- “We are predicting that art will comfortably overtake wine as the best-performing asset class this year,” Andrew Shirley, a partner at Knight Frank and author of the luxury index.
“Prior to the global financial crisis, art was one of the top performing assets in the index, but growth slowed considerably over the past five or so years. However, confidence seems to have returned to the art market in 2017, highlighted spectacularly by the recent record-breaking sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450m (£333m). Contemporary artists like Basquiat are also seeing higher and higher prices paid for their works.”
Shirley said the record sum paid for Salvator Mundi was a spectacular one-off “but there are plenty selling for $50m, $100m, $200m – the confidence is definitely back”.
NO ONE is arguing that art is objectively good because of price. Charles Saatchi has been championing provocative artists for three decades.
Four million dollars, bitch. We've been down this road before.
Woah! Woah! I didn't post the article or the video to start a huge fight.
I posted the article cause I thought it was interesting and I posted the video because, even though I don't know how wide spread it is, it makes some interesting points about the art world and market manipulation and at least on the surface, it makes some compelling arguments. I actually thought about a comment you made one time in reference to art and cars, both referenced in the article, that they're being used as tokens by the wealthy because interest rates are so low.
As for the video and whether people are arguing whether or not art is good cause of price, sometimes Adam Ruins Everything starts with a really lame strawman argument just to get the conversational ball rolling. I'm sorry about that. I didn't write the script. Once again, I just thought it had some interesting points to make.
It's a stupid and offensive video, dude. It takes the economic complexities of a system with no intrinsic value and reduces it to evil and malfeasance. You didn't learn anything from that, you had your insecurities stroked and your smug sense of self-satisfaction reinforced.
I watched 30 seconds of it and it made me mad. then I read your response, watched the whole thing to see what I missed, and got madder. The only argument made in the film is that the art market exists to fuck you, the little guy, over. And that's because you want to be mad about it because someone told you to be mad about it, just like the only modern work of art you could think of was Piss Christ.
A similar summary of Shawshank Redemption would explain that Andy Dufresne let himself be taken to jail because he liked digging tunnels.
I don't feel like watching the video. But I'm an artist, I know a lot about contemporary art. I can't explain the art market. It is kind of a racket. At least when it comes to contemporary art. Buying a piece by an artist with like 50-100 years of lasting importance is totally a good investment. If you do research. Salvador Dali kinda turned his prints into a cash machine. You're probably going to buy it for its value and appreciation will be small.
And holy Christ I framed so many Thomas Kinkade turds that people thought were investments. It was both funny and sad. I mention him because Dali was not dissimilar in his approach. Not because the value of a Thomas Kinkade prints isn't anything but a joke to a person with half a brain. The cynicism of those two is awful. Except at least its laughably ironic how many proud Christians Kinkade fleeced
I'm not willing to believe the patronage model of contemporary art is any different than it was under the Medicis. Rich taste-makers like your stuff, you will do well as they prove they have more taste than each other. Rich taste-makers don't like your stuff, you will starve. The safety of buying a pedigreed piece is that you attach to the secondary market - you endorse the judgements of the taste-makers only when they're safe and settled.
Not a bad point but art at that time was not the pointy headed world it is now. Artists were fine craftsman until the 19th century more or less. There was more objectivity to what was wanted. Not that it was purely objective. But the narrative I learned in art history was that stylistic changes were driven by artists, not the patricians. It could be a combination. The styles kinda go in cycles where each subsequent style is a reaction in some way to the previous one. I don't know if we are sure if it was the tastes of the patronage or the artists and I bet it was more of an evolution than the art history classes explain because it's easier to box in styles and look at the major style making artists as revolutionaries than to teach a slow progression of one style to the next.
Now I think I've meandered off topic...
- Not a bad point but art at that time was not the pointy headed world it is now. Artists were fine craftsman until the 19th century more or less.
Completely irrelevant.
Paudung beauty is traditionally a matter of how elongated their necks are. The Chinese bound feet to make them smaller. European wealth was marked by corpulence and soft hands. Fundamentally, anthropologically, wealth is signaled by abundance; extreme wealth is signaled by waste and one's ability to squander resources.
The basic mechanism underpinning value is scarcity. During the Medicis, a realistic depiction of any scene was the domain of talented craftsmen. therefore, realistic depictions were of value. Now? Find a phone without a camera on it. We're awash in realism so abstraction becomes prominent.
Let's talk about Felix Gonzales-Torres.
I think you will likely agree when I state that his art is not to my taste. I would describe it as "rank bullshit." It is literally a giant pile of candy in the corner of a room (in the Guggenheim because fuck you). There's nothing rare about the candy. If I recall correctly Torrez didn't even pile it himself. It's a waste of candy. It's a waste of space. It's a waste of thought. It's a waste. It's four and a half million dollars. It is not the conspicuous consumption of wealth, it's the conspicuous destruction of wealth.
The Medicis had an eye for nourishing artists that suited their tastes. So does Charles Saatchi. That our tastes are more closely aligned with the Medicis only goes to demonstrate how highly refined Charles Saatchi's tastes truly are. I mean, any schlub can appreciate a Michelangelo. A Gonzales-Torres? That takes a hypersensitized palate.
I really don't think it has anything to do with scarcity. Plenty of artists, even popular modern and contemporary ones, work in a naturalistic style. The circles that certain works are valued in are diverse. But right now it's a subjective free for all where as the old Masters were high skilled craftsmen. Yes scarcity. It takes money to hire a fine craftsman and they can command a high price because of their skills. But like building a piece of fine furniture or building an expensive house. I really can't think of anything equivalent today. To say that the taste makers of today are the same as patrons four hundred years ago ignores a lot of factors. I'm on my phone. I can't hold a thought well enough to explain anything. And it's not as if we're that far apart in opinion.
If Tracy Emin made a million beds, the beds would be worth less. But then, if Tracy Emin made a million beds, Saatchi wouldn't try to sell her bed to his friends.
Hirst's dots go for between $50k and $1.3m. There are a thousand of them. That fuckin' shark, of which there is one, sold for at least $8m. Hirst has figured out the same angle as Kinkade - sell for less, make it up on volume. But he couldn't have done that if it weren't for the fuckin' shark.
Here's an equivalent: watches.
Nobody needs a mechanical object capable of calculating hebrew holidays. But if you're the only one who has one, you must be rich. Richer than they are.
Clearly - there is more technical competence, more effort, more skill that goes into that technically useless object than go into Hirst's dots. But that thing allows Vacheron to sell Patrimonys for $14k.
The signaling among watches is extreme - you probably know Rolex, Seiko and maybe TAG Heuer. The in-group knows the Holy Trinity is three companies you've never heard of and Seiko is something you buy at the mall. Meanwhile they spend their money on things that you can't even figure out what time it is:
You could see that lying on the street and figure it was a cheap piece of shit that came out of a vending machine. Pick it up and you'd start to wonder. I could tell you there are ten of them and they list for a shade over $2m and you would have no idea why.
That's why. Because you can go to a store and "waste" six grand on a Rolex but it would never occur to you to pay apartment-complex money for something that ugly.
The old masters had things you couldn't have. The new masters have things you can't have. Same same. And I reiterate: that you're more likely to want the things the old masters had makes their tastes less refined, not more.
(for the record, I hope my tastes never "refine" that much)