Anybody have reliable data or an educated guess about how many works of art exist in the world which would realize at least a million dollars at auction?
For purposes of this discussion, exclude any “works of art” which the owner can use for ongoing income, like architectural buildings or rights to performance arts. Also exclude any archaeological works of art, whose value resides primarily in their antiquity, rather than the renowned merit of the creator.
Also, how many living artists have produced works that would realize a million-dollar bid?
I can’t imagine how this could be tallied. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, all by itself, probably has thousands of pieces that are each worth more than a million dollars.
The least expensive painting on Wikipedia’s list of the top 43 sold for $61.7 million. I’d agree that there is probably no way to determine the number over $1 million, and that’s paintings only. Incidentally only one artist on the Wikipedia list is still living: Jasper Johns, whose painting sold for $80 million (not really relevant, but he also appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons).
Now this is just sales, and many of the most valuable works (E.g., Guernica, David, Mona Lisa) will never be sold, but I think it’s at least a starting point.
$64-billion in total art sales last year, a number that has remained fairly stable for the past five years or so. That would be about 65,000 pieces at an average price of a million, or 650,000 pieces at an average of $100,000. Drawing a hypothetical curve, it would look like between 50,000 and 100,000 at a million or more. And counts only the ones that actually changed hands, which might be just 10% of the total number in existence, so a million might not be an unreasonable estimate. Certainly more than a half a million.