shown at the media preview of the summer auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong in May 2015.
dug into the Artnet Price Database to bring you five insights about how the fine-art auction market has evolved—and what you as an art investor need to know to get the most out of this dynamic, fast-changing industry.Total auction sales in 2021 reached $16.5 billion, making it the art market’s most lucrative year ever. The previous peak, in 2014, generated $16.3 billion in total sales. Last year marked a remarkable recovery from the pandemic-era trough, when the auction market slumped to $10.
The top of the art market also rebounded more quickly than other asset classes, according to Artnet’s index of the top 100 best-performing artists. In 2021, the blue-chip art market outpaced the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index. Looking ahead, some suggest art may also benefit from rampant inflation, which is reaching 40-year highs in the U.S., as it can be seen as a secure store of value during times of financial volatility.
Auction houses, which had been relatively slow to adapt to the Internet revolution, pivoted rapidly to the web during 2020. While IRL sales were limited or impossible, online transactions spiked. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips sold a combined $1 billion in art online in 2020, up 1,007 percent from 2019. Miraculously, a year spent in lockdown seems to have permanently altered buyer behavior, meaning that total online sales continued to grow even after the world began to emerge from lockdown.