Global

The art market leaves 2020 behind

, 2 min

Il mercato dell’arte si lascia alle spalle il 2020

The early summer auctions confirmed the art market's decisive recovery, thanks in part to the use of participation systems that have made it increasingly global.

The most responsive element, but not necessarily the most representative one, is that of international top-level auctions as it keeps the "pulse" of the most important segment in terms of turnover, but also the most elite.

What is still missing is the panorama of fairs and the galleries that participate in them, where record prices are not achieved, perhaps, but important volumes attended by tens of thousands of people and not just a few hundred billionaires.

Usually, the art calendar foresees a slow recovery in September before arriving at the big fairs and auctions in October and November in London and New York, but this year this was not the case: the main Art Basel fair was held in the second half of September, after a postponement from the traditional date in June.

And for those following the Italian market, September saw the MiArt fair, an important checkpoint in the Lombard capital for national and primary-market galleries.

The spotlight, in a time of virtual interactions, has so far been on digital art and the unusual prices of so-called NFT, overshadowing the suffering of private galleries in their main sales channel: relationships with collectors.

The digital market will remain in vogue for speculators and those who need to 'park' the volatile liquidity of virtual currencies, but it has no prospect of replacing the 'real' market based on relationships, encounters, physicality.

The reason is obvious and banal, but it is worth repeating, especially for those who are entering the art economy for the first time: the vast majority of operators and their customers have a genuine interest in art for its historical, cultural and relational value, values that cannot be replaced by an online presence alone.

And so the mechanism of fairs is set in motion again, allowing everyone to breathe a sigh of relief and even potentially discuss convenient acquisitions at a time when operators need to make money!

Autore: Giovanni Gasparini