Daniel Grant has a good explainer on how and why dealers bid on their own artist’s works at auction. Too often there is finger pointing at this practice calling it market manipulation, except the only times one can claim market manipulation is when the dealer is making him or herself known as the bidder which makes it something more transparent than mere manipulation:

“I have bid up prices to appropriate levels, when auction houses have estimated too low works by artists whom I represent,” said Manhattan gallery owner Renato Danese. “I want to protect the work from going below the low estimate or not selling at all, because that puts a cloud over the work and over the artist.” Disappointing results at auction can potentially come back to haunt works sold at the gallery. “I don’t like to spend fruitless hours explaining why a good piece went for a quarter of the price I charge at the gallery.” He added that “artists expect me to protect their market and their reputations.”

Artists often look to their dealers to do something when their work comes onto the secondary market. “We are in conversation with our living artists about work that arrives at auction, and we attempt first to place works in collections that are not speculative,” said John Cheim, partner in the Manhattan contemporary art gallery Cheim & Read. Artist Kiki Smith, who is represented by New York’s Pace Gallery, said that she expects her dealer “to care about my work and the market for it, and do whatever they need to do to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

Bidding Up: Escalating Prices Are Putting Pressure on Dealers to Double Down on their Own Artists (Gallerist)