2008

Artprice.com has just published Art market trends 2008. Last year, the top-10 artists in terms of turnover at auction were: Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Hirst, Monet, Giacometti, Richter, Degas, Fontana, and Klein. The list shows how post-war art has become the most important section of the market. (Koons, Basquiat, Freud, Prince, and Rothko can all be found between places 11 and 20.)

Andy, Pablo and Francis

A couple of weeks ago, Artprice.com published its yearly overview of art market trends. It contains interesting insights in the "suicidal competition" in the art market and the remarkable rise of contemporary Chinese art (for example from Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun). Anyway, 2007 might have been the last year without Asian artists in the top-10 of artists based on the total revenue generated by public sales (2006 ranking between brackets):

1 (2) Andy Warhol [422 million USD]
2 (1) Pablo Picasso [320 million USD]
3 (19) Francis Bacon [245 million USD]

4 (79) Mark Rothko
5 (14) Claude Monet
6 (9) Henri Matisse
7 (37) Jean-Michel Basquiat
8 (26) Fernand Léger
9 (6) Marc Chagall
10 (17) Paul Cézanne

Have fallen out of the top-10 this year: Modigliani, De Kooning, Gauguin, Liechtenstein, Schiele and Klimt.

Buy Warhol, sell Richter

Artnet predicts some trends:
- "Is this the season where prices for blue chip art finally stop going up? The answer is no. What’s more likely to happen is that prices for works by younger artists, which appear in part two of the day sale sessions, are going to stop going up."
- "The market will decline, this season or next, for Chinese contemporary art. The price rise in Chinese contemporary is a sucker bet based purely on speculation rather than on the quality of the work itself."

The article also gives some advice, after saying that "given the inflated state of the market, every artist should be a 'sell'". Anyhow, the author's opinion can be summarized as follows:
- BUY: De Kooning, Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol
- HOLD: Bacon, Basquiat, Fontana, Rothko
- SELL: Christo, Doig, Freud, Gursky, Haring, Hirst, Koons, Prince, Richter, Tuymans

Give me a call when you sell your Richter, alright?