In case you were wondering how this week’s sales of Contemporary art stacked up against previous years, here’s a chart of the sales from 2004 to present. The $635m in Evening sale proceeds is remarkably consistent with the previous Fall and Spring sale totals suggesting an art market that has settled into a new, post-crash mode.
Note, in particular, that the Fall 2006 sales reached a level that is very close to the mean for the last seven years of sales despite the boom and bust of the 2007-2009 period. The recent three New York cycles have all come in substantially higher than the average volume.
