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Amazing Art Stat of the Day: "Collectors" Art Isn't Reaching

by Hrag Vartanian on September 29, 2011

Last night, Hyperallergic publisher Veken Gueyikian and I attended a panel at the General Assembly co-working space that had the nebulous title, “Art Outside the Gallery.” Carter Cleveland of art startup Art.sy was easily the most interesting speaker of the night and he lobbed out one stat that blew my mind:

For every household that buys fine art in US, there are 37 households with the same average income that don’t buy art.

I approached Cleveland after the event to ask about the source for the statistic and he was only too happy to explain. He said it was an internal stat they created based on the fact that the average household income of art collectors in the US is $350,000 and there are roughly 100–200,000 collectors. He elaborated that the biggest factor in whether someone buys art is their geographic proximity to art galleries.

In another part of his presentation last night he focused on the fact that Art.sy is interested in reaching those who don’t already buy art, not the ones that do.

I found it fascinating that the 350K household number is sure a far cry from the idea of millionaires and billionaires buying art like trinkets that the media and art world detractors like to promote.

Image via Gridskipper

Tagged as: art collecting, Artsy

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  • http://twitter.com/rwetzler Rachel Wetzler

    This is my gripe with statistics generally — they look interesting and informative at first, but when you look at them more closely, you realize that they aren’t actually saying anything (or are in fact totally misleading.) The word “average” in itself is a huge red flag, especially since we’re talking about a world with wildly divergent incomes. In my experience (granted, this is purely speculative, but I think probably accurate) the people who tend to buy art are likely to be, on the one hand, multimillionaire/billionaires, or on the other, people who work in the art world (artists, curators, gallery/museum workers/critics, whatever — the kind of people who would save up for months to buy a piece they loved instead of a pair of shoes or a new computer or whatever) and are making substantially less than $350,000 a year. So just because the average income of collectors might be $350K doesn’t actually mean that people with $350K are the ones buying at all. The stat is pretty much meaningless — as far as I can tell, he’s generated an average income of 350K/year income for collectors and then is making assumptions about the art collector base as a whole based on that number, which in fact does not seem to reflect the actual demographics of collectors at all. Furthermore, while I don’t argue with his conclusion that the majority of people with $350K incomes in the US don’t buy art, I have a major qualm with how he got to that conclusion, and especially with the 1/37 number, which is effectively pulled out of thin air. As explained here, he generated the number by comparing the 100,000-200,000 (let’s say 150,000 for the sake of ease) people in the US who collect art to the rest of the population with the same rough income as the average of those 150,000 — but, as I said before, those are not the same demographic at all. It would be far more informative if he’d compared the ACTUAL number of collectors with 350K incomes (or any income level, whatever) against the rest of the population with that same income. 

    • http://hragv.com Hrag Vartanian

      But Rachel, you’re parroting the millionaires and billionaires part with what proof? Anecdote? Sure, they grab the headlines but are most collectors millionaires or billionaires? I think most gallery owners would say no, just people who are doing well. And in NY 350K for a family isn’t that uncommon, as I’m sure you know.

      And considering Artsy’s investors are Gagosian and one of Google’s honchos sits on the board, I think he’s got access to lots of stats and people who call him out on this sort of stuff.Maybe there’s an actual statistician reading this who could chime in?

      • http://twitter.com/rwetzler Rachel Wetzler

        As I said in the original comment, I’m speculating here, but as someone who knows a lot of millionaires (and a lot of art workers, for that matter) I am comfortable saying that most of them own art of some kind. I’m not just talking about the megacollectors who are snapping up Picassos at Christie’s, but people who are maybe buying a few paintings or prints here and there for their homes. And I’m certainly not saying that no one with an income of around $350K/year is buying art, just that it’s not a particularly useful number in terms of generating legitimate information about collectors since it’s an average that includes a huge range of figures. Again, I’m certainly no statistician, but it seems to me that a much more useful way to approach this would’ve been to look at the mode (the number that occurs most frequently in the data set) instead of the average — ie, if the majority of collectors were to fall into the 1-5million/year range, for example, (this is a number totally pulled out of thin air for the sake of argument) comparing that to the rest of the population with that income level.

        Also, I wonder about how he’s defining “collector” here. Is it anyone who’s ever bought something at a gallery? Someone who buys at least one piece per year? Does it include things like 20×200 prints? What about people who buy from regional craft fairs or local art shows, etc.? 

        • http://hragv.com Hrag Vartanian

          I’m confident that the 20×200 collectors probably aren’t included, but I understand your point. I’m sure the problem with art world stats is that galleries will never reveal their buyers….so, could this possibly be info from Gagosian? And who will tell people how much they make? That’s private too. Soo many questions.

  • Anonymous

    far more questions than answers, and rachel wetzler raises a good point– quite a few of us with virtually no income will scrimp and save for art, especially when we work in the arts.  averages are almost never useful as actual statistics.

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