After a two-year slump, global auction sales have rebounded, increasing by 25 percent in 2017, according to a new report from Art Tactic. The London-based art market analyst surveyed 2017 sales data (excluding online auctions) from Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
Salvator Mundi, the long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII of France more than 500 years ago, has sold at Christie’s in New York for $450.3m, including auction house premium, shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction.
The work had carried a guarantee understood to be around $100 million, so it was a certainty to sell, but the bidding blew past that number quickly and kept going over the course of 19 minutes.
Zurich gets a new museum. The ‘Swiss Finance Museum’ will open on 28th June and it will be located at the new head office of Six in Pfingstweidstrasse 110.
The ‘Swiss Finance Museum’ will offer visitors a new multimedia exhibition illustrating the origins of our economic system as well as the major significance of the financial market and its infrastructure for our everyday life. The exhibition focuses on stock exchange trading, the capital market, financial instruments, payment transactions and technical objects, demonstrating the exemplary innovation of the financial industry
The 2017 edition of Art Basel is a welcome distraction from the doom and gloom that has dominated the headlines throughout Europe and the world in recent months. The art world’s elite collectors were reaching deeper into their pockets this year than they have for at least the past two editions of the fair. Just hours into Tuesday’s VIP preview, many dealers were reporting multiple sales in the seven- and eight-figure range-a welcome reappearance of a phenomenon that had been rare at art fairs since the market’s most recent peak in 2014.
Stonehage Fleming, a London-based wealth management company, has acquired Zurich-based art management and advisory business OmniArte.
The business was bought for an undisclosed sum. It will be absorbed into the Stonhage Fleming art management division, which counts clients’ assets at around $43bn and founded its arts arm in 2007 to advise on issues such as succession planning and insurance. As part of the acquisition, Maria de Peverelli becomes executive chairman of the art management division.
Art investors, collectors and owners will be able to trade shares in fine art for the first time on a unique online marketplace powered by blockchain technology. Maecenas is a new marketplace for fine art investment that uses blockchain technology to revamp what its founders claim to be a market that has largely remained unchanged for more than 300 years.
It will also allow any investor to have a fractional share of a masterpiece. Maecenas focuses on masterpieces and proven successful artists. The platform only lists art pieces worth US$1 million and above.
Simultaneous double exhibition of art collection which a German kept hidden from the world for decades will be shown at museums in Switzerland and Germany later this year, Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern announced Wednesday. The content of the exhibitions at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and at the Kunstmuseum Bern is closely coordinated.
The Swiss museum, which Gurlitt designated as his sole heir, announced it would co-host the "Dossier Gurlitt" shows together with the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.
A group of Geneva-based art dealers, lawyers, and consultants formed a Responsible Art Market Initiative in an effort to alleviate international concerns over the city’s freeports. It is intended to raise awareness of the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities, and the ways in which art facilitates money laundering and other financial crimes.
The project was launched at the Artgenève Salon d’art on January 26 with the publication of a set of guidelines designed to crack down on illegal activity in the city.
