"Someone called El Anatsui"

El Anatsui's Searching for connection draped over the facade of the Royal Academy during the Summer Exhibition

Not for the first time, I demonstrated my ignorance by referring to the creator of the amazing wall hanging in the Christie's exhibition as "someone called El Anatsui". I now know he is a Ghanaian artist born in 1944, who has been exhibited around to the world (including the Hayward Gallery in 2005). Worse, I failed to take proper notice of the enormous work, Searching for connection, hanging over the front of the Royal Academy when I visited the Summer Exhibition. (In my defence, I don't think the display showed it to best advantage - still, it was pretty difficult to miss!) The work in the Christie's show, Energy Spill, sold for a highly satisfactory £699,875, and it is a measure of the growing globalisation of the art market that the owner of this example of African art bought it in Mumbai before selling in in London.

The contemporary African art market is enjoying a boom among the continent's newly rich, especially in Nigeria and South Africa, and is attracting increasing attention in Europe. Angola became the first African country to win a Goldern Lion at the Venice Biennale this year,and Tate Modern is currently showing work by Benin's Meschac Gaba and Sudan's Ibrahim el-Salahi. It's said Tate is very anxious not to miss the boat with African art as it notoriously did with modernist art in the last century, thus missing out on the best pieces when they were still reasonably priced.