This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Each year, Art Basel art fair and the bank and financial services provider UBS produce a survey of global collecting. The focus is on high net worth individuals, but their data crunching also yields an overview of wider art-buying trends and shifts. The latest survey, for 2023–24, based on grilling 3,660 HNWIs in 14 regions, has just been published.

The art market emerged from the Covid pandemic in the rudest of health, with collectors (and would-be collectors) keen to offload their hoarded cash outside online auction platforms. Now, however, real-world issues such as high interest rates and geopolitical tensions have quenched the euphoria.

Although during the course of 2023 the market fell by 4 per cent, to $65 billion, rather more notable is a significant drop in auction sales, particularly at the higher end of the scale. In the first half of 2024, sales at the big four auction houses — Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams — were down by fully 26 per cent on the previous year, taking them back to pre-pandemic levels (although the values differ between the houses). Aggregate sales at the four companies were $7.4 billion in 2022, but the figure for 2024 is $4.7 billion. Quite a chunk and both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have made redundancies.

From 2021, artworks selling for more than $10 million helped drive the recovery. They have now tailed off, whilst stronger sales at a lower price range can’t make up the shortfall. There has also been a range of responses between sectors. At Christie’s, luxury sales fell by 39 per cent whilst Asian art was up by 20 per cent.

The past year has also seen a contraction in the amount of art imported and exported around the globe. This is no surprise — imports and exports of all goods fell globally by 7 per cent and 5 per cent. Nevertheless, the UK has fared particularly badly, with exports of art declining by 16 per cent year on year and now standing 60 per cent lower than in 2019.

Amongst other findings, it emerged that HNWIs in mainland China and Hong Kong were the most bullish in their purchasing. Furthermore, in China the number of potential buyers was twice that of sellers, suggesting plenty of scope for further expansion, even though the number of billionaires in China declined from 560 (2023) to 473 (2024).

What HNWIs globally are not buying are NFTs (non-fungible tokens), the modish form that took off a couple of years ago and reached an apogee of idiocy in 2021 when Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million.

In that year, NFT sales peaked at $2.9 billion. In 2023 they had slumped by more than half to $1.2 billion — still a ridiculous amount of money for this smoke-and-mirrors genre. Sales of digital art more widely also contracted, although, perhaps surprisingly, it is millennials and Gen-Z collectors who show least interest in it.

By way of contrast, female artists have continued to rise. In HNWI collections women now account for 44 per cent of holdings against male artists: in 2018 the figure was 33 per cent.

Nevertheless, some seriously expensive works of art continue to be sold, especially “classic” moderns. Last year, for example, Christie’s sold Jean-Michel Basquiat’s El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) for $67 million and some Claude Monet waterlilies, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, for $74 million.

Sotheby’s did a bit better. Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) went on sale with the highest ever estimate for an auction in Europe — $80 million — and ended up selling for $108 million. It was pipped by one of Picasso’s 1932 paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Femme à la Montre, which reached $139 million.

So far this year, big sellers have included David Hockney’s A Lawn Being Sprinkled ($28.6 million); Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer Crouching ($27.7 million), René Magritte’s L’ami Intime ($43 million). Most noteworthy, perhaps, was the sudden elevation of the English Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, whose Les Distractions de Dagobert galloped to a whopping $28.5 million, making her the most expensive British-born woman artist.

The old masters have been less heady. Two pictures by Rubens, Salome Presented with the Head of Saint John the Baptist and Portrait of a Man as Mars, made $26.9 and £26.2 million respectively. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Le Melon Entamé went for €26.7 million this summer, becoming the most expensive old master ever sold in France.

Whilst in the UK, Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, a painting once looted by Napoleon and later stolen again only to be found in a plastic bag at a south London bus stop, was sold by Lord Bath and the Longleat Trustees for £17.5/$22 million, an auction record for the artist and proof that works by one of the greatest painters — albeit an early piece — are a relative snip.

Meanwhile, Quentin Matsys’ The Madonna of the Cherries made £10.7/ $13.5 million and heads off to the Getty in Los Angeles, and Portrait of a Gentleman of the de Wolff Family by Frans Hals, an artist riding high on the back of the National Gallery’s exhibition, sold for £5.7/$7.2 million. However, an immaculate George Stubbs painting, Mares and Foals in an Extensive Landscape, failed to meet its estimate of £7 million, despite not having appeared at auction since 1978.

The survey and such results give flesh to recent mutterings suggesting that the idea of a “$50 million masterpiece” as a yardstick for outstanding works has now been downgraded to $20 million.