However, one billion dollars was projected during Sotheby’s New York Fine Art Week in May and “only” 799 million dollars were fetched. Sotheby’s will also not release its half-year results in 2023. Furthermore, Christie’s London June auctions of 20th and 21st century art yielded 32% less than the previous year’s comparable auctions. This house’s profits plummeted by 23% in the first half of 2023, to 3.2 billion dollars. According to Christie’s, this is due to a difficult macroeconomic situation. Among the publicity-generating collections that flowed into auctions in the first half of the year, only music producer Mo Ostin’s collection at Sotheby’s ($123.7 million) and real estate mogul Gerald Fineberg’s collection at Christie’s ($210 million) stood out.
New Customer Base
The Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1995 and have a large inheritance, are the new market pillars who buy goods worth a million dollars or more. They prefer what galleries and auction houses refer to as “ultracontemporary art” over what their parents like. Even with prices in the millions, the market is still highly active here, particularly in terms of the widely sought-after range of works by female and black artists.
The Asian Market
Sotheby’s sold million-dollar masterpieces by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse to Asian purchasers this season. Sotheby’s drew not just domestic collectors but also bids from Indonesia and the Philippines in July in Singapore, with modern and contemporary art from Southeast Asia. The most expensive lot of the half-year, Gustav Klimt’s last work “Lady with Fan,” which sold for the equivalent of 108.4 million dollars at Sotheby’s in London, was purchased by a collector in Hong Kong.
Phillips reported 471 percent more Japanese bidding activity than in 2022 and 38 percent more new purchases overall, highlighting the return of Japanese collectors to Hong Kong auctions.
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Auctions in Europe
With the exception of a few outstanding pieces, average dominated the first two-thirds of European auctions. With a half-year turnover of 40.9 million euros, Ketterer tops the German-language auctions. Millions of euros in fees were unusual in Switzerland. They were only auctioned three times at the Kornfeld Gallery in June, with hammer prices ranging from one to 1.7 million Swiss francs for works by Ferdinand Hodler, Pablo Picasso, and Felix Vallotton. At Koller, a lovely winged altarpiece by Lucas Cranach the Elder from his studio tops the list for more than one million Swiss francs. The highest price of approximately 1.3 million euros paid at the Dorotheum for Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey’s interior scene “A Look in the Mirror” is the season’s highlight in Austrian auctions.
Structural changes
Transactions, as well as changes in the corporate structure of long-established institutions, most notably the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, have influenced the market in the first half of the year. Following a 14% increase in half-year revenue to 338 million euros, two Parisian investment companies, Groupe Chevrillon and Vesper Investissement, bought a 30% stake in France’s oldest auction house.
Artcurial, the Parisian auction house that also owns the luxury real estate firm John Taylor and the horse trader Arqana, has had a presence in Switzerland since June. It has made an undisclosed investment in the Basel auction house Beurret Bailly Widmer, which was founded in 2011.
