While price movements at auction grow increasingly volatile, we’ll help you track them. AMR’s Trendline draws a durable path through an artist’s prices so you can make sense of the shifting mix of sales.
Two signals in every price
An AMR index is built on prices, and prices carry two signals at once. One is supply: which works happened to come up. A strong season of major canvases lifts the line; a thin run of minor works drops it — nothing about the artist changed, only the sample did. The other is sentiment: what collectors were willing to pay for the same calibre of work. From inside the record the two look identical — a spike is a spike — and a method built on prices cannot honestly say which one it is looking at.
The Record itself — the Central 80% of an artist’s sales, published monthly and never restated across fifty years — does not change. The Trendline is a second read drawn through it by rule, designed to hug the movement of the index while smoothing out its noisiest swings. This durable path is optimal when carrying values over longer periods. For shorter runs, where the mix of supply and sentiment are particularly volatile, a more considered approach is advisable. Our Create an Index tool gives you a heads-up when the Trendline diverges from the Record. A list of recent sales allows you to compare with individual prices, or you can contact us for an Expert Read.
The Expert Read — when you need the number anyway
AMR’s dataset of prices has been processed and filtered, normalising medium, currency and auction house commissions. With a 50 year record of prices, every sale in an artist’s lifetime record, detrended, gives a spread of prices: the shape of what this market normally trades. We measure the works that traded across your exact window against that spread of prices, and where the mix has drifted — dearer works than usual, or thinner — we can say by how much. It is the answer to one precise question: what would the Record have read across your window, had the usual mix of works been trading? The result is a best estimate over a window the record alone could not support.