Consumer Demand Drives Art Market to $12 billion in sales.

STEVENS, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--Oct. 14, 1999--

Fine art and print industry sales grew 10% in past year due to

rising collector interest and growing demand to

decorate the home with art

The American consumer is gaining a new appreciation of fine art. Museum attendance is up; the auction market for fine art is rebounding; and prints and other artwork are more available than ever due to the expansion of distribution brought about by the mall-based art chains, such as Deck the Walls and Thomas Kinkade Galleries, the growing exposure of framed art prints in specialty home decor retailers, such as Pier 1, Pottery Barn, Bombay Company and Kirklands and the emerging availability of art on the Internet through e-commerce sites such as art.com and auction sites such as Sotheby's and eBay.

This growing interest in art generated consumer sales of $12 billion in 1998, a 10% increase over the previous year, according to the latest research report from Unity Marketing, entitled The Art Market Report: The Market, The Industry, The Trends. The fine art market analyzed in this report includes unframed prints, framed prints, canvas reproductions, gicl?e, animation cels and original art.

It is a highly fragmented and diverse industry with few clear delinations between the manufacturer of art, who may be an art publisher, an art gallery or even an individual artist, and the gallery retailer who may also be a manufacturer/publisher or an artist.

"One of the key challenges in analyzing the art industry was determining whether the sales of a particular company should be classified on the manufacturer or the retail distributors' side," says Pam Danziger, president of Unity Marketing.

"The art industry is a democratic one with few barriers of entry to a creative artist with a vision and an ability to express that vision. Further, the Internet offers the artist today exposure to a national, even international audience, where they were limited in the very recent past to building a reputation on the regional level first."

Consumers are also gaining exposure to artists' work through licensing. Art licenses are being applied to a rapidly expanding range of products including home decorative accessories, such as linens, rugs, and furniture, gifts and collectibles, and greeting cards and stationery.

Retail sales attributed to artist licensed properties totaled $5.4 billion in 1998, according to EPM Communications Licensing Letter. One of today's most popular artist licenses is Mary Engelbreit, whose total sales of licensed product generated nearly $90 million in 1997, as reported in License! magazine.

New interpretations of traditional art themes by today's artists are attracting more collectors to the art category. Art publishers and galleries alike identify the male collector as an important segment of the art consumer market who are drawn to artwork depicting wildlife, western and historical themes.

Spiritual and religious themes are being explored by more artists as the new millennium approaches and are being eagerly received by the collector market. In addition, African-American themes are finding a ready audience among collectors. "Today's African-American artists are reaching an expanded base of collectors because they are going beyond the African-American visage to portray the underlying universal and timeless human emotions," explains Danziger.

This new research report, The Art Market Report: The Market, The Industry, The Trends examines in detail the art market and is based upon surveys among art publishers, galleries, and art collectors. It details industry sales by segment, leading categories, distribution channels, growth trends and projections. It also examines in-depth the gallery market for art which accounts for about 60% of industry sales.

Leading art publishers profiled in the report include Bruce McGaw, Greenwich Workshop, Graphique de France, Lang Companies, Media Arts Group, Mill Pond Press, New York Graphic Society, Walt Disney Art Classics, Wild Wings, Winn Devon among others. Insights into the collector market for art, including buying behavior and consumer demographics, are also included.

The report is available for $1,500 from Unity Marketing, a marketing research and consulting firm serving the gifts and collectibles industry. For more information, contact Pam Danziger, Unity Marketing, 188 Cocalico Creek Road, Stevens, PA 17578; telephone [phone]; fax [phone]; web site: www.unitymarketingonline.com; [e-mail]. (Note to Editors: Danziger available for interview)