Every autumn, Artprice.com publishes a report based on its monitoring of the global Contemporary Art market – which in practice means the publicly reported sales of such works (paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, prints, videos, installations, art NFTs, and of course tapestries). More specifically, the data comes from the results of art auctions held between 1 July and 30 June 2022. The headline: global sales of Contemporary art (defined as work by artists born after 1945) totalled $2.7 billion in the period.
That compares with $2.73 billion the previous year, a 1.1 percent contraction that Artprice attributes mainly due to the zero-Covid policy in China. Sales in this segment dropped by a third there (China had been the largest single market in the previous year and fell back behind the States in the current period).
As it stands, Artprice counted 39,880 Contemporary artists with work being sold – 5,300 more than the year before – and a total of 119,400 works changing hands (up from 102 000 in 2020/21, a 12 percent increase). Meanwhile, the unsold rate remained stable at 33 percent, so despite the increase in transactions one in three lots remained unsold.
New York seems to be the preferred site for buyers and sellers of Contemporary art; auction turnover of $1.05bn there was up by a fifth and represented 38 percent of the total billion. China held on to second pace despite the restrictions, and the UK accounted for 18 percent. Thereafter it’s clear that the Far East is rapidly developing a taste for this kind of art; both Seoul and Tokyo have nearly overtaken Paris as the fourth largest market.
So what would have happened if the Chinese market had continued its trajectory of the previous five years? The global Contemporary art market would have grown by fully nine percent, says Artprice. This is something of a boom time for art by the (relatively) young (and the still-alive).
Artprice concludes “this remarkable result reflects the dynamism of an art market that is constantly expanding its buyer base”.
And what about NFTs? They’ve only been seen on the secondary art market for a couple of years, but for 2021-22 they represented just $60m of the $2.7bn total; and that was down sharply on the hype of year one, when NFT art sales topped $110m.
NFT artists often operate outside the traditional art markets, instead using platforms like Super Rare to deal with their audiences with complete autonomy, allowing a rapid economic return on their digital works. It’s clear that the conventional art market isn’t where the NFT action is now or will be in the future; it’s the specialised crypto-based hubs where the NFT business will be done.
But back with what might be termed conventional art, buyers are clearly committing enthusiastically to a market that generated just $90 million in 2000 – for the kind of artists and the kind of work that might once have been confined to speculative buys at grad shows. So who’s spending the $2.7 billion? And what’s their motivation?
Artprice can’t say: the sales data doesn’t give any information about the buyers, of course, and that’s how it should be. But there are more people with money out there than there used to be, and the moneyed are younger on average than they used to be; they’re reactive to trends, they use social media, they’re motivated by the very idea of ‘contemporary’ because that’s how they see themselves … They also like to make a quick buck; speculation and flipping are as much a part of their pleasure in art as actually possessing or being able to view the work.
After all, art by younger artists tend to be less expensive than indifferent pieces from the studio of an old master; theres more of it around (those old masters aren’t nearly as productive as once they were); and it appreciates quicker. As Artprice puts it, “certain young artists are hitting extraordinarily high price levels very early in their careers, rising very quickly from a few thousand to several million dollars”.
Major collectors and dealers want to bet on the next Basquiat – works that in a few years or decades will be among the highly rated and the most coveted artistic productions on the planet. The result has been a dizzying acceleration in prices for some young artists who have been anointed as capturing the zeitgeist.
Over the last 20 years, demand for what Artprice calls ‘ultra-contemporary art’ (meaning works by artists under the age of 40) has exploded. Compare H1 2002 with H1 2022; the number of artists in this category being offered for sale in auctions increased by a factor of five, from 543 to 2,670. The number of transactions went from 691 to 4,847, implying that more works per artist were sold (most of them Basquiats and Banksys, apparently). And they sold for a lot more: auction turnover in the category went for $7.7m to $200.9m in the 20 years. Between 2000 and 2022, the average price of the top five sales rose from $618,000 to $4.9m, a multiple of nine. Even allowing for inflation, that’s not a bad return.
The auction turnover data for artists under 40 shows four peaks:
One very welcome highlight from the Artprice report is the arrival of women as legitimate candidates for art stardom. Artprice’s Top 10 ranking of young artists under 40 (based on their H1 2022 auction turnover) includes no fewer than seven women: Ayako Rokkako, Flora Yukhnovich, Avery Singer, María Berrío, Anna Weyant, Christina Quarles and Loie Hollowell, all born after 1980. (Matthew Wong, who died before he was 40, holds the top place.) In Artprice’s Top 50, we count 21 women.
Not that the kudos is evenly spread. Artprice counts more than 2,600 artists under 40 now on the ultra- contemporary art market and their work generated $200.9 million in the first half of 2022; but just 10 of them accounted for half of that total. Maybe things aren’t so different after all …
The 2022 Ultra-Contemporary Art Market Report is available as a free download here.
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