In times of economic uncertainty, everybody seeks out market-tested blue chips. That would seem a wise strategy with postwar and contemporary art, the category some observers predict will be worst hurt by a recession. With that in mind, we’ve created the first Who Are the New Topsellers (henceforth, WANT) matrix, representing our analysis of how certain 20th- century artists are doing in 2008 relative to 2007. Specifically, WANT compares the February auctions in both years. Instead of merely charting artists’ sales totals, we developed a special formula for rating their performances on the block. Artists were awarded extra points for special feats, such as appearing on a catalogue cover, and suffered demerits, say, for having pieces bought in.
Our computations may not account for the many nuances of each work’s individual quality, but they do reveal broad trends. For instance, artists whose markets reached new highs in 2007, such as Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko, didn’t fare quite as well this February, while demand for Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana and Gerhard Richter increased this year.
How We Did It
We examined the catalogues from the 2007 and 2008 February sales and identified the artists who not only appeared in both but whose lot volumes were in flux. Along the horizontal axis, we plotted them according to the change in number of lots sold. Artists were given points if they exceeded their low estimates by a high percentage or were featured on the cover. We also took into account how much the artist contributed to overall sale totals in each year—if their works made up a bigger percentage of the total in 2008, they got points. They lost ground if their works were bought in, if they had sale prices that came in below low estimates or if their prices in 2008 made up a smaller percentage of the final tally.
