Market and auctions

Auctions are only the visible tip of the market, while most trade in art happens privately, off the public record. That is the source of the grey area, where data is missing and value is harder to establish.

A bidding limit is the ceiling a bidder sets in advance and is willing to go to at a sale. It protects them from being carried away by emotion in the room.

The buyer's premium is the auction house's commission, which the buyer pays on top of the hammer price. It is why the final price is always higher than the one at which the auctioneer's hammer falls.

A chandelier bid is a bid the auctioneer calls by gesturing into thin air, as if towards the chandelier, in order to lift the price towards the first real offer. It is legal, yet it belongs to the greyer corners of the saleroom.

The hammer price is the sum at which the auctioneer's hammer falls; the final price is what the buyer actually pays. There is a substantial gap between them, and it is worth knowing which figure you are looking at.

Online viewing rooms are digital selling “rooms” where you can look at a work and buy it straight from the screen, without sitting in a saleroom. They came fully into their own after Covid and extended selling far beyond the walls of auction houses and galleries.

The opening price is the figure a sale starts from; the estimate is the range within which the house expects the value of a work to fall. Two figures that tell you more about a sale than you might think.

Pre-sale exhibitions let you look at works up close before they go under the hammer and often disappear into private collections. In London or Paris they are frequently small free shows of masterworks.

Price levels on the Czech market are the indicative tiers into which works fall by price, from inexpensive prints to works by the leading names running into hundreds of thousands. It is a clear map to keep a new collector from getting lost.

The primary market is the first sale of a work directly from the artist or their gallery; the secondary market is every resale after that, typically through auctions. Slightly different rules apply on each, and prices behave differently too.

Sale on consignment means a work stays the property of its owner until it actually sells (the auction house or gallery merely offers it for a commission). It is often how works that did not find a buyer first time round come back into play.

The sell-through rate is the share of lots in a sale that actually sold, and it often says more about the health of the market than a single striking record. Once you start following it, you will read catalogues between the lines.

The auction season is the period holding a concentrated wave of major evening sales (the market has two peaks a year). Traditionally the most celebrated works, and the tensest contests between collectors, are drawn into these few weeks.

A third-party guarantee is a minimum price for a work agreed in advance, which sustains its saleability even in a weaker season. As a buyer it is worth knowing that such an arrangement may stand behind a work.