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Sales of art ranging from Old Masters to contemporary works by the three top auction houses slid 27.2% to US$5.7 billion this year, yet the number of sales made rose by 6.7% as a higher number of lower-priced pieces found buyers, the London-based analysis firm ArtTactic said on Monday.
Rising interest rates, inflation, and geopolitical strife contributed to the softer sales, but the precipitous drop also can be explained by the absence of the US$1.6 billion masterpiece-filled collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Christie’s, which brought the collection to market last year, released figures earlier on Monday indicating its sales would have fallen only 7% if the Allen collection was left out of the year-to-year comparison. Instead, its preliminary results slid 27% to US$6.2 billion.
In addition to art auctions, Christie’s results include sales of jewelry, watches, and other luxury goods and private transactions. Across all these categories, it sold 45,000 lots—actually about 1,000 fewer than last year—although jewelry sales tend to include more lots than art auctions.
The absence of a collection such as
Paul Allen’s
, which was led by five works that each sold for US$100 million or more, contributed to a 30% fall in the number of artworks brought to market with a price estimate of at least US$10 or more, ArtTactic said. At the same time, sales of artworks with estimates below US$50,000 reached US$153 million, up 7.4% from a year ago, with the number of lots sold rising 18% from a year earlier to 10,350, the firm said.
“Although the trophy market and its billionaire buyers have had a quieter year, there is plenty of action and confidence at the lower end of the market, which is a positive sign that the art market is growing beyond the super-rich,”
Anders Petterson,
ArtTactic’s founder and CEO said in the report.
ArtTactic looked at major-market auction results at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips in five categories: Old Masters, Impressionist, Modern, Post-War, and Contemporary art. The pandemic changed the complexion of sales in many of these categories, as the auction houses shifted online and drew in collectors more comfortable buying at lower price levels.
At Christie’s, for instance, 35% of its clients this year were new to the auction house, driven by a growing number of younger collectors, CEO
Guillaume Cerutti,
said at a press event announcing its preliminary results.
Many of these collectors bought works at online sales, which generally include lower-priced items. Christie’s online-only auctions accounted for two-thirds of these new buyers. In all, its online sales totaled US$369 million, roughly in line with last year.
Though this broadening of the market was certainly a factor, Christie’s also pointed to strength in its luxury sales, which reached a record US$1 billion for the auction house. The most high profile sale was for the pear-shaped “Bleu Royal,” diamond, which sold for US$43.8 million in November in Geneva, but the auction house also leveraged digital interest in its luxury goods by selling a Patek Phillipe watch (Ref. 2523J) for a record HK$66.6 million (US$8.5 million) online.
Christie’s has been reducing the size of its live watch auctions to focus on curated, high-value sales, moving other timepieces online where collectors can have up to two weeks to consider a purchase, Francis Belin, president of Christie’s Asia Pacific said. “We maximize the return for our sellers as we can engage with collectors over a long period of time,” Belin said.
The auction house also got a boost this year from private sales, which rose 5% to US$1.2 billion. Its largest-ticket transaction all year—of about US$100 million—was private, for instance, Cerutti said at the press event. He declined to provide further details about the type of work or its category, or the time of year it was sold, because of the sale’s private nature.
The auction house’s 20th/21st century sales of art created since the late 1800s, meanwhile, fell 41% to US$3.2 billion, according to the preliminary figures. Among the three auction houses tracked by ArtTactic, sales of contemporary art fell 12.8% to US$1.79 billion this year, driven by a US$150 million drop in sales of works by young contemporary artists (those born in 1977 or later).
Sales of impressionist art, made by artists born between 1820 and 1879, sank 53.4% to US$810.2 million (many of the Allen collection’s finest works were from the impressionist category). Meanwhile, sales of modern art, made by artists born between 1880 and 1909), fell 20.4% to US$1.7 billion, while post-war works, made by artists born between 1910 and 1929, fell 31.6% to US$1.08 billion.
Sotheby’s has not yet released preliminary 2023 results, although its “consolidated sales for the year are currently on par with last year, at around US$8 billion,” according to a spokesman. Full results, which unlike Christie’s also includes sales of luxury and classic cars, will be released in January.
The auction house sold the Emily Fisher Landau collection of 20th century art in November, the most high profile single-owner collection of the season. It included a 1932 painting by
Pablo Picasso,
Femme à la montre, that fetched US$139.4 million.
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