The rise of the internet, the comeback of Asia and the breakthrough of India, mark the 2023 auctions, which totaled $14.9 billion.
Despite these results, the market is down compared to 2022, according to Artprice's annual report published on Wednesday.
“
This drop in turnover masks an absolute record in transactions (763,000), up 5%, with an explosion in those of less than 1,000 dollars (423,000) and a 285% increase in online sales.
Only the very high-end segment is slowing down with a 25% drop in those above ten million dollars
,” explains Thierry Ehrmann, founder and president of Artprice, the world leader in information on the art market.
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Three years after the start of the Covid crisis, the Fine Art auction market (painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, prints, videos, installations, tapestries, NFTs), where the share of contemporary art (artists born after 1945) represents 17%, is picking up strongly in Asia but is declining in the West
,” he explains.
The American market is still in the lead with $5.2 billion in sales (-28%), followed by China, which is returning to its pre-Covid performance, with $4.9 billion (+4%).
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The return of NFTs
In other Asian countries, the disparities are strong: Japan saw its sales fall by 22% and those of South Korea by 49%, while India posted a record with 152 million dollars (+ 76% ).
With 1.8 billion dollars (-15%), the United Kingdom remains third, ahead of France, which totals 875 million dollars in sales (-11%) and remains fourth, with a significant increase in the number of million-selling works (around +80% compared to the years 2011-2014).
The year 2023 also marks the rise of women, with five of them now appearing in the world's Top 50 most valuable artists and a number of transactions involving them which has doubled in five years.
It is also the year that NFTs (certificates of digital authenticity for online content) took root in museums (LACMA and MoMA in the United States, Center Pompidou in France).
They were all the rage when they arrived on the art market at the end of the 2010s, with a boom in 2021, before recording a spectacular fall in 2022 following the crash of cryptocurrencies.