Art valuation

[8][9] For collectors, the emotional connection felt toward a work or collection creates subjective personal value.

[11] In contrast, the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) suggests that the key issues are authenticity, quality, rarity, condition, provenance and value.

Liquidity in the art market means having artworks in very high demand and being able to sell those works without impediment.

[11] In a divorce action between a couple who sought to divide a $102 million collection between them, the couple decided a sale would prove problematic because selling the entire collection and dividing the profit would saturate the market and drive down prices; in reporting on the case, The Seattle Times described the case as a study on how people measure the value of art, and which counts for more — pragmatism or sentiment.

[18] The newspaper attempted to calculate the value of the many artworks at issue in the case by determining a per-square-inch price based on each piece's value divided by its dimension, to end up with a per-square-inch price to apply to the amount of wall space the businesslike litigant wanted to cover with the available art.

In recent decades the values of historic Russian and Chinese art have greatly benefited from increased wealth in those countries creating new and very rich collectors, as the values of Orientalist and Islamic art had earlier been boosted by oil wealth in the Arab world.

[22] Research data available from art auction houses such as Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips, Bonhams, and Lyon & Turnbull are those tracking market trends such as yearly lot transactions, bought-in statistics, sales volume, price levels, and pre-auction estimates.

Generally, estimates are made by looking at what a comparable piece of art sold for recently, with estimates given in a range of prices rather than one fixed figure,[25] and in the case of contemporary art especially, having few comparables or when an artist is not well known and has no auction history, the risks of incorrect valuation are greatest.

One method for pricing pieces by new artists of uncertain value is to ignore aesthetics and consider, besides market trends, three semi-commoditized aspects: "scale" - size and level of detail, "intensity" - effort, and "medium" - quality of the materials.