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The Storm Hits the Art Market

news.artnet.com

121–130 of 221 posts

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#121
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collectors are different from speculators or investors. Collectors want something for personal reasons, whatever they are. Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term. I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out…

Here's a rembrandt for sale: https://www.masterworksfineart.com/artists/rembrandt/etching... No idea the price, but I would much prefer this to a Charizard pokemon card!

When buying etchings, beware of fakes. Since Rembrandt is very popular, people have found ways to make additional prints, by using the same copper plates in or after his lifetime.

The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.

One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.

Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#122

How much is crypto currency to blame? Art has traditionally been a means to launder cash and evade taxes. The scarcity is what allows for this. Crypto is manufactured scarcity. Why go through the bother of buying and storing art when you can just buy crypto?

This, there are now other options for moving large amounts of cash around.

Art used to be a good way to get around currency controls - David Walsh who built the MONA art museum I believe once said he first bought art and artifacts as a way to get cash winnings out of some countries.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#124
post #97

I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP. The bursting of the art market bubble in mid 2022 coincides exactly with when interest rates started rising following the 'transitory' inflation caused by pandemic relief measures. This was also the same time that we started seeing hiring freezes in tech, the bursting of the luxury watch bubble, etc. It's all tied together, and has the same root cause: It s…

2022 is also when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza started in earnest When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections. 2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to b…

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Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#125
post #5

> The question is how to “get people to understand that art isn’t an asset class,” Schwartzmann added. “That’s not how you should be collecting,” > Valentine said ... "Asking $20,000 for a work in an artist’s first show is unsustainable" none of the separate participants in this article are willing to acknowledge that these are related problems. there is no price discovery in the art world, and it was only just begin…

price discovery happens at auction. otherwise yes, it’s the gallery’s job to preserve a level of value for the artist, and they work hard to maintain the house cards.

A huge number of things receive either no bid or don't meet the reserve bid

And yet the price of the piece is still set above the reserve bid for all intents and purposes, and if the piece is part of a collection that one future trade is setting the price of the whole collection - just like with any low float asset like illiquid shares

but I find the artists, dealers, and galleries to be doing the most to prevent price discovery. Doing the most to not be compared to other kinds of markets.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#126

when covid happened gold prices, crypto and art prices went through the roof; now that the covid situation appears under control and markets have returned back to normal, everything is predictable again - it makes sense that art markets are taking a steep decline back to normal levels. Being able to hide assets during a time of //war/plague/market crash/comet strike etc// is a skill which will make a man great wealth…

> markets have returned back to normal From my readings and general pulse checks, it’s quite the opposite. Old risk calculations have been thrown out, and there is no new normal. Everyone operates under the assumption that market is god, and it will be bailed out in case if things go sideways, so exposure to equity is high.

Imagine if the USG bailed out everything except AI.

https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-...

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The public is not conscious of how big of a deal the war in Ukraine is. My sincerest desire is that there’s a peaceful resolution to this conflict before they’re forced to realize it.

It's not a "conflict" and there will not be a peaceful resolution of it.

Of course it's a conflict. Every war is a conflict.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#128
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP. There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.

I think that art-to-NFT flow is not really about storing value long-term, but about money laundering. To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.

A popular hot take, but if that were the case, the art market should have collapsed when NFTs were booming, and recovered after they disappeared. Unless you can give a credible alternative that has eclipsed both.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#129
One need to look at it from view point of the buyers. Who are these buyers? Someone who has lots of floating money, not concerned about future of his people or country or economy, having completely predictable life routine and not too busy at work. And most importantly someone who is nostalgic about old times and old things and who can sense and admire the human effort that goes into art.

That species of humans is getting extinct or do not have control of their investment decisions anymore. Someone who was born in the 70's and later is likely to be less interested in collectible than someone who was born in the 50's.

Another big problem is, the buyer now has hard time in sensing the raw human talent that went into the art vs the machine output. If it is a sculpture, we can't know whether it is 3d-printed. In old-times this trust issue wasn't there. It was raw human skill at display.

I keep telling this story from pancha-tantra the folk-lore tales from India. Friends walking in a forest, come across a dead tiger. Having great skills in different branches of science, they decided to test their skills to bring the tiger back to life. Sure, it worked, but before they could celebrate, they were attacked by the tiger.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even make sense there. Since you can digitally sign things without blockchains or NFTs.

The blockchain acts like timestamp proving the digital data existed prior to when the block with the hash was mined.

Sure, it does do that. But I can't think of many scenarios where proving something was signed at least at a certain date is particularly useful. Usually when you are signing something you have two parties involved so you can just write the date on the document and if you lie the other party will call it out.

NFTs seem like a solution to a non existent problem. Or a problem you have to search really really hard to find.

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