Clare McAndrew On Why the Art Market’s Future Lies Beyond the $10 Million Sale |
The founder of Arts Economics discusses how globalization, new wealth demographics and online sales are reshaping the balance of power in the art world. Paul McCarthy, Courtesy of Arts Economics
Clare McAndrew, featured on this year’s Art Power Index, has done what many thought impossible: she quantified the art market. As the founder of Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, McAndrew has become the industry’s de facto oracle, translating the art world’s opaque dynamics into data points, patterns and insights. When her report lands each spring, its results ripple across the market—from charting the health of global sales, identifying emerging regions and revealing the settlement behind the numbers.
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See all of our newslettersOver two decades, McAndrew has redefined how the art trade understands itself, applying the rigor of economics to a sector often governed by instinct and perception. Her analyses have shown how concentrated wealth, demographic change and globalization have remodeled the market’s power structures, and how resilience increasingly comes from its peripheries, not its peaks.
This past year was a pivotal one for the global art economy, marked by softening sales at the top end, a surge of activity in the sub-$50,000 segment and a generational shift driven by Gen Z and women collectors. New technologies, direct-to-artist sales and global diversification are transforming the market’s infrastructure, she reports, while also questioning how the boundaries of art are defined as luxury goods and collectibles enter the fold. McAndrew has emerged as an economist who helps markets evolve by revealing how confidence, perception and access shape value in ways that pure data cannot.
What do you see as the most transformative shift in the art world power dynamics over the past year, and how has it impacted your own work or strategy?
Sales in the art market for many years have been driven by an intense focus on a very small number of artists at the high end, which has escalated their prices, while creating higher barriers to entry for new artists and a winner-take-all type market scenario, where the works of the most famous artists are demanded the most, while emerging artists and the galleries and businesses that support them find it harder to generate sales and build careers. Alongside this, as most of what the mainstream media reports on is the multi-million dollar sums paid for this very small number of artists’ works, new buyers are led to believe that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there are so many other less publicized artists and works available at much lower prices.
These really high-priced sales were critical in driving the recovery of the market from the pandemic, particularly sales of ultra-contemporary and contemporary art, which outperformed other segments by a significant margin. However, a significant shift over the last year is that these are the two areas that have now slowed down the most. The segment of artworks sold for over $10 million has softened both in terms of volumes and value, and some of the bigger businesses have come under more pressure than some of the smaller ones. While this might not radically transform the market’s power dynamics overnight, it has at least shifted the focus away from that very narrow high end and the tiny share of artists it supports. Although some of the recent narrative around the market has been negative—focusing on a lack of eight- and nine-digit sales—there have actually been a growing number of transactions taking place, albeit at lower price levels, which is a positive development.
As the art market and industry continue to evolve, what role do you believe technology, globalization and changing collector demographics will play in reshaping traditional power structures?
My latest report on global collecting highlights the increasingly significant presence of female artists in the market and the growing influence of women as collectors, facilitated in part by shifts in the distribution and growth of wealth. Our research also uncovered the growing dominance of young Gen Z collectors, who were the most........