Manipulation is the game they're playing, that is the whole market. Fuzz your eyes to abstract the details of the art pieces and only look at the social structure around it, and that's all the information you need to predict demand.
I found this contradictory. Galleries set prices, but
"desirable collectors are well educated consumers and won’t blatantly overpay."
What are collectors educated in, exactly? Is it reading the collective market and understanding the pricing signals it generates? Is it marking new art to this market?
If the latter, how does that work if the art has no intrinsic value?
I suppose this means formal or accidental training in art and shared taste with the art market community. I presume the minimal level of skill is identifying famous artists' work from similar pieces of not-so-famous artists, recognizing influences and obvious pastiches, and so on.
I.e. someone who had credibility among the art crowd and whos purchase of a work will function as social proof of the gallerists' brand.
Good answer. I don't invest in art but I have a friend (an aspiring artist) who advises art investors. He knows the art scene, the trends and the local young artists so he has educated guesses on what to choose.
There is also another effect, which I call recursive over-valuation.
The "high-end" art collectors tend to be extremely wealthy, and - with of course some exceptions - wealthy people are wealthy also because they care about money.
So, imagine that you are a wealthy art collector and you have just paid - let's say - 100,000 US$ for a painting by an "emerging" artist.
It is only human to show off your new painting, and the people you frequent are likely to be also wealthy and art collectors.
So, if you have a name as an art collector, that painting soon becomes in your elite a "set point" for the value of the new artist work.
The year later, a gallerist that is selling at 115,000 US$ another similar painting of the same artists can well say "Last year TheOtherHobbes bought a similar one for US$ 100,000, and you know him, he wouldn't pay that kind of money if it hadn't this value".
And this sets a second precedent, and it goes on.
BTW it is all in your interest to "defend" and "promote" the artist (because you defend your investment into it) even if the painting is awful.
In a couple of years this way you will be able to re-sell the painting for - still say - US$ 200,000 while having - besides the profit - reinforced your fame as good investor and educated art expert, capable to see the potentiality of the artist ahead of all others...
Sure but this dynamic is always true for all markets for things. You're just loosely describing a Keynesian beauty contest.
At the core there's still someone or some group of people making some kind of fundamental aesthetic valuation. It's really more the severe lack of liquidity and impossibility of commoditizing of the market that creates the effect you're seeing.
> You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be remotely successful?
Cannot the author imagine a person who would find a dismembered corpse to be aesthetically pleasing and relaxing? If so, I don't think that person with such low empathy should be a journalist.
Art is not utilitarian. Art doesn't have the function of being hanged in a wall or maximise good feelings. That's just a low trick to make common people buy it.
> Art is not utilitarian. Art doesn't have the function of being hanged in a wall or maximise good feelings.
The sentiment can be appreciated, but as a general statement I believe this is false. As an example: when new hotels are built, they are commonly outfitted with a collection of original art consisting of pictures and sculptures. This is certainly done to a large degree due to the utility of the art, which serves to make the hotel more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Would you argue that decoration for such a purpose does not constitute art?
No, I'm just saying that art is not made to be hanged in the walls and maximise good feelings but is sold to be used like that. And only a subset of artworks are suitable to be sold as original decoration.
I'm not a seller but I believe is way easier to sell something with a clear function than the opposite.
Professional art is a big trading card game where the cards don't have attack/defense values but attention/exclusivity.
Maximisation of good feelings when hung on a wall is just as valid as a "+n attention" modifier as scandal, backstory (this is where "(self) expression" has its place) or innovation. The scraps of exclusivity that can be attained from craftsmanship or materials are utterly dwarfed by exclusivity derived from the artist being dead and famous.
Works that are nice to look at tend to fall short in exclusivity, because design is abundant. But in the eyes of someone who rejects the idea of "ugly art", exclusive reliance of nonaesthetic attention drivers is almost a form of cheating.
Art is not utilitarian. Art doesn't have the function of being hanged in a wall or maximise good feelings
Except when it is, especially in architecture, product design, and some clothing. Sometimes it is just there to distract you from something crappy, sometimes it is there to make folks happier.
That's just a low trick to make common people buy it.
Only, it isn't always. A lot of common people are buying stuff to make their home prettier - not everyone will hang disturbing pictures on the wall because folks would rather stare at something less disturbing on a daily basis. Some is positive, some makes a statement, and so on.
Art is (self) expression.
Except when it isn't. I can't imagine every animator at disney (back when a lot was watercolor) was expressing themselves, just like a lot of commissions aren't self-expression. Some folks just do things they think will sell or others will like. Sometimes it is just something the person thinks looks neat (no more expressive than a webpage layout or product design, honestly).
This is tangential, but if you're looking for an oldschool history channel style documentary of a reclusive artist, this video on Henry Darger was fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg
My wife works in the high-end art and auction world.
I always joke that artists are the most extreme capitalist you will ever find. This is a world where a dinner table can easily be sold for 1$mio because it's owned by some famous person. Pretty fascinating world.
On a slightly different note. This is also the reason why I think cryptocurrencies/tokens are going to be doing just fine. Humans very rarely exchange and value based on utilitarianism alone.
My whole attitude towards cryptocurrencies changed when I realized that intrinsic value literally didn't matter to the global rich, they're not interested in growth or value at all, only in security, and they'd be willing to pay a premium to store their wealth if it only means that they can control the risk.
Crypto can provide them with precisely that. The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The resilience of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.
Techies can make a nice side income arbitraging the scrambling of the global elite for a safe haven. It's the new Cayman Islands bank account, only now it's math keeping the filthy government's hands off your money, not the flimsy sham of sovereignty.
> The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The resilience of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.
You may eventually be able to make this claim, but to make it now is lunacy.
So just wait for it to come back up. You're not looking to withdraw it now, just eventually. Tap one of your other asset stores until Bitcoin climbs back.
The perspective of wealthy people is not ours. They have to weigh risk differently than we do. To them, if a bank fails or if the state seizes their wealth, it's the same thing as Bitcoin falling. Only it's not, because Bitcoin can climb back, while the people that stole their wealth are never going to give it back.
Bitcoin being a market entity that can remain outside government regulation and enforcement reach makes it the ultimate asset store. Nothing else in the world offers that.
If the global elite start parking wealth in Bitcoin, then there's literally no ceiling on the price. You see this in any market that gets targeted by them. Prices go up, and they don't come back down until governments start paying attention and figure out how to control access and regulate. Then they come back down some.
But unless a governing entity can figure out how to completely shut global money out of a market, then that asset price might not be being held up by God Himself, but by a force almost as strong.
Don't think it really is. There is a need for a store of value of the digital space and anyone who wants to invest in the digital space in the future will have to be able to access some of the deals through cryptocurrency or token means.
I would rather bet on that, than the US government in the long run.
> There is a need for a store of value of the digital space
Something like 90% of U.S. dollars are held digitally. Most American stock and bonds are held digitally. Cryptocurrencies aren't novel in being digital. They're novel in being de-centralised. They're pitched in being de-centralised away from the very system the global elite have built and profited from.
If the blockchain proves resilient, it will be adopted by central banks. There is no good reason for those banks adopting Bitcoin over something they design.
That's not the point. It's not about whether it's digital it's about how it can be used in the digital space.
Bitcoin is not just decentralized and thus isn't subject to any political opinion, it's non-inflatory and it's built in a way that both the current elite plus those with less political power can access it furthermore it's actually tracable and not possible to launder.
Those are all things that anyone from government to elite to the working class can get behind.
Whether blockchain is adopted by banks does not have any bearing on the value of bitcoin and how it can be used. If anything it will only improve cryptos value and thus be a good investment target for the elite.
Only if blockchain proves to have no backing and no utility will this trend be inversed. My bet is that it does have backing and does have plenty of utility which will just take some time to manifest itself to everyone.
> Bitcoin being a market entity that can remain outside government regulation and enforcement reach makes it the ultimate asset store.
Any major world government could muster up the resources to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. China could go after the major miners, the US could shut down Coinbase, etc. Many ways for them to stagger the currency, potentially shaking confidence enough on it for people to cash out.
That's not even counting the non-governmental shenanigans of things like Tether that are going on that could do that on their own.
The global market place is an order of magnitude bigger than all the governments in the world. They maintain order through force, not through economic size.
If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
> They maintain order through force, not through economic size.
Force goes a long way.
> If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
That's pretty handwavey. "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
It really doesn't. It only goes as far as your resources. Once they run out, then you can literally no longer enforce your will. When dealing with an amorphous entity with an order of magnitude more resources than you do, then deploying force is a game of whack-a-mole that you can't win. Your only option is to fight a rearguard action trying to stay on top while the new world order emerges.
> "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
That is already the operative environment under which much of this wealth was created.
Really rich people have most of their money in t-bills and real estate. Once you have a few million dollars, 95% of people become very conservative and focused on wealth preservation. 4.9% lose it, and 0.1% keep doubling down and get even more wealthy.
The principles of sovereignty have been around for a millennia. They aren't going anywhere. Debt is the financial innovation that has ignited centuries of growth, not few forms of cash... people were getting rich even when they needed to hump wagons of silver and gold around. Cryptocurrency is just a new form of scrip.
Not everyone has access to t-bills and real estate. Capital controls can prevent wealth moving across borders. If you literally can't get your wealth to safety, then Bitcoin looks really, really good.
If you can't move your money due to capital controls, you use bitcoin to bypass those controls, and get your money into somewhere more stable, preferably something that does not have volatility of 20% per day.
I am not against bitcoin. I have a bunch of Bitcoin. But buying bitcoin is strictly a speculative play. It is. It is not an investment: it is not a store of value. Nobody knows know what will happen ten years from.
But whatever happens ten years from now, odds are that it will be very different than what is here now, and odds are that t-bills will be pretty much the same.
Hence, why for long term stability you buy t-bills. If you want more risk, you buy the S&P 500.
For an amount of money that you can afford to lose, and you’re willing to put it into a highly speculative position, that goes into bitcoin.
Or the US dollar defaults. Nobody know what happens ten years from now either. It doesn't matter that the USD have been more secure or that having a central bank have helped stabilize the currency. In the long run, ten year? who knows.
Point is that Bitcoin is as solid an investment as many other things that are backed by governments.
I am willing to be that crypto will be around much longer than many states and so I am keeping that in mind when I invest.
I only invest long term and crypto like the US stock market is for me long-term winners. I could be wrong but today bitcoin isn't more fragile than many other currencies out there.
You're not investing, you're speculating on a commodity that you do not understand.
If your personal investment outlook is dependent on the major world currencies defaulting, you have a problem. Play with bitcoin, but don't bet your fortunes on it.
I am betting on bitcoin and blockchain being important in the future just like I am betting on a given stock to do well in the future because of the way I believe the world is going. The major world currencies do not have to default for that to be a reality so not sure why you portray it as if that's what I said.
All investments come with a risk the longer your perspective the less the risk depending on which asset we are talking about. Bitcoin/blochain is one of those that will be less risky over time unless the world moves in an anti-technology direction and I don't see that happening.
The world's second-largest economy, with over a billion people and 20 percent of the total world population, has the type of capital controls that inspire people to find creative ways to move their money. That same country accounts for 60+%, a majority, of Bitcoin mining.
And that country is also riddled with corruption. I wouldn't find it that strange that even for China, a lot of that money is made illegally, even by Western standards.
You need to have both a US Tax ID number and a bank account in order to buy treasuries. This opens you up to capital controls and nation-state seizure risk from a number of sources.
> Crypto can provide them with precisely that. The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The resilience of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.
What? Nobody sane is putting their long-term savings in crypto. The resilience of bitcoin has absolutely not been proven.
For long term assets, you want your money in some stable, solid, not volatile, and preferably backed by a global superpower, hence US Government bonds and Euro bonds are pretty much the safest assets you can buy. They won't go up much in value, but they won't go down much either.
Government bonds are limited in quantity, the government can't sell enough of them to meet demand. Not even the US government has that much appetite for spending. And if you think about it, governments could never be that sink. Security will forever be a scarce asset.
Long term it's exactly what you should do unless you truly believe that the USD is going to be as valuable as a security as it is right now in the long run (it's not).
One thing that many people forget is that most bitcoin is owned by very few people who go in very very early. They will not need to sell even if it was cut on half from now and they do not have to worry about inflation. If you can do that in the long run bitcoin will gain trust and thus be less volatile or even live with the volatility (as we used to do with normal fiat currencies)
> They're...interested...in security, and... [c]rypto can provide them with precisely that.
20% of all bitcoins have been irretrievably lost [0] and 7% have been stolen [1]. If I was the global rich, I'd rather hide gold bars in my mattress rather than put it in Bitcoin if my goal was just security.
Due to haphazard security and sheer being unlucky (i lost 300bitcoin from very very early on because they were on an external hardisk that I threw out) I am not the only one.
I disagree with this point. While the facts about the amount of bitcoin being lost are true, if someone is properly motivated to learn how to do things correctly, and large amounts of money can definitely be motivating, you can be very confident in your security.
So many coins have been lost because people were careless or uninformed, not because the system is fundamentally broken.
Edit: You're free to downvote, but if you can't make a reasonable argument against me it just shows the emotional response you are leaning on. I would be happy to post a wallet address with $10,000 in bitcoin on there, if I am wrong about what I said, surely you'd be able to take the money from me?
Just because I can't steal from you starting from nothing but your wallet address doesn't mean that your system is secure. It just means that if there is an effective attack vector, it doesn't work by working out the private key from the public address.
I agree with you that downvoting without offering counter-arguments is a sign of emotional rather than intellectual responses... but so is using straw man arguments like the one you put up.
I disagree. No one has ever lost bitcoins from keeping them in cold storage with multi sig keys distributed in safety deposit boxes. Literally no one. Its secure.
You misrepresent the intent of bitcoin along with it's intended use. Bitcoin was designed to be lost - to be eternally deflationary and for coins to fall out of circulation. Also you have to consider that the majority of coins were lost when bitcoin was worth considerably less than it is worth today.
Proper techniques to store bitcoin (local keys on a secure machine or a hardware wallet) make bitcoin mathematically impossible to steal. "Stolen" bitcoin is synonymous with "insecure" bitcoin. Properly securing bitcoin would be significantly cheaper than storing gold bars in a mattress.
Can one mathematically prove invulnerability to a $5 wrench attack?
Edit: Just in case it's not clear, my point is not that specifically bitcoin is more vulnerable to violence/coercion than other forms of value storage (although I'm pretty sure it is, as there are fewer safeguards/redress mechanisms). My point is that the regardless of the security of the mathematical element, cryptocurrency also has the real-world to contend with, which contains bugs, hardware failure, extortion, phishing, memory loss, theft, etc.
So much bitcoin was lost/stolen in the past because it simply wasn't worth very much. It's harder to forget you have 10btc on a laptop when it's worth $100,000 than when it's worth $10.
> My whole attitude towards cryptocurrencies changed when I realized that intrinsic value literally didn't matter to the global rich, they're not interested in growth or value at all, only in security, and they'd be willing to pay a premium to store their wealth if it only means that they can control the risk.
perhaps a bit more accurately, they're interested in growth and value, but they've got enough of both that they've become interested in eliminating risk. which requires finding assets which are decorrelated from one another. the various electronic currencies are a new sort of asset class which appear to be decorrelated from everything (except NVDA?).
> The volatility of crypto is immaterial...
eh, the volatility isn't great, but so long as it is very different from everything else's volatility, it can be useful.
Art is extensively used to, ahem, conveniently move around large sums of money [1]. It is difficult to differentiate unusual prices due to money laundering from unusual prices due to manipulation.
You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall.
Considering a lot of the art collectors buy is immediately whisked away to temperature-controlled, pitch dark warehouses where it can be kept safely until it's put back on the market a decade later, I really wouldn't expect the value to be related to what the art looks like at all.
High-end art prices aren't "manipulated" in some kind of nefarious way, they're just highly illiquid and complicated. The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between galleries, but there's no evidence of that.
The author makes the argument that more transparency would lead to lower prices... yet simultaneously implies prices are lower than they ought to be: "One of the worst things a dealer can do is over-price a work because they can’t lower the price when it doesn’t sell."
And anyways, I find myself sympathizing far more with artists than with the rich buyers here -- making a living as an artist is already hard enough! Why would we want to lower what they can make? And for buyers who want less expensive art, there's tons -- just don't shop at Gagosian!
Finally, the article seems to imply that art is subjectively bad now ("rape of dismembered corpses"), but that lowering prices would help fix that. That doesn't follow at all, and modern art on the vanguard is always considered "bad" by the majority at its time -- whether Monet or Pollock.
For anyone interested in details of how the art world really works and why, I highly recommend "Seven Days in the Art World" by Sarah Thornton.
> The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between galleries, but there's no evidence of that.
I would say that a gallery bidding on an auction because they have an interest in increasing the transaction price of pieces being sold by an art dealer connected to them is a textbook example of collusion (as opposed to bidding because they want to own the piece).
As usual free market fundamentalists will disagree that this is wrong in any way.
Furthermore, restricting future sales to a buyer because you don't like that they sold the last one sounds pretty anti-competitive, especially when you consider that usually a gallery has a temporary monopoly on an artists works.
Not only that, but dealers themselves privately bid on pieces they're selling to run up the price, according to Art as an Investment? by Melanie Gerlis.
While I've read and enjoyed the book you recommend, it doesn't actually explain the economics of the art world, more likely the relationships that develop. For a much more informed look you should try "The 12 Million Stuffed Shark" which is written by an economist.
As for the rest, the market isn't exactly manipulated, as the article implies, but if you bother to ask any collector they'll complain that prices are high. And this happens for two reasons. One is that there is very low supply of available art of non-contemporary era since museums are popping everywhere and they buy pretty much everything available. The other is that art has become an investment which leads a lot of rich people buying art pieces at great volumes.
We live in an era where you pay $5k to buy a giclee Murakami painting printed in a high-end printer and that if you're lucky enough because a limited edition of 50 copies could sell out in a couple of days.
I am usually quite slow to imply evil intent. However, having spent many years on the periphery of the high-end art and antiques market I can say without a doubt it is one of the most corrupt and opaque markets you can imagine. It is a chain of concealed influence from top to bottom.
Imagine, if you will, a kind of mega-rich suckers list being worked by a pyramid of scammers: auction houses, super-dealers, agents, professional intermediaries, "experts" with no credentials etc etc...The bait is always the same: high society connections. Usually you will find that the scammers are charming, well connected persons who exist in a kind of demi-monde - friends in high and low places.
I use "they" and "them" as gender-neutral singular pronouns. There is disagreement on this choice of style. Alternating between gendered pronouns seems to be the preferred alternative to the last decade's (s)he he/she garbage.
The objective of any industry is to collect power and influence for itself. Collusion is the natural state of affairs once people with power and money start entering the arena. Once you've exhausted the income opportunity that a single firm can offer you, your priorities change. Mere cash grabbing won't move the needle anymore.
What you want to be doing at that point in time is move up the value chain so you can capture a healthy percentage of the entire market. Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark, of course while you take your cut. You see it in every creative arena. Musicians open record labels, actors open acting schools and talent agencies. Career trajectories differ, but the principle remains the same. You move up the value chain.
Once you've mastered selling shovels to the prospectors, then you have to learn how to control value itself. There is no intrinsic value to products of human creation, so that value has to get created somehow. The making of the value sausage is often really, really dirty. But as long as humans want it, then there needs to be a price attached. And that price has to be arrived at somehow.
"Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark"
This is not generally the case in art. While there exist informal "artist run spaces" set up by struggling young artists, it is unknown for an artist to become a prestigious commercial gallerist. It doesn't happen. Setting up a gallery primarily requires capital, and only secondarily involves artistic judgement.
Damien Hirst is the only partial exception I can think of, and he was also involved in coordinating group shows in temporary industrial spaces early in his career, so he has always had an interest in staging exhibitions. His London gallery is definitely not about making sales or supporting emerging artists, though. It's a status symbol.
There are a few ways of looking at the art world that explain why artists don't become gallerists. One thing is that gallerists/curators are "cultural intermediaries" rather than creators. It's a different talent. Artists are sometimes asked to curate but they don't get involved in setting up galleries or publishers. It would be like an actor setting up a chain of cinemas.
I guess the phenomenon you perhaps have in mind of movie stars becoming producers differs because producing is still a creative activity.
There's a book called "Art World Prestige" that does a sociological analysis of what goes on -- all the things that are specific to the art world.
This makes me think of an episode of the short lived Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert engineers the perfect piece of art (a Blue Duckie).
It becomes highly popular and the rulers of the underground art world (I think it included a still living Michelangelo or DiVinci) kidnap him and tell him to cut it out.
I can't make myself outraged about rich people throwing money at each other. If there was no art, they'd find another excuse. It's not like that money would go to saving lives.
I'm also not outraged about few artists making a living from all this money flying around. Artists aren't entitled to rich people's money, it's a side effect of the game.
The only thing I'm outraged about is when the elite starts foisting ugly art on the poor, by putting it in public squares and government museums and textbooks. No matter how advanced your taste is, it's a brute fact that the poor don't enjoy ugly art. So these actions amount to taxing the poor in favor of the elite, which is immoral.
The high priced art market definitely has negative effects on culture. When something is sold for $100m it stops being about whatever the art represents and just becomes about how expensive it is.
Almost all artists, even successful ones, spend decades in poverty and uncertainty. Yes, it is tautologically true that today's "great artists" will also be rich. But considering that the art market is far more difficult to predict than even professional sports or science, nobody would choose a career in art for financial reasons.
> I can't make myself outraged about rich people throwing money at each other. If there was no art, they'd find another excuse. It's not like that money would go to saving lives.
What if they're throwing money at each other so that down the line they have the plausible deniability when they, um, "donate" $10m pieces because they need a tax write-off?
What if its manipulated to inflate costs for a very hilarious game of tax evasion? Is that worth any outrage?
If you buy something for $10m you're out $10m. Yes, when you donate it you can write off those $10m, or present value at the day of the donation.
But you're only saving the taxes on those $10m of income, so you're still down $5m (assuming a 50% tax rate). And you could just as easily donate those $10m directly, and get the same tax write-off.
"I can't make myself outraged about rich people throwing money at each other. If there was no art, they'd find another excuse."
Yep. Art was always a plaything for the rich. The Romanovs bought thousands and thousands of paintings to show how cultured they were. Every succesful Dutch merchant had to have a portrait done by Hals or Rembrandt. Italian bankers spent their entire fortunes on statues. Chinese emperors had enough porcelain made to host Beijing for a tea party.
Considering most artists are pretty poor, the link between wealth and taste is a bit strenuous.
I personally know quite a few people who have little income, but enjoy life by engaging with the kind of art you seem to dislike. Some have consciously made the decision to forgo a career, earning just enough for their minimalistic lifestyle, and spending lots of time on experiences. Others are poor against their will, yet still interested in art.
So, no: it's not a "brute fact". Art isn't even measured on a scale of beauty vs. ugliness–that's "design" maybe. Good art almost always upsets some people.
The art you may think of as universally appreciated was almost certainly deeply divisive when it was created. Those dutch still-lives, for example, are full of sexual innuendo, including prostitution, incest, or homosexuality. Picasso was the target of Nazi sabotage because they considered abstract art elitist. Andy Warhol was shot and almost died because his art had become some woman's paranoid obsession etc.
It's not required, obviously. But art as its commonly understood (and specifically protected in many countries' constitutions) functions as one of the mechanisms of a "civil society", much like journalism, unions, religions etc.
In that sphere, i. e. politics (broadly), there are no crazy new inventions that make everyone happy. Science can find a cure for AIDS and nobody will complain. But politics is to some degree a zero-sum game, where a finite amount of "power" can only redistributed.
Almost any change will therefore have opponents: the sexual revolution frustrated catholics, #metoo unearthed buried guilt etc.
"Ugliness" really doesn't play into it. Every city has places far uglier than any piece of publicly displayed art I can think of. More often, it's the actual idea that freaks people out: The holy Mother Maria spanking the infant Jesus[0] is not too bad on the eye, but it's a really strange idea[0] (From the 1920, by the way–shock value isn't a new idea).
The Nazis hated Picasso not (just) for his Guernica, but because they abhorred uncertainty, subjectivity, and doubt. That's why they rejected his (and most other) abstract art. It's also why they really didn't like relativity and quantum physics: it's possible that they missed their chance to get the atom bomb first because they had aesthetic objections to this "strange new relativism".
I agree that art is communication, but not all communication is art. To me, good art is a message that relies solely on argument from beauty to prove its point. So any art that looks ugly to someone is self-defeating in their eyes, because it throws away its only weapon.
The artists that speak to me most (like Pushkin, Orwell, Hunter Thompson, Andrew Hussie, davesecretary...) are keen observers of their time and have strong opinions, but they play fair in a sense. They make their points of view aesthetically compelling and stop there. What they can't say with beauty, they don't say at all. Anything more forceful is closer to a Fox News editorial than to art.
My original comment said public art that looks ugly to many people is harming them, so elites should stop pushing it.
Then Matt said art shouldn't be concerned with beauty. I disagreed, and argued that artists should try to express their ideas with beauty. That standard (whether the artist tried to achieve subjective beauty) is actually objective. For example, we know that Hunter Thompson tried to create something beautiful according to him. After all, many other people found his work beautiful, and that can't happen by accident. Another example of such attitude in modern art is Rothko. I'm not a fan of his paintings, but he clearly went to extreme lengths in pursuit of beauty, and I can easily imagine how someone could fall in love with them.
Compare that to many artists today who don't try to express their ideas with beauty. They explicitly say as much. Read Matt's comments: beauty is merely "design", winning power games is what matters... That trend is causing the current wave of public art that looks ugly to almost everyone.
If I can use music as a metaphor for a second - most of the music I love deeply is probably regarded as ugly by a lot of people.
And I'm not talking about extreme serialism, avant-garde noise sculptures or anything too tricky. I'm talking about stuff I'd be happy to defend on it's intrinsic merits and stuff that genuinely gives me the same emotional response as a lot of the more mainstream music I like.
So - moving back to art - I don't know what your tastes are. Maybe you only like pretty paintings of flowers. But assuming you are moderately eclectic in your tastes I would almost guarantee that a lot of the art you regard as non-ugly was regarded as heretical when it was first produced.
Don't forget that romanticism in music and the visual arts was once regarded as a provocative and dangerously subversive trend.
(Back to music because I know more about it than painting) Handel would have Beethoven incomprehensible. In fact the Große Fuge was regarded as incomprehensible for quite some time after Beethoven's death.
There truly is no such thing as "ugliness" in any reasonably objective sense. Context, culture and time change everything.
EDIT - I've got no particular love of modern high-end art but that's largely because it seems like an elitist, vacuous, cultural backwater than because of anything to do with the supposed "ugliness" of modern art.
Most people tend to dismiss the wide-range manipulation of high-end art as an irrelevant problem that only affects millionaires and a tiny subsection of "commercial artists". A point worth making is that more often than not, it is taxpayers who end up footing the bill when public museums purchase wildly expensive work whose price has been driven up by the processes described in the article.
While museums may get a discount for being important "taste-makers", I can't believe that that makes up for the crazy overvaluation.
This alone should make the case for better regulation as difficult as it must be across international borders.
So lets stop making museums buy overpriced art then.
So while it is nice for the public to be able to see a certain original, I can think of millions of better ways to spend that money and then just see a replica.
I spent 4 days in a row at the Met last week and I still want to agree with you. Museums are mostly a delicacy. The Louvre was built for artists to study other artist's work. That's tremendously not how we use museums. Medium is valuable for study, yes, but I didn't learn anything last week. I just saw evidence of it in bare vision.
But I am torn, because the more privately funded museums seem to be more prone to skewing history. I could be wrong.
A story I heard is that it's very useful for tax cheating. You want to pay someone a lot of money ? "Sell" them high end art cheap. Nobody questions if art suddenly sells for 40% less or more, and then resells after a few years for 4x or 5x it's original amount. Of course, not entirely risk-free.
Same goes for things like some watch brands and a few other things.
The biggest issue in the art market is transparency and it continuously amazes me that governments allow it to go on because at minimum, a lot of tax money is lost. The fact that this sector is so under-regulated enables the opacity, making it a great avenue for money laundering and fraudulent behaviour including forgeries (enabled not just by forgers but some dealers), inaccurate reporting (flawed stats), price manipulation, collusion (at all levels and between individuals and organizations), etc. Buyers often never know whether they just overpaid or underpaid or what the current value for a piece is.
Change is most possible (and has been occurring in fragments) in the primary art market vs secondary (resales, mostly of dead artists).
BTW, for those implying artists benefit the most: galleries often make the bigger share of any sale they're involved in, with commissions ranging anyhere from 50-70% or more. Plus, auction house premiums are often at least 20%, leaving less of profit for seller (after subtracting original purchase price).
Of course, art sales are taxable but how much tax can be collected when many transactions are undeclared, item prices of declared sales are not reported correctly for various reasons, thus incorrect amount of tax is assessed? A lot of the activity in this sector is simply undetectable, even to many insiders.
You don't have to on-shore art. You can keep it as a store of wealth in "Freeports" (logistics hubs within airports around the globe) and not have to pay tax on the purchase or asset in your homeland if you have the required funds sitting outside of your tax base, which in these cases, is quite likely.
Yeah and you buy a piece for $1m and sell it for $1.1m to the guy who wants to "donate" it to a non-profit for a tax write off of $10m, offsetting his tax bill on something much larger.
I never understood how this works. If you donate $X to charity, you reduce your taxable income by $X but now have $X less. If you paid your tax on $X, you would still have $X-Y. How can the former approach save you any money?
When $X is $ARTWORK_THAT_I_CLAIM_IS_WORTH_10M, which I bought for not 10M but 1M, but got "appraised" at 10M, what did I just do? Pay $1M for $10M of tax writeoffs.
Or, you know, you can get your friends running the charity to accept 1/N * $X, but ascertain they accepted $X from you (e.g. by giving you back the rest through various channels).
Even better, the charity is run by some politician's friends or relatives, and you pay $X indeed, but you're basically buying several favors (plus special cuts and treatment that's worth more than 10 * X).
Agreed, if galleries had to list their prices it would be better. Although eventually they would just start colluding and we would be in the same place.
If open pricing were mandated as part of a detailed and systemic reform, it could work. I.e. if reporting is coordinated such that discrepancies are automatically flagged (e.g. in price/inventory receipts between gallery, buyer and artist).
Arguably, this is why art is so valuable. You have to know what you're looking for, you can't just show up with a bucket of money and expect to be a player. You have to know someone in the business, it's an industry that is highly based on community knowledge.
To be more specific, it’s not based on knowledge of art but knowledge of community. The art market is a subculture in every sense. It has only a superficial relationship with objective human creativity or even art history.
“You have to know what you’re looking for” is both correct and misleading. The thing you’re looking is predominantly a record of aristocratic relations. This was not always the case, but it is very much is now.
The way to view it is as a bubble. It’s a bubble based on the notion that common people cannot be trusted to evaluate art. This claim does hold water, but it was historically based on cultural intelligence which is no longer synonymous with capital wealth.
The average art history knowledge an art investor has is fairly superficial, which is probably best, because the market could care less about theory and critique.
Arguably, this is why art is so valuable. You have to know what you're looking for ... You have to know someone
Art can still be valuable without such gatekeeping and often fraud-inducing secrecy. Art is intrinsically valuable in the eye of the beholder (based on whatever reasons attracts them to it).
One shouldn't have to know what one is looking for beforehand, as long as one recognizes it on sight and decides to acquire it. The serendipitous journey to discovering your taste or buying on impulse shouldn't be marred by anxiety over accessing the right gatekeeper. And contrary to popular opinion, art need not be expensive to be good or valuable.
F For Fake is a great movie/video essay by Orson Wells investigating the work of one of the most notorious art forgers of the 20th Century. Fascinating story worth seeking out. The full film is on youtube at the moment, as well as Filmstruck.
It's a brilliant film not just because of its subject, but because Wells uses the structure of the movie itself to say something about the world of forgery.
if you donate a piece of art to a museum, in the US you can deduct its "fair market value" from your taxes. so if there's a way to drive "fair market value" up higher than what was paid, say if a few comparable artworks sell for an inflated price, everyone can donate to museums and effectively realize some profits without crashing the market by actually selling their art.
> You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value.
This is just plain wrong. Not only does the author not understand art at all, but he also doesn't understand basic collecting.
Following that judgment, people collecting post stamps are just morons, cause a stamp that's been used can't be used again and so has 0 value - except perhaps its aesthetic one, which is not huge...
While I feel I've seen enough evidence to suggest that galleries are used to launder/manipulate the market, this writer's reasoning seems problematic. Her whole argument starts from a place of misunderstanding art entirely:
"You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be remotely successful? Yet these paintings were classified as desirable by the art market."
aesthetic value != "a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall"
and further, a corpse can't be enjoyable to look at??
(Picasso's Guernica, Caravaggio's Death of a Virgin...)
That'd be like saying the movie market is clearly manipulated because Blair Witch Project is the most successful indie of all time.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] thread"desirable collectors are well educated consumers and won’t blatantly overpay."
What are collectors educated in, exactly? Is it reading the collective market and understanding the pricing signals it generates? Is it marking new art to this market?
If the latter, how does that work if the art has no intrinsic value?
I.e. someone who had credibility among the art crowd and whos purchase of a work will function as social proof of the gallerists' brand.
The "high-end" art collectors tend to be extremely wealthy, and - with of course some exceptions - wealthy people are wealthy also because they care about money.
So, imagine that you are a wealthy art collector and you have just paid - let's say - 100,000 US$ for a painting by an "emerging" artist.
It is only human to show off your new painting, and the people you frequent are likely to be also wealthy and art collectors.
So, if you have a name as an art collector, that painting soon becomes in your elite a "set point" for the value of the new artist work.
The year later, a gallerist that is selling at 115,000 US$ another similar painting of the same artists can well say "Last year TheOtherHobbes bought a similar one for US$ 100,000, and you know him, he wouldn't pay that kind of money if it hadn't this value".
And this sets a second precedent, and it goes on.
BTW it is all in your interest to "defend" and "promote" the artist (because you defend your investment into it) even if the painting is awful.
In a couple of years this way you will be able to re-sell the painting for - still say - US$ 200,000 while having - besides the profit - reinforced your fame as good investor and educated art expert, capable to see the potentiality of the artist ahead of all others...
At the core there's still someone or some group of people making some kind of fundamental aesthetic valuation. It's really more the severe lack of liquidity and impossibility of commoditizing of the market that creates the effect you're seeing.
Cannot the author imagine a person who would find a dismembered corpse to be aesthetically pleasing and relaxing? If so, I don't think that person with such low empathy should be a journalist.
Art is (self) expression.
The sentiment can be appreciated, but as a general statement I believe this is false. As an example: when new hotels are built, they are commonly outfitted with a collection of original art consisting of pictures and sculptures. This is certainly done to a large degree due to the utility of the art, which serves to make the hotel more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Would you argue that decoration for such a purpose does not constitute art?
I'm not a seller but I believe is way easier to sell something with a clear function than the opposite.
Would you also accept the corollary that any object specifically made to be hung on wall to maximise good feelings cannot be art?
Maximisation of good feelings when hung on a wall is just as valid as a "+n attention" modifier as scandal, backstory (this is where "(self) expression" has its place) or innovation. The scraps of exclusivity that can be attained from craftsmanship or materials are utterly dwarfed by exclusivity derived from the artist being dead and famous.
Works that are nice to look at tend to fall short in exclusivity, because design is abundant. But in the eyes of someone who rejects the idea of "ugly art", exclusive reliance of nonaesthetic attention drivers is almost a form of cheating.
That's just a low trick to make common people buy it. Only, it isn't always. A lot of common people are buying stuff to make their home prettier - not everyone will hang disturbing pictures on the wall because folks would rather stare at something less disturbing on a daily basis. Some is positive, some makes a statement, and so on.
Art is (self) expression. Except when it isn't. I can't imagine every animator at disney (back when a lot was watercolor) was expressing themselves, just like a lot of commissions aren't self-expression. Some folks just do things they think will sell or others will like. Sometimes it is just something the person thinks looks neat (no more expressive than a webpage layout or product design, honestly).
But relaxing? That would .. require more explanation.
I always joke that artists are the most extreme capitalist you will ever find. This is a world where a dinner table can easily be sold for 1$mio because it's owned by some famous person. Pretty fascinating world.
On a slightly different note. This is also the reason why I think cryptocurrencies/tokens are going to be doing just fine. Humans very rarely exchange and value based on utilitarianism alone.
Crypto can provide them with precisely that. The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The resilience of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.
Techies can make a nice side income arbitraging the scrambling of the global elite for a safe haven. It's the new Cayman Islands bank account, only now it's math keeping the filthy government's hands off your money, not the flimsy sham of sovereignty.
You may eventually be able to make this claim, but to make it now is lunacy.
When one speaks of assets in which one parks their wealth, an asset that loses 50% of its purchasing power overnight is not one of them.
The perspective of wealthy people is not ours. They have to weigh risk differently than we do. To them, if a bank fails or if the state seizes their wealth, it's the same thing as Bitcoin falling. Only it's not, because Bitcoin can climb back, while the people that stole their wealth are never going to give it back.
Bitcoin being a market entity that can remain outside government regulation and enforcement reach makes it the ultimate asset store. Nothing else in the world offers that.
Some assets do not come back up.
But unless a governing entity can figure out how to completely shut global money out of a market, then that asset price might not be being held up by God Himself, but by a force almost as strong.
That's a big if.
I would rather bet on that, than the US government in the long run.
Something like 90% of U.S. dollars are held digitally. Most American stock and bonds are held digitally. Cryptocurrencies aren't novel in being digital. They're novel in being de-centralised. They're pitched in being de-centralised away from the very system the global elite have built and profited from.
If the blockchain proves resilient, it will be adopted by central banks. There is no good reason for those banks adopting Bitcoin over something they design.
Bitcoin is not just decentralized and thus isn't subject to any political opinion, it's non-inflatory and it's built in a way that both the current elite plus those with less political power can access it furthermore it's actually tracable and not possible to launder.
Those are all things that anyone from government to elite to the working class can get behind.
Whether blockchain is adopted by banks does not have any bearing on the value of bitcoin and how it can be used. If anything it will only improve cryptos value and thus be a good investment target for the elite.
Only if blockchain proves to have no backing and no utility will this trend be inversed. My bet is that it does have backing and does have plenty of utility which will just take some time to manifest itself to everyone.
Any major world government could muster up the resources to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. China could go after the major miners, the US could shut down Coinbase, etc. Many ways for them to stagger the currency, potentially shaking confidence enough on it for people to cash out.
That's not even counting the non-governmental shenanigans of things like Tether that are going on that could do that on their own.
If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
Force goes a long way.
> If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
That's pretty handwavey. "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
It really doesn't. It only goes as far as your resources. Once they run out, then you can literally no longer enforce your will. When dealing with an amorphous entity with an order of magnitude more resources than you do, then deploying force is a game of whack-a-mole that you can't win. Your only option is to fight a rearguard action trying to stay on top while the new world order emerges.
> "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
That is already the operative environment under which much of this wealth was created.
The principles of sovereignty have been around for a millennia. They aren't going anywhere. Debt is the financial innovation that has ignited centuries of growth, not few forms of cash... people were getting rich even when they needed to hump wagons of silver and gold around. Cryptocurrency is just a new form of scrip.
If you can't move your money due to capital controls, you use bitcoin to bypass those controls, and get your money into somewhere more stable, preferably something that does not have volatility of 20% per day.
Maybe in the far future, but not even remotely now.
The whole point is that if you get in now you both gain the upside of the value plus the increasing stability.
If you have enough money you can make that bet, hell even if you have less money you can still make that bet.
I am not against bitcoin. I have a bunch of Bitcoin. But buying bitcoin is strictly a speculative play. It is. It is not an investment: it is not a store of value. Nobody knows know what will happen ten years from.
But whatever happens ten years from now, odds are that it will be very different than what is here now, and odds are that t-bills will be pretty much the same.
Hence, why for long term stability you buy t-bills. If you want more risk, you buy the S&P 500.
For an amount of money that you can afford to lose, and you’re willing to put it into a highly speculative position, that goes into bitcoin.
Point is that Bitcoin is as solid an investment as many other things that are backed by governments.
I am willing to be that crypto will be around much longer than many states and so I am keeping that in mind when I invest.
I only invest long term and crypto like the US stock market is for me long-term winners. I could be wrong but today bitcoin isn't more fragile than many other currencies out there.
If your personal investment outlook is dependent on the major world currencies defaulting, you have a problem. Play with bitcoin, but don't bet your fortunes on it.
All investments come with a risk the longer your perspective the less the risk depending on which asset we are talking about. Bitcoin/blochain is one of those that will be less risky over time unless the world moves in an anti-technology direction and I don't see that happening.
I'm willing to bet that the majority of Bitcoins out there are somehow involved in money laundering for good ol' fashioned (organized) crime.
If I can't move $100K of my money due to capital controls, then I also can't move those $100K to buy the bitcoin I need to bypass those controls.
If you have a bank account and an Internet connection, you can buy yourself a Treasury [1].
[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov
What? Nobody sane is putting their long-term savings in crypto. The resilience of bitcoin has absolutely not been proven.
For long term assets, you want your money in some stable, solid, not volatile, and preferably backed by a global superpower, hence US Government bonds and Euro bonds are pretty much the safest assets you can buy. They won't go up much in value, but they won't go down much either.
One thing that many people forget is that most bitcoin is owned by very few people who go in very very early. They will not need to sell even if it was cut on half from now and they do not have to worry about inflation. If you can do that in the long run bitcoin will gain trust and thus be less volatile or even live with the volatility (as we used to do with normal fiat currencies)
Can't you see how wrong that claim is?
20% of all bitcoins have been irretrievably lost [0] and 7% have been stolen [1]. If I was the global rich, I'd rather hide gold bars in my mattress rather than put it in Bitcoin if my goal was just security.
[0] http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-bitcoins-have-been-s...
Peoples money gets stolen all the time.
Edit: for large institutional investors in a trust fund
This is only the case for this particular trust fund. You can secure your coins for free on your own.
edit: downvoted for stating a fact? really?
So many coins have been lost because people were careless or uninformed, not because the system is fundamentally broken.
Edit: You're free to downvote, but if you can't make a reasonable argument against me it just shows the emotional response you are leaning on. I would be happy to post a wallet address with $10,000 in bitcoin on there, if I am wrong about what I said, surely you'd be able to take the money from me?
I agree with you that downvoting without offering counter-arguments is a sign of emotional rather than intellectual responses... but so is using straw man arguments like the one you put up.
Proper techniques to store bitcoin (local keys on a secure machine or a hardware wallet) make bitcoin mathematically impossible to steal. "Stolen" bitcoin is synonymous with "insecure" bitcoin. Properly securing bitcoin would be significantly cheaper than storing gold bars in a mattress.
Edit: Just in case it's not clear, my point is not that specifically bitcoin is more vulnerable to violence/coercion than other forms of value storage (although I'm pretty sure it is, as there are fewer safeguards/redress mechanisms). My point is that the regardless of the security of the mathematical element, cryptocurrency also has the real-world to contend with, which contains bugs, hardware failure, extortion, phishing, memory loss, theft, etc.
perhaps a bit more accurately, they're interested in growth and value, but they've got enough of both that they've become interested in eliminating risk. which requires finding assets which are decorrelated from one another. the various electronic currencies are a new sort of asset class which appear to be decorrelated from everything (except NVDA?).
> The volatility of crypto is immaterial...
eh, the volatility isn't great, but so long as it is very different from everything else's volatility, it can be useful.
Careful - before you know it you'll have a long and tedious conversation about the true nature and scope of 'utility'.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves...
Considering a lot of the art collectors buy is immediately whisked away to temperature-controlled, pitch dark warehouses where it can be kept safely until it's put back on the market a decade later, I really wouldn't expect the value to be related to what the art looks like at all.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Baue...
FWIW I love Klimt, Lady in Gold isn't my favourite but she's grown on me.
High-end art prices aren't "manipulated" in some kind of nefarious way, they're just highly illiquid and complicated. The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between galleries, but there's no evidence of that.
The author makes the argument that more transparency would lead to lower prices... yet simultaneously implies prices are lower than they ought to be: "One of the worst things a dealer can do is over-price a work because they can’t lower the price when it doesn’t sell."
And anyways, I find myself sympathizing far more with artists than with the rich buyers here -- making a living as an artist is already hard enough! Why would we want to lower what they can make? And for buyers who want less expensive art, there's tons -- just don't shop at Gagosian!
Finally, the article seems to imply that art is subjectively bad now ("rape of dismembered corpses"), but that lowering prices would help fix that. That doesn't follow at all, and modern art on the vanguard is always considered "bad" by the majority at its time -- whether Monet or Pollock.
For anyone interested in details of how the art world really works and why, I highly recommend "Seven Days in the Art World" by Sarah Thornton.
I would say that a gallery bidding on an auction because they have an interest in increasing the transaction price of pieces being sold by an art dealer connected to them is a textbook example of collusion (as opposed to bidding because they want to own the piece).
As usual free market fundamentalists will disagree that this is wrong in any way.
Why should it be simpler? Why should anyone be able to "create" whatever he wants and decide that it be valuable for other people?
Laundering Drug Money With Art (https://www.forbes.com/2003/04/08/cx_0408hot.html#1da16d3e66...)
Valuable as Art, but Priceless as a Tool to Launder Money (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-att...)
Chinese snap up fine art for use in laundering schemes (http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/20/news/economy/china-art-laund...)
https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...
As for the rest, the market isn't exactly manipulated, as the article implies, but if you bother to ask any collector they'll complain that prices are high. And this happens for two reasons. One is that there is very low supply of available art of non-contemporary era since museums are popping everywhere and they buy pretty much everything available. The other is that art has become an investment which leads a lot of rich people buying art pieces at great volumes.
We live in an era where you pay $5k to buy a giclee Murakami painting printed in a high-end printer and that if you're lucky enough because a limited edition of 50 copies could sell out in a couple of days.
Oh boy.
Imagine, if you will, a kind of mega-rich suckers list being worked by a pyramid of scammers: auction houses, super-dealers, agents, professional intermediaries, "experts" with no credentials etc etc...The bait is always the same: high society connections. Usually you will find that the scammers are charming, well connected persons who exist in a kind of demi-monde - friends in high and low places.
The author of the article is somehow either confused or offended by this.
Is this a political statement? It just appears childish to me and makes the article look less professional.
I use "they" and "them" as gender-neutral singular pronouns. There is disagreement on this choice of style. Alternating between gendered pronouns seems to be the preferred alternative to the last decade's (s)he he/she garbage.
It's not about the gender itself, but whether a gender pronoun has been chosen conciously, which likely is the case here.
> She may have owned the painting, but reselling it at a profit without the gallery’s permission would blackball her from the art industry.
And in any case, most of the "anonymous protagonists" in articles are men so why not change it from time to time?
And now I've noticed the author uses "he or she" at some point, so I guess the neutral "they" is indeed disliked by some writers.
What you want to be doing at that point in time is move up the value chain so you can capture a healthy percentage of the entire market. Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark, of course while you take your cut. You see it in every creative arena. Musicians open record labels, actors open acting schools and talent agencies. Career trajectories differ, but the principle remains the same. You move up the value chain.
Once you've mastered selling shovels to the prospectors, then you have to learn how to control value itself. There is no intrinsic value to products of human creation, so that value has to get created somehow. The making of the value sausage is often really, really dirty. But as long as humans want it, then there needs to be a price attached. And that price has to be arrived at somehow.
This is not generally the case in art. While there exist informal "artist run spaces" set up by struggling young artists, it is unknown for an artist to become a prestigious commercial gallerist. It doesn't happen. Setting up a gallery primarily requires capital, and only secondarily involves artistic judgement.
Damien Hirst is the only partial exception I can think of, and he was also involved in coordinating group shows in temporary industrial spaces early in his career, so he has always had an interest in staging exhibitions. His London gallery is definitely not about making sales or supporting emerging artists, though. It's a status symbol.
There are a few ways of looking at the art world that explain why artists don't become gallerists. One thing is that gallerists/curators are "cultural intermediaries" rather than creators. It's a different talent. Artists are sometimes asked to curate but they don't get involved in setting up galleries or publishers. It would be like an actor setting up a chain of cinemas.
I guess the phenomenon you perhaps have in mind of movie stars becoming producers differs because producing is still a creative activity.
There's a book called "Art World Prestige" that does a sociological analysis of what goes on -- all the things that are specific to the art world.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Prices-Contemporary-Princeton...
It becomes highly popular and the rulers of the underground art world (I think it included a still living Michelangelo or DiVinci) kidnap him and tell him to cut it out.
I'm also not outraged about few artists making a living from all this money flying around. Artists aren't entitled to rich people's money, it's a side effect of the game.
The only thing I'm outraged about is when the elite starts foisting ugly art on the poor, by putting it in public squares and government museums and textbooks. No matter how advanced your taste is, it's a brute fact that the poor don't enjoy ugly art. So these actions amount to taxing the poor in favor of the elite, which is immoral.
What if they're throwing money at each other so that down the line they have the plausible deniability when they, um, "donate" $10m pieces because they need a tax write-off?
What if its manipulated to inflate costs for a very hilarious game of tax evasion? Is that worth any outrage?
If you buy something for $10m you're out $10m. Yes, when you donate it you can write off those $10m, or present value at the day of the donation.
But you're only saving the taxes on those $10m of income, so you're still down $5m (assuming a 50% tax rate). And you could just as easily donate those $10m directly, and get the same tax write-off.
Yep. Art was always a plaything for the rich. The Romanovs bought thousands and thousands of paintings to show how cultured they were. Every succesful Dutch merchant had to have a portrait done by Hals or Rembrandt. Italian bankers spent their entire fortunes on statues. Chinese emperors had enough porcelain made to host Beijing for a tea party.
It seems more like an "acquired taste" thing that cultured individuals just must enjoy. Like atonal music or rhymeless poetry.
I personally know quite a few people who have little income, but enjoy life by engaging with the kind of art you seem to dislike. Some have consciously made the decision to forgo a career, earning just enough for their minimalistic lifestyle, and spending lots of time on experiences. Others are poor against their will, yet still interested in art.
So, no: it's not a "brute fact". Art isn't even measured on a scale of beauty vs. ugliness–that's "design" maybe. Good art almost always upsets some people.
The art you may think of as universally appreciated was almost certainly deeply divisive when it was created. Those dutch still-lives, for example, are full of sexual innuendo, including prostitution, incest, or homosexuality. Picasso was the target of Nazi sabotage because they considered abstract art elitist. Andy Warhol was shot and almost died because his art had become some woman's paranoid obsession etc.
In that sphere, i. e. politics (broadly), there are no crazy new inventions that make everyone happy. Science can find a cure for AIDS and nobody will complain. But politics is to some degree a zero-sum game, where a finite amount of "power" can only redistributed.
Almost any change will therefore have opponents: the sexual revolution frustrated catholics, #metoo unearthed buried guilt etc.
"Ugliness" really doesn't play into it. Every city has places far uglier than any piece of publicly displayed art I can think of. More often, it's the actual idea that freaks people out: The holy Mother Maria spanking the infant Jesus[0] is not too bad on the eye, but it's a really strange idea[0] (From the 1920, by the way–shock value isn't a new idea).
The Nazis hated Picasso not (just) for his Guernica, but because they abhorred uncertainty, subjectivity, and doubt. That's why they rejected his (and most other) abstract art. It's also why they really didn't like relativity and quantum physics: it's possible that they missed their chance to get the atom bomb first because they had aesthetic objections to this "strange new relativism".
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2e/8b/96/2e8b9610aca3535a8d6b...
The artists that speak to me most (like Pushkin, Orwell, Hunter Thompson, Andrew Hussie, davesecretary...) are keen observers of their time and have strong opinions, but they play fair in a sense. They make their points of view aesthetically compelling and stop there. What they can't say with beauty, they don't say at all. Anything more forceful is closer to a Fox News editorial than to art.
> Orwell, Hunter Thompson
Orwell looks ugly to someone. Hunter Thompson looks ugly to someone
Remember Room 101 in 1984? Have you read "Hells Angels"? These aren't uncontroversial works of "beauty".
You are mistaking your personal aesthetic judgement for objective standards.
My original comment said public art that looks ugly to many people is harming them, so elites should stop pushing it.
Then Matt said art shouldn't be concerned with beauty. I disagreed, and argued that artists should try to express their ideas with beauty. That standard (whether the artist tried to achieve subjective beauty) is actually objective. For example, we know that Hunter Thompson tried to create something beautiful according to him. After all, many other people found his work beautiful, and that can't happen by accident. Another example of such attitude in modern art is Rothko. I'm not a fan of his paintings, but he clearly went to extreme lengths in pursuit of beauty, and I can easily imagine how someone could fall in love with them.
Compare that to many artists today who don't try to express their ideas with beauty. They explicitly say as much. Read Matt's comments: beauty is merely "design", winning power games is what matters... That trend is causing the current wave of public art that looks ugly to almost everyone.
And I'm not talking about extreme serialism, avant-garde noise sculptures or anything too tricky. I'm talking about stuff I'd be happy to defend on it's intrinsic merits and stuff that genuinely gives me the same emotional response as a lot of the more mainstream music I like.
So - moving back to art - I don't know what your tastes are. Maybe you only like pretty paintings of flowers. But assuming you are moderately eclectic in your tastes I would almost guarantee that a lot of the art you regard as non-ugly was regarded as heretical when it was first produced.
Don't forget that romanticism in music and the visual arts was once regarded as a provocative and dangerously subversive trend.
(Back to music because I know more about it than painting) Handel would have Beethoven incomprehensible. In fact the Große Fuge was regarded as incomprehensible for quite some time after Beethoven's death.
There truly is no such thing as "ugliness" in any reasonably objective sense. Context, culture and time change everything.
EDIT - I've got no particular love of modern high-end art but that's largely because it seems like an elitist, vacuous, cultural backwater than because of anything to do with the supposed "ugliness" of modern art.
While museums may get a discount for being important "taste-makers", I can't believe that that makes up for the crazy overvaluation.
This alone should make the case for better regulation as difficult as it must be across international borders.
So while it is nice for the public to be able to see a certain original, I can think of millions of better ways to spend that money and then just see a replica.
But I am torn, because the more privately funded museums seem to be more prone to skewing history. I could be wrong.
Same goes for things like some watch brands and a few other things.
BTW, for those implying artists benefit the most: galleries often make the bigger share of any sale they're involved in, with commissions ranging anyhere from 50-70% or more. Plus, auction house premiums are often at least 20%, leaving less of profit for seller (after subtracting original purchase price).
Art sales are taxable.
It's a vehicle for tax write offs and laundering.
When $X is $REAL_LIVE_MONEYDOLLARS, yes.
When $X is $ARTWORK_THAT_I_CLAIM_IS_WORTH_10M, which I bought for not 10M but 1M, but got "appraised" at 10M, what did I just do? Pay $1M for $10M of tax writeoffs.
Even better, the charity is run by some politician's friends or relatives, and you pay $X indeed, but you're basically buying several favors (plus special cuts and treatment that's worth more than 10 * X).
“You have to know what you’re looking for” is both correct and misleading. The thing you’re looking is predominantly a record of aristocratic relations. This was not always the case, but it is very much is now.
The way to view it is as a bubble. It’s a bubble based on the notion that common people cannot be trusted to evaluate art. This claim does hold water, but it was historically based on cultural intelligence which is no longer synonymous with capital wealth.
The average art history knowledge an art investor has is fairly superficial, which is probably best, because the market could care less about theory and critique.
Art can still be valuable without such gatekeeping and often fraud-inducing secrecy. Art is intrinsically valuable in the eye of the beholder (based on whatever reasons attracts them to it).
One shouldn't have to know what one is looking for beforehand, as long as one recognizes it on sight and decides to acquire it. The serendipitous journey to discovering your taste or buying on impulse shouldn't be marred by anxiety over accessing the right gatekeeper. And contrary to popular opinion, art need not be expensive to be good or valuable.
if you donate a piece of art to a museum, in the US you can deduct its "fair market value" from your taxes. so if there's a way to drive "fair market value" up higher than what was paid, say if a few comparable artworks sell for an inflated price, everyone can donate to museums and effectively realize some profits without crashing the market by actually selling their art.
This is just plain wrong. Not only does the author not understand art at all, but he also doesn't understand basic collecting.
Following that judgment, people collecting post stamps are just morons, cause a stamp that's been used can't be used again and so has 0 value - except perhaps its aesthetic one, which is not huge...
"You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be remotely successful? Yet these paintings were classified as desirable by the art market."
aesthetic value != "a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall"
and further, a corpse can't be enjoyable to look at?? (Picasso's Guernica, Caravaggio's Death of a Virgin...)
That'd be like saying the movie market is clearly manipulated because Blair Witch Project is the most successful indie of all time.