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HEALTH-VIRUS-LIFESTYLE-ART-SALES
Online sales save art market: report
PARIS, March 15, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – A surprisingly rapid shift online helped
cushion the art market from the worst ravages of the coronavirus pandemic
although sales still fell by a fifth last year, an Artprice report said
Monday.
Artprice, the France-based leader in art market data, said the digital
transformation of auctions amounted to a “revolution” in the way fine art is
sold after lockdowns forced change on a slow-moving industry.
“It’s been a spectacular shift that has gone beyond expectations and
despite the reluctance of certain auction houses,” said its president Thierry
Ehrmann.
Digitisation has opened up auctions to a huge new customer base,
particularly 30- and 40-year-olds, who rarely dabbled in the market
previously.
They are mostly after contemporary art, Ehrmann told AFP, which accounts
for some 16 percent of sales.
Online also means more global, with auction houses in Belgium or Sweden now
able to easily tap clients in Singapore or Indonesia.
“The market was 30 years behind the times. It has made up the gap in just
one year, when even the most optimistic projections had predicted it would
take until 2025,” said Ehrmann
– Chinese growth –
China’s success in containing the Covid-19 outbreak propelled it back to
the top of the sales charts, dominating the market with 39 percent of global
fine art sales by value.
The United States, which topped the chart for the previous four years, was
on 27 percent, with Britain in third on 16 percent.
That speaks not just to wealthy Chinese collectors, but a booming domestic
art scene — a previous Artprice report from late 2020 showed that 395 of the
top 1,000 highest-selling artists are Chinese, compared with just 165 for the
US. Despite Hong Kong coming under stricter Chinese control in recent months,
it has remained a major base for global art sales, with Sotheby’s doing a
quarter of its business there, Artprice said.
Meanwhile, sales in Europe dropped precipitously, with Britain, France and
Italy all down by around a third. The exception was Germany, relatively
untouched in the first wave of the pandemic, where sales were up 11 percent
for the year.
As for individual sales, the highest price was a Francis Bacon triptych
sold by Sotheby’s for $84.5 million, while graffiti artist Banksy sold the
most works — nearly 900.
Tastes tended towards contemporary figurative paintings, Artprice added,
especially from Africans such as Ghana’s Amoako Boafo.
In the gloom of the pandemic, “the top-level market remains keen on lively,
joyous and audacious figurative paintings” from artists such as Roy
Lichtenstein, David Hockney and French-Chinese painter San Yu.
BSS/AFP/RY/1942hrs