A bull scenario for the art market

The headline numbers for auction transactions always receive the most attention in art market reporting. These raw numbers are meaningful, but they are also highly misleading, as the art market is not one Market – it is a collection of independent markets divided by era, style, movement, artist and even by works within an artist’s oeuvre. And as true collectors know, the overall market can also be divided by the Value of properties sold. When I asked our friends at ARTDAI to break down the auction results of the last 17 years into six different price categories – sales over $25 million; those between $5 million and $25 million; between $1 million and $5 million; between $250,000 and $1 million; between $50,000 and $250,000; and anything that sold for under $50,000 – the segmented results offered a far more differentiated picture of recent trends.

Among the more interesting findings is the market's strength at lower prices, which contradicts the general assumption of a crash. If we are in an art market recession, no one has told buyers willing to spend up to $250,000. Sure, the overall auction market hit a four-year low in the first half of 2024, possibly due to a number of factors: the shift from contemporary to historical artists, risk-averse consignors, and political and macroeconomic nervousness that have made selling art a lower priority. But the volume of works of art sold at auctions rose in price ranges between $50,000 and $1 million over the same period. And if you sold works priced under $50,000, the volume was actually higher than at any other point between late 2008 and late 2022. Moreover, the growth in the sub-$50,000 sector is due to more and more lots being sold at auction, rather than rising prices in the category due to, for example, inflation.