The art market has bounced back worldwide after prices slumped by more than 10 percent last year as investors look for a safer alternative to falling stock markets, the leading index Artprice said yesterday.
Chinese collectors had driven rocketing prices over the past few years that peaked in May last year when Picasso’s masterpiece the The Women of Algiers (Version 0) sold for US$179 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art.
Sales later cooled off considerably due to a “readjustment of the Chinese market,” Artprice said, with the international total for the year falling nearly US$2 billion short of 2014’s high of US$17.9 billion.
However, the world’s leading art auction database said figures for the first two months of this year show a strong recovery.
Artprice president Thierry Ehrmann said that with the world’s stock markets in turmoil, investors are returning to put their money in art “as a real alternative” to stocks and shares.
In the first seven weeks of the year prices recovered by 7.2 percent, he said.
The figures seem to give the lie to pessimistic reports from auctions of impressionist, modern and surrealist works in London and New York, which saw drops in sales figures of up to half compared with the same period last year.
Experts had also said that with fears over falling prices, fewer of the highest quality paintings and sculptures were coming to market.
However, Artprice said that with global interest rates now close to zero and with greater access to auctions over the Internet, “all the conditions are in place for the price levels to rise further.”
The company said that when the fall-off in interest from Chinese collectors was factored out, art prices were stable last year.
The dramatic 27 percent drop in buyers from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan came in the first half of last year, it said, with a slight 3 percent rise in activity from those areas in the latter months of the year.
After dominating the big art sales for several years, Chinese collectors slipped back into second place after knocking American buyers from the top of the tree in 2014.
The US accounted for 38 percent of all art purchased last year, while only 12 percent of the total worth of art sold came from sellers in the US.
Traditionally, art is seen as a “lagging market” which takes time to reflect changes in global economic conditions.
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