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The Art Market’s Year of Magical Thinking

Auction totals are down a jarring 25 percent from the first half of last year. But new data from ARTDAI, which contextualizes the results with sales from the past decade, suggests we’ve been here before—a couple times.

paul allen art auction christie's
Charting the half-yearly totals reinforces what we’ve seen before: the same drop from the Paul Allen auction in the second half of 2022 to the first half of 2024 that we saw from Rockefeller to two years later. Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
July 16, 2024

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.