The Art World’s Mini-Madoff and Me

The best thing about this article are the comments, which are obviously written by the "mini-madoff" himself. So yeah, read the article first and then read the four comments, three of which are ostensibly from different accounts but all obviously written by the subject of the article. It is pretty funny, actually because in those sock puppet comments he comes off as exactly the same person described by the article.

This article seems more like a former lover complaint than a serious article on how f-ed up the contemporary art market is (and I'm pretty sure it's f-ed up).

> I expressed my incredulousness at the very thought — who over 8 years old plays checkers

From time to time I tend to forget how Anglo/US-centric most of the people who write in English are, it's almost like the rest of the world doesn't exist. And the answer is "yes, there are millions of people playing checkers even though they are over 8 years old"

The fact that everything was fine and dandy while all the valuations were going up reminds me of this sama post: https://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government

...for more than one reason.

My painter friend told me that the art market was sketchy as hell, but I must admit even this article surprised me. I have a hard time feeling too bad for anyone in this story.

This just goes to show, once again, what a ridiculous clusterfuck of greed and outright criminiality this "industry" is.

And I was worried about my little manifesto [1] being too straightforward. Time to spice it up, I guess.

[1] https://binnedart.com/about/

Scammers scamming scammers, what could be more delightful to watch? But sadly this is nowhere near Madoff’s heist, it had a promising beginning but the protagonist soon got sidetracked by drugs and a lavish lifestyle. Why is this even news? This is the price of doing this type of business

> There is an adage with which my father frequently admonished me as a child: You can lie as much as you like, but don’t believe your own lies.

Strange advice to give a child.

*...and I

> Consequently, prices sometimes can be manipulated by the very well connected, who would be consistently selling and reselling the same works at increasing prices

Go ask your local fine art gallery about the prices, try to do literally any price discovery and get the avant-garde run-around and count the minutes until it gets defensive

"ah you know I'm just in finance and most of the markets I work with have other mechanisms for price discovery so I was just curious about how it works here, for this artist"

well you know you need to buy something you really appreciate for yourself and want to keep for decades and you need all that time for the price to appreciate

generic stuff, but none of this answers what the market depth is now and how is standing market depth determined and what were the prior prices, or why that piece over there keeps increasing in price by 15% but is still in your gallery - is this consignment from someone you just sold it to? how come they weren't influenced by the same thing you just told me

Anyway, you can't ask it exactly like this in a casual conversation because thats just asking for defensiveness, but don't expect a transparent market. you can try asking about the art world in any cordial way you can think of and get stonewalled. You know the answers deep down.