The online art market has reached a new normal. While COVID-19 represented the most difficult challenge for the wider
since the 2008 financial crisis, among rescheduled art fairs and canceled auctions, this was not the case for online art sales at all. With auction houses and galleries boosting their digital departments during the lockdowns,
skyrocketed during the health crisis, then remained way above pre-pandemic levels in the following years. In 2023, online art sales totaled nearly 12 billion U.S. dollars, roughly doubling from 2019 and accounting for almost a fifth of the
A new era for online auctions
Big companies like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips, among the
leading global auction houses based on revenue, were just marginally relying on online sales before COVID-19. After quickly adapting to the challenges posed by the health crisis, however, they kept offering online auctions even after the pandemic, marking a new era for this market. In 2023, the
combined online-only auction sales of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips amounted to just under 900 million U.S. dollars, a five-fold increase from 2019. This shows that, even though both the sales value and the
number of online-only auctions declined compared to the peaks reported during the pandemic, the interest in selling art online did not disappear with the return of in-person events.
The NFT market after the hype
Data on online sales of art and antiques excludes non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are often considered as a separate category, with sales mostly taking place outside the traditional art market. As the NFT craze lost steam in 2023, the aggregated
sales value of art and collectible NFTs worldwide fell dramatically, decreasing by almost 13 billion U.S. dollars compared to the previous year. When focusing on the art segment,
monthly figures on art-related NFT sales show that, after the sharp rise and fall that followed the Beeple’s auction in 2021, this market reached a more stable but much lower level in 2023. In this sense, rather than revolutionizing the sector or vanishing completely, it seems more likely that non-fungible tokens will carve out their niche within the art market. After all, even though no NFT sales hit the news in 2023,
data on public auctions of art-related NFTs shows that two transactions still fetched over one million U.S. dollars that year.
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