Even so the same preoccupation of "trophy art" in world art markets appears to have its local miniature equivalent Down Under. The average prices paid for the 2000 or so fewer Antipodean paintings and sculptures that changed hands compared to 2012 rose from $9145 to $11,330.
The average, achieved on gross sales 7.6% higher represented a gain of 23.9 per cent. Achieved on a smaller number of art works changing hands, it showed a growing appreciation of quality art.
Buyers are becoming more selective and raising the premium for art with slightest touch of “trophy” appeal.
Less art is selling for more money especially if it is fresh to the market, and or has “wall- power” and associational value.
Provenance was a big driver of the Australian art market in 2013 Buyers have not just been buying (Sid) Nolans and (Brett) Whiteleys and (Arthur) Streetons. They bought (Colin) Lavertys and (Reg) Grundys, and to a lesser degree (Robert) Bleakleys, (Lex) Aitkens and (Clive) Evatts.
Offered outside the context of a one owner sale, art received far less attention. People are not turning up in such numbers at the mixed vendor sales but retaining their anonymity stayed home and bid on the Internet or telephone.
Banks of telephone bidders came to life in depleted salerooms and saved the day for multiple vendors.
The trend was encapsulated in the single vendor sales such as the Laverty collection on March 25 for $5.07 million and the Reg and Joy Chambers Grundy sale on June 26 for $19.16 million.
Both were held in Sydney by Bonhams boosting that company's primacy in the secondary market.
Buyers rewarded pleasure in both instances. Reg has an AC and an OBE, that is an Australian and British gong. He brought 'The Wheel of Fortune' to TV screens while Mr Laverty's diagnostics helped the poor unfortunates who had indulged in too much pleasure, as well, of course, as those sick from other causes.
The buyers were also purchasing professional connoisseurship in the Grundy sale, Australia's biggest ever art sale, buying Cruthers (John Cruthers was the main art adviser to the Grundys) as much as a Grundy itself.
Listed as co-owner of the collection, Mrs Grundy's personal love is believed to be Lladro porcelain.
The profession of art consultancy also emerged more prominently with entries from the public institutional sector and professionalisation in a body. That must have had a bearing on selectivity.
But in a very level society as Australia's with its great history of aspiration, art's status is potentially as great as in Russia where the petro-tsars are attributed with the most outstanding art purchases, or in the Middle East , emirs of Qatar. Australia's big new spenders mostly stay home although they will have to come out of the closet if they too are to benefit ultimately from a respect for their connoisseurship.
Expensive paintings are becoming more so as Australia is reluctantly dragged into the growing world trend for social inequality.
Cheaper paintings are dumped in the culture bin as the lower middle class is absorbed into the unemployed working masses.
Art is acquiring the status of relics, its finest specimens repeatedly hailed in the auction box as icons.
Margaret Olley was an icon and it was a relief that as her work posthumously headed skyward bits and pieces could still be bought by the impoverished.
While some of her paintings sell for more than those of the internationally respected Fantin Latour one desperate buyer gave $732 for Margaret Olley's old straw hat – an iconic relic if ever there was one.
The provenance buying may have been only a puff by world standards but the two sales were part of the world blow out for big spenders.
With Christie's and Sotheby's winding down their Australian operations, Bonhams lucked out because it had rooms in London's Mayfair and could show art and have a party there.
Sales initially centred on Sydney where Bonhams has its major presence but moved to Melbourne where people live indoors and have dinner parties with paintings on their walls.
Bonhams was the biggest player in the $1 million plus club, which produced 11 sales compared with only six last year.
Bonhams at $31.4 million dwarfed its competitors being way out in front of Menzies Art Brands at $19.25 million although the Menzies Group produced the 2013 auction record for a work by Brett Whiteley, and the highest price for 2013.
The gap between Menzies and Deutscher and Hackett was smaller with D + H coming in at $17.36 million. Mossgreen fell for the second successive year but its merger with Leski Auctions has strengthened its base as an all purpose auction house and gallery. Its sales should benefit from the link with Leski and should bounce back from the present low of $2.733 million.
At Menzies in October the high price for for a Whiteley was set by lot number 42, Whiteley's My Armchair. The record was $3.93 million against the previous auction high of $3.48 million for this artist.
So much is the market in transformation that cerebral Fred Williams surprising still beat visceral Whiteley in terms of financial worth.
Williams' 26 works sold for $7.7 million against Whiteley's 60 works selling for $6.82 million.
Brack, one time market cheer leader, suffered a few setbacks but 20 of his works still grossed $6.8 million.
With 35 works selling for $2.49 million Emily Kngwarreye still helped underpin the Aboriginal art market with Lin Onus chipping in $985,995 from 14 works.
The 45 or so artists' records were spread across to the colonials when Christies London sold Ben Lomond from Mr Talbot's Property Four Men Catching Opossums giving John Glover a new high of £1.74 million (then $A3.01 million).
Fred Williams You Yangs Landscape Number 1 sold for $2.29 million at Bonhams in the Grundy sale at which a fine von Guerard, a far better painter than Glover, was passed in.
The artist's record for interwar painter Herbert Badham soared from $178,500 to $732,000 when his Travellers also in the Grundy catalogue (lot 13) made $732,000.
The artist may have been a dug-up but it had wall power, Grundy and Cruthers to boost its value.
Selective enthusiasm was also seen in the lower percentage sold down from 66 per cent of lots to 60 per cent.
Records were broken across the spectrum and across the Tasman where a new high was established for a NZ art work sold at auction. Charles Goldie's first Maori painting, Kawehena sold for $NZ732,000.
The year's total compared with $95,084,000 in 2012 and nearly recovered to head back towards the $114,688,000 of 2008.
But this time it was seriously indebted to extraordinaries making death, debt, divorce, and now de-cluttering a big part of the market mix which it could be difficult to rematch.
The advance was made despite the rude awakening to the significance of Australian art by the London critics to the exhibition Australia which opened at the Royal Academy in London in October.
The exhibition had been expected to boost awareness of Australian, so much so that Christie's, around the corner from the RA in St James, built its annual travel sale around it.
The more sanguine of sale organisers will be reading the death notices very closely this year as competition is going to be even stiffer for major collections with so many of the more eminent and saleable of the present generation of collectors now having gone under the hammer.
Sad awakenings of mortality
There have been many sad awakenings of mortality over the past year with the loss of so many of the latest generation of artists too.
But death is said to be the best career move an artist can make as it tends to boost value by ruling a line under the oeuvre.
The deaths stretched across the media and stretching from the extreme traditional to the very contemporary and could inspire some re-assessments in the coming year, especially of less visible artists like Dorothy Braund and Gunther Christmann.
Gum tree artist Leonard Long died at 102 so his place in art history should be fully resolved. But that of John Peart who died prematurely at 68 in a bushfire may not have been.
Lewis Morley severed a photographic link with sixties swinging London, Braund a tie with the George Bell School.
In sculpture Australia lost Herbert Flugelman and Norma Redpath, in ceramics Gwen Hansen Piggott and Marea Gazzard.
Christmann for many years had more paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia's collection than any other living Australian artist. But the saleroom has seen little of his work since the collection of Sydney solicitor Bill Burge was sold by Christie's as its last local hurrah in 2006.
The deaths of Margaret Olley and Jeffrey Smart robbed the saleroom of two of its big providers although this would already have been discounted in the critical assessment of their work.
The death at the the weekend of Martin Sharp comes as his usually most visible work, a large tapestry in the State Library of NSW, is away for conservation and is destined to lose its eminent place in the foyer of that institution to another location. But the library has been a big buyer of Sharp's work through Sydney dealer Josef Lebovic while Davidson's, Sydney has been a major venue for the sale of his prints, which were his main medium, and which while dispersed among a bigger following, do not command the same sort of respect as oils. Sharp also had a massive collection of ephemera which coincidentally includes another Margaret Olley straw hat.
A healthy swing back to dead artists rebalancing many of them in the critical firmament appears to have been taking place. Young and emerging artists' career status can shift seismically.
The Australian Aboriginal art market did a Mark Twain as reports of its death were much exaggerated. Auction houses revamped or re-organised their approach to the school mostly to include it with non-indigenous mixed vendor sales.
It rose from $8.21 million to $11.03 million and also benefitted from association.
The Evatt collection, sold by Bonhams in October helped resuscitate the market in barks which have been around much longer than the dot paintings but mostly priced more economically.
The record setting ranged from nana pictures like Abby Altson's Children's Children sold by Sothebys in their May 14 sale, to modernist Frank Hinder's Tram Kaleidoscope of 1948 in the Grundy collection.
Hinder's reputation was simultaneously enhanced by his inclusion in the Sydney Moderns exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
A strong dollar helped free up works of Australian interest overseas although some of the more valuable like the Thomas Baines collection of the Royal Geographical Society was sold by private treaty through Christie's rather than its auction arm.
Everywhere Australian art appeared to be in play with a George Stubbs, English by authorship but Australian in content (a portrait of a native dog and a kangaroo) fought over by Britain's National Maritime Museum and the NGA with the former winning out.
Big consignments of works by art deco print maker Ethel Spowers and by bird painter Neville Cayley Senior boosted results of Bonhams and Davidsons mixed vendor sales.
Exceptional finds in colonial portraiture and Australian marine art were made in Nottingham (a portrait of Admiral Sir James Stirling founding Governor of Western Australia,) and Stockholm (an Australian shipwreck by von Guerard..
A Bridget Riley (modern British artist ) at $984,000 (estimate $60,000 to $80,000) at Deutscher and Hackett, from the designer Lex Aitken's collection, provided refreshing evidence of global collecting from Australia in recent times.
A collection of nine drawings by Adam Gustavus Ball at $15,955 against an estimate $2000 to $3000 revived enthusiasm for weekly sales at Lawsons Leichhardt.
Art just has a remarkable habit of turning up in the oddest of places. Little of it could go down as sleepers for while it sold for much more than the estimates, made on discovery, word was out well before the hammer fell and little of it sold for a song.
This was especially so of traditional art which although often the subject of a burst of buying, made the money after being substantially marked down on values formed in the 1980s. Lesser Impressionist period artists like, B.E.Minns, and lesser works by the master Impressionists themselves appeared specially vulnerable.
* Australian early 20th C slang for "lift their hats"
