Our friends at Athena Art Finance have released their figures and charts covering the New York sales. You can download their entire report here.
There’s a lot of great detail in these charts. We will post a number of them over the coming days. But this offers the broadest over view of all of the sales both Impressionist-Modern and Contemporary, split by day and evening and by house.
Or read out analysis for subscribers below:
The statistic that leaps out at the reader from these charts is the prevalence of 26% of the lots in three of the six sales making prices above the estimate range. A fourth set of sales, Sotheby’s day sales, reached an even higher 30%. And even Phillips day sale saw aggressive bidding on nearly a quarter of the lots. Whatever the cause of the broader decline in art transaction volume, these figures show that there has been very healthy bidding and selling in November.
From what we know anecdotally with the widespread use of third-party guarantees in the Evening sales, the 26% figure in both Sotheby’s and Christie’s top lots (meaning Evening sale lots) also gives stronger color to the sales in retrospect.