Quantcast
Art Fairs, Economic Trends, Market Reports
Laura Roughneen0March 14, 2013

TEFAF: Global Sales Drop 7% in 2012

Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 15.01.34

 

  • Global sales in 2012 contracted by 7% to €43.0 billion
  • Sales in the Chinese market fell 24% to €10.6 billion while the US experienced an uplift of 5% year-on-year to €14.2 billion.
  • The US regained the top percentage of global market share at 33% while China dropped to 25% and the UK remained in third place with 23%.
  • The volume of transactions in 2012 fell by just under 4% to 35.5 million.
  • The heaviest buying is concentrated at the high end of the market for the best-known artists.
  • Contemporary art was the largest fine art auction sector, with 43% share by value, and reaching just under €4.5billion, its highest ever recorded level.
  • Modern art was the second largest sector with a 30% share. After sales of €3.8 billion in 2011, sales dropped 17% in 2012 to €3.2 billion.

TEFAF Art Market Report 2013: The Global Art Market, with a focus on China and Brazil. Prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew

General, Market Reports
Laura Roughneen4November 12, 2012

Tell me again, is it Urban Art, Street Art or Graffiti? Toronto in debate.

Toronto. November 2012. A panel, consisting of five city staffers with backgrounds in “the arts, urban design, architecture and other relevant disciplines” has been officially set up to decide on issues of the preservation of street art.

On one side of the argument, panelists must face off against property owners who argue:

“Even if it’s Picasso, you’re not allowed to paint on other people’s walls,” says Elyse Parker, a city official who is leading Toronto’s crackdown on graffiti.

However, street art/urban art/graffiti (the politically correct term is under dispute in the article) is gaining more and more merit in the art world.

Toronto’s council has already given its blessing to what is known as Graffiti Alley, a series of colourful backstreets only a few blocks from City Hall.

David Liss, the director of Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, who also has some background in street art, applauds the move.

And so the age-old argument prevails between street art and “the man”. However, it is interesting to note that the 2011/2012 Annual Artprice Contemporary Art Market Report  contains a section dedicated to Urban Art: The Next Generation. In 2008, London’s Tate Modern held it’s Street Art exhibition, quickly followed by galleries showing interest and exhibiting urban art shows.

The vast and complex genealogy of this trend is intertwined with the history of 20th century art, set against a backdrop of major socio-political and technological upheavals . Initially, the pio- neering experimentation with urban space led in the 60s by artists such as Daniel Buren, Allan Kaprow and Ernest Pignon-Ernest profoundly changed the envi- ronmental dimension of art and paved the way for a new field of study. In the late 70s, the new territory for creation offered by modern living space saw the birth, in the streets of New York, of a fundamental practice in the evolution of urban art: graffiti.


Tags by Jean-Michel Basquiat, working under the pseudonym SAMO (Same Old Shit), and Taki 183 flooded the Big Apple, contributing significantly to the explosion of the phenomenon in the following decade . The subject of hot debate for many years, the artistic character of urban art had to struggle to acquire its current recognition .

In 2011, during Art Basel Miami, the American city was transformed into a key theatre for international urban art, with big names and emerging artists invited to create dozens of walls in the Wynwood district .

Over 40 years after its birth in New York, urban art has crossed the thresholds of museums, galleries and auction houses in no uncertain manner, breaking nume- rous records along the way . With a growth rate of over 90% in urban art sales over the last decade, the movement proved to be dynamic on the international market place .

With the success and market for work by Jean-Michel Basquiat recently, it the argument for street art appears to be heating up once again. The 2011/2012 artprice report digs deeper to take a look at the next generation of urban artists. (See report for details)

Graffiti: is it art or vandalism? (The Art Newspaper)

Market Reports
Marion Maneker0November 08, 2011

Ai Weiwei, Zeng Fanzhi Lead ArtTactic Chinese Market Confidence Poll

ArtTactic released its Chinese Market Confidence report today showing that experts have the most faith in Zeng Fanzhi’s short-term market prospects and Ai Weiwei’s long-term art historical prospects. However, there is growing fear of a bubble on the mainland:

The risks of an art market bubble is growing, as 75% of the experts believe the Mainland Chinese contemporary art market remains highly speculative. Only 25% of the experts believe the same is the case for the International Chinese contemporary art market.

ArtTactic Chinese Market Confidence Report

Featured, Market Reports
Marion Maneker0October 29, 2011

The Class of 2007: Why Are Boom Buys on Offer in New York?

Looking through the catalogues for New York’s marquee Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales, the first thought that is likely to occur is the substantial number of works sourced from museums or private collections: Boston’s MFA, Norton Simon, the City of Denver, Lew and Edie Wasserman, the Burnett Foundation, John Kluge and number of other groups of works proffered by collectors interested in minimalism, the work of Max Ernst and Gerhard Richter and so forth.

The strength of the art market was clearly attractive to institutional sellers stacking the evening sales to near bursting with 155 lots in the combined Sotheby’s and Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sales and 235 lots of Contemporary art being vended at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury. With that kind of selling volume the auction houses can pick and choose what they see as the works most likely to sell well.

A bought in lot is a failure for the consignor but also a lost commission for the auction house and a waste of valuable time and effort.

With all of that in mind, how do we explain the significant number of lots on offer in the evening sales—primarily Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales—that were bought during the art market’s peak year of 2007. There are 36 lots on offer over the next two weeks that were bought in 2007 or later. The vast majority were bought at auction, though some works were bought through dealers. Another five works were bought in 2006, another strong year for the art market.

Works from the Class of 2007 and later make up slightly more than 10% of the evening sales total lots. When the number of institutions and collections are accounted for, the Class of 2007 is making an even stronger showing. It used to be that works with a recent auction history were approached by the auction houses gingerly. Fresh to the market is one leg of the auction-house mantra of what sells (Good works, fresh to the market that are attractively estimated.)

Each lot from the Class of 2007 surely has its own story. How and why it is up for sale this November can only be determined by talking to the consignor. But as a group some very interesting observations can be made: [Read more...]

Artists, Market Reports
Marion Maneker2October 26, 2011

ArtPrice Top 50 Contemporary Artists

Last week, ArtPrice put out their report on the Contemporary art market hoping to catch a contact high from FIAC. The firm’s obsession with China is immediately apparent (as is some of their stranger self-promotion about the “de-materializing” art market,) but lack of reliable data from China means those sales and artists need to be viewed with some skepticism. How much of the spectacular numbers seen during the first half of this year is a product of adding domestic Chinese sales to totals that previously did not record Chinese sales. Nonetheless, ArtPrice.com says a record 34,700 works of Contemporary art were sold during the 12-month period from July of 2010 to June of 2011. Those works were sold for €895m. And that is only publicly auctioned work:

Finally, after the jump, you can see the top 50 Contemporary artists on Artprice’s list of 500 auctioned artists. Again, the list is over populated with Chinese names whose work is not well known in the West. Even so, there are some very interesting rankings, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s position at number 1. Notice the volume of works for Murakami, Nara and Haring.

Gerhard Richter’s absence is strange and calls some of the list’s methodology into question. [Read more...]

Economic Trends, Market Reports
Marion Maneker0September 29, 2011

Diamonds Are a Lender’s Best Friend

There’s an interesting side note in two recent stories about art loans: diamonds are increasingly being used as substantial collateral against short-term liquidity loans. Here’s the Wall Street Journal on pawn shops doing brisk business in loans to the wealthy against their high value assets:

“There is a certain type of affluent customer that will not go into a pawn shop,” owner Todd Hills told Newsweek in 2010. “And they don’t have a $50 or $100 problem. Maybe they have a $100,000 problem.” The granddaddy of all the plutocrat pawnshops is Beverly Loan Co., in Beverly Hills, which bills itself as “the Pawnshop to the Stars” has been helping the cash-strapped and famous for nearly 75 years.

Owner Jordan Tabach-Bank told CNN in 2009 that he was “giving more loans and they’re bigger than ever.”

“I recently had a hedge-fund manager in here getting a large loan on his collection of diamonds,” he said.

Now listen to Reuters on the rise of loans against luxury assets:

Martin Rapaport, chairman of diamond services company Rapaport Group, says owners of top-quality precious stones have also started to use these as collateral in financial transactions, repeating a trend he saw in the first days of the crisis in 2008.

“We know it happened in 2008 and I expect to see more of (it) this year. The stock market fell so much recently so these people are looking at tangible assets like high end diamonds,” he told Reuters.

At the root of this trend is the fact that such assets are proving better stores of value than investments such as equities. Their value is still appreciating, driven by huge demand from the fast-growing rich of Asia and Russia. David Prager, director of communications at diamond miner De Beers, said the firm’s prices rose by an “unprecedented” 35 percent in the first half of 2011. “That was driven by big increases in consumer demand, particularly in China and India.”

Pawn Shops for the (Formerly) Rich (Wealth Report/Wall Street Journal)

How to Borrow $10 Million (Reuters)

Market Reports
Saul Singer0April 06, 2011

Investment Diamonds Seeking 20% Returns

Investment diamond prices continued their upward trend in Q1 2011, rising a further seven percent in March and 13% for the quarter. Investment Diamond prices have now returned to their pre-financial crisis levels of Q2 2008.

After a good holiday season investment diamond prices broke price resistance levels that held steadfast during the second half of 2010 and continued to trend upwards throughout the first quarter of 2011. With rough prices remaining very robust throughout 2010 there was only one direction polished prices could go once these strong rough prices and the increase in demand moved its way through the diamond pipeline in the last quarter of 2010.

A further indication of the diamond market’s strength came last week at the De Beers’ March sight. For the second time this year De Beers increased its rough diamond prices with an overall average increase of ten percent on a relatively large estimated sight value of $500 million. Although part of the reasoning behind this price hike may have been an attempt to keep premium levels in the secondary markets in check, it is clear that De Beers and other major producers remain bullish and believe that the market can absorb further price increases. [Read more...]

Featured, Market Reports
Marion Maneker0October 21, 2010

Chinese Contemporary Market Confidence Report

[wpsc_products product_id='15']

Untitled Document