ArtTactic’s 2018 Outlook report: bloom, gloom or doom for the UK?
Andy Warhol once said, “…making money is art, and working is art — and good business is the best art.”
At odds with that romantic image of a penniless artist driven only by creativity, Warhol openly embraced the commercial potential of art (and made some great stuff in doing so). Still, I’d wager even he would be amazed at the size, value and complexity of today’s market.
Good business is the best art
It’s tempting to call out the extreme prices at auction and smashed records as a clear sign of booming times. For example, Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi sold for $450.3m last November, over quadruple what Warhol’s own Eight Elvises went for in 2008 (I do wonder how he’d react to the news that his work is now the 27th most expensive painting ever sold: proud or a little bit offended?). Yet just like any global financial market or trade of high-value commodities, the picture is never as simple as a few double-take headlines.
ArtTactic is a London-based research firm that aims to shed light on the always complex — and often volatile — global art market. It uses techniques similar to those of other financial markets to analyse and predict trends, and one of its major outputs is the biannual Global Art Market Outlook report: a survey of art market confidence across 119 experts (including auction specialists, collectors, dealers, advisers and curators).
So how good will the business — or by Warhol’s reckoning, art — of the UK market be for the coming year, according to ArtTactic’s report?
The UK art market in 2018
2016 saw a six-year low in the value of the UK auction market for Post-war and Contemporary art (the most popular category and historical bellwether), and so the rebound in 2017 (+32.9% to £589m) came as a welcome relief. Also, total evening sales between Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips in October were the highest ever posted (£173.3m) for that month.
On this basis, you’d expect an optimistic outlook for 2018. Yet as ArtTactic’s report indicates, the situation is more complicated.
Whereas UK experts are less negative in their 12-month outlook than at the start of last year (25% expect a downward turn in 2018 vs 38% in 2017), only 28% anticipate a positive trend for the year ahead. A majority of 47% expect no or little change, which given the 2017 results is not necessarily bad. Yet the UK results contrast a much rosier outlook for the global market as a whole (47% positive) and specifically European market (45% positive).
The most straightforward explanation for these results would be Brexit. The general uncertainty caused by our looming— and still poorly defined — EU departure has contributed to a slowing of the UK economy; analysts predict growth of 1.5% in 2018, down from 1.8% in 2017 and 2% in 2016. It’s likely then that similar concerns are affecting confidence in the art market.
Given Europe’s brighter prospects, it’s also possible the continental auction houses will benefit from the UK slowdown. Paris would appear to be best placed to take advantage after a positive 2017: it increased its share of the European market to 68.3% (up from 62% in 2016 and 58.6% in 2015) and also hit a record high in total sales for the year of Post-war and Contemporary art ($125.3m).
So while definitely not a doomsayer for the UK, ArtTactic’s report does suggest we’re unlikely to see a bloom in the year ahead. And as Brexit won’t be resolved any time soon, this period of uncertainty could continue.
In Warhol’s terms then, 2018 looks to be an artwork in progress for the UK.
