What’s it worth? It depends on who you ask
A new market report shows the difficulty of tracking the trends, says Colin Gleadell
Usually, there is just one comprehensive report on the art and antiques market every year, produced in March by Tefaf (The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht), the biggest and widest-ranging quality fair for art and antiques in the world. For years, it has been researched and written by arts economist Dr Claire McAndrew, and has been treated as the last word on what has happened in terms of total sales by dealers and auctioneers, and how the global art cake has been sliced up. When a journalist needs a figure for the market’s worth or percentage shifts, they look up the Tefaf report.
But this year, McAndrew was poached by another fair, Art Basel, which focuses solely on modern and contemporary art, to write her report. I don’t know exactly how prestigious it is for a fair to produce a high-profile market report, but obviously the folks at Art Basel, backed by UBS, thought it was worthwhile, and showcased their findings during last week’s Art Basel Hong Kong fair, where Asia is very much part of the equation.
Tefaf did not take the loss sitting down, and immediately appointed Prof Rachel Pownall, who is attached to Maastricht University, to write their report. The result is that, within just two weeks, we have had two highly detailed reports on the art market’s performance. That’s more than 400 pages of densely packed graphs and statistics with explanatory texts to absorb, compare and contrast – the perfect antidote for insomnia.
The result, though, is intriguing. The two economists come up with different statistics for virtually every subject covered in the reports – the product of differing methodologies. But where there is some kind of agreement is that, while they confirm that public auction sales of art and antiques fell last year, they estimate that private sales by dealers and auctioneers increased – by different margins, of course, taking the biggest slice of the art market cake.
So if you think you’d seen it all, with record prices for Monet and others at auction, you actually hadn’t seen the half of it. The question is, have Pownall or McAndrew seen it, or is it an educated guess based on the result of a questionnaire that most dealers wouldn’t answer?
To highlight the main differences, Pownall calculates that global public and private sales of art and antiques by auctioneers and dealers rose 1.7 per cent in 2015 to $45 billion. McAndrew starts with a much higher estimate of sales in 2015 to calculate that in 2016 they fell 11 per cent to $56.6 billion. Because auction sales are in the public domain, you would have thought there would be some consensus about their sales levels, but Pownall adds them up to $16.9 billion (down 18.8 per cent) compared with McAndrews’s much higher $22.1 billion (down 26 per cent).
The auction falls were, however, offset by the rise in private sales, which, according to Pownall, was between 20 and 25 per cent. This major market shift meant of the art and antiques sold last year, 70 per cent by value was sold privately. “Collectors have become more inclined to secure deals away from auction publicly,” she says. McAndrew, on the other hand, calculates private sales rose only 3 per cent, though those with sales of over $10 million increased 19 per cent.
But do the differences matter? Do the surveys matter? For a number-cruncher such as Anders Petterson, whose company, ArtTactic, produces performance graphs and predictions in an array of contemporary art sectors – Indian art, photography, Latin American art, individual artists – there should be more research on the art market.
“Relying on any single source of information in the art market, or any market, is risky,” he says. “I believe we need more research and more perspectives on the art market – more transparency. When you have this you will start to create a competitive market place for information and research. Look at the hundreds of companies publishing research on the equity market and other financial sectors – they don’t all say the same thing, but that is exactly why people buy and read the research.”
There’s one thing the general reader should be clear on: these reports are what could be termed “performance reports” – how sales totals have gone up or down or been shared. They do not confront the price issue of whether your Modigliani was worth any more or less last year than it was the year before. For that, you need a different kind of report.
‘We need more research and more perspectives on the art market – more transparency’