I recently watched an interesting video by Ingo from About Africa and the Rest of the World, in which he asks a question that comes up quite regularly among collectors: is African and Oceanic art something in which you can invest, or is it really only a market for people who collect because they love the objects?
I found his analysis particularly interesting because much of what he describes corresponds with what I have been observing in the African art market for many years. I do not necessarily agree with every conclusion, and auction statistics never tell the whole story, but the video gives us some useful numbers and, perhaps more importantly, raises some questions that are worth discussing.
I have included the video below because I think it is worth watching before reading my comments.
VIDEO: About Africa — Is Tribal Art a Good Investment?
A market that is smaller than the headlines suggest
One of the first things Ingo points out is that the apparent size of the African and Oceanic art auction market can be rather misleading.
The year 2024 is a good example. It was an extraordinary year for African and Oceanic art at auction, but this was largely because of one exceptional event: the sale of 99 works from the Barbier-Mueller collection at Christie’s in Paris.
The sale realised approximately €73 million, an extraordinary result and a record for a single-owner sale in the category.
See the complete Barbier-Mueller sale at Christie’s
There is nothing wrong with using that figure when discussing the market, but it is important to understand what it represents. The Barbier-Mueller collection was not an ordinary collection coming to auction. These were objects assembled over generations by Josef Müller and subsequently by Jean Paul and Monique Barbier-Mueller, with exceptional provenance and an unusually concentrated group of important African and Oceanic works.
In other words, one should be careful not to look at a €73 million auction and conclude that the African art market suddenly became a €73 million larger market.
The underlying market is much smaller and, in my opinion, much more stable than the spectacular results of a handful of masterpieces might suggest.
That is one of the characteristics of African art that makes it quite different from some of the larger international art markets. It remains a relatively small specialist market, with a limited number of serious buyers.
And this brings us to one of its biggest problems.
Who is going to buy the collections?
The African art market has a demographic problem, and I think this is probably one of the most important observations in the video.
There are still collectors, of course. There are also younger wealthy collectors entering the market. But they are relatively few.
In my own experience, I do occasionally see wealthy collectors around forty who become seriously interested in African art, but they are exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of serious collectors I encounter are considerably older.
This is not necessarily surprising. Collecting African art requires a certain amount of time, knowledge and disposable income. It is also not a market that most people discover naturally. Someone in their twenties or early thirties is far more likely to encounter contemporary art, watches, cars, design, photography, Pokémon cards, or other forms of collecting than a traditional African mask or figure.
The result is that we have an interesting situation developing.
There are many collections that were formed twenty, thirty, forty or even sixty years ago. Eventually some of these collections will come back onto the market, whether because the collector has died, because the family does not wish to continue the collection, or simply because the collector is getting older and wants to reduce it.
At the same time, there are not enough new collectors entering the market to absorb everything that may eventually become available.
That is a basic question of supply and demand.
I do not see this as meaning that African art is “dead”. Far from it. It means that it remains a niche market, and a niche market behaves differently from a large financial market.
The 135 objects that tell another story
The most interesting part of Ingo’s analysis is probably his comparison of 135 African objects that had appeared on the market more than once. According to his research, around 49% had fallen in price, around 32% had more or less stagnated, and only around 19% had increased in price between the two sales. If these figures are representative of his sample, they are certainly not very encouraging if your intention is to buy African art as a financial investment.
There is another problem with the idea of “stagnation”.
Suppose that somebody bought an object at auction for €10,000 including the buyer’s premium. Ten years later it sells for €10,000 again. At first sight one might say that the collector has not lost anything.
But this is not really true.
There were transaction costs when the object was bought, there will be costs when it is sold, and there has also been inflation during the intervening years. If the collector had put the same money into another investment, the result would probably have been very different. African art therefore has to appreciate considerably before it becomes a genuinely profitable investment.
And this is where I would agree with the conclusion of the video: I would not buy African art as I would buy a stock, since African Art has much less volatility and is not so easy to evaluate as a stock.
His demographic observation is also important. An ageing collector base combined with relatively few younger buyers creates a structural problem: more collections will eventually come onto the market without a proportionate increase in demand. I already see this happening to some extent, and I think it is something the African art trade will have to deal with for many years to come. There are still young people interested in African art, but very few who are becoming serious collectors, and certainly not enough to replace the generation that built many of the important private collections during the second half of the twentieth century.
I particularly agree with his final distinction: falling prices can be bad for investors but very good for collectors. If a quality object that was selling for €5,000–€7,000 a decade ago can now be bought for €2,000–€3,000, the collector is not simply buying the same object at a lower price; he is potentially getting substantially more quality for his money. Of course, this only works if the object really is good. A cheap mediocre object does not become a good purchase simply because it has become cheaper. But when you know how to recognise quality, a market in which prices have softened can offer opportunities that were much harder to find when everything was more expensive.
But auction statistics are not the whole market
There is, however, one qualification I would make.
Auction statistics are very useful because they give us something that can actually be measured. But they are not the entire African art market.
A great deal of African art changes hands privately, through dealers and between collectors. And serious collectors often do something that is difficult to put into a spreadsheet: they exchange African Art objects.
A collector may have owned a figure for twenty years and exchange it with another collector for a different figure, perhaps adding some money to the transaction. From the point of view of the collector, this may be a very successful transaction even though there is no conventional auction result to record.
Among knowledgeable collectors, objects can almost become a form of currency.
This is particularly true in a small market where many of the serious participants know each other. A collector may have been looking for a particular type of mask for years, and when the right one finally appears, the question is not necessarily what the last auction result was. It is whether the object is good enough, rare enough and interesting enough to justify the price being asked.
For that reason, I would be cautious about interpreting auction statistics as a complete measurement of the health of the African art market. They tell us a great deal about the auction market, but rather less about what happens between collectors and specialist dealers.
What the comments tell us
What I found almost as interesting as the video itself were some of the comments underneath it, because they give a rather good impression of how collectors actually think about this market.
One collector wrote that he had noticed prices falling during the ten years he had been interested in tribal art and added, quite honestly, that “as a buyer it’s good for me”. Another simply wrote, “I will die with my collection.” Someone else said that money does not really motivate the collector unless he becomes desperate to sell.
I think these comments are worth taking seriously because they illustrate something that is difficult to capture in auction statistics. A person who buys African art because he wants to build a collection is not necessarily disappointed when prices fall in the way an investor would be. If he has been looking for a particular type of mask for several years and suddenly finds a good example at half the price it would have cost previously, falling prices are not a problem; they are an opportunity.
One of the collectors made another observation that I particularly liked. He said that it is sometimes difficult to separate the “heart” from the “head” when spending, and that one should perhaps wait a week or a month after seeing an object to discover whether one still feels the same about it. That is very good advice, although I would add that waiting is only useful if you use that time to look at other examples and learn more about what you are considering buying. Otherwise you are simply postponing the same decision.
There was also a little joke in the comments which I found revealing. After Ingo showed that only around 0.4% of his viewers were between 25 and 34, one viewer wrote: “I’m in the 0.4%!” Another collector mentioned that he was in the older age group but was apparently the only collector in his family. These are small comments, but together they underline the demographic problem: the market certainly has younger admirers, but there are still very few young people actually building serious collections.
Not everybody agreed with Ingo’s interpretation of the auction figures, however. A gallery owner from Uganda argued that the objects discussed in the video came mainly from the top two percent of the auction market and therefore were “zero indicators” of the general art market. Ingo replied that he believed the major auction houses generate considerably more turnover than tribal art galleries.
I think the discussion is more complicated than either statement suggests.
The major auction houses are certainly an important part of the market, and their results cannot simply be dismissed. At the same time, I would never regard auction statistics as a complete picture of African art. A considerable amount of business takes place privately, through dealers and between collectors, and many experienced collectors do not simply buy an object and later put it back into an auction.
There is also a rather important question behind the gallery owner’s comment: what exactly are we calling the “general market”?
If we include everything sold internationally as African decorative art, the picture becomes very different. In some markets, particularly in China, there is now an enormous quantity of newly made African-style sculpture, masks and figures being produced for decoration. I have discussed this before, and I think it has a real effect on the market for genuine traditional African art.
The African Art Market: Why So Many Antiques Are Not What You Think
These reproductions do not all have to be deliberate fakes to create a problem. Many are simply decorative objects made because there is a demand for something that looks African. But when an inexperienced buyer encounters hundreds or thousands of such objects, often mixed visually with genuine traditional works, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to understand what he is looking at and, consequently, what he should be prepared to pay.
This is where I think the argument made by the Ugandan gallery deserves a qualification. Perhaps the major auction houses really do represent only a very small, high-quality part of the market. But the alternative is not necessarily a healthier market of ordinary African art. A large part of the lower end can be occupied by modern decorative production, and that creates its own distortion because it makes the genuine objects more difficult to value.
For an experienced dealer or collector, the difference can often be recognised through the carving, materials, construction, wear, patina, proportions and many other details that reveal how an object was made and whether it has actually been used. For somebody entering the market for the first time, this is much more difficult.
And when the buyer cannot confidently distinguish between the genuine and the decorative, he will naturally become more cautious about what he is prepared to pay for the genuine object.
This is one reason why I think the current weakness in prices cannot simply be explained by saying that people have lost interest in African art. Part of the problem is that it has become harder to understand the market. There is more material, more information and more images than ever before, but not necessarily more knowledge.
Why falling prices can be good news
This is where I arrive at a somewhat different conclusion from someone looking at the market purely from an investment perspective.
If you bought an object fifteen years ago for €6,000 and it is now worth €3,000, you have clearly not made a good investment. But the person who discovers that same object today does not have a €3,000 loss. He has a decision to make about whether it is worth €3,000.
This distinction is important.
The collector entering the market today can potentially buy considerably better quality for the same amount of money than the collector could have bought some years ago. If a good object has fallen from €6,000 to €3,000, that does not make the object itself half as good. It simply means that the relationship between its quality and its price has changed.
And this is where knowledge becomes increasingly important.
When the market was stronger, it was easier to buy something simply because it belonged to a fashionable category and assume that there would always be another buyer prepared to pay more. In a weaker and more selective market, that safety net disappears. The mediocre object becomes difficult to sell, while the exceptional one continues to attract the small number of people who understand why it is exceptional.
This is particularly true because African art is not really a market in which you buy “a Songye” or “a Dogon” or “a Fang” in the abstract. You buy a particular object. Two objects from the same culture can be separated by a very large difference in quality, age, patina, rarity and artistic strength, and the market will not necessarily recognise that difference immediately.
For me, this is precisely why periods of lower prices can be interesting for collectors. When the general market is rising, the good and the mediocre can rise together. When the market becomes more selective, the collector who has learned to distinguish between them has a much better chance of finding something genuinely interesting.
The exceptional objects are different
The Barbier-Mueller sale is a good illustration of this. It would be wrong to look at the spectacular prices achieved there and assume that the whole African art market behaves in the same way. Those objects represented an extraordinary concentration of quality, rarity, provenance and history, and some of them were works that very rarely become available. Christie’s itself describes the collection as an extraordinary group assembled over decades by Josef Müller and Jean Paul and Monique Barbier-Mueller.
The same principle exists at lower levels, although naturally the prices are very different.
A rare and powerful Songye mask is not simply another Songye mask. An old figure with an exceptional patina and convincing provenance is not interchangeable with a more ordinary example simply because both belong to the same cultural group.
This is why I have always felt that African art is fundamentally a market in which learning to look matters more than learning the latest price.
You can find a very expensive object that is not particularly interesting, and you can sometimes find a very interesting object that has been overlooked by the market.
The difficulty is knowing the difference.
So, is African art a bad investment?
If by investment we mean buying something primarily because we expect to sell it later for more money, I would not recommend African art.
The market is too small, the number of buyers is limited, transaction costs are high and the resale value of most objects is impossible to predict with the precision we expect from financial investments. The figures presented in the video make this quite clear. Even where an object appears to have maintained its price, the collector may have lost money after taking commissions and inflation into account.
But if the question is whether this is an interesting moment to become a collector, my answer is very different.
I think it is.
There is more material coming onto the market from older collections, prices for many categories have become considerably more accessible, and the collector who knows what he is looking for has more negotiating power than he had when prices were rising across the board.
I would much rather spend €3,000 on one genuinely good object after having looked at hundreds of objects than spend the same money on three mediocre objects because they seem inexpensive. The first purchase may never increase in value, but if the object is beautiful, authentic, old and interesting, I can still consider it a successful purchase.
And that brings me back to the title of this article.
Is African art a bad investment, or are we perhaps living through a particularly interesting period for collectors?
For the investor, I think the answer is fairly clear. There are much more predictable places to put your money.
For the collector, however, I am much less pessimistic.
The market is not expanding rapidly. I do not expect an army of young buyers to arrive and suddenly push prices back to the levels of twenty years ago. It will probably remain what it has always been: a relatively small specialist market, with a limited number of serious buyers and a great deal of knowledge concentrated among a relatively small group of people.
But that may not be a bad thing.
It means that the collector who takes the time to learn, who is prepared to wait for the right object, and who understands the difference between something that merely looks African and something that is genuinely an old and interesting work of African art, can still find opportunities.
Perhaps the most sensible way to approach the market is therefore not to ask what an object will be worth in ten years, but whether you would still be happy to own it if nobody could tell you what it was worth.
If the answer is yes, you may have found something worth collecting.
What do you think?
The figures and observations in this article are only one view of the African art market. I am also interested in what collectors, dealers and other people involved in African art are experiencing themselves.
I have therefore made a short survey about the current African art market, and I would be interested to hear your opinion. Whether you are an experienced collector, a dealer, or simply someone who has recently started looking at African art, your answers can help give a broader picture of where the market is today.
Take the short African Art Market Survey →
The more people who participate, the more interesting the results will become. I intend to share some of the findings in a future article.