The Decade in Review

Say what you will, purists: the story of the aughts was the art market. When it wasn't all we could talk about, we were talking about why it was all we could talk about. After the Russian and Asian markets took a dive in the late '90s and tech stocks plummeted, and in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, the art market sagged a bit, breaking the stride it had slipped into in the mid-'90s, when it began to recover from the last recession.

But that was a short dip, and by 2003 it was moving into uncharted territory. Soon we were looking at tens of millions of dollars for works of contemporary art; new buyers from Russia, Asia, and Latin America; and the rise of our robber barons, the vaunted "hedge fund guys." In 2008, the crash of the global economy brought the art market back to earth, but that was quite a run. Here's a quick rundown of some of the decade's highlights.

Jeff Koons is the comeback kid (2000s)

A poster child for the gogo 1980s, when he began showing his work in New York’s East Village, Koons was less visible during the '90s recession, when low-production-value art stole the spotlight. But with the gargantuan topiary sculpture Puppy, first produced in 1992 and recently declared by New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz to be THE artwork of the 2000s, Koons popped back into the limelight, and has remained there, for the omnipresence of his work, and the million-dollar prices for which it’s been traded.

The turn of the century didn’t just bring London the Millenium bridge. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron transformed a former power plant on the Thames into the city’s iconic museum for modern and contemporary art, Tate Modern, and, in a sign of the attendance figures new art could rack up, by 2006 the visitor count was up to 2 million a year.

Christie's and Sotheby's collusion/price fixing scandal (2000)

It was the art-market story of the decade – it could turn out to be one of the most explosive of the century – and it broke just as the 2000s began: Christie’s and Sotheby’s had been illegally cooperating to fix prices by setting matching fees. The details of the shenanigans were revealed in the ensuing months, and legal proceedings culminated in a prison sentence for Sotheby’s chairman A. Alfred Taubman.

France allows foreign art auction houses to conduct sales (2001)

The opening up of the French auction world to foreign competition was a major leap forward for the European art market. Parisian sales had been monopolized for centuries by Drouot, but the big two houses started conducting sales there in 2001 (Sotheby’s in November, Christie’s the following month). This has arguably been one factor in Paris’s recent art-market rise; consider that the stunning Yves Saint Laurent sale, conducted by Christie’s last February, might otherwise not have taken place.

Art Basel Miami Beach launches, becomes the most important modern and contemporary art fair in U.S., changes everything (2002)

Many an art dealer will remember when, in the 1990s, the dominant fair in the United States was Art Chicago. All that changed when Art Basel landed on U.S. shores. Delayed a year by the events of September 11, it hit the ground running in 2002, and effected a major shift in the art market’s calendar, throwing an international spotlight on a burgeoning art scene in Miami, and extending the market action well beyond the November auctions in New York.

Hirst buys his work back from Saatchi for $14 million (2003)

The 2000s saw the rise of big art: big art dealers, big art fairs, big auctions, big artworks. They also saw the ascendance of the big artist — the businessman-artist — in the form of Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, and, of course, Damien Hirst. Hirst made one of his boldest moves in controlling his own work when he bought back, through his gallery, White Cube, a cache of his pieces – 12 in all, in a deal rumored to have gone into tens of millions of dollars – from British collector and market maker Charles Saatchi.