Each year, FDEF Finance Professor Roman Kräussl, authors the Manager Magazin’s Kunstindex about the current year’s art market trends, listing and analysing the 50 most popular artists worldwide based on the sale price of their artwork at auctions. According to Prof. Kräussl, 2021 was a year of recovery for the art market.
Mirroring other markets, the key word in 2021 was “inflation”. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have flooded the art market and caused price increases for individual artists, while the mere fear of inflation has fueled price increases in a self-fulfilling prophecy; buyers paid 26 percent more for art works by the 500 top-selling artists than in 2020. In 2021,152 artworks were sold for more than ten million dollars, almost three times as much as the previous year. The price boom and strong demand for top works are keeping auction houses optimistic. Overall, the auction market increased by 40 percent to nine billion dollars in 2021.
A new star in the art market sky
With Banksy, the rising star at the top-end, the art scene is appealing to a new generation of buyers. In October 2018, Sotheby’s auctioned one of Banksy’s canvases to an anonymous collector for 1.4 million dollars. While still in the auction room, the mechanism hidden in the frame shredded the painting in half, hence the hype around the painting only increased. Three years later, in October 2021, the painting, now known as “Love in the Bin”, was auctioned for 25.4 million dollars. This set a new record for the Banksy market and increased the British artist’s annual sales seventy-fold. In 2021, Banksy made it into the top 10 of the world’s most demanded artists for the first time.
Indispensable Basquiat
In May 2022, many collectors offered their top works at the New York spring auctions. What high-profile auction is not complete without a work by the art market star Jean-Michel Basquiat? Cheyenne Westphal, Chairwoman at New York auction house Philips, announced that Basquiat’s painting “Untiitled (Devil)”, for which Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa paid 57.3 million dollars in 2016, would be auctioned with an estimated price of 70 million dollars – payable also in Bitcoin or Ethereum. In the end, the painting was sold for 85 million dollars. In 2021, only Pablo Picasso was more desirable than the Brooklyn-born Basquiat.
NFTs soon out again?
The hype around the Non-fungible Token (NFT) works has already waned. Early in 2021, Mike Winkelmann alias “Beeple” put the NFT scene into the spotlight. His work “The First 5000 Days” made 69 million dollars in New York at Chrisite’s, shooting Beeple from zero to #17 in the artist rankings. Just behind Beeple, another NFT sensation was in the top 50: Larva Labs, creator of 10,000 Cryptopunks. Nevertheless, according to Philips’ Chairwoman Westphal, the business of NFTs has decreased in in the first part of 2022. How NFTs will affect the art market in the future remains to be seen.
Read the full article: „Die Kryptoschwemme spült noch mehr Geld in den Auktionsmarkt. Exklusive Rangliste der umsatzstärksten Künstler und Künsterlinnen“, which was exclusively published in the May 2022 issue of the Manager Magazin. (German / Paywall)