Sarah Thornton speaks to the woman who, year after year, maps the most elusive of markets

Meet Arts Economics' Clare McAndrew, the brains behind The Art Market Report

For more than a decade, Dr. Clare McAndrew’s annual report of the global art market has been offering an unrivaled overview. Most financial analyses of art examine only auction results, despite the fact that they account for fewer than half of global art sales. In what other industry would analysts let the resale market stand in for the whole and ignore the hundreds of thousands of new products selling for the first time? For most artists, curators, critics, and collectors – not to mention dealers – the primary market is where they find the greatest meaning and pleasure. But the gallery world is fragmented, opaque, enormous, and hard to quantify, so it takes an ambitious scholar – and a particular kind of personality – to tackle it.Enter McAndrew, an insistently curious, conscientious economist. McAndrew was born in Ireland and grew up in Australia, the daughter of a psychiatrist father and a doctor mother who specialized in addiction. A diligent student with an aptitude for mathematics, McAndrew began university at the age of 16. ‘Math is like knitting,’ she tells me modestly. ‘It’s an organized, orderly process.’ While the family home was not full of art, it did feature a Hieronymus Bosch print – his Garden of Earthly Delights. To this day, McAndrew admits to a predilection for art that is ‘odd and kind of freaky, slightly disturbing or unreal.’ She and her restaurateur husband are decorating their new, ‘little, small’ architect-designed house in Dublin, Ireland, with contemporary Surrealist photography. ‘I tell the kids,’ says McAndrew, who has two, ‘that they’re not just pretty pictures, but stuff that makes you think.’

McAndrew started studying the international trade in visual art while a postgraduate at Trinity College Dublin. Her PhD in economics examined how the physical, regulatory, and cultural distances between countries affect transactions, for which she used a gravity model, applying Isaac Newton’s equations about the physical world to art’s economic relations. After that, she worked for four years at a boutique investment firm in Dallas, Texas, founded by David Kusin, where she delved into statistical analyses of the art market. ‘I had econometrics coming out of my ears,’ says McAndrew. ‘We were doing indices and fantastic risk analyses. David was very forward-thinking, a great guy.’Upon returning to Ireland and founding Arts Economics, McAndrew started to drift away from strictly quantitative financial models. ‘I came round to thinking that you have to embrace a mix of methodologies when it comes to art. You have to interview people and think more broadly to produce something with real validity,’ she says with friendly efficiency. ‘I like to check and confirm, rather than accept. I am good with uncertainty. To paint the whole picture, you have to take risks, make some assumptions and model things.’A key tenet of this year’s 407-page report is that the art market is not singular or homogenous, but a vast array of ‘independently moving submarkets that are defined by artists, genres, price points, and geographical locations.’ The appendix outlines a dizzying array of sources, including many auction databases and online businesses, from Artsy’s and Artfacts.net’s statistics on galleries and art fairs to social-media platforms’ data on followers. Moreover, the report investigates the results of two substantial pieces of market research: McAndrew’s own survey of 6,500 galleries (almost 18% of which responded, with a total of 1,138 completed questionnaires) and&nbsp;her survey in collaboration with UBS&nbsp;of 600 high net worth individuals (HNWIs) in five countries. It is rare in the artworld for Excel and Stata files to take 20 minutes to open. Luckily, McAndrew has a good IT guy.

McAndrew enlisted the more specific expertise of university colleagues to help her think through the material. ‘Some academics are very isolated. Clare is a great balance of independent and collaborative, rigorous and receptive,’ says Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s Director Americas, whose own PhD on the global contemporary art market was published by Princeton University Press.‘I am impressed by Clare’s ability to step out of academic economics and be a citizen of the social world,’ says Taylor Whitten Brown, a sociologist working on gender and inequality in the creative professions, who wrote part of this year’s report. Working with McAndrew was, she says, ‘creative, fast paced, pretty awesome.’The seeds of McAndrew’s style of collaboration, as well as her interest in gender, may well hark back to her school days as a drummer in punk and indie bands. In those years, her heroines were Poly Styrene and Eve Libertine, ‘the in-your-face feminist ladies of punk,’ as she puts it. ‘Everyone thinks that women have moved forward, but in researching the report I was gobsmacked at how the Contemporary sector is still so male dominated.’ Indeed, the revolution is excruciatingly slow. Although the share of women artists in global exhibitions grew from 25% in 2000 to 33% in 2018, only two artworks by women have commanded a sum high enough to put them into the top 100 prices.As McAndrew’s annual report becomes more nuanced and well-known, its uses become more tangible for a broader range of artworld professionals. The report has long provided the art trade with benchmark statistics about the size of the market and the number of people employed in order to promote the art industry and lobby governments to change regulation of all kinds. More recently, however, its more granular study of the costs, revenues, and capitalization of galleries can help gallery owners rethink their business models and provide them with information that helps them borrow from banks or recruit other financial backers.No matter whose desk her report lands on, McAndrew’s clear-eyed global perspective maintains utmost relevance. She describes herself as an outsider and prides herself on being impartial. When asked whether it’s advantageous to be located outside New York and London, she admits, ‘Ireland is aware of itself as a small island. It is a place where you are looking out all the time.’Download The Art Market | 2019 <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/about/initiatives/the-art-market">here</a>.

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