We recently heard from Artnet that the global auction market was up 19% to $8.6bn for the first half of 2014. Now Artprice has released their auction figures which tell a similar tale just with slightly different numbers:

The global art market rose in value by 17 percent to a record $7 billion in the first half of 2014, according to new industry figures. Artprice, a French company which tracks art sales worldwide, said that during the first six months of the year art works sold at public auction totalled $7.15 billion ($5.22 billion euros), up on $6.11 billion for the same period in 2013.

“The art market is hungry,” Thierry Ehrmann, Artprice’s president and founder, told AFP. “We have gone from 500,000 collectors in the post-war period to nearly 70 million ‘art consumers’ — art lovers and collectors — worldwide,” he said.

Global art market in rude health (GlobalPost)