The headline number for auction transactions always gets the most attention in art market reporting. Those raw numbers are meaningful, but they are also highly misleading because the art market isn’t one market—it’s a collection of independent markets partitioned by period, style, movement, artist, and even bodies of work within an artist’s oeuvre. And, as true collectors know, the overall market can also be divided by the value of the property sold. Indeed, when I asked our friends at ARTDAI to divide the auction results from the past 17 years into six separate price categories—sales above $25 million; those between $5 million and $25 million; between $1 million and $5 million; between $250,000 and $1 million; between $50,000 and $250,000; and everything sold for below $50,000—the segmented results offered a far more nuanced picture of recent trends.
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