Typology and spatial characteristics of the Hungarian art market – The example of Budapest

Abstract

Art trade still belongs to the little-discovered segments of Hungarian art market, even though, its investigation is rather timely, considering that certain sections of the population spend significant amounts of money on buying artifacts and invest a high portion of their accumulated income into antique and contemporary art pieces. The art market mostly consists of galleries, auction houses and antique shops, but second-hand bookshops also play a remarkable role.

This study aims to establish a typology for the Budapest art market and to describe its spatial characteristics. The research – based on primary data collection – examines the art market population in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, and draws upon the author’s fieldwork observations and semi-structured interviews. It also presents and analyzes the shops’ and trading houses’ location by using GIS.

The paper classifies art market actors based on their profile, points of sale, pricing policy and supply. According to their profile, the Hungarian art market consists of second-hand bookshops, antique shops, galleries, auction houses, and mixed gallery-auction houses. The actors of the market use three different distribution channels. Besides the traditional in-store sales, they also rapidly have been implementing e-commerce and multichannel solutions. The analyzed marketers typically applied fix-prices, bidding and the combination of these different tactics as their pricing methods. Their supplies could be both general (selling a wide range of products), or specialized. In this latter case, marketers focus on specific style, historical age, origin, brand or product characteristic.

Art galleries and auction houses are located in Budapest’s most elegant, traditional shopping areas, while the secondary shopping zones are mostly homes, second-hand bookshops and antique shops. This spatial distribution can be explained by several factors, like the level of rental fees, historical events, agglomeration advantages, among others. These economic, historical and geographical factors reinforce each other and result in a unique spatial structure with four gravity centers. Galleries and auction houses concentrate in Falk Miksa street, Múzeum Körút is an important hub for second-hand bookshops, other galleries populate the other parts of the 5th District (Pest side), and in the more touristic areas of Buda (Castle district) antique shops, galleries and second-hand bookshops dominate the art market.