Art auctions rebounded to an all-time high of US$2.7bil over the last year

Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting 'In This Case' sold for US$93.1mil (RM389mil) in an auction Tuesday at Christie's in New York in May this year, the second-highest price paid for a work by the late artist. Photo: AFP

Contemporary art auctions rebounded to an all-time high of US$2.7bil (RM11.3bil) over the last year, boosted by online sales and the arrival of digital art in the form of "NFTs", according to the annual report by Artprice released on Monday.

Having seen sales collapse by a third in the previous year because of the initial crisis caused by the pandemic, sales soared between June 2020 and June 2021 as auctioneers quickly adopted a more online approach.

"Photography and prints have been particularly successful in this new online environment and in 2021, we have seen the sensational arrival of completely dematerialised artworks, the famous NFTs," said Artprice CEO Thierry Ehrmann in a foreword to the report.