The ‘Winner Takes All’ Art Market: 25 Artists Account for Nearly 50% of All Contemporary Auction Sales
Just 25 artists are responsible for almost half of all postwar and contemporary art auction sales, according to joint analysis by artnet Analytics and artnet News. In the first six months of 2017, work by this small group of elite artists sold for a combined $1.2 billion—44.6 percent of the $2.7 billion total generated by all contemporary public auction sales worldwide.
Our findings quantify what many market-watchers have long observed: As increasingly wealthy buyers compete for a shrinking supply of name-brand artists, the art market has become highly concentrated at the top. Nevertheless, the reality—that the work of just 25 artists generated almost as much money at auction as the work of thousands of other artists combined—may be even more extreme than some realized.
Winner Takes All
“The contemporary art market is a good example of a ‘winner-takes-all’ market, where a very small proportion of artists is responsible for a very large market share, and a very large proportion has a very small market share,” says Olav Velthuis, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. The same phenomenon is evident among athletes, actors, and musicians, he notes.
The list of the most profitable 25 artists includes blue-chip Pop and Abstract Expressionist names like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Cy Twombly, as well as living artists like Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, Christopher Wool, and Mark Grotjahn. The only women to make the list were Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama.
Andy Warhol, Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable) (1962). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
But after the market crashes of 2000 and 2008, “you saw a more substantial shift to resale material and proven masters,” says Allan Schwartzman, the co-founder of Art Agency Partners and chairman of global fine arts at Sotheby’s.
This shift was made more extreme by the emergence of ultra-wealthy new collectors in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Gulf, who sent a jolt of fresh money into the auction market. “Most of those new buyers were not entering the market with [purchases of work by] the artists of their generation—they were entering with the most important works by the most important artists,” Schwartzman notes.
The numbers bear this out. In the first half of 2007, when many of these new collectors began flooding into the market and a focus on brand names had firmly taken hold, the top 25 artists accounted for 48.8 percent of total auction sales, a slightly greater proportion than they do today.
Winners and Losers
What do the winners of this 21st-century market dynamic have in common? Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all artists on the 2017 list are white and male. Thirteen, or just over half, of the top 25 are American.