Displaying items by tag: auction market

For the fifth consecutive year, Christie’s has beaten the annual art sales record, clocking up £5.1 billion ($8.4 billion dollars) of sales during 2014, which is up 12 percent on 2013. The figure includes private (as opposed to public) sales of £916 million, and online only sales of £21.4 million. But the majority was for good old-fashioned public auction sales (up 10 per cent to £4.2 billion).

Of the many categories of sale Christie’s holds, the largest by far is for post-war and contemporary art, the driving engine of the auction market. Sales in this category at Christie’s rose by 33 per cent last year to £1.7 billion ($2.8 billion), accounting for an extraordinary 40.5 per cent of public auction sales.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s have long dominated the auction market for fine art. Now Phillips, the world’s third biggest auctioneer of international contemporary works, is about to open a new flagship salesroom here that it hopes could help challenge that duopoly.

The company, with auction rooms in New York and London, plus offices in eight other cities, has moved its European headquarters from Victoria, near one of London’s main railroad stations, to a 73,000-square-foot building at 30 Berkeley Square, in the heart of the wealthy Mayfair district