Recession-Proof Supercollectors Sustain Patchy Market, Survey Finds

LONDON—According to ArtTactic’s June 2008 Art Market Confidence Survey, billionaire collectors are propping up the upper end of the contemporary-art market, while the middle market for works in the $50k-$500k range is facing considerably more uncertainty, Bloomberg reports.

The survey, which is based on responses from 142 leading collectors and art-market professionals, found that the market for works priced at $1 million and more operates independently from lower-priced areas. Supercollectors like Russia’s Roman Abramovich, who paid multimillion dollar record prices for paintings by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at the May auctions in New York, belong to “a global wealth bracket that's not going to be affected by local economic downturns,” according to Anders Petterson, founder of ArtTactic.

However, the survey reported, the market for lower-priced works “is suffering from lower confidence levels and more uncertainty.”