According to a recent New York Times article, contemporary art is outpacing Impressionist and modern art at the major auction houses.
Old Masters and 19th-century painters have “fallen out of fashion with the majority of art buyers”, while postwar and contemporary art generated a combined $1.6 billion at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips’s recent art auctions.
It is not just the buyers’ tastes that are shifting; it is their demographic as well. Sotheby’s reports a “new range of buyers has appeared in the last four years from Asia, Russia and South America.”
Indeed, the market for fine art is changing.