Auction house Christie’s on Monday announced a record year with $8.4 billion in sales, boosted by the historic Paul Allen collection, as did rival house Sotheby’s, which reached its highest figure in 2022 at 8 billions of dollars.
Thus (7.2 billion in auction sales and 1.2 billion in private sales), Christie’s did better than the 7.1 billion dollars in 2021, after a downturn in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic which had prevented 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 dollars.
New
In a memorable evening at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York, five works had exceeded the 100 million dollar 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 work of art of the XXe 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 Asian were absolutely crucial for the result” of the Allen collection, relativized the general manager of the company controlled by the company Artémis of the 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”, those native to the 1980s and 1990s.
“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 billionaire Patrick Drahi, had nevertheless announced record sales projections of 8 billion dollars last week (7.3 billion in 2021), figures including art sales, 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.”