BySiddhi Jain

February 25, 2020 (IANSlife) With a Claude Monet painting raking in more than 100 million USD at auction in 2019, the global art market continues to deepen with a record 5,50,000 fine art lots -- the highest annual number since 1945 -- sold via auctions around the world in the previous year, generating a total of USD 13.3 billion, says a new report.

Calling the present art market “the deepest and broadest public art market ever recorded”, the  Artprice by Artmarket's 2019 Annual Art Market Report shows continued growth in the art market driven by a combination of investment logic, speculative buying, passion collecting and insatiable demand for major signatures from the world's new museums.

Claude Monet's Haystacks (Meules) (1890) peaked the market at $110.7 million. Its value was multiplied by 44 since its previous auction in 1986.

Jeff Koons recovered the title of "most valued living artist in the world" when his Rabbit (1986) fetched $91.1 million. Gerhard Richter and David Hockney were the world's best-selling living artists, each with annual totals of $130 million in 2019.

The report also said that over the last 20 years, the art market has experienced very substantial growth.

The “market's total auction turnover has grown four fold since 2000, from USD 3.2 billion to USD 13.3 billion in 2019” and “the number of lots sold has doubled over the same period,” said the report.

As per the recently-launched report, France posted the best performance in its auction history, raising its auction turnover by 18 per cent. 

Among the three main trends of the global art market is: Street art is increasingly present on auction podiums, with its own stars -- Kaws and Banksy. Lots of other street artists are moving up the sales rankings including Invader, Stik, Shepard Fairey and Vhils.

“African-American and African-origin artists are recovering their rightful places in art history and in the market,” it added.

The report places the onus of this growth on the ease of access to art market information, electronic sales, the financialization of the market, a growing population of ever-younger art consumers (from 500,000 after the second world war to 120 million in 2019) and the extension of the market to the entire Asia/Pacific area, plus India, South Africa, the Middle East and South America.

“The internet has now become the principal and definitive forum for auction operators worldwide and they are using it to consolidate their market shares on all continents. Of the world's 6,300 auction houses, 99 per cent are today present on the internet (versus just 3 per cent in 2005),” it said.

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Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in

Editing by Aditi Roy and N. Lothungbeni Humtsoe