Cost of living pressures? Nowhere to be seen at Deutscher and Hackett’s auction last week. Collectors splashed out more than $10 million on art, fuelling five new artists’ records, and quieting fears about a post-lockdown market slump. The discretionary budgets of Australia’s wealthiest are clearly strong enough to fund travel and art, but there appears to be something else firing demand. Art collectors are growing in number.

“It’s a deeper collecting audience than it was a decade ago, so if one or two collectors are not participating, another one or two will be,” says Deutscher and Hackett’s co-executive director Chris Deutscher, who has been in the game for more than 40 years. “The market is deep enough to keep having strong sales even in a challenging economic environment … we come across new collectors at every auction,” he says.