How to buy in the print market
Fine art prints are much easier to buy and sell than one-of-a-kind artworks, but the print market has often been overlooked compared to the art market for original works. That's changing now.
Hello and a warm welcome from a freezing New York to the latest edition of the Priceless newsletter. I want to start by thanking everyone who has given me such valuable feedback about this newsletter. You are all great and obviously incredibly smart and I appreciate it!
A lot of people enjoyed the last newsletter about fine art that is accessible to all art buyers, which is why I’m going to focus this newsletter on the print market. Prints start at a price point that’s accessible to everyone and are much easier to buy and sell than one-of-a-kind artworks.
Prints, and other art objects that come in editions, accounted for 47.3% of the total volume of all art sold at auction, according to a recent Prints & Editions report published by by ArtTactic. Given the size and turnover of the fine print market, and the fact that artists have been making prints for over 500 years, it has been rather overlooked as a potential investment, until pretty recently, and considered more of an entry point for the art market for original works.
That’s not the case any more. The arrival of NFTs may have increased interest in digital works in editions, but collectors, young and old, new and experienced, are also buying in the physical print market these days, and viewing this as an important collecting category in its own right. You can buy screenprints, etchings, lithographs and more from a wide range of auction houses, galleries and online venues, including online sales platforms, galleries or fairs that specialize in prints, like the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City or the London Original Print Fair, which will both be held in March.
The secondary print market
Because it’s the part of the market with the most data available, I’m going to focus here on prints by modern and contemporary artists that perform consistently well in the secondary (or resale) market – artists such as David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Banksy and Keith Haring. Whereas paintings by these so-called blue chip artists can cost millions of dollars at auction, their prints, which are often a key part of their artistic practice, if not the most important part, are much more affordable.
For example, Portrait Of The Artist (Pool With Two Figures), a painting by David Hockney, set a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist when it sold for $90.3 million in 2018. However, his prints, a medium which Hockney has championed and experimented in throughout his life, start at around $1,200. The average selling price for Hockney prints in 2024 was £21,000 ($26,453), according to online print marketplace MyArtBroker.
Icons (complete set) (1990), edition of signed screenprints by Keith Haring. Image: MyArtBroker.
The performance of the print market
The market for blue chip prints has slowed down over the last two years, along with the rest of the art market. However, Huw Lougher, managing director and founder at Lougher Contemporary, a gallery that specializes in secondary market sales of prints and other editions, believes that while there are always financial risks in buying art, blue chip prints are a good long-term buy compared to original, emerging art, which may or may not have any resale value.
“If you take a macro view, and you’re buying for the right reasons, because you want to collect and you love the art, there’s a strong chance that in five, 10, 15 or 20 years time, that [print] will be worth more than it’s worth now,” he said during a recent panel discussion hosted by MyArtBroker. “The works that I’ve bought over the years that are prints by blue chip artists have nearly always gone up over time.”
They are certainly far easier to buy and sell than unique artworks, which are rarely resold, if at all, which, as I’ve written before, makes them extremely illiquid. Because prints come in editions, and prices are lower, their turnover is much higher.
Gauging how much you should pay for prints is also easier because there are other directly comparable works out there. Say you wanted to buy Barking Dog, one of an edition of 250 Keith Haring screenprints from his 1990 Icons series, you can find out what other prints in that edition have sold for, and their trading history over time, before you decide to part with your cash.
“It’s a case of drawing on all the information available and making sure you’re aware of prices, so that you’re not paying huge amounts of money for a work that might be on sale somewhere else for a lot less,” said Jess Bromovsky, Sales Director at MyArtBroker, during the same panel.
Tracking print prices
There are a number of places to find data about secondary market print sales. ArtTactic publishes reports on the print market, while data companies like ArtPrice and ArtNet track sales of prints at auction. MyArtBroker tracks data on the sales of prints at auction and through private sales, including its own. It offers an index of the top 100 performing prints in the secondary market and users can track the performance of individual prints and individual artists within the print market on its platform.
MyArtBroker’s report published in January, for example, showed that the value of prints sold at auction by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Roy Lichtenstein were up in 2024, despite the broader art market slow down, whereas other artists such as Banksy and David Hockney saw sales values drop a lot, following peaks for these particular artists in the print market in 2021 and 2023 respectively.
Here’s Roy Lichtenstein’s print market performance and average selling price from the report over the last few years:
And here’s Banksy’s:
As you can see, the Banksy print market has been on a pretty wild ride over the last few years. If you haven’t already read the nutty story about what happened when my friend got his Banksy print valued, you can find it here.
Variations in the print market
Although the fine print market has a lot more data about the price of comparable works, and more liquidity than the market for one-of-a-kind art, you definitely need to do your homework before buying. It’s obviously important to determine that the print is authentic, comes with an authenticity warranty or guarantee from the seller, and is created by the artist in question, because no one wants to end up with a knock off duplicate, basically a poster, of fine art print.
Commissions that galleries, auction houses and online marketplaces charge print buyers and seller vary a lot, so that’s another factor to consider, but many other variables can also affect the value. “There are so many different variations to a print that either adds value or takes value away,” Bromovsky said. Those include the popularity of the artist, the popularity of the subject, the size of the edition, and the condition of the print, both the front and the back.
There are also technical differences. As well as prints from the standard edition, it’s also possible to buy artist proofs, printer’s proofs and trial proofs. Trial proofs are created when artists are still experimenting with the print, meaning they can have unique elements or colors compared to the standard edition.
All these variations can affect the price, so it’s important for buyers to work with reputable galleries, dealers and online platforms, and build trust with sellers before they buy, according to Bromovsky, so that they really understand why a print is selling for the amount that it is.
I hope this helps if you’re thinking of buying – or selling – in the print market. Until next time, I’ll leave you with a quick round up of other art investment news below.
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News in brief
It’s still hard to know how President Trump’s proposed tariffs, or any counter tariffs imposed, will impact the art market, but Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, told Karen K. Ho at ARTnews that significant tariffs could be “the kiss of death” for international art transactions.
Melanie Gerlis has written in the Financial Times about the latest crop of art investment funds.
An open letter to Christie’s, signed by more than 6,000 artists, demanded that Christie’s cancels its sale dedicated to art created with Artificial Intelligence, which starts this week. The letter claims that many of the works to be auctioned were created using AI models that were trained on copyrighted work without a license.