(New York) Auction house Christie’s on Monday announced a record year with $8.4 billion in sales, boosted by the historic Paul Allen collection, as was rival house Sotheby’s which hit its highest in 2022, at $8 billion.
With this figure (7.2 billion auction sales and 1.2 billion private sales), Christie’s is doing better than the 7.1 billion dollars in 2021, after a downturn in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. which had prevented the auction houses from operating normally.
For the managing director of Christie’s, Guillaume Cerutti, this performance, “despite a difficult macro-environment” with the war in Ukraine and inflation, is explained in particular by “the resilience of the art and luxury markets and the remarkable success of several major collections” put up for sale, “including the unforgettable Paul Allen”, named after the co-founder of Microsoft, who died in 2018.
On November 9 and 10, this collection of 155 works, tracing 500 years of art history, had totaled a record amount of $1.62 billion.
New
On one memorable evening at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York, five works surpassed the $100 million mark, including a Cézanne, a Van Gogh and a Gauguin. And in May 2022, a famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol had reached the record for the artwork of the 20e century at auction (195 million dollars), still at Christie’s in New York.
For 2022, buyers from North and South America are up (40% in value, 35% in 2021) and those from Asia-Pacific are down (from 31 to 26%), but “buyers Asians were absolutely crucial for the result” of the Allen collection, relativized the general manager of the company controlled by the Artémis holding company of French billionaire François Pinault.
According to Christie’s, the good numbers are driven by “a new generation of collectors: 35% of buyers in 2022 were new and 34% of them were millennials (born in the 80s and 90s)”.
“Asia-Pacific has the fastest growing base of new collectors,” adds the auction house. Mr. Cerutti clarified that cars and real estate were not included in these results.
With less spectacular sales, Sotheby’s, owned by Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, announced last week record sales projections of $8 billion ($7.3 billion in 2021), figures including sales of art, luxury, but also residences and vintage cars.
The auction house also noted that its customer base in Asia is “growing rapidly” and collectors there are “spending more per person on average.”