In its haste to get a leg up on the competition, the Financial Times seems to have garbled a few statistics. This weekend’s column in the FT covering the art market closes with an item questioning Art Basel’s claims of $3bn in sales at the world’s premier private trading event.

The story that the FT seems to want to refute appears to be this one on Bloomberg about the €3bn insurance value of all the art shipped to Basel. The insurance story is a hoary—and not very useful—tactic to generate attention for the fair and the insurance company. Nonetheless, there was never a claim that €3bn in sales took place which would rank among the single greatest art trading events ever to have taken place.

Yet here is the FT:

While potential total sales figures from Art Basel have been reported by some outlets as more than $3bn, Magnus Resch, whose Magnus application crowdsources the generally private prices of art in galleries, has done his own number-crunching. His data, which he says captures at least 80 per cent of works from the 292 galleries at the main fair, finds a total value of $850m — so tricky to get to $3bn of sales — with a median price of $35,000.

From public to private (Financial Times)