February 14, 2025
Invest in Art

Why you should invest in female artists


“Louis Vuitton shop window display”, by Yayoi Kusama

(Image credit: “Louis Vuitton shop window display”, by Yayoi Kusama © JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images)

Move over Jeff Koons and David Hockney. When it comes to making money from investing in art, it’s female artists who are in the frame. Is that overstating things a bit? Koons and Hockney are both big names, who continue to attract big prices. Just look at Koons’ Rabbit, which sold for $91.1m (£74.7m) in May a smidgeon more than the $90.3m Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist fetched last November. Both of those sums set the record for the most paid for an artwork at auction by a living artist and both Koons and Hockney are, of course, male. But on the whole, it’s works by post-war female artists that are appreciating at the fastest rate, according to Sotheby’s Mei Moses indices, which track the repeat-sale prices of 60,000 artworks.

The Sotheby’s study found that the All Art-Female (AAF) index, which comprises 2,472 repeat sales by 499 female artists, rose by 72.9% between 2012 and 2018. That compares with just 8.3% for the All Art-Male (AAM) index, which is made up of 55,706 repeat sales by 8,477 male artists. “This is in contrast to the previous 50 years in which the resale markets for both male and female artists performed roughly in parallel (albeit at different volumes),” says Michael Klein, head of Sotheby’s Mei Moses. Break the data down to show works by just contemporary female artists (as opposed to all female artists) and resale prices have risen by 87.7% in those six years. (For non-contemporary female artists the figure is 30.7%.)



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *