Art market datapoints of the day, China edition | Felix Salmon

I suspect we’re still only in its early days, but there’s no doubt that we’re in a massive Chinese-art bubble right now. And for proof, all you need to do is look at the league table of the highest-grossing artists of 2011.

If you look at the artists who made the most money at auction in any given year, it’s normally pretty predictable, with Picasso at the top of the list and Warhol increasingly dominating. But here, courtesy of ArtPrice and Bloomberg’s write-up of ArtPrice’s results, is the top of the 2011 league table:

1. Zhang Daqian, $506.7 million
2. Qi Bashi, $445.1 million
3. Andy Warhol, $324.8 million
4. Pablo Picasso, $311.6 million
5. Xu Beihong, $212.9 million

This is in many ways the tip of the art-market iceberg, where most deals — especially in the white-hot contemporary-art scene — are still done privately, rather than at auction. The reason no living artist is on this list is mainly that living artists have gallery representation, and galleries don’t like buying and selling at auction.

But still, the rise of Chinese artists on this league table is nothing short of astonishing. The most expensive artwork sold at auction in 2011 was Qi’s Eagle Standing on Pine Tree; Four-Character Couplet in Seal Script, which sold for $65.5 million in Beijing in May; it beat a major Clyfford Still into second place. (And remember too that this is using a value for the yuan which in many ways is artificially low.)

And the sheer levels here! Picasso has never grossed more than $362.7 million in one year; both Zhang and Qi handily beat that figure in 2011, without anything approaching Picasso’s place in the canon. And the way that these artists came out of nowhere makes Groupon’s growth seem positively sluggish. Here are the Artnet reports for Zhang and Qi:

And lest you think that the growth from 2010 to 2011 isn’t all that impressive, note the little footnote. The 2011 numbers are for the first half of the year only.

Precisely because these artists have almost nothing in the way of a long-term auction history, they’re not going to be showing up in the Mei-Moses art index for a while. That requires paintings to have been sold twice. But when that happens, we’re going to have some very crazy results. Either the index will soar, due to the bubble, or else the first datapoints will come when the paintings being bought today are eventually sold. And that might well be for prices much lower than we’re seeing right now.