New York’s Grip on the Artworld Is Loosening, Study Finds

New York remains the world’s strongest city for contemporary art, but its dominance is eroding on almost every measure, according to a recent report published by Cardiff University.

The World Art Cities Index (WACI), compiled by Robert Huggins, professor of economic geography at Cardiff University, ranks 50 cities where art is produced, marketed and consumed. Huggins describes it as the first systematic ranking of the world’s contemporary art cities. 

New York tops the composite with 496.1, ahead of London (339.6), Paris (236.5), Berlin (202.8) and Los Angeles (185.7). Beneath the leading five the field flattens fast: the gap between first and second place is wider than the gap separating 21st-placed Hong Kong from 50th-placed Brasília.

The report’s most pointed findings come from its analysis of ArtReview’s Power 100, which Huggins samples at five-year intervals from 2005 to 2025, measuring each wave against eight cities he treats as the established core: New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Milan and Düsseldorf. These are the cities where most of the 36 artists in his sample are based, and which he characterises as dense in institutions, galleries and technical infrastructure. That criterion admits Düsseldorf on the strength of Andreas Gursky and the Becher school at its Kunstakademie, though the city places 46th of 50 in Huggins’s own ranking.

New York’s representation fell from 35 entrants to 15 over the two decades, the most consistent trend in the dataset, while London fell sharply in the middle of the period before recovering to 12 by 2025. Asian cities outside the core group climbed from a single entrant in 2005 to 24 in 2025, led by Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Mumbai and Delhi. European cities outside the group moved the other way, from 20 entrants to 13.

The figures suggest curatorial authority has travelled further than money has. Across the 20 years, 63 percent of listed curators were based outside those eight cities, against 26 percent of gallerists.

The clearest case of the wider argument is Ibrahim Mahama. Rather than move to an established capital, the Ghanaian artist has built three institutions in Tamale: the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, the Red Clay studio complex and the Nkrumah Voli-ni, and has been recognised by the Venice Biennale, documenta and White Cube without leaving the north of the country. Huggins treats this as a pattern, describing a periphery that originates work rather than exporting talent.

The sharpest argument concerns the distance between making and selling. Johannesburg, the only sub-Saharan African city in the index, ranks tenth for production and last for consumption, while the United States, the UK and China still take roughly three-quarters of global sales by value. Production has dispersed, Huggins concludes, but the machinery that monetises it has not, leaving newer centres to ‘bear the cultural labour of city-making without securing its economic returns’.