THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL

According to joint analysis by Artnet Analytics and Artnet News, just 25 artists are responsible for almost half of all postwar and contemporary art auction sales.

In the first half of 2017, works by this group of 25, which includes Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly, sold for a combined US$1.2 billion – 44.6 per cent of the US$2.7 billion total generated by all contemporary public auctions.

Ralph Taylor, global head of post- war and contemporary art at Bonhams, notes: “As demand outstrips supply, prices keep going up, which does distort the market. Much of this has certainly been driven by Asian buyers but that’s a reflection of their desire for quality.”

the UK Brexit vote to a slight economic slowdown in China and the surprise US presidential election. Christie’s overall sales fell 16 per cent to £4 billion (S$7 billion), while Sotheby’s reported a 27 per cent decline to US$4.9 billion. But 2017 brought renewed enthusiasm for the art market. Sales for the first half of 2017 at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips were up US$1.08 billion on the same period in 2016, and the momentum continued in the second half of the year.

Christie’s Fall Auction series in New York achieved US$1.42 billion in one week, which, even without the sale of the da Vinci, compared favourably with the US$620.2 million achieved for the equivalent series in 2016.

Gregoire Billault, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York, noted that a signal of a more robust market is that many clients had been willing to part with works that had been in their collections for decades, such as a Mao by Warhol, which had been in a private European collection since 1972, and was sold to an Asian collector for US$32.4 million.

activity at its auctions in New York and London, Sotheby’s Hong Kong started to offer Western contemporary art in its evening sale last year, while Christie’s complemented its Hong Kong autumn auction series for the second time with The Loaded Brush, a private selling exhibition offering works by Monet, Matisse and Mark Rothko that in previous years would have been sold in New York or London. In 2016, Phillips debuted its first contemporary art auction in Hong Kong.

According to the UBS/PWC Billionaires Report 2017, there are now 16 Asian billionaires ranking on Artnews’ Top 200 Collectors list compared with just one in 2006. To tap this growing buying power, a number of top Western galleries are opening outposts in Greater China. This year, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth will open galleries in Hong Kong, while Levy Gorvy is planning to open an office in Shanghai.

Importantly, Taylor remarks, auction houses and western galleries are now bringing top western contemporary artworks to the region, and expanding beyond the wellrecognised brand names of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons to offer more exclusive artworks. “Now galleries are bringing artists from their core rostra, bringing the best and most challenging works. They equate the appetite of what they do at Art Basel Hong Kong with what they do at Art Basel in Basel.” ≠