Every autumn, Artprice publishes a report on the global Contemporary Art market – specifically, auction sales for artists born after 1945. This year it has a narrowed focus, on what it calls ‘ultra-contemporary’ artists, defined as those under 40. This makes sense; it is after all where the action is, both in terms of works coming to market and the potential returns for buyers who spot a hot possibility early in his/her/their career.
It’s an interesting read, especially as Artprice’s study comes out more or less at the same time as the much more wide-ranging UBS/Art Basel Global Art Market Report we covered a few days ago.
One headline from Artprice’s report is that global contemporary art auction turnover was down slightly in the period covered (mid 2021 to mid 2022). It attributes the 1.1 percent decrease primarily to the zero-covid policy in China, where sales in this segment fell by a third; without this restriction, Artprice reckons the market for contemporary art would have grown by 9 percent – reflecting “the dynamism of an art market that is constantly expanding its buyer base”.
Indeed, Artprice observes that the contemporary art market – which not so long ago barely registered – is establishing itself as the most dynamic auction segment of the entire art market, with sales of $2.7 billion that represent 18 percent of its total turnover. (By contrast, contemporary art accounted for just $87.9 million in 2001).
The Global Art Market report, which has rather different figures and perhaps better access to detailed sales data, puts the total auction take at $26.8 billion and says Contemporary Art made up 54 percent of that – $7.8 billion.
Both reports of course acknowledge the boom in values for work by young artists, those under 40. Artprice counts bids worth a total of $419 million in this sector, a figure that represents 15.5 percent of the Contemporary art market at auction (and 2.7 percent of the total global fine art auction market)
Artprice does a decent job of highlighting the inflation in prices for these artists. And it has a useful list of the top 200 artists under 40 ranked by auction turnover for fine art and NFT sales achieved in the first half of 2022.
As well as the youth impact generally, Artprice notes that women are (perhaps belatedly) making an impact on the market: seven of the top 10 under-40 artists ranked by H1 2022 auction turnover are women (one artist – Ayako Rokkaku – provided 119 of the 252 lots sold, good enough to get her second place in the list).
And of the ten young artists whose work elicited new auction records during the first half of 2022, six were women – including the top four (Avery Singer at $5.3m, Christina Quarles $4.5m, Jennifer Packer $2.3m, María Berrío $1.6m).
Artprice is also interesting on NFTs. The slowdown in NFT art sales is certainly noted: of the 277 NFTs put up for auction in H1 2022, two-thirds sold and the average price was $47,000. A year before 225 NFTs were offered for sale and 86 percent found a buyer – with an average price around $520,000.
Artprice says the underperformance can be “mainly” explained by the crash in cryptocurrency values, which is debatable – there’s surely an element of chasing fashion trends at play, and trends come and go. There’s been more than a little over-supply, aka bandwagon-jumping. But while NFT sales have tended to be in marketplaces outside the traditional art market, and artists no longer have to rely on traditional art galleries to do their intermediation work, Artprice does note the increasing role for auctioneers “in developing their notoriety and formalizing their price levels”. The imprimatur of Christie’s or Sotheby’s is “a path to recognition … if the auction is successful”.
Artists like Fewocious have certainly benefitted from this – Christie’s sold five lots for $2.1 million in a June 2022 sale dedicated to the artist; in October, Sotheby’s got $2.85 million for a single work. Artprice however doesn’t highlight the extra commitment that the two bluechip auction houses are putting into NFTs – Christie’s unveiled its 3.0 platform, which enables it to conduct auctions on the blockchain and held a couple in 2022; it sold 87 NFT lots in total in 2022 for just less than $6 million. And Sotheby’s has been working on its own NFT sales platform, Metaverse, with a full blockchain solution for transactions promised for this year.
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