The stop-start year in art collecting – Financial Times

“I’ve never worked so hard without moving.” So says Lucie Kitchener, chief executive of London’s Masterpiece fair, summing up the art market in 2020. Covid-19 and its shutdown of mass events for most of the year meant that Kitchener was one of dozens of art fair organisers forced to move their longstanding editions online. The art world was shocked when Art Basel Hong Kong became the first fair to migrate in March but such dramatic decisions soon became inevitable outcomes through the year. Gallery shows, auctions, sale previews and talks programmes all turned virtual too. 

End-of-year numbers have yet to be finalised, but data from Pi-eX show that for the top three auction houses — Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips — public sale totals were down 31 per cent in the year to December 9, having already fallen 17 per cent for the same period last year. The decline looked to be much worse earlier in the year though and the 2020 total of $6.9bn is slightly ahead of where it was during the last deep-recession year of 2009.

“The 2020 crisis in the art market has very much been an operational crisis — how do you sell art with limited ability to showcase it live ahead of a sale? It is clear that without the internet, the whole auction business would have come to a standstill,” says Christine Bourron, chief executive of Pi-eX.

Art market analysts expect the gallery sector to have fared worse, predicting revenue falls nearer 40 per cent as the loss of art fairs in particular dented business. 

In their place came the “OVRs”, or online viewing rooms, which now, with their increasing frequency, can inspire feelings of dread. Scrolling through sometimes hundreds of gallery pages with dozens of works on each has proved to have limited appeal, though dealers are grateful to have some sort of sales platform for their works. Artists too have at least had a reason to keep going, notes the industry podcast editor Charlotte Burns, as most of their other viewing channels — including the coveted museum shows — have been stop-start. The Italian dealer Massimo De Carlo described OVRs as “almost crucial to survival” this year.

Survival is not to be sniffed at. The conservative art market suddenly had to embrace the internet and worked hard to produce alternatives that arguably make for a healthier future. Lapada, the Association of Art and Antiques Dealers, began to teach its generally older members how to use social media while contemporary galleries, mostly more au fait with digital delivery, started to remove some of the barriers to entry that had been preserved for too long. Dealers are now in the minority if they don’t post at least a price range for their work on an online fair, something that would have been unthinkable just a year ago. Collaborations that would also have been unimaginable — such as auction houses offering their digital platforms and physical spaces to art fairs — also began to emerge this year. 

In the interludes outside of full lockdowns, a hybrid model of online exhibitions complemented by real-life shows has captured imaginations and injected some life back into the individual galleries. “We didn’t want to cancel — we’re not a mass physical event in one venue — it was a question of how to adapt,” says the gallerist Stephen Ongpin, chairman of London Art Week, one of the first events to test a clicks-and-bricks event in July. 

In the mean time, the high costs of operating at dozens of temporary events around the world disappeared completely, while those in the market with an environmental conscience have been able to rest easier. Awareness of the world outside has also changed market behaviour with movements such as Black Lives Matter helping to prompt tangible beginnings of a more just and diverse art world. 

Supply was understandably down this year as would-be sellers waited for a better time. But demand for art, while suffering a brief blip as the pandemic’s realities hit hard in late March, initially returned with a vengeance. During the many lockdowns in the first half of the year, sellers noted a trend that the wealthy — unable to spend on lavish meals or splashy holidays — turned instead to redecorating their homes, including with art.

The impact was felt at all levels of the market: Lyon & Turnbull, an auction house in Edinburgh, recorded nearly 1,400 bidders at a decorative arts and design auction in April, double those registered at its equivalent in-person sale six months previously. At the highest end of the scale, bidders and the market’s all-important sellers responded well to the new and sparkly live-streamed evening sales at the big-name auction houses.

In late June, Sotheby’s tested its slick technology first and sold $363.2m of art in a few hours. Christie’s followed suit a couple of weeks later, with a clunkier system but an even better result of $420.9m. Individual hits included $84.6m for a Francis Bacon triptych at Sotheby’s — the highest public price of this year. Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS global wealth management, compared the pent-up demand with April’s reopening of the Guangzhou branch of the luxury chain Hermès, which reportedly registered $2.7m of sales in just one day.

Such momentum didn’t last at auction all year, not least because the summer’s optimism that the worst of the pandemic was over proved misplaced. By mid-December, and with a significantly slimmed-down staff, the auction houses’ greatest hits proved more at the “easier to access day sale price points” of between $200,000 and $1.2m said Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of postwar and contemporary art. Consequently, the auction houses have fed the market more frequently — with wares ranging from designer sneakers to art deco bathtubs and prime paintings from struggling museums — and have managed to stem some of the flow. A high proportion of guarantees has also helped keep the public appearance of top-value works on the market, while private sales, we are told, have been gung-ho. 

The pandemic hasn’t gone away and the art market’s eventual shape will probably involve more bloodletting in the coming months. But, for now, its participants — many of whom found imaginative solutions when forced to follow unforeseeable extrinsic events — can allow themselves a festive pat on the back for getting through so far.

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