Art valuation, an art-specific subset of financial valuation, is the process of estimating the market value of works of art. As such, it is more of a financial rather than an aesthetic concern, however, subjective views of cultural value play a part as well. Art valuation involves comparing data from multiple sources such as art auction houses, private and corporate collectors, curators, art dealer activities, gallerists (gallery owners), experienced consultants, and specialized market analysts to arrive at a value. [1] [2] [3] Art valuation is accomplished not only for collection, investment, divestment, and financing purposes, but as part of estate valuations, for charitable contributions, for tax planning, insurance, and loan collateral purposes. This article deals with the valuation of works of fine art, especially contemporary art, at the top end of the international market, but similar principles apply to the valuation of less expensive art and antiques.
The source of a work's artistic charisma has long been debated between artists who create and patrons who enable, but the charismatic power of artworks on those who would possess them is historically the initial driver of value. [4] [5] In the 1960s that charismatic power started edging over to accommodate commercialized culture and a new industry of art, when aesthetic value fell from prominence to parity with Pop art and Andy Warhol's idea of business art, a recognition that art has become a business and making money in business is an art. [6] [7] One of many artists to follow Warhol is Jeff Koons, a stockbroker turned artist who also borrowed imagery from popular culture and made millions. [8] [9]
For collectors, the emotional connection felt toward a work or collection creates subjective personal value. [10] The weight assigned by such a collector to that subjective measure as a portion of a work's overall financial value may be greater than that by an art speculator not sharing the collector's emotional investment, however, non-economic value measures such as "Do I like it?" or "Does it speak to me?" still have economic effect because such measures can be deciding factors in a purchase. [11]
In contrast, the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) suggests that the key issues are authenticity, quality, rarity, condition, provenance and value. [12]
Art valuation activity concerns itself with estimating market demand, estimating liquidity capability of lots, works, and artists, the condition and provenance of works, and with valuation trends such as average sale price and mean estimates. [13] As with other markets, the art market uses its own industry-specific terms of art or vocabulary, for example, "bought-in", describing the disadvantageous situation occurring when a work or lot at auction is returned to its owner having been passed over, withdrawn or otherwise unsold. [14] [15] Valuing art is also necessary when a piece is to be used as collateral. The art-lending market has expanded to an estimated $15 billion to $19 billion of loans outstanding in the USA. [16] The shift in Asia towards investment in western art is a factor that has allowed art lending companies to launch offices in Asia as western works are often easier to use as collateral. [17]
As in the housing market, "comparables" are used to determine what level of demand similar items have in a current market. The freshness of the comparables is important because the art market is fluid and stale comparables will yield estimates that may have little relation to a work's current value. [10] Subject matter and the medium of a work also affect market demand, as does rarity.
Liquidity in the art market means having artworks in very high demand and being able to sell those works without impediment. Art sales slow in downturns resulting in the market becoming more illiquid. There is a greater degree of liquidity risk facing the art investor than with other financial assets because there is a limited pool of potential buyers, and with artworks not reaching their reserve prices and not being sold, this has an effect on the auction prices. [11] In a divorce action between a couple who sought to divide a $102 million collection between them, the couple decided a sale would prove problematic because selling the entire collection and dividing the profit would saturate the market and drive down prices; in reporting on the case, The Seattle Times described the case as a study on how people measure the value of art, and which counts for more — pragmatism or sentiment. [18] The newspaper reported that one of the two litigants had a more sentimental view of the value of the works, while the other had a more businesslike view, wanting balance and diversification. [18] The newspaper attempted to calculate the value of the many artworks at issue in the case by determining a per-square-inch price based on each piece's value divided by its dimension, to end up with a per-square-inch price to apply to the amount of wall space the businesslike litigant wanted to cover with the available art. [18] The Times ultimately concluded that using this formula as between the litigants, John Singer Sargent's Dans les Oliviers à Capri was valued at $26,666.67 per square inch, that the sentimental litigant received $3,082 of appraised value per square inch while the businesslike litigant received $1,942 per square inch, but could cover more wall space. [18]
Trends for values from the world's top auction houses are compared for study of market direction and how that direction affects given artists and works. [19] [20] Valuations for art sold at the market's top houses usually carry more weight than valuations from less established houses, as most of the top houses have hundreds of years of experience. [20] [21]
Long term economic trends can have a great impact on the valuation of certain types of work. In recent decades the values of historic Russian and Chinese art have greatly benefited from increased wealth in those countries creating new and very rich collectors, as the values of Orientalist and Islamic art had earlier been boosted by oil wealth in the Arab world.
One of many factors in the primary market's price of a living artist's work is a dealer's contract with an artist: many dealers, as stakeholders in their artists' success, agree to buy their own stable of artists' work at auction in order to prevent price drops, to maintain price stability, or to increase perceived value, or all three, thus dealers bidding on their own artists at auction have a direct impact on the selling price for those artists' works and as a result, the valuation of those works. [22]
Research data available from art auction houses such as Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips, Bonhams, and Lyon & Turnbull are those tracking market trends such as yearly lot transactions, bought-in statistics, sales volume, price levels, and pre-auction estimates. [23] There are also companies such as ArtTactic utilizing art auction data as providers of art market research analysis. [24] Information available from internet-based art sale history databases generally does not include the condition of a work, a very important factor, [10] therefore the prices quoted in those databases reflect auction hammer prices without other, crucial valuation factors. Additionally, the databases of auctioned work do not cover private sales of works, and thus their use for art valuation is but one source among many needed for determining value. [11]
Valuation estimates by auction houses are typically given in ranges of prices to offset uncertainty. Generally, estimates are made by looking at what a comparable piece of art sold for recently, with estimates given in a range of prices rather than one fixed figure, [25] and in the case of contemporary art especially, having few comparables or when an artist is not well known and has no auction history, the risks of incorrect valuation are greatest.
One potential factor in valuation are the seller's reasons for selling a particular work and/or the buyer's reasons for buying, neither of which may have anything to do with the other. For example, a seller may be motivated by financial need, boredom with a particular artwork, or the desire to raise funds for a different purchase. [26] Common motivations include the so-called three D's: death, debt and divorce. Buyers may be motivated by market excitement, may be acting in accord with a collection plan, or buying like buyers of stock: to drive value up or down either for themselves or for another person.
One method for pricing pieces by new artists of uncertain value is to ignore aesthetics and consider, besides market trends, three semi-commoditized aspects: "scale" - size and level of detail, "intensity" - effort, and "medium" - quality of the materials. [27]
Valuing artworks in such a specialized market, therefore, takes into account a wide variety of factors, some indeed in conflict with each other.
In the United States, art bought and sold by collectors is treated as a capital asset for tax purposes, [28] and disputes relating to the valuation of art or the nature of gain on its sale are usually decided by the federal Tax Court, and sometimes by other courts applying federal tax law to specific cases.
An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition exist and are described in the section about different types. The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory.
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
In finance, valuation is the process of determining the value of a (potential) investment, asset, or security. Generally, there are three approaches taken, namely discounted cashflow valuation, relative valuation, and contingent claim valuation.
Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
Market value or OMV is the price at which an asset would trade in a competitive auction setting. Market value is often used interchangeably with open market value, fair value or fair market value, although these terms have distinct definitions in different standards, and differ in some circumstances.
Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of assessing the value of real property. Real estate transactions often require appraisals because every property has unique characteristics. The location also plays a key role in valuation. Appraisal reports form the basis for mortgage loans, settling estates and divorces, taxation, and so on. Sometimes an appraisal report is used to establish a sale price for a property.
The Rothko case was the protracted legal dispute between Kate Rothko, the daughter of the painter Mark Rothko; the painter's estate executors; and the directors of his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art. The revelations in the case of greed, abuses of power and conspiracy by financial interests in the art world were described by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court of New York state, as "manifestly wrongful and indeed shocking", serving as a cautionary tale for both artists and their gallerists.
Business valuation is a process and a set of procedures used to estimate the economic value of an owner's interest in a business. Here various valuation techniques are used by financial market participants to determine the price they are willing to pay or receive to effect a sale of the business. In addition to estimating the selling price of a business, the same valuation tools are often used by business appraisers to resolve disputes related to estate and gift taxation, divorce litigation, allocate business purchase price among business assets, establish a formula for estimating the value of partners' ownership interest for buy-sell agreements, and many other business and legal purposes such as in shareholders deadlock, divorce litigation and estate contest.
An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of art works, in most cases in an auction house.
Auction theory is a branch of applied economics that deals with how bidders act in auctions and researches how the features of auctions incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-world auctions. Sellers use auction theory to raise higher revenues while allowing buyers to procure at a lower cost. The confluence of the price between the buyer and seller is an economic equilibrium. Auction theorists design rules for auctions to address issues that can lead to market failure. The design of these rulesets encourages optimal bidding strategies in a variety of informational settings. The 2020 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats."
An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art.
Economics of the arts and literature or cultural economics is a branch of economics that studies the economics of creation, distribution, and the consumption of works of art, literature and similar creative and/or cultural products. For a long time, the concept of the "arts" were confined to visual arts and performing arts in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Usage has widened since the beginning of the 1980s with the study of cultural industry and the economy of cultural institutions. The field is coded as JEL: Z11 in the Journal of Economic Literature classification system used for article searches.
Artnet.com is an art market website. It is operated by Artnet Worldwide Corporation, which has headquarters in New York City. It is owned by Artnet AG, a German publicly-traded company based in Berlin that is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The company increased revenues by 25.3% to €17.3 million in 2015 compared with a year before.
Park West Gallery is a commercial art gallery based in Southfield, Michigan, United States. Park West Gallery claims to be the largest private art gallery in the world, but that is largely disputed, and that it has sold hundreds of works of art for thousands of dollars. It exhibits work from historic artists such as Renoir, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Durer as well as contemporary artists such as Peter Max, Michael Godard and Mark Kostabi. The gallery derives the majority of its revenue from auctions that take place aboard cruise ships.
Blockage discount is an art-business-related and legal term of art for referring to the money discount assigned to a group of artworks by a single artist when that group of works is to be released to market as a group rather than individually. A blockage discount adjusts the fair market value of the works downward because of the risks of depreciation when a large volume of art is released into the market all at once.
Most local governments in the United States impose a property tax, also known as a millage rate, as a principal source of revenue. This tax may be imposed on real estate or personal property. The tax is nearly always computed as the fair market value of the property, multiplied by an assessment ratio, multiplied by a tax rate, and is generally an obligation of the owner of the property. Values are determined by local officials, and may be disputed by property owners. For the taxing authority, one advantage of the property tax over the sales tax or income tax is that the revenue always equals the tax levy, unlike the other types of taxes. The property tax typically produces the required revenue for municipalities' tax levies. One disadvantage to the taxpayer is that the tax liability is fixed, while the taxpayer's income is not.
The art market is the marketplace of buyers and sellers trading in commodities, services, and works of art.
An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long gallery in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses served many purposes including the display of art. Historically, art is displayed as evidence of status and wealth, and for religious art as objects of ritual or the depiction of narratives. The first galleries were in the palaces of the aristocracy, or in churches. As art collections grew, buildings became dedicated to art, becoming the first art museums.