Channeling the conspiratorially unhinged salesmanship of a Cash 4 Gold pitchman, the New York Times ran a hilariously bad art market trend piece today — a story titled “As Money Props Up Art World, Prospects Are Mixed,” which portends to link macroeconomic trends with demand for art market investment vehicles. In its own imbecility it reveals a different sort of trend: the perpetual shortcomings in art market coverage, an area that often sees a minimum of rigor and a maximum of price-tag sensationalism at major newspapers.
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This week, The Stranger‘s art critic, Jen Graves, wrote a blog post titled, “Should We List Prices With Art Reviews?” When I first saw the headline, I had a knee-jerk reaction to the effect of, “No!!”
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As if we didn’t have enough trouble preserving the middle class, the middle of the art market is the latest topic of debate among members of the art world’s commercial side. Why is the high end of the art market constantly booming while the lower and middle sectors suffer?
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As the New York Times convenes a debate over the possibility of an art market bubble in a letter to the editor, the news arrives that international art sales reached a grand total of $64 billion over the past year, reports Artlyst.
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Puzzled. That’s a good word to describe my state of being for my first Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB). One of the primary things I learned is that art fairs can be fun — when you’re standing on the right side of the velvet rope and you have all the right RSVPs and a prepared partinerary printed out.
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This doesn’t happen very often. It’s highly unusual for someone in an industry to critique its inner workings.
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Wall Street Journal art market reporter Kelly Crow is probably one of the only journalists whom Larry Gagosian will talk money with — or talk to at all, really. The megadealer is known for rarely agreeing to interviews, so it’s always interesting to read what he has to say when he does grant them.
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In an article published on Wednesday in the International Herald Tribune titled “The Impoverished Connoisseurs,” longtime art and auction correspondent Souren Melikian recalls an era that lasted from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when European art buyers “who went in for small Medieval objects, antiquities and the rest did so because they wanted to live with them, not because they looked for tokens of social status or clever investments.”
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Following up on the essay I wrote about the ZERO1 Fellowship sponsored by Google, I wanted to speak with someone with a wider perspective on the shifts that have taken place in the past few decades in the arts, particularly shifts that relate to the interface between art and the marketplace. Martha Buskirk came to mind as an ideal interviewee.
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With a Mark Rothko painting selling for nearly $87 million at Sotheby’s in addition to record prices for artists from Edvard Munch to Roy Lichtenstein, it seems pretty strange to see a variety of art and business writers are predicting the end of the art market boom.
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