Don't know how much your art is really worth? You're not alone

South China Morning Post

4 days ago

Depending on your perspective, the verdict delivered by art services and technology company Winston Artory Group was either very good or very bad. A print that had recently been appraised for US$1 million was, the company determined earlier this month, now worth just US$300,000 – a 70 per cent decline in possible value. These were happy tidings for the insurance company that requested the appraisal, and potentially devastating for the print's owner. 'The insurance company loved it,' says Winston Artory's co-executive chairman Elizabeth von Habsburg. 'The client, maybe not so much.'
Art is not easy to value. Unlike soya beans or gold, whose prices might shift but whose inherent qualities are immutable (one soya bean is functionally the same as any other soya bean), every artwork is different, and therefore must be considered on its own merits. Making valuation even harder is the fact that a huge chunk of the art market's transactions are conducted privately, meaning that variations in price are often impossible to discern unless the world is explicitly told a sale has taken place. (Even then, the exact price is often suspect.)
Mark Rothko's Untitled (Yellow and Blue) sold for HK$252.5 million (US$32.4 million) at Sotheby's Hong Kong in November 2024, making it the third most valuable work by a Western artist to be sold in Asia. Photo: courtesy of Sotheby's
During a boom market, when auction results set records and art fair reports include hundreds of sales, information about price fluctuations is relatively accessible. But in recent years, as the market has deflated, publicly reported sales have thinned out and value – good or bad – has become increasingly difficult to determine.
To find out more about the valuation process and the state of the art market today, we sat down with Habsburg and and her co-executive chairman, Nanne Dekking, founder of Artory, the art market data and technology company that recently merged with art appraiser and adviser Winston Art Group. We were joined by Winston Artory president Peter Loukas at the firm's Midtown headquarters in New York.
Everyone says the market's down. Based on all your internal data, how bad is it really?
Elizabeth von Habsburg: The market's tough, there's no question about it. You see it with the dealers that are going out of business or deciding not to continue. I'm seeing things that would've sold three years ago just not selling – even with a more reasonable reserve at auction. It's hard.