Contemporary art, always prone to big price swings, has had a strong start this year, and the latest generation of artists is attracting prices that rival those of established auction stars despite a two-year downturn in the sector.
The New York contemporary art auctions last month set several records and helped lift prices by 5 per cent this year, according to Artprice.com, which has developed an index to track art prices at auction.
Artprice warned that there was a similar rise early last year, but the index then fell away for the remainder of the year. Prices for contemporary art - usually defined as works by those born after or around 1950, which take everyday objects and transform them into art - have fallen more than art prices overall, and are hovering at a three-year low.
But this obscures the fact that the prices paid for top contemporary artists are coming close to those paid for the Impressionists. A sculpture by US artist Bruce Nauman holds the record for the top contemporary art price paid to date: $9 million (€7.82 million) in 2001, for the sculpture Henry Moore bound to fail, back view, which was completed in 1967.
Three of the four top prices paid are for sculptures.
That is perhaps not surprising because so many contemporary artists work in media other than painting. Michael Jackson and Bubbles, completed by Jeff Koons in 1988, made $5.1 million at auction in New York in 2001.
Only 11 of the top 20 prices paid for contemporary art works are for paintings, according to the Artprice.com data.
The highest price for a painting was $5 million, paid last year for a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who has had a strong and steadily rising market since his death in 1982.
Thirteen of the top 20 prices recorded were for the work of US artists. Despite talk of the global nature of the art market, buyers tend to favour their own nationalities, and the large population of wealthy US collectors and museums helps to underwrite the market for American artists. Four Germans and two Britons appear on the list.
Nauman (61), a conceptual artist who works in sculpture, film, holograms and installations, has seen the value of his works triple in the past five years. The second-highest price was garnered by 1980s wunderkind Koons, who has seen his works triple in value in the past five years despite being somewhat out of the limelight.
The youngest artist on the list is the 33-year-old British Jenny Saville, whose Figure 11.23 was sold at Christie's last month for $480,000. - (Financial Times Service)
