Global Art Market Soars 29% In 2021
Reaching $65 billion in sales.
Reaching $65 billion in sales.
The global art market rebounded strongly in 2021 despite the challenges of the pandemic, according to a global art market report released Tuesday.
Aggregate sales, including sales by dealers and auction houses, jumped 29% from 2020 to an estimated US$65.1 billion last year, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in 2019, according to the annual report jointly published by Art Basel and UBS and authored by Clare McAndrew, founder of Dublin-based Arts Economics.
“The art market has demonstrated incredible resilience in 2021, with a strong uplift in aggregate sales, despite still operating under some very challenging conditions,” McAndrew said in the report. “Dealers and auction houses successfully adjusted to a new two-tier system of online and offline sales and events, and the rising wealth of the high-net-worth collectors helped to support demand at the higher end of the market.”
The median expenditure by high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), those who have a net worth of more than US$1 million, excluding real estate and private business assets, reached US$274,000 in 2021, more than double the level in 2020, according to the report.
Further, 74% of HNWIs surveyed bought art-based non-fungible tokens, or NFTs in 2021, with a median price of US$9,000 each, the report said.
The findings are based on a survey of 2,339 wealthy individuals across 10 major markets, and represent one element of the wide-ranging report on the state of the global art market.
Sales by dealers amounted to approximately US$34.7 billion in 2021, increasing 18% year-on-year. Public sales by auction houses, excluding private sales, reached an estimated US$26.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 47% from a year ago, according to the report.
Geographically, the U.S. still dominates, accounting for US$28 billion, or 43% of the total global sales of art and antiques in 2021. Greater China was the second largest with a market share of 20%, or US$13.4 billion in sales.
Reprinted by permission of Penta. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: March 29, 2022.
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A study suggests that when jobs are hard to come by, the best workers are more available—and stay longer
Could a recession be the best time to launch a tech startup?
A recent study suggests that is the case. The authors found that tech startups that began operations during the 2007-09 recession—and received their first patent in that time—tended to last longer than tech startups founded a few years before or after. And those recession-era companies also tended to be more innovative than the rest.
“The effect of macroeconomic trends is not always intuitive,” says Daniel Bias , an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, who co-wrote the paper with Alexander Ljungqvist, Stefan Persson Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Drawing on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the authors examined a sample of 6,946 tech startups that launched and received their first patent approval between 2002 and 2012.
One group—about 5,734 companies—launched and got their patent outside of the 2007-09 recession. Of those, about 70% made it to their seventh year. But the startups that launched and got their first patent during the recession—about 1,212 companies—were 12% more likely to be in business in their seventh year.
These recession-era firms were also more likely to file a novel and influential patent after their first one. (That is, a patent the researchers determined was dissimilar to patents in the same niche that came before it, but similar to ones that came after it.)
So, why did these recession-era firms outperform their peers? Labor markets played a big role.
A widespread lack of available jobs meant that the startups were able to land more productive and innovative employees, especially in their research and development groups, and then hold on to them. More important, the tight labor markets also meant that the founding inventors—the people named on the very first patent—were more likely to stick around rather than try for opportunities elsewhere.
For startups started during the 2007-09 recession, founding inventors were 25 percentage points less likely to leave their company within the first three years. On average, about 43% of founding inventors in the entire sample left their startup within the first three years.
“Our study really highlights the importance of labor retention for young innovative startups. Retaining founding inventors cannot only help them survive, but also thrive,” Bias says.
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