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NFTs not disrupting traditional art world (yet), China now biggest auction market: arts update
- Clare McAndrew, author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, says non-fungible tokens have yet to affect traditional art world hierarchies
- China overtook the US to become the biggest public auctions market for the first time in 2020, McAndrew’s most recent report, released on Tuesday, says
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The recent hype over crypto art has yet to disrupt traditional hierarchies in the art world, one of the world’s leading experts on the art market says.
Last week’s staggering news that a jpeg file of a digital collage was sold for nearly US$70 million in a Christie’s auction has positive implications for digital artists and will further disrupt the way we consume art, says Clare McAndrew, founder of research firm Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report.
“When last week’s US$69 million sale of an artwork by Beeple blew the ceiling off the online-only art market, the disruptive thing is not that it has disrupted the hierarchy of the traditional art market [but that] the NFT market has a huge amount of dealing going on - it is very speculative, very bubbly,” she says, referring to non-fungible tokens, a “one of a kind” digital asset.
This space is where a lot of people buy a piece of art, sell it on, and make lots of money – just as they have always done, she adds.
Her latest report, released on Tuesday, is a summary of more traditional transactions that took place during 2020, a year when the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a 22 per cent year-on-year fall in global sales of art and antiques, to US$50.1 billion. However, the decline was not as steep as expected, the report says, with the market supported by record online buying and resilience in the China auctions market.
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