Gender Differences in Hammer Prices for Australian Indigenous Art

Based on data from the Australian Art Sales Digest (AASD) from the period 1995–2014, Farrell et al show that that:

  1. The Top 100 Australian Indigenous artists (by sale value) constituted 84% of the total sales value; and, of those,
  2. A total of 12,298 artworks were offered for sale, with
  3. 8,175 from male artists and 4,123 from female artists; however,
  4. This represents a shift in gender across the period — in 1995, 8.29% were by female artists, but by 2014 that number is 42.21%.
  5. The difference in clearance rate across the period is statistically significant, with 63.7% offered for sale sold for male artists, but only 57.3% for women.
  6. However, work sold by women artists appears to have both greater economic value and greater certainty of value (ie, lower variance) when looking at hammer price.
  7. When looking at work differences (in medium etc.) it seems that, while works of art created by female artists sell for more than works of art created by male artists, much (though not all) of the gap can be explained by gender specialisation in types of art.

Interesting and strange.

My stylised impression of the art market as understood by artists is that artists working today expect to see non-linear (sale price) returns to ‘ambition’, as defined by

Open Question: Can we quantify ‘ambition’ in artworks, and how much does it explain variation in hammer prices?

Previous work I’ve seen — eg Ashenfelter & Grady — has mostly focused on one of two things:

  1. the relationship between pre-auction information and hammer price;
  2. a hedonic model relating characteristics (artwork medium, artist, auction) to hammer price.

While the latter ‘hedonic model’ approach partly addresses artist intuitions as I understand them, I haven’t seen anything definitive.