Michael Prodger on Art
THE ART MARKET faces 2021 in an uncertain and anxious frame of mind. In many ways it adapted quickly to the events of 2020, with online auctions — which had grown in five of the past six years to reach $5.9 billion in sales in 2019 — quickly becoming the norm rather than the niche. Christie’s and Sotheby’s online auctions, for example, have grown by 900 per cent and account for more than half of all their sales value.
Nevertheless, as both they and their clients adapted to the new world, their auctions in the first half
