Art market shift - London ahead of New York
[
18 Aug
]
The growing interest shown by emerging markets (China, the United Arab Emirates, India...) and good performances from traditional markets resulted in spectacular figures for the first half of 2008. This has silenced the sceptics who were still expecting economic woes to have a knock-on effect on auctions.
The first Half of 2008 at auctions has so far countered gloomy and alarmist prophecies of a recession with sales of EUR 3.8bn (more or less equivalent to the EUR 3.7bn for the same period of 2007) and 504 bids over a million euros compared to 517 as of July 1st 2007. The art market has repeated the record performance reached in 2007 without beating it.
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