The spring 2026 auction season confirmed a renewed sense of confidence in the art market. For the first time since the pandemic years, the three main global MM Art Price Indexes—Impressionist, Contemporary, and Chinese art—all rose simultaneously, while sentiment indicators showed bidding intensity returning close to historical levels.
Looking at Europe, despite a broadly positive trend, significant differences emerge across countries. While France, the United Kingdom, and Germany posted a strong recovery, the Italian market continues to move at a slower pace. The longer-term picture is even more striking: from 2000 to the present, the Italian art index has recorded the slowest growth among the major European markets.
But what do these indexes actually tell us? Just as the S&P 500 summarizes the performance of the stock market without determining the value of any individual company, an art market index does not assess the value of a single artwork. Instead, it describes the evolution of a specific segment of the market. In the case of the MM Art Price Index, the reference market is auctions.
MM Art Price Index
Art is often presented as an alternative form of investment. Unlike traditional financial markets, however, the art market is opaque, illiquid, and characterized by high transaction costs. It is probably the only asset class worth tens of billions of dollars in which most transactions take place outside a transparent market. This is why reliable metrics are so important. Even if they capture only part of the market, they can provide meaningful information on the evolution of the sector and its main segments.
The MM Art Price Indexes are developed by the team led by Jianping Mei of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, in collaboration with SDA Bocconi School of Management. They are based on the repeat-sales methodology, which compares over time the prices of the same artworks sold at least twice at auction by the world's leading auction houses.
They are complemented by sentiment indicators, which measure the strength of demand by examining how far final sale prices deviate from the pre-auction estimates.
The focus on auctions is no coincidence. Auctions represent the only segment of the market that is sufficiently transparent to support robust statistical analysis, thanks to the availability of public and observable prices. They nevertheless provide only a partial picture. Auctions account for less than half of all transactions, and even when private sales conducted by auction houses are included, the indexes cover less than 40% of the global art market. Everything that takes place through galleries, private negotiations between collectors, and the primary market remains largely invisible.
The results show that the international market is going through a recovery phase. In spring 2026, the Impressionist art index rose by 15%, the Contemporary art index by 10.8%, and the Chinese art index by 1.7%, all accompanied by a marked improvement in market sentiment.
Europe also experienced a recovery, although with varying intensity. France (+24.7%), the United Kingdom (+18.5%), and Germany (+6%) all recorded substantial gains, while Italy declined by 3.2% compared with the previous observation.
From a longer-term perspective, between 2000 and spring 2026, Italian art delivered a compound annual return of just 1.4%, compared with 2.7% for Germany, 2.6% for the United Kingdom, and 2.5% for France. These figures are less encouraging than the performance of the main financial asset classes.
The modest returns of the European art market do not necessarily imply a weak market. They may instead reflect structural characteristics that differ from those of other international markets or, more cautiously, raise questions about its relative positioning and the opportunities that may still remain unexplored.
More importantly, these findings remind us that art cannot be assessed solely through the lens of traditional financial investments. If the only objective were to maximize returns, the comparison with major financial asset classes would inevitably be unfavorable. Art should instead be understood as an asset capable of preserving value over the long term, as reflected in the positive—albeit modest—returns recorded by the indexes over medium- to long-term horizons. A truly rigorous comparison between art and other asset classes, however, requires going beyond returns to incorporate measures of price volatility, return correlations with other asset classes, transaction costs, and liquidity. Yet the value of art extends well beyond its financial dimension. Its aesthetic, cultural, and social qualities represent an essential part of the benefits derived from owning an artwork. At the same time, art is also a physical asset exposed to specific risks—from authenticity and conservation to transportation and theft—that have no direct equivalent in traditional financial investments.
More broadly, the indexes primarily reflect the secondary market and, within it, the artworks that return most frequently to auction. It is also important to remember that the auction market is highly concentrated on both the supply and demand sides. A relatively small number of artists, auction houses, and major collectors account for a substantial share of the market's total value. Less than 1% of auction lots generated approximately 45% of global auction revenue, with Christie's and Sotheby's accounting for most ultra-high-end sales (2025 Artprice Global Art Market Report). By contrast, the middle segment of the market remains far less observable, although other international reports describe it as more dynamic, characterized by a higher turnover of artworks and a broader base of collectors.
This does not diminish the usefulness of the indexes. On the contrary, precisely because the upper end of the market tends to lead the major expansionary and contractionary phases of the sector, they provide a valuable indicator of the art market's main trends, while acknowledging that they cannot capture its full complexity.
Beyond prices: The next frontier of research
What, then, can art market indexes actually tell us? For market participants, collectors, and investors, the first lesson is to use them for what they truly are. They are not designed to determine the value of an individual artwork or to indicate whether it is worth buying. Rather, they provide a compass for interpreting market developments and identifying its main trends.
But research does not stop here. The research group is developing a new generation of tools that will complement price measures with liquidity indicators—that is, measures of how easily an artwork can actually be resold. These indicators are already available for the contemporary art market and represent one of the main directions of future research. Liquidity is, in fact, a fundamental dimension of art's economic value: a theoretical valuation translates into realized value only when there is a market willing to purchase the work.
The differing performance of European markets also raises new research questions. Why do some markets grow more rapidly than others? Does it depend on the structure of auction houses, the composition of demand, the presence of international collectors, or the quality of market infrastructure? Answering these questions could help explain the different competitive positions of European markets and, in particular, the prospects for the Italian market.
Another area of research concerns the integration of auction data with qualitative information and indicators derived from the attention the art market receives in the international press and digital media. The objective is to complement traditional price indexes with new measures of market sentiment and attention capable of capturing dynamics that price data alone cannot detect.
Major intergenerational wealth transfers could also reshape collectors' preferences and, consequently, the geography of the art market—from growing interest in women artists to works from previously underrepresented regions, such as contemporary African art, and toward forms of collecting increasingly driven by the cultural and social value of artworks.
Understanding how these changes will influence prices, liquidity, and market structure will be one of the key challenges of the coming years. The goal of the SDA Bocconi research group is to develop analytical methodologies that integrate quantitative and qualitative data while recognizing the dual nature of art: a cultural and financial asset whose value cannot be reduced to financial returns alone, yet which also requires reliable data and rigorous methodologies to be properly analyzed.
