Where art and money meet
Jul. 12th, 2008 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy latest columns touch on the subject of the relationship of art to money. Satirizing Luxury introduces New York Times readers to Chim↑Pom's "reverse auctions" and Michael Portnoy's "abstract gambling", both satires on financial procedures. Meanwhile, Genuinely Rude in Frieze considers whether rudeness in art journalism is healthy, and generally answers the question by saying that "the big yes" means little unless it's accompanied by "the big no", especially when advertising and PR is generally so unbelievably positive.
There's a passing reference in the Frieze piece to Don Thompson's assertion, in his book "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", that broadsheet reviews have zero effect on the prices of contemporary art. Thompson's book presents a freakonomics-style list of strange-but-true facts about the financial structure of the art world. I quote a few of them from New Yorker András Szántó's summary in the Artworld Salon blog:
• Eight of ten works purchased directly from an artist and half the works purchased at auction will never again resell at their purchase price.
• For a branded dealer in a strong market, there is little financial risk in opening additional galleries. When paintings sell for $50,000-100,000, three sold-out shows pay for leasing and renovating the new gallery.
• Conventional wisdom in the art world is that four out of five new contemporary art galleries will fail within five years. Ten percent of galleries established for more than five years also close each year.
• Only one artist in 200 – and that is 200 established artists – will reach a point where her work is ever offered at Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions.
• The past twenty-five years have seen a hundred new museums around the world, each intent on acquiring, on average, 2,000 works of art.
• The world of contemporary art is not that big. There are about 10,000 museums, art institutions and public collections worldwide, 1,500 auction houses and about 250 annual art fairs and shows. There are 17,000 commercial galleries worldwide, 70 percent of which are in North America and Western Europe. Average turnover per gallery is about $650,000, implying gross sales for the primary market and part of the secondary market of about $11 billion – of which $7 billion could be considered contemporary art.
• There are approximately 40,000 artists resident in London, and about the same number in New York. Of the total 80,000, seventy-five are superstar artists with a seven-figure income.
• In 2006, 810 works of art – all art, not just contemporary art – were auctioned for more than $1 million; of these 801 were sold at one or other of the two main auction houses.
• The $135 million paid by Ron Lauder for Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I” equals the price of a fully equipped Boeing 787 Dreamliner, an aircraft capable of holding 300 passengers.
• The number of wealthy collectors is probably twenty times larger today than it was before the 1990 crash.
• Fewer than half of the modern and contemporary artists listed in a Christie’s or a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction catalogue twenty-five years ago are still offered at any major auction.
Personally, I find artists playing with the rites of money (auctions and gambling, for instance) a lot more interesting than money facts about the art world. I wonder if disgraced Société Générale trader and "digital surrealist" Jérôme Kerviel -- who generated €1.4 billion in SocGen profits in 2007, then lost them €4.9 billion in three days in January -- has become an artist yet?
There's a passing reference in the Frieze piece to Don Thompson's assertion, in his book "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", that broadsheet reviews have zero effect on the prices of contemporary art. Thompson's book presents a freakonomics-style list of strange-but-true facts about the financial structure of the art world. I quote a few of them from New Yorker András Szántó's summary in the Artworld Salon blog:
• Eight of ten works purchased directly from an artist and half the works purchased at auction will never again resell at their purchase price.
• For a branded dealer in a strong market, there is little financial risk in opening additional galleries. When paintings sell for $50,000-100,000, three sold-out shows pay for leasing and renovating the new gallery.
• Conventional wisdom in the art world is that four out of five new contemporary art galleries will fail within five years. Ten percent of galleries established for more than five years also close each year.
• Only one artist in 200 – and that is 200 established artists – will reach a point where her work is ever offered at Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions.
• The past twenty-five years have seen a hundred new museums around the world, each intent on acquiring, on average, 2,000 works of art.
• The world of contemporary art is not that big. There are about 10,000 museums, art institutions and public collections worldwide, 1,500 auction houses and about 250 annual art fairs and shows. There are 17,000 commercial galleries worldwide, 70 percent of which are in North America and Western Europe. Average turnover per gallery is about $650,000, implying gross sales for the primary market and part of the secondary market of about $11 billion – of which $7 billion could be considered contemporary art.
• There are approximately 40,000 artists resident in London, and about the same number in New York. Of the total 80,000, seventy-five are superstar artists with a seven-figure income.
• In 2006, 810 works of art – all art, not just contemporary art – were auctioned for more than $1 million; of these 801 were sold at one or other of the two main auction houses.
• The $135 million paid by Ron Lauder for Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I” equals the price of a fully equipped Boeing 787 Dreamliner, an aircraft capable of holding 300 passengers.
• The number of wealthy collectors is probably twenty times larger today than it was before the 1990 crash.
• Fewer than half of the modern and contemporary artists listed in a Christie’s or a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction catalogue twenty-five years ago are still offered at any major auction.
Personally, I find artists playing with the rites of money (auctions and gambling, for instance) a lot more interesting than money facts about the art world. I wonder if disgraced Société Générale trader and "digital surrealist" Jérôme Kerviel -- who generated €1.4 billion in SocGen profits in 2007, then lost them €4.9 billion in three days in January -- has become an artist yet?
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:08 am (UTC)A good quote on the radio yesterday. "Capitalism is a series of fictions believing other fictions." As soon as the belief is broken, the whole house of cards tumbles. Credit crunches are a good time to disprove people who say there is no room for psychology in economics or social studies!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:39 am (UTC)Was that on a BBC network somewhere? I'd like to "listen again".
Credit crunches are a good time to disprove people who say there is no room for psychology in economics or social studies!
I'd have thought those people have been struggling for quite some time against pretty widely-accepted concepts like "consumer confidence". But maybe the idea was that only consumers are "irrational" and the "supply side" is rational? That notion is certainly crumbling.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 02:01 pm (UTC)But I discovered Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, talking advanced accounting on 'Global Business', on the World Service. International accounting standards aren't supporting globalised markets. Cross-border auditing ends up as 'an art and not a science'. Solvency is so subjective as to be ‘whistling in the dark’. The Credit Crunch as a kind of mass Jackson Pollock of accounting.
Bill Drummond Said
Date: 2008-07-12 11:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:37 am (UTC)Gosh, I've hit on an analogy that makes sense - selling your art is like selling your children.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:48 am (UTC)It surely depends on how these worlds meet, though? The two examples I cite in the NYT are artists satirizing money rites -- performance artists who (like me, alas) ultimately have little to sell.
NADiff's Kimiaki Ashino told Japan Times (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20080710a1.html): "I don't think any of [Chim↑Pom] actually make a living from their art. So it's like, 'You're starting a new gallery with a bunch of amateurs?' Yes! I'm very pleased with that."
And I just got a mail from Michael Portnoy this morning -- turns out he's living in Kreuzberg, which suggests to me that he, too, isn't making money from his "meetings with the rituals of money".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:51 am (UTC)Yes, it does, and I confess I was not even thinking about your examples when I made my statement, my brain skipping (it is quite late after all) to my pet hate - non-artists making money out of artists.
Just a brain dump, really.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:04 pm (UTC)Slightly tangentially, the video makes me think about those who fervently safeguard artefacts from the past - which in the climate of shit-creation we all currently live in makes some sense. But wouldn't it be nice if we could smash nice old things and make new, better things to replace them? It would be quite fun! It would certainly solve the problem of constant reinvention of the wheel.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 11:51 am (UTC)"negative criticism has to come from an authoritative figure, a trusted gatekeeper, but the hierarchies once imposed by Greenbergian colossuses have long since disappeared."
Explain why people need to be told what to look out for, and explain what qualifies someone's opinions over everyone elses.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:07 pm (UTC)To clarify, the two worlds I'm describing are:
1. Modernist, bottlenecking, broadcasting, gatekeeper-controlled world in which there are "intellectuals" and "the masses", there's high and low, there's Scrutiny and T.S. Eliot, there's authority and charisma, Clement Greenberg deciding what will and won't fly. I'd say this model includes Peel, who confessed quite readily to being Reithian in his mission to educate and filter and improve, although he was quick to point out that Reith wouldn't have seen him as any sort of heir.
2. Postmodernist, diverse, narrowcasting, Web 2.0 world in which everybody speaks to everybody, there's no more high and low, and there are no more big name critics or big ideologies or dominant narratives. This is obviously "great" in many ways, but it means that nobody ever says anything is bad in any even semi-objective sense, they just say it's "not for me", adding "but if you know me, you knew that anyway". This is a clearly a totally wishy-washy world, and quickly becomes a critical wash-out.
And you know what? Somebody does know more about art than you do, and than I do, and their opinion is, as a result, worth more than yours is. We're now beginning to see "authority tools" emerging, even on the super-democratic internet. Some people's comments are junk and spam, others are valuable and authoritative, and it's groups of people using rating buttons who decide which is which. The idea of hierarchy returns, and with it the idea of useful negative criticism.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:42 pm (UTC)But if you know me, you already know I felt like that!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:48 pm (UTC)The bee keeper, who knows thousands of species of flower and who could tell you what flower dominates the taste of a particular honey is undoubtedly going to give excellent commentary on honey. Ultimately however, my tongue will decide which honey I favor in regards to taste.
Whilst it's a joy to hear someone speak extensively of a subject, it's knowledge born of academic pursuit. Taste and preference comes from a different place, an illogical place.
If you were to slightly adjust your viewpoint I could agree with you, for example:
"We need more art critics who are knowledgeable of the subjects they critique. I feel that in this age, because post-modernism has qualified all opinion as equal, we're missing out on the academic commentary. Whilst opinion is just subjective preference, I feel objective knowledge of a subject frames that opinion and make it much more interesting"
This I could agree with you on. One person's opinions being more qualified than others however I can't.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 01:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 01:40 pm (UTC)Only qualified pilots are legally allowed to fly planes because an unqualified pilot is more likely to cause an accident. That accident would result in injury or death. Most humans have an aversion to injury and death, so I've heard.
Only nuclear experts and qualified engineers are allowed to build nuclear power stations because amateurs are more likely to cause a disaster. Again, most humans aren't keen on disasters.
The same for unqualified nurses and pain.
The same consensus doesn't exist when it comes to most forms of art because most forms of art don't cause injury or death or disaster.
If liking or disliking the wrong art caused injury or death to people, then it would be different. And even then, A qualified art critic wouldnt be telling you what to like, he'd be telling you how to avoid pain and injury.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 03:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 03:55 pm (UTC)I don't think I do. Please explain.
I think we're digressing from the original point here, which was whilst general knowledge adds to the depth of someones understanding of a subject, you can't escape from the fact that matters of taste are subjective.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 05:47 pm (UTC)I disagree. I think there are people within the art world who are attracted to hype, and people who want to make money from the hype. Undoubtedly these hyped pieces and artists attract the most amount of interest, but I hardly think that means people think that stuff is of the highest creative caliber objectively.
I've personally never met anyone so crude that they think the price of a piece of art reflects its creative worth. Im sure there are people like that out there but theyre the minority.
but back to the point, what does this issue of money have to do with critics needing to be more Greenbergian?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 09:05 pm (UTC)The problem with "objective creative value" is it creates elitism and stifles creativity.
My knowledge of art history is embarassingly poor, but I remember having to write a basic paper back when I was an art student describing the progress western art had made.
Academic art dominates most of Europe's modern history. It endured for hundreds of years because society at that time was so rigid and strict about what could justifiably call itself "art". Telling the difference between the different academic styles is difficult even though something from the renaissance period might be hundreds of years older than something baroque or neoclassical.
Then during the 20th century we had this huge explosion of progress -- art nouveau, dada, futurist, art deco, bauhaus, etc.
I remember my tutor at the time (he was my favourite of my tutors) asking us to concentrate on academic art, art nouveau, art deco and bauhaus in the assignment.
for this reason, he called the assignment "The 4 seasons".
If post-modernism promises to be the ceaseless winter of art, maybe the only way spring can ever return is to encourage the rigidity of the classical academic approach to art... and we're back full circle.
Personally, I've never seen post-modernism as winter, more a case of all seasons all at once.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-13 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-14 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 12:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 01:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 03:31 pm (UTC)And this is where the "experts" have to step in and tell the people managing money who's worth investing in and who isn't. This is where an apparently flat and diverse scene is shown to be very narrow, and where bottlenecks and authoritative experts still exist, and still count. But do they only count money, or do they establish artistic reputations and art history too?
Have the greenbacks, in other words, replaced the Greenbergs, or are greenbacks and Greenbergs just two sides of the same coin, as they've always been?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 01:23 pm (UTC)I sell little paintings on paper for about $5, partly to get them out of my studio. As much as I'd love to survive from painting, it seems to traditionally have too many lies; to one's self, from managers and gallery owners, etc etc...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-12 05:13 pm (UTC)As close as I can do, I'm afraid: 16
Date: 2008-07-12 07:25 pm (UTC)Thomas Disch
Date: 2008-07-12 05:17 pm (UTC)http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/hypatia-and-the-burning-library-pt-ii/
perception
Date: 2008-07-12 07:02 pm (UTC)UNRELATED TO THIS ENTRY, BUT...
Date: 2008-07-12 07:22 pm (UTC)love,
John Flesh
www.fashionflesh.com
Re: UNRELATED TO THIS ENTRY, BUT...
Date: 2008-07-12 10:48 pm (UTC)Re: UNRELATED TO THIS ENTRY, BUT...
Date: 2008-07-12 11:39 pm (UTC)much love to you,
John Flesh
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-13 12:38 am (UTC)