With much of the art world scattered for the summer, it was the perfect time to have our friends at ARTDAI perform a gut check on the market’s health over the first half of 2024. In short: These aren’t the glory days, but we’ve been here before. Fine art sales at Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s totaled $2.66 billion, according to ARTDAI—down 25 percent from the same period last year, and down 48 percent from the first half of 2022. One has to go back to the disastrous first half of 2020—you might remember a pandemic forcing everything to close down?—to find a lower number, at $1.24 billion. But that would hardly be a fair comparison.
The last time the auction market for fine art dipped this low without an external crisis was the second half of 2019, when all three houses posted nearly the same total ($2.67 billion). Or you can look back to 2016, when the first stirrings of Brexit, MAGA, and global populism spooked international markets. The auction total for the first half of that year was $2.83 billion—slightly higher than this current era, even if the vibe was similar—and $2.16 billion in the second half, which made 2016 a substantial reset after the strong market performance of 2013-15.
