Marion Maneker: Your latest report says the art market rose 4 percent in 2025, to $59.6 billion in overall sales. Where does that number stand relative to previous years over your 20-plus years of doing this report?

Clare McAndrew: This was a step-up, rather than any kind of massive boom. I had to qualify this when I wrote about the positive recovery in the first paragraph of the report, and the first chart showing sales over the last decade makes it clear that the market was still down about 7 percent compared to where it was 10 years ago. That is a really interesting dynamic: It hasn’t really grown from that point.

Dealers made up about 58 percent of sales, but their aggregate sales growth was sluggish, at around 2 percent in 2025. The largest dealers saw a small improvement, but even in that $10 million-plus segment, around 48 percent of dealers improved while 43 percent went down. It was a really mixed bag. The lower-end dealers did well, but they don’t shape the big picture that much. Then there was a stagnant segment from $1 million–$10 million dealers, which is a big portion of my survey respondents and an important part of the overall market when you consider the distribution of sales.

Auctions did better. Public auctions make up around 35 percent of sales and were up 9 percent. The smaller private sales segment—about 7 percent of total value—was down 5 percent. Performance was proportional to price level: Sub-$250,000 segments at auction were stagnant while segments above that grew, with the best annual growth at the very top, which is what really turned the auction sector around.

So it was an improvement, but in context, the market is still not where it was at the post-Covid peak in 2022—and still not where it was 10 years ago.

One of the reasons these numbers are hard to understand is the sheer number of factors involved. There are the internal dynamics of how the art market works, and within that, global liquidity and other macroeconomic considerations.

Right, and although you can find relationships between parts of the art market with, say, financial markets, or the direction and spread of wealth in different periods, there are no perfect and consistent correlations. It’s an ebb and flow with art sales because this is such a supply-driven marketplace. When the market is low, it takes a while to build confidence and encourage vendors. When dealers and auction houses can get the right supply onto the market, that turns the cycle positive. But although a positive market can have a good run, it inevitably also creates scarcity in the pipeline, which eventually tapers, and then you’re on the down slide again.

I’ve always believed that if you can get the right material onto the market, there are always people waiting in the wings to buy it, no matter what’s happening in the broader economy. I think that’s what happened at the end of last year. It’s about feeding that supply pipeline—and the outlook coming into this year is still positive in that regard. There are some big collections coming on to the market.

One really interesting thing in your chart is the way the number of objects sold has gone up and to the right since 2020. It was steady for a long time, and then suddenly it’s moving in one direction. What’s driving that?

I think some of this growth in the volume of transactions is tied to the growth in online sales, which remain dominant at the lower end of the market. We saw a spike in sales through online channels from 2020 onward—and they’re still running at much higher levels than they were pre-Covid—but because they still are mainly focused at lower prices, they don’t have as much effect on what’s happening in terms of overall sales. That segment is still very much concentrated under $50,000, so you need a lot of transactions to shift meaningful value.

There are also a lot of auction houses and dealers operating at that lower end who are thriving—at least in terms of volume. Many categories that the big auction houses have moved away from still sell well through other channels.

I think that’s where most of the business in the art market is. If you look at the auction sector in any given year, over 90 percent of lots sold are in the sub-$50,000 segment, with a large portion actually under $10,000. That’s really where most of the day-to-day business of the art market takes place.

Can you describe your methodology?

For the annual art market report, I cover dealer and auction sales. Everyone assumes the auction sector is the easy part, but it’s not that straightforward. There’s a lot of cleaning, correcting, and assembly, especially in certain regions. China is always particularly complex and challenging every year, and it takes a lot of work that has to be done as it is such an important auction market. The great thing about auctions, though, is that you do get transaction-level data, so you can track sales and prices in detail by segment or sector or artist.

For dealers, as with any industry that has private sales, there’s limited public records and official statistics, so surveys are necessary. These have improved over the years, and I’ve worked more closely with gallery associations. Coverage is still only ever going to be a sample of the total number of businesses. I’ve always said that I cover a fairly representative sample of the mid-to-high-level businesses in the sector, but there’s a very long tail of small businesses that don’t get picked up in the survey as they are harder to reach, and for which I use conservative estimates. I’m aware that may mean underestimating some smaller markets, and this year I’m focusing a bit more on markets outside the traditional core in Asia Pacific and other regions, where there isn’t such a strong network of galleries.