Heterogeneity in Auction Price Distributions for Australian Indigenous Artists

Abstract

Studies of auction prices for artworks typically relate the conditional moments of a single realised price distribution either to characteristics of the artist, the artwork and the auction or to pre‐sale information. Using data from the Australian Art Sales Digest for the 100 best‐selling Australian Indigenous artists over the period 1987–2014, we use finite‐mixture models to understand heterogeneity in auction prices. Our results complement the existing literature by identifying new ways in which factors previously used in the literature may be related to price heterogeneity in a differentiated market such as that for Australian Indigenous art.

‘The Lucky Country’: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Revitalised Australia’s Lethargic Art Market

“…The market for this genre of art has been developing since the 1980s, with waves of popularity domestically and internationally, particularly through genre-specific galleries and auctions (Coslovich 2020b). Its market has distinct characteristics and a separate infrastructure that has been investigated by scholars in depth, most recently by Chow (2021), Akbar and Sharp (2020), Archer (2020), Myers (2020), andFry (2020). After a lull for the last decade, Australian Indigenous art was experiencing a boom of international interest prior to the pandemic, driven by the exhibition of artworks by leading Indigenous artists at the mega-gallery Gagosian in New York.…”