By the numbers: it’s art market report season

8 April 2025 Art market

Springtime sees the arrival of the art market numbers, just in time for Art Dubai, with three data-based reports – Artprice.com’s The Art Market in 2024; the Art Basel / UBS Art Market Report 2025; and The Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2025 by Artnet. They don’t all cover the same areas, they don’t all have the same numbers, but they do share much the same conclusion – the art market generally is contracting, but we needn’t panic just yet.

The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report

The biggest, deepest and best is the Art Basel/UBS report, compiled as ever by the doyens of art market analysis at Clare McAndrew’s consultancy Arts Economics. As usual this is a meaty piece of work, based on data gathered from dealers (who between them are estimated to account for between 70% and 80% of all dealer sales), auction houses, collectors, art fairs, art and financial databases, industry experts, and “others involved in the art trade”. There’s granular analysis by size, type and location, and for anyone in the business it’s an essential read.

It is quite dense – 266 pages, only a handful of which are fillers – so we’ve summarised out what we see as the key points:

  • Global art market sales are calculated as $57.5 billion for 2024. That’s down 12% on the year before.
  • Dealers and auction houses both suffered, but it was the auctioneers that took the bigger hit – sales were 25% lower (at a total of $19bn) while dealer sales were 6% lower. The big falls were at the top end, for instance with 39% fewer auction sales priced over $10 million.
  • Some 43% of dealers were less profitable than in 2023 and 25% were about the same; on average, their operating costs were nearly 10% higher on the year.
  • There wasn’t much change in the number of exhibit5ons dealer held (about eight in 2024) or the number of art fairs they attended
  • NFTs are looking increasingly irrelevant – all segments of the NFT market declined in value, with art down by 65% in value year-on-year and collectibles down by 43%. The average number of unique buyers of NFT art also dropped from about 16,835 per month in 2023 to 5,620 in 2024.
  • Good news comes from the increased number of transactions – up by an admittedly modest 3 percent, but still suggesting an appetite for lower­ priced art. That’s reflected in sales by dealer size, on the basis that smaller dealers tend to sell less expensive art: those with an annual turnover below $250,000 saw annual sales increase by 17%, dealers with turnover over $10 million reported a drop in sales of 9%.
  • There are new buyers too – the share of sales by dealers to new buyers was up by 5% at 38% of all sales. That said, buyers seem more conservative, with dealers voicing concerns about “a lack of curiosity by collectors in discovering new artists and works … Galleries showing newer and emerging artists noted that it was increasingly difficult to get people in to see shows for new artists, while those for more established artists would sell out easily”.
  • Art fair organisers will be quite happy: sales made by galleries there increased slightly to 31% of total dealer sales – up by 2% from 2023, though still well below 2022 (35%) and pre-pandemic levels (42% in 2019).
  • More important, perhaps, art fairs remain a key source of new buyers, with 31% of dealers citing them as their primary source (followed by in-person gallery walk-ins at 23% and client referrals at 16%). On average dealers exhibited at around three fairs in 2024.
  • The report counts 336 art fairs in 2024 – down from the pre-pandemic high of 407 in 2019, and slightly lower than in 2023 (when there were 336).
  • As for expectations, dealers seem happy enough: 80% expected stable (47%) or improved (33%) sales in 2025. Among auctioneers the mood was more pessimistic, with only 15% expecting sales to improve and fully 40% of respondents forecasting a decline.

Perhaps predictably, the majority of dealers said their greatest challenge would be the effects of political and economic volatility on the market – and that was before thre arrival of Trump’s tariff trade wars. UBS’s Chief Economist Paul Donovan contributed something of a hostage to fortune in his assessment that “from an economic perspective, the outlook should be one of continuity” – though he did hedge his bets with “politics introduce uncertainty, with the shift toward economic nationalism bringing trade protectionism, restrictions on labour movement and limits on capital flows”. The Art Market Report does include some detailed analysis of the effect of pre-2025 tariffs, but there are no hard and fast predictions.

Read the report online here, or download a free copy here.

The Art Market in 2024

Artprice’s report is based on data from auction sales – it doesn’t include dealer sales at all – and it uses much the same sources as Art Basel/UBS. As a result, the headline conclusions are very similar:

  • Global art auction sales were $9.9bn, down 33.5% because of fewer high-end sales.
  • But growth of in other price segments contributed to a record in total transaction volumes, with 804,000 lots sold – a 4% increase on 2023.
  • Half of the works sold went for less than $607; 90% went for less than $9.225.
  • More artists are being represented at auction – more than 187,000 in 2024, an increase of 6% on the year before.
  • Boom areas include prints, surrealism, and female artists (which Art Base/UBS also noted).

Read the report online here, or register to download a free copy.

The Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead, 2025

Artnet’s Intelligence Report also bases its numbers on auction sales, but this one is less of a data-driven assessment and more a collection of thinkpieces, essays and interviews.

The editor-in-chief’s main conclusion is more dramatic than we get from the other reports: “the market is shifting gears … This is more than a market correction. It’s a transformation. We are moving away from an era driven by financial speculation into one guided by personal taste. The resilience of the $100,000-to-$1 million price bracket in 2024 suggests that mid-tier collectors are again ascendant. They are neither billionaires chasing status nor flippers seeking short-term gains, and they are buying with conviction …”

The basis for that conclusion? Top-end ‘trophy’ lots at auction – sales at $10m plus – saw the steepest decline last year, down over 44%. Online art sales are surging, says the report (to be fair, Art Basel/UBS diagrees with that); and there is a lot of interest in luxury collectables (undenaibly true).

There are also some nuggets from the accompanying interviews, especially as they relate to the Middle East. Anthea Peers, President of Christie’s Europe and MEA, was naturally bullish about prospects in the region – observing inter alia that “a third of our global client base is under 44, but the proportion is even higher in the Middle East, where 58 percent of new buyers and bidders are millennials or younger”. (She neatly sidestepped a question about human rights issues in Saudi Arabia, talking about “an ongoing process of change” and “the power of arts and the free market place as a positive force of change in society”.)

Leila Heller is also interviewed, and she’s enthusiastic about Dubai – “I have yet to face obstacles in Dubai – in fact, I am constantly given opportunities to thrive”. The Sharjah and Jeddah Biennials are both “on a par with the Venice Biennale in terms of scope, curation, and vision”. And “working in the Middle East is deeply personal, often
involving friendships and family ties. That’s what makes being an art dealer here so much more rewarding …”

The best of the interviews is with Vivienne Chow, recently installed in a newly created Art Dubai position of Executive Director, Curatorial. She is particularly acute about the ecosystem: “Countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have prioritised culture in national development strategies … The scale of these initiatives is significant, but the key is building frameworks that allow them to thrive. It’s not just about attracting talent or expanding exhibitions but about creating conditions where institutions and cultural organisations develop substantive, reciprocal relationships … This isn’t just about building spaces but about fostering frameworks that ensure long-term impact”.

Read the report online here, or download a free copy here.

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