work, and TEFAF needed to claim its piece.
But here’s the clever part—rather than abandoning its roots, TEFAF simply expanded its canopy. The vetting remains famously rigorous. The quality threshold remains sky-high. The only difference is that alongside that perfect Louis XVI commode, you might now find a Gerhard Richter canvas.
This evolution preserved TEFAF’s most valuable asset: its reputation as the place where only the best will do.
The most rarefied air: TEFAF’s elite attendees and spectacle
The real TEFAF—the one that matters for serious collectors—happens before the official opening.
On preview days, private jets line up at Maastricht Aachen Airport. The wealthy arrive in processions of luxury vehicles to the MECC Maastricht convention center. This is invitation-only territory, where the price of admission isn’t just the VIP card—it’s your reputation, buying power, and art world connections.
Inside, the atmosphere is deceptively relaxed. Servers circulate with champagne and gourmet offerings.
But make no mistake—beneath the civilized veneer, there’s nothing casual about what’s happening here. The first two hours of TEFAF’s preview represent perhaps the most concentrated exchange of cultural assets and capital on the planet.
“If there’s one fair I’m going to go to, it’s TEFAF,” a veteran collector told me. He’d flown in that morning. “Basel is a scene. Frieze is fashionable. But TEFAF is where the great things are.”
The attendee list reads like a peculiar mashup of a museum directory and Forbes billionaire ranking. Museum acquisition committees work in coordinated groups, and watching them work the floor is like observing a carefully choreographed dance of cultural acquisition.
The institutional presence is staggering. During the preview days alone, the 2024 fair attracted over 300 museum directors and 650 curators, an extraordinary turnout that underscores TEFAF’s unique position in the art world ecosystem.
At TEFAF 2025, the most talked-about offering was a late Picasso, “Les Dormeurs,” with its €50 million price tag.
The “red dot” phenomenon—small red stickers indicating a sale—begins almost immediately when the doors open. By lunchtime on preview day, prime pieces across all categories sport these tiny crimson medals of desirability.
What’s fascinating is the demographic mix. Old Europe is well represented by aristocrats who’ve been collecting for generations and view acquisition as a form of cultural stewardship. But they’re now joined by American tech wealth, Gulf royalty, and, increasingly, elite collectors from Asia.
And me. Somehow I got in.
“I didn’t see a lot of young collectors roaming the aisles in the early VIP hours,” one dealer told me as Thursday evening wound down.
The crowd does still skew older—this isn’t the youth-obsessed environment of a contemporary fair. But that’s starting to change, with more collectors in their 40s and even some in their 30s making significant purchases.
One gallerist summed it up perfectly: “The people here are very different from those you meet at the opening of Frieze or Art Basel.” Indeed. At TEFAF, the serious collectors arrive with scholarly catalogs, not Instagram followers.
What smart money buys at TEFAF
TEFAF operates on a different wavelength than other major fairs, and the savvy players know it.
At Art Basel, collectors often chase the newest, hottest artists—sometimes buying works sight unseen from PDFs sent by galleries before the fair opens. At Frieze, the emphasis tends toward the conceptual and cutting-edge. These are environments optimized for speculation and social currency.
TEFAF, by contrast, rewards the patient and the knowledgeable. Its rigorous vetting process—where teams of museum curators and specialists authenticate and evaluate every single object—creates a baseline of quality that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere.
This quality assurance creates confidence that translates directly into buying behavior. While prices at contemporary fairs can sometimes feel arbitrary (why is this emerging artist’s work $50,000 while another’s is $5,000?), TEFAF prices tend to reflect consensus valuations built on decades of scholarship and market history.
The smartest collectors at TEFAF think in terms of categories and cycles. They understand that different segments of the art market perform differently under varying economic conditions.
Others practice a form of cross-category arbitrage. When contemporary prices seem overheated, they rotate into undervalued classical areas. When a particular period or style suddenly attracts institutional interest, they’re positioned to benefit from the renewed attention.
The most sophisticated buyers at TEFAF also understand the power of institutional validation. When the Museum of Fine Arts Boston spent years tracking Lotte Laserstein’s 1932 self-portrait before finally acquiring it at TEFAF 2023, astute private collectors took note. That level of museum interest signals something important about an artist’s place in the canon—and potentially, their future market.
Old masters – market reality check
Let’s be candid about what’s happening with Old Masters, which were once TEFAF’s exclusive focus but now share the spotlight with newer categories.
The data doesn’t lie: Old Masters have become the smallest segment of the fine art auction market by value. In 2021, European Old Master works represented only 4% of the world’s $26.3 billion art auction sales.
This isn’t a temporary blip; it’s a structural shift decades in the making.
The reasons are numerous and interconnected. Collecting tastes have evolved—many younger buyers don’t connect emotionally with religious scenes or aristocratic portraits. There’s an education gap—appreciating Old Masters requires art historical knowledge that’s no longer a standard part of elite education. And there’s a basic relevance issue—contemporary art speaks to our time in a way that Renaissance paintings may not.
Add practical concerns like condition problems, attribution risks, and the lack of speculative buying, and you have a perfect storm of market challenges.
But this market reality creates interesting dynamics at TEFAF.
First, there’s a stark bifurcation: the true masterpieces still command extraordinary prices and attention.But mid-tier Old Masters—good but not great works by lesser-known artists—struggle to find buyers.
Second, institutions have become the dominant players in this space. Salvador Salort-Pons, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, called TEFAF “the pre-eminent place” for museums to use their funds restricted to non-contemporary art. Museums now routinely outbid private collectors for significant Old Masters, seeing an opportunity to acquire important works at what they consider historical bargains.
Third, a contrarian subset of collectors has emerged, approaching Old Masters as value investments. They see a category with reduced competition, potentially undervalued assets, and the benefit of centuries of vetting by art history itself.
This value disconnect creates opportunities for patient capital. When a small work by a Renaissance master sells for less than some living artists’ minor pieces, some collectors sense a market inefficiency worth exploiting.
The future of elite art collecting
TEFAF functions as something of a crystal ball for the serious end of the art market, and several emerging trends are visible if you know where to look.
Most striking is the dramatic increase in the representation of women artists. In 2025, TEFAF featured over 500 artworks by women, nearly double the previous year. This included not just contemporary work but also rediscovered historical women artists whose markets are finally developing after centuries of neglect.
Global diversification is also accelerating. While European art still dominates, more galleries are exhibiting African, Asian, and Latin American works. At TEFAF 2025, the London-based gallery TAFETA dedicated its entire booth to prominent 20th-century Nigerian artists—something unimaginable a decade earlier.
Digital innovation is happening even in this most traditional of settings. In 2019, a dealer incorporated virtual reality into their booth for the first time, allowing visitors to “enter” the world of a particular artwork. By 2025, such digital enhancements had become more common, though always in service of the physical objects rather than replacing them.
Perhaps most interesting is TEFAF’s approach to developing new collectors. Recognizing the need to cultivate the next generation of buyers, the fair introduced an Insider’s Guide in 2025 spotlighting works under €20,000. While that’s hardly “entry-level” for most people, it represents a conscious effort to create on-ramps for those not yet ready to spend millions.
The fair has also become more transparent in its selection processes. A 2019 procedure revamp resulted in 40 new dealers, injecting fresh energy and perspectives. By 2025, about 15% of exhibitors were new to TEFAF Maastricht, ensuring a balance of continuity and discovery.
This evolution reflects broader shifts in how wealth interacts with culture. Today’s collectors are more global, diverse, and likely to cross traditional category boundaries than their predecessors. They may buy an Old Master and an NFT in the same month. They care about provenance and sustainability. They collect with passion and purpose.
Where art and wealth converge
TEFAF Maastricht stands at a fascinating intersection—where history meets contemporary taste, where cultural value meets financial value, and where public institutions meet private wealth.
Its evolution from an Old Master-focused fair to an encyclopedic showcase mirrors larger transitions in the art market and collecting culture. Rather than resisting change, TEFAF embraced it while maintaining its core identity as the quality standard-bearer.
The result is unique: a place where a 15th-century altarpiece can share space with a sculptural installation completed last year, where curators from the world’s greatest museums compete with private collectors for treasures spanning millennia, and where serious money meets serious scholarship.
For investors in alternative assets, TEFAF offers a master class in how quality, provenance, and connoisseurship create lasting value beyond market trends. While the art world churns through fashions and investment theses, objects of true beauty and significance retain their power—and their worth.
Navigating this terrain requires knowledge and guidance. The most successful collectors at TEFAF typically build relationships with trusted advisors who help them distinguish the merely good from the truly great and who understand the cultural and financial dimensions of their decisions.
Those who approach TEFAF with open eyes and informed perspectives will find something increasingly rare: an environment where substance still trumps spectacle, where history provides context for the present, and where the joy of collecting revolves around the objects themselves rather than their social media potential.
In an age of hype and instantaneous gratification, that might be the most radical position of all.
Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own research. Please.
That’s all for this week; I hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers,
Wyatt
Disclosures
- We own quite a lot of art in Altea’s various funds
