Commercial Sales of Aboriginal Art

Welcome to our Australian Aboriginal art investment online gallery in Sydney, Australia

We are an investment art gallery in Sydney offering Indigenous artworks and Aboriginal art rental. Our team of art investing and art rental advisers are experts in financial planning, art wealth management and wealth creation and can help you with art and financial advice.

Australian contemporary art can be purchased in a number of different ways, for example, directly from the artist, through a gallery or via an auction house (for both primary and secondary sales)

Whilst it is generally acknowledged that auction houses dominate the resale market in Australia, their total sales are far exceeded by those of commercial art galleries.  Total auction sales in 2000, for example, were $78.1 million, in comparison to total commercial sales which reached $218 million[1] (explained further below).

In 2000, a Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) study [2] as well as Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data reported that commercial art galleries numbered 514 and achieved total sales of $218 million, in comparison to an earlier 1996-97 survey which recorded sales of $131 million[3]; pointing towards a 66 percent increase in total sales value in the commercial gallery sector [4].

A commercial art gallery for survey purposes is defined as a business whose primary activity is the display and sale of artworks (excluding sales by art museums, department stores and market stalls).  Accurate quantification of this sector is difficult, as data obtained from the 1999–2000 ABS survey on commercial art galleries in Australia included only 31 Indigenous art and craft centres, which in reality number over 100 [5].

Despite this difficulty, growth in the commercial gallery sector, as indicated by survey data, is supported by the 2007 Viscopy Report [6], which found that the sales of the galleries increase by an average of 6% per year.

Another attempt to ascertain the growth of the commercial gallery sector involved a ‘Yellow Pages’ search of Art Galleries’ in Australian capital cities (excluding public galleries, artist-run initiatives, framing businesses, community art centres and duplicate), which identified approximately 640 gallery businesses [7].  On the face of it, this suggests that the commercial gallery sector, much like the auction house sector is growing and changing as part of a broader, dynamic and unpredictable marketplace.

Based on the data discussed above, total Aboriginal art sales is estimated to be $68 million per annum in 2010, calculated as follows:

• in 2000, approximately 514-640 galleries yielded $218million
• gallery sales are expected to increase at 6% per year – resulting in forecast sales of $390.4m in 2010
• Indigenous works comprise 14% [8] of total Australian art sales
• therefore – 640/514 galleries generating $390.4m gives an estimated $486m total art sales, of which 14% ($68m) will be Indigenous Sales. 
  

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