Spring 2022

ARE YOU INCLUDING YOUR ART IN YOUR FINANCIAL PLANNING?
Colleagues at business meeting in conference room
While art is widely recognized as an asset class, not many people consider it when thinking about their estate and tax planning. Understanding the fair market value of your artwork can be quite useful when considering a museum donation to offset taxable gains or when developing a strategy for equitable distribution.

Cochran Arts was recently asked to join an interdisciplinary team that consisted of a financial advisor, a lawyer, and an accountant to respond to the particular needs of a client. Their goal was to create a trust for their children that included artwork. We were asked to first create an Appraisal for Financial Planning Purposes, which assigned a fair market value to all the works in the collection. From there, the client selected the pieces they wanted to go into the trust, after which we created a separate Gift Tax Appraisal to submit to the IRS.

2021 Figures Are In
The 2022 Art Market Report, prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew for UBS and Art Basel, was released last month. Here are a few of the highlights:

  • Aggregate sales of art and antiques in 2021 was up by 29% from the year before reaching an estimated 65.1 billion, surpassing even the pre-pandemic levels of 2019
  • Post-War and Contemporary art was the largest sector of the fine art auction market with sales totaling 6.7 billion, up by 42% year-on-year
  • Sales of works in the Emerging Market, or those made in the last 20 years, reached 2.5 billion at auction, more than doubling value from 2020
  • In 2021, just over one third of High Net Worth collectors had spent over $1 million on art and antiques, up from 20% in 2020 and more than double the level in 2019
  • The online market, which experienced a marked rise in 2020, grew again in 2021 by 7% to reach an estimated 13.3 billion
  • Sales of art and collectable NFT's on the Ethereum, Flow and Ronin blockchains have grown from 4.6 million in 2019 to 11.1 billion in 2021
these dances performed in museum settings?

Winter 2022

NOW IS THE TIME TO REALIZE VALUE FROM YOUR ART HOLDINGS
"Santa Cruz, California, USA - April 1, 2012:  Framed prints at the Santa Cruz Flea Market with a woman visible in the background"
2021 sales figures for fine art are beginning to come in, and they are exceptional. Sotheby’s announced a record 7.3 billion in total sales, Christie’s saw a five year high with 7.1 billion, and Phillips had its most successful year with 1.2 billion. Both public auctions and private sales are included in their figures, which cover several different collecting areas, but Contemporary Art continues to drive the most activity and garner the biggest headlines.

This trend is expected to continue in 2022, so if you are considering selling, Cochran Arts can help value potential works and identify whether private sale or public auction is your best option. We recently worked with a collector to sell a group of 20th c. British prints at auction in London. We walked the collector through the process, helping to negotiate the terms and facilitate the overseas transportation of the work. All pieces sold at or above their presale estimates.

Art Fairs are back in 2022!
Gallery sales were equally strong in 2021, fueled in part by a bottlenecked fall season of regularly-scheduled and postponed art fairs. 2022 looks to return to a more even pace, although some fairs have taken advantage of the disruption to permanently change their dates. Here are a few highlights of this year’s schedule:

  • January 20-23 - Fog Art Fair, San Francisco
  • February 9-13 - Zona Maco, Mexico City
  • February 17-20 - Frieze, Los Angeles
  • February 23-27 - ARCO, Madrid
  • March 24-26 - Art Basel, Hong Kong
  • April 6-10 - SP-Arte, Sao Paulo
  • April 7-10 - Expo Chicago
  • April 21-24 - Dallas Art Fair
  • May 18-22 - Frieze, New York
  • May 20-22 - AIPAD Photography Show, New York
  • June 16-19 - Art Basel, Switzerland
  • September 8-11 - The Armory Show, New York
  • October (dates tbd) - Frieze, London
  • October 20-23 - FIAC, Paris
  • November 10-13 - Paris Photo
  • November 16-20 - Art Cologne
  • December 1-4 - Art Basel, Miami Beach
2021 included several groundbreaking retrospectives. If you missed the shows, you can still snuggle up this winter with these wonderful exhibition catalogs:
  • Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
  • Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful (Columbus Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art)
  • Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art)
  • Joan Mitchell (SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art)

Spring 2021

As the Art Market Stabilizes, Now is a Good Time to Update Your Insurance Appraisals
When the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March of 2020, the art market took a pause. Auction houses, galleries and art fairs quickly pivoted to working online and their resiliency has been impressive. With a year under our belt, studies have shown that while the overall number of sales were down, there was not a corresponding decrease in values. In fact, certain sectors of the Post-War and Contemporary market have seen an incredible uptick.

Cochran Arts recently appraised a work for a client by a female Post-War artist whose value has jumped threefold since her last appraisal. If you or your clients have been waiting to update your appraisals, whether for insurance purposes, financial planning or to consider gifting to institutions or family members, Cochran Arts is ready to help.

2020 Figures Are In
The art industry has begun issuing their market assessments of 2020 and their predictions for the future. The Art Market 2021 report compiled by Dr. Clare McAndrew and published by Art Basel and UBS include the following key findings:

  • Sales in the US art market fell by 24% in 2020 to $21.3 billion but remained 76% above their level in the last recession in 2009.
  • Despite the contraction of sales overall, aggregate online sales reached a record high of $12.4 billion, doubling in value from 2019.
  •  Public auction sales of fine and decorative art and antiques (excluding auction house private sales) were $17.6 billion in 2020, a decline of 30% from 2019.
  • In 2020, the largest sector in the fine art public auction market was Post-War and Contemporary art (55%), which along with Modern art accounted for just over 81% of the value of sales. Sales in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist sector, the dominant category 30 years ago, showed the largest decline in value year-on- year, with sales down over 50%.
  • Millennial HNW collectors were the highest spenders in 2020, with 30% having spent over $1 million versus 17% of Boomers.
  • Just under half (48%) of the HNW collectors surveyed said they would be willing to go to an art fair in the first six months of 2021, although 64% would be ready to attend local events. The majority of collectors (68%) reported that they would be happy to attend any fair by the end of Q3 2021, and over 80% into Q4.
THESE GREAT ART INSPIRED MOVIES?

The Last Vermeer is based on the true story of the gallerist and painter Han van Meegeren (Guy Pearce), who was charged with collaboration with the Nazis for selling a Vermeer masterpiece to Hermann Göring, but was able to prove his innocence by showing that the painting in question, in fact, his own forgery.

Woman in Gold is also based on the true story of Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), who attempts to reclaim family possessions that were seized by the Nazis sixty years after fleeing Vienna with the help of young lawyer Randy Schoeberg (Ryan Reynolds). Among them is a famous portrait of Maria's beloved Aunt Adele: Gustave Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I."

The Thomas Crown Affair: Both the original starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway and the remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo follow a thief and an insurance agent in a game of cat and mouse over the theft of a Monet from the Met.