On Friday, 15 March, the art economist Clare McAndrew is due to present the findings of her annual art market report at a panel discussion held during Tefaf in Maastricht. Focusing on the emerging market of China and Brazil, the report reveals a shuffle in countries leading the market, with the US regaining the top position, above China. It takes the temperature of the international art economy, which McAndrew finds to be resilient but closely tied to wider financial events. In advance of the published report, we asked McAndrew to summarise her findings.
While art has shown relative resilience to the recent global financial crises compared to other asset markets, its fate as a whole is increasingly tied to wider economic events, in particular the expansion and distribution of global wealth. Poor and variable economic growth along with political uncertainties encouraged investors to retreat to the safest and most low-risk areas of many asset markets over the past year, such as bonds and blue-chip stocks. In the art market, this was exemplified by cautious buying and selling in many areas leading to a strong polarisation of the market, with the best performance seen at the top end of the best quality works and the most well known artists.
Last year was fraught with economic worries in many parts of the world, and this filtered down to parts of the art market. In 2012, global sales of fine and decorative art and antiques contracted by 7% in value, reaching €43bn. This contraction eliminated the gains recovered over 2011, but this was still a less dramatic change than the previous boom and bust years. This is due to the fact that many sectors have been recovering at different rates. Unlike the boom years from 2005 to 2007, when nearly everything did well, or the two that followed, when virtually nothing did, the past two years have seen mixed fortunes for different countries, sectors and individual businesses, leading to more stability in overall sales figures. This has protected the market’s downside risk, reducing the possibility of more extreme and protracted booms or busts.
