The Financial Times’s new art market columnist, Melanie Gerlis, has been adding up figures from Sotheby’s website to come up with a snapshot of the house’s auction sales for the first half of 2016:

During this time, the value of sales at auction at Sotheby’s fell 24 per cent to $2.4bn. Volumes were hit particularly hard in North America (down from $1.4bn to $869m) while Asia sales grew, from $382m to $458m.

The full story comes out August 8th when Sotheby’s releases Q2 earnings. In the meantime, the big surprise of these numbers—considering the global macroeconomic changes taking place—is the growth in

The Art Market: Oh you pretty things (Financial Times)