You know, I would much rather see the super wealthy spend mroe millions on art than buying yet another super-yacht or Gulfstream. Art probably has a much smaller carbon footprint than most other forms of conspicuous consumption.
Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to make a profit with art trading. I'm not that much into (looking at) art, but a little.
It was first published in 1971. Needless to say, collectors and galleries don’t love it, but some artists continue to use it.
It would only be if the rich spent their money directly on subsiding fossil fuels would it make any difference.
Imagine two billionaires buying a painting from one another, and just swapping it back and forth between their mansions. How does that dollar spent leave that closed system? It doesn't. They might pay people to move their precious painting, pay for insurance, and alarms, but the painting itself is a fixed store of value. That value is never doing to trickle down.
Large amounts of wealth will never leave the pockets of rich people unless they spend on investing or buying newly created assets (like Gulfstreams). Rich people buy investment art because it keeps their money in their own pockets.
They could even add the tax amount to the premium and collect both.
Like any other investment class it's a leaky system. When a collector bought Girl With Baloon/Love is in the Bin for £1m at auction that money went to Banksy, to be spent on whatever Banksy spends money on.
This is exactly the point I was making - when someone buys a new thing the money circulates in the economy. They (sort of, in the case of Banksy) paid for it to be made. They created work. When it's just two rich people buying existing things from one another the money doesn't leave that loop, no additional work is done, and there's no real benefit to the economy.
To be honest I'm just making a pedantic point about Daniel's post where he said every purchase trickles down eventually. That's just not true in a small number of very high value purchases like art. If you've got buckets of cash it's better for the economy to buy a shiny new yacht instead of a painting. Nice problem to have I guess.