After Clare McAndrew jumped ship, moving over to Art Basel, TEFAF hired Rachel Pownall to produce their 2016 report on the health of the art market. Pownall’s numbers were very different from McAndrew’s … she actually revised downward the McAndrew’s numbers from the year before $44bn vs $63.8bn; and then came in with $45bn for 2016 … McAndrew’s competing report came in at $56.6bn.
Now it seems that TEFAF is going in another direction (guess they did not like Pownall’s findings) … hiring Anders Petterson, founder of ArtTactic, to create a different type of report. Regardless of what it contains, it is all a bunch of B.S. And in case you are wondering, Pownall, along with colleagues from the Business School at Maastricht University, is going to produce her own report. Sorry, more B.S.!!!
The biggest issue with the current report is that a lot of the information comes from private business. Do you really believe a private gallery is going to give you the ‘real’ numbers? I don’t!
Source: TEFAF scraps art market report for smaller focused surveys