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The Storm Hits the Art Market

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31–40 of 221 posts

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#31
post #7

This is really the art as speculation fad coming home to roost. The people actually interested in art as art are now on things like Instagram buying direct from the artists with very little gatekeeping either by art schools or galleries. It would be tempting to see if there is a correlation in when the “legit” art world price going off a cliff and the NFT bubble, because that suckered in a lot of the idiot end of the…

NFTs were about transparency in provenance, using public, tamper-proof records, that replace jurisdictions/authorities with the type of math that enabled cross-border digital payments. Sure there was a spin-off scam industry but there remains a kernel of legitimacy in the concept.

NFTs? They didn’t really solve a problem other than providing something else to gamble with. Nobody bought a low-res pixelated ape image because it stirred something deep in their soul.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#32
Just go to the smaller/community art shows and you can usually find a couple or five really excellent artists who put their life into their work and will talk to you one on one vs these high priced pompous ego exhibitions like Art Basel.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#33
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.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#35
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…

I have a painting of a commuter train I used to ride to work every day. It's not a conversation starter (or rather, I'm always the one who starts talking about it) but I love it because it reminds me of when I discovered that I didn't need to be a slave to my car and how freeing that was. It cost me $50 and I've taken it with me every time I've moved. I really don't get dropping thousands on a single piece, I've neve…

I didn’t end up buying it - it went for a price I could afford but did not want to pay - but I have seen an original Al Bean painting. Twelve men walked on the moon. One painted it. If it had gone for $10k it would have been mine.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#36
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…

I have a painting of a commuter train I used to ride to work every day. It's not a conversation starter (or rather, I'm always the one who starts talking about it) but I love it because it reminds me of when I discovered that I didn't need to be a slave to my car and how freeing that was. It cost me $50 and I've taken it with me every time I've moved. I really don't get dropping thousands on a single piece, I've neve…

I think it depends on the piece. I have a piece that I love and spent about $5k on. It's relatively large and has a lot of detail. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the equivalent of a month's work full time for the artist so the price seems reasonable to me.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#37
post #7

This is really the art as speculation fad coming home to roost. The people actually interested in art as art are now on things like Instagram buying direct from the artists with very little gatekeeping either by art schools or galleries. It would be tempting to see if there is a correlation in when the “legit” art world price going off a cliff and the NFT bubble, because that suckered in a lot of the idiot end of the…

NFTs were about transparency in provenance, using public, tamper-proof records, that replace jurisdictions/authorities with the type of math that enabled cross-border digital payments. Sure there was a spin-off scam industry but there remains a kernel of legitimacy in the concept.

Non-fungible tokens are not about payment, they are about cryptographic ownership of uniqueness.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#38
I make an unusual kind of art, but I haven't tried selling it, as you need a stable of interested people, and I can only post it in one place at the moment (a Facebook interest group on tiling, Instagram is overrun with AI, you can't start a new profile without lots of existing supporters). I've considered opening a gallery in my local area just to sell my art (5 million people in the metro, and barely a real commercial art gallery). My overhead would be just me and a location. The idea of selling art for tens or hundreds of thousands seems nuts.

I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.

I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!

Mentioned it here before, https://andrewwulf.com if interested.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#40
post #29

> Now that the bubble has burst, the speculators are out of the picture, off flipping meme coins, where no one makes them feel inadequate or insists that they buy three things they don’t want to get the one thing they do. > “The juice has got to be worth the squeeze,” one collector-trader said. “And there’s no juice in the art market. It’s just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Rude, rude, rude.” From what little I know of…

This is very much a nouveau riche culture - infinite entitlement and self-importance that confuses marketing and narcissism for substance.

The same illness infected the art world, and it was no more sustainable there than anywhere else.

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