The Storm Hits the Art Market
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
https://www.resourcefulfinancepro.com/news/irs-section-174-c...
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
I don't know what causes bubbles to pop, but I don't think it's directly related to US monetary policy. I suspect that the bubble just moved elsewhere.
While canvas, sculpture, and other media are far removed from jpegs, the scarcity of adjacent digital forms going away may have reduced the interest in the market for "shaped aesthetic things".
The attention, and thus money, has moved elsewhere.
This could be because of capital controls, financial stress or increasing sense of national pride - take your pick
Only partially correct. The reason why so many Chinese invested into the West is because the Chinese Government has strict monetary policies in place.
We have all seen news of people becoming miljonairs, billionaire's and then they leave for another country. The issue is that this was happening a lot in China. Rich folks made their money in China and then took the money outside the country. The issue was that they converted that money into foreign assets, what drain the national currency reserve (mostly dollars).
Like 12+ years ago the government implemented strict rules, disallowing money to be transferred out of the country, if it exceeded a specific amount. Its been a long time and i do not remember the exact limit. But there is used to be a backdoor, that if you knew the right people, and it was a company investment or other investment that build up soft power of China in the West. And voila, money flowed out that way. Of course, not for normal citizens ;)
O, you are investing a million or 5 into some painting. Well, now that money got transferred out of the country but the value (as in the painting) is now in the US, EU, ... Its the same reason why we had a TON of movies being made with Chinese backers. It was all used as a way to launder money out of China.
That means, if the Chinese government confiscated your assets at home, you had value in other countries to be tapped. Its not coincidence that a lot of rich folks their families study in the west and live in the west but the husband/family head works in China. Its a way of protection. And the West where if you leave a country, there is no real check on you leaving, China is different.
A few years ago, with Covid, China was in constant lockdowns, areas sealed off. The big cities like Shanghai, entire area's felt like prisons the moment somebody tested positive. So a lot of people with money tried even harder to get out.
It was around that time, even more stricter laws got introduced regarding "foreign investments". The whole backdoor regarding "foreign investments" has been restricted and is under much more scrutiny if you want to bring money out of China.
Hong Kong used to be a exit door but that has also been under a lot more pressure.
Its not that Chinese have less confidence in the West but that the government has "advised" that investing at home is the "better choice" for you and your family.
That means, if you do not want to be investigated and jailed. A lot of rich celebrities have been publicly investigated and jailed for short times. Charges like tax evasion was a thing. Until they paid a nice big sum to the government (with some money sticking on the edges), and a very, VERY public apology about their bad behavior. What in turn keeps the rest in place. As in, sure, you can play around but do not get too big for your bridges and think about moving money out of the country.
Getting money out of China, unless you have some connections is a hard thing. The level of control is much larger then 2010, and has only gotten worse with time.
You think about setting up a company in the West? You better be sure its registered in China (forgot the branch) or you can enjoy jail time when found out. Its all about tracking where money goes and ensuring control.
Its the same reason you see a lot of Chinese companies that used to be in China, now having head seats in Singapore etc. People using that route to get assets out.
So no, its not just about the West becoming less interesting, and people being more patriotic, its literally about way more financial and people control, what in turn affects that massive money flow from China into outside assets.
Funny thing, you ever wonder why so many, just BAD movies have been coming out the last 15 years. Check the investments and the money trail.
Its because even if the movie loses money, what then gets reported as a lost value in China, part of the money is still transferred out sideways. O, we spend 20 million on X movie (but it looks like a 2 million budget movie). O, ... i wonder what happened to those other million. We earned only 1 million from the movie sales, so we "lost" 19 million. Reality is that a lot of that money simply flowed somewhere else. 101 money laundry ..
- fewer people can afford a home, let alone multiple = less wall space for premium art
- it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
Sure art sales can be used to launder money, but that can't be the majority of sales. Doesn't laundering rely on being masked by a larger legitimate cash flow?
I think a much more significant portion of the art market is people speculating on prices and people collecting to look cool. Both of which are highly sensitive to changes in mood and sentiment as described in the section of the article talking about Beth Rudin DeWoody .
Art was always a favorite way to launder money. This is a good point.
When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections.
2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
This is just wrong for Gaza; either you take the "conflict has been running continuously since 1948" approach, or you date the present intense fighting to October 2023.
> AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry
Not to the "fine art" part of it, no. It's taken out the lower and middle tiers; people doing commissions for a few hundred dollars are squeezed out, and there's much more slop to sell to tourists, but any business which cares about uniqueness and provenance (sometimes more than the content of the art!) is not going to notice.
My sincerest desire is that there’s a peaceful resolution to this conflict before they’re forced to realize it.
Otherwise there will be no peace, just oppression and torture of the occupied population. And more war down the line, when Russia feels it can take another bite.
No one forces Russia to attack its neighbors.
As long as Russia insists on waging war against its sovereign neighbors, Russia is a threat to Europe.
WW2 didn't have to happen, and the UK and France could have interviened sooner, before the Nazi war machine took over the Czechs, the Poles, etc.
ounce of prevention vs. a pound of cure
According to your theoretical, Russia could attack and immediately invalidate Ukraine's ability to join NATO by re-triggering a conflict.
Come on is this stuff really that hard?
Russia is currently acting in this mode. There can be no "resolution", only a devastating military defeat of one of the sides.
Expansion is not uncontroversial either. The Roman Empire had periods of a non-expansionist policy, and the British Empire in the 19th century had a fairly popular Little Englander movement that opposed expansion of the empire.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conflict
> Definition #1: : Fight, battle, war
So, having proved my point, I’ll note that (1) this war could certainly end in compromise, and (2) even a devastating military defeat would be a resolution.
And I’ll appreciate not being called an invasion-sympathizer when I’m only pointing out that using the word “conflict” is not a political statement.
Of course things could become different if the current Russian leader dies, or is deposed.
Russia switched fully to war economy, on purpose, there is no easy way back even if they wanted. Their goal is to conquer as much Europe as possible, losing few millions of its sub-citizens from rural remote regions is not such a concern that we in the west think about. Nobody there cares. Their enemy is whole western world, doesn't matter how much trump licks putin's a*, not a zilch.
In fact, I strongly believe that almost nobody in the west fully understands how depraved and primitive russian thinking is, think about white heroin addicted trash or common slums folks, and spread it on the level of largest nation in the world and give them huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. On top is good old mafia (and I don't mean Coppola's idealized version, I mean real murder-whole-family-in-acid-vat type), nothing more.
Now what good do you expect from that, now or in 10 years? Whatever you do, you are naive.
:s/russian/american/
can we not label whole nationalities as depraved, primitive heroin addicted trash!?!
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.
I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
No idea the price, but I would much prefer this to a Charizard pokemon card!
The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.
One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.
Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.
To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.
How would one measure "the art market" in a way that can be graphed?
> should have collapsed
Through what mechanism would it "collapse? Laundering tricks don't involve bidding wars or high volumes of items. Consider this scenario:
1. Alice wants to transfer $5m to Bob in exchange for something off the books.
2. Bob goes and buys anything he can find that seems to have a consistent ~50m price point. Since Bob's task doesn't require any specific item, he doesn't get into bidding wars to drive up prices.
3. Bob privately sells it to Alice, who deliberately pays a higher amount of $55m. No auction, no bidding wars.
4. Alice can either resell the item to unrelated people for probably ~$50m, or keep it around for a bit to provide either plausible-deniability or a future tool for an inbound cloaked transaction with someone else.
How would that kind of activity charge up "the art market" in a way that is easy to measure?
> when NFTs were booming
Most of that boom was other speculation. My point is that an NFT by cyber-Rembrandt is a lot more convenient than certificate a real Rembrandt held in a freeport as its ownership shifts.
The trick is getting something where the generally-accepted value is high enough that transactions can plausibly be hidden as noise in the signal.
In a way, we are actually in a golden age. I lurk on social media accounts of amateur art enthusiasts around the globe with (IMHO) good taste who seek out interesting little known artists and post it on their feeds. I am introduced to so much great art that I probably would have never known about otherwise. If I see something I like, I search for the artist online and see if they have something available in their portfolio for sale that I love.
I’ve bought amazing art from talented artists around the globe that speak no common language with me. We get it done (Google Translate to the rescue). I don’t filter on price but virtually everything I’ve bought is always in a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars range. The fact that you can talk to the artist just adds to the story.
Forget the “tastemakers” in art. I can give my money to excellent artists directly, including many that never attracted the attention of tastemakers or who weren’t deemed worthy by said people. I received a huge piece from Denmark today. The whole experience is lovely and the artists really appreciate that someone loves their work. This is the future.
No, you can't, or at least not to any artist.
Although I wholeheartedly support the idea of paying directly to the artist and even commissioning specific pieces, many "blue chips" are selling only via galleries/dealers to ditch management and bargaining and keep prices consistent.
I've attended local art festivals (i.e. Atlanta Dogwood Festival) where I've bought some incredible prints and paintings in the hundred dollar range which are subjectively more beautiful compared to some of the stuff I've seen in the High Museum of Art in downtown Atlanta. For example:
https://www.instagram.com/alejandro_munoz_art
https://www.instagram.com/marirosafineart
https://www.instagram.com/s.carterscreations
https://www.instagram.com/shealeyartworks
https://www.instagram.com/salazarartes
http://bryanyung.com/ (no instagram)
Artists are the most interesting people you can ever talk to.
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
The title of 'artist' is also an interesting one. Some titles have to be earned, for example, you can't call yourself a 'genius', an 'intellectual' or a 'hero' for obvious reasons. Yet creatives can call themselves an 'artist' as job description without society deeming them to be an 'artist'. In the olden days, before mass production, artists were just tradesmen doing a good job at whatever their trade was.
Our idea of art is deeply tied into capitalism. Compare the art of indigenous peoples with Western art. Art is all about fame and fortune rather than a love of the subject material and the craft.
One problem with the current status quo is that most artists are not in the commissioning game. Artists want to paint whatever their thing is, not some patron's dog, fancy house, religious deity or elderly relatives. If you do know someone making a living from painting people's dogs, then the question has to be asked, are they a real artist, or just a craftsperson?
Take the case of the architect, where the client is invariably calling the shots. Are they an artist? They don't need to be since they have the title of 'architect', however, few of them are called 'artist'.
Being 'artist' also comes with some understanding that the 'artist' doesn't have to work in the conventional sense, and therefore an 'artist' is high status. It works a bit like 'foot binding' in that regard since some people will want their kids to grow up to be 'artists', as in high status and not working for a wage. Sometimes this is just to validate the parent's life choices and shore up their status.
The real art of the age is all around us and made by commercial artists.
The commercial artist has a client and patron in the company they work for. They make adverts, packaging designs and such like, working within constraints. If working for Ford, the commercial artist isn't going to redesign the blue oval, they have to stick to the style guide, working within the constraints to make something new, in time and on budget.
So yes, commission what you want from an artist that puts the customer first.
Regarding the article, in the UK we had an art movement at the turn of the century with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and their ilk, pushed by Saatchi into art superstardom. However, about a year before 2008, this hustle came crashing down. If we currently have some cooling off in the art market then that is an indicator that the economy as a whole is heading for tough times.
That's actually the only art I've commissioned so far.
We are in a golden age for discovering art that you really wouldn't get to see otherwise. I would not even call myself a hardcore art enthusiast but I stumble upon great art all the time on Instagram, as you mentioned, from around the globe.
It's really cool.
https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/
https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/
https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/
https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/
https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/
https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/
And curating:
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
Commercial galleries and the art school pipeline are awful in so many ways, but one thing that many people fail to understand is that art in its best light is an ongoing conversation.
Yes you can be incredibly skilled and build an aesthetically beautiful hand made work of art without ever being part of the larger art world. And as a viewer, you can appreciate that art and buy it and cherish it. This is good, great in fact.
But to say that is all that art should be is sort of missing the forest for the trees or whatever. We have this thousands of years old conversation going about form, color, concept, story, material, humanity, etc and when its working correctly the art world cultivates and encourages that conversation.
We can absolutely have this conversation without financializing art to the extreme as has been done the past 10 years, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
I just finished decorating my living room. Majority are prints of pictures that I found on the internet and then pushed through an AI upscaler, which means the costs are equal to the printing service and they look amazing. Two pieces have been commissioned, and total cost of both of them with printing is below a thousand. Just recently I saw a beautiful painting in a gallery and it cost me a thousand. Art doesn't need to be expensive to be beautiful.
It would be tempting to see if there is a correlation in when the “legit” art world price going off a cliff and the NFT bubble, because that suckered in a lot of the idiot end of the speculator crowd.
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
[Stares aggressively in the direction of gen AI.]
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
It's dependent on how performant the underlying protocol is, not all blockchains are the same.
And you can counter-sign the time if you need to prove that.
NFTs seem like a solution to a non existent problem. Or a problem you have to search really really hard to find.
without any enforcement with sanctioned violence, this is merely symbolic. It's why so much scam happens with the NFT space.
My web browser has a novel and advanced attack on the cryptosystem built into it I have dubbed the right-click-copy-image attack.
I’ve even managed to replicate it on my phone.
Nobody cares about your precious little certificate, but if it makes you happy, buy it.
[0] https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-ri...
They had various payment methods, including cash (highest price on their list was 300k usd) at their office in Dubai.
"I've got an exciting bag-holding opportunity that you don't want to miss."
I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.
I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
Mentioned it here before, https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
You dropped me onto a page with no sense of range or scope. Clicking around results in some very "odd" perceptions about what it is your putting out.
Categorize them so they can be filtered (colored, geometric, organic), load randomly by those tags or at least put a breadth of samples out front.
I like your stuff, but you need to have a better introduction and better access for it.
They put you into a good piece of artwork at a good price, build a raport, look after their good clients, perform well over time and take a couple of points on the way in and out
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
> In my process, generation is supplemented by many manual processes, including image manipulation, digital painting, and occasionally even AI
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
Seems like it’s not an art problem but an art dealer problem. If you rent a $100k/month restaurant space that seats 20 people, is the food industry dying if you can’t turn a profit and close?
I have found that the higher priced galleries seem to sell worse art. The emperor has no clothes. And just like the Impressionists revolted against the Academy, us artist shall revolt at the Art market system that says “your work only matters if you have an MFA from a top school”.
For mainstream "rich person" art, all of this is outsourced. Curators discover the artist, promote the work, and set the price. Glossy trade journals tells you what the artwork means and how to talk about it to others in a way that's more erudite than any thoughts you can form on your own. Your function, really, is just to show up with money and then hang the piece.
Just one example, one of the biggest Canadian collectors of contemporary art is condo marketer Bob Rennie, who during the foreign wealth lead boom in Canadian real estate, was making so much money that he opened up an entire personal downtown museum to show off his art works.
After layers of regulation against foreign buying amongst many other shifts in the economy (hi interest rates), condo sales are now in retreat with developers on the ropes and Rennie Marketing laying off staff.
Things change.
(I have no idea if Rennie has stopped buying, but given the sorts of big shifts in his industry, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd eased off!)
Etsy and reddit are easy ways to find rather good art for what I can tell is a consistent price based on the size of the piece.
The only time I 'browse' art offline is during special events, which have all been wander from house to house or small art studio to studio. I love the experience, it's much more personal as you know the artist will be there and you can discuss the piece with them.
That species of humans is getting extinct or do not have control of their investment decisions anymore. Someone who was born in the 70's and later is likely to be less interested in collectible than someone who was born in the 50's.
Another big problem is, the buyer now has hard time in sensing the raw human talent that went into the art vs the machine output. If it is a sculpture, we can't know whether it is 3d-printed. In old-times this trust issue wasn't there. It was raw human skill at display.
I keep telling this story from pancha-tantra the folk-lore tales from India. Friends walking in a forest, come across a dead tiger. Having great skills in different branches of science, they decided to test their skills to bring the tiger back to life. Sure, it worked, but before they could celebrate, they were attacked by the tiger.
> “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
> “The juice has got to be worth the squeeze,” one collector-trader said. “And there’s no juice in the art market. It’s just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Rude, rude, rude.”
From what little I know of the NY art scene, by osmosis (by having an SO who previously was accomplished in it, and could mingle well at gallery openings and cocktail parties, infinitely better than I could ever learn to)...
I wonder whether the "rude, rude, rude" means that the market had come to depend on nouveau riche speculators (who'd typically have neither the intellectual and artistic background, nor old-money social graces/conventions).
If you didn't respect your customers, and didn't make them feel valued, then the ones who only cared about money or status games have other options.
The same illness infected the art world, and it was no more sustainable there than anywhere else.
> Valentine said ... "Asking $20,000 for a work in an artist’s first show is unsustainable"
none of the separate participants in this article are willing to acknowledge that these are related problems.
there is no price discovery in the art world, and it was only just beginning to happen in the pandemic era flush with cash
when you question the price or try to find any rational trend, the gallery director gaslights you into the prior quote "you should just love the piece!" okay but why should I love it at this price "because it will be another price in the future!" but why will it be another price who sets that price "we the gallery do! it moves up over time!" how does that work "you should just love the piece!"
It cost me $50 and I've taken it with me every time I've moved.
I really don't get dropping thousands on a single piece, I've never felt any work speak that loudly to me.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
otherwise yes, it’s the gallery’s job to preserve a level of value for the artist, and they work hard to maintain the house cards.
And yet the price of the piece is still set above the reserve bid for all intents and purposes, and if the piece is part of a collection that one future trade is setting the price of the whole collection - just like with any low float asset like illiquid shares
but I find the artists, dealers, and galleries to be doing the most to prevent price discovery. Doing the most to not be compared to other kinds of markets.
Art used to be a good way to get around currency controls - David Walsh who built the MONA art museum I believe once said he first bought art and artifacts as a way to get cash winnings out of some countries.
I'll be blunt. I've looked at their works, and those in the article itself.
I won't be losing any sleep over this.
From my readings and general pulse checks, it’s quite the opposite. Old risk calculations have been thrown out, and there is no new normal. Everyone operates under the assumption that market is god, and it will be bailed out in case if things go sideways, so exposure to equity is high.
https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-...
Bleeding money, the gallery recently laid off half their staff.
It's almost as if the curators would rather lose their jobs than exhibit art that the public enjoys.
I just want to know the bottom line: is this good, bad or indifferent for the actual struggling artists. Or upside for some, downside for others? And, which struggling arists; how many out of the multitude associated with what outcome?
while its costs (for operating two spaces, in New York and Los Angeles) remained unchanged, about $150,000 a month.
Anything worthy of the concept of art isn't likely to be found in these places.
If you like making shit that looks cool and you want to sell it, have at it. Just please drop the intellectual pretence that anything other than "it looks cool" is going on.
Got to love 'late stage capitalism'
It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
The art part of the market - in the sense of original creativity that means something to someone - had become a footnote. And large parts of it were more about performance than craft.
So resale values collapsed, and now everyone is walking through the rubble and wondering if there's anything left to rebuild.
AI is both completely irrelevant to this and absolutely central, but for non-obvious reasons.