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The Storm Hits the Art Market

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Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#41

Post by fluoridation »

riazrizvi wrote: post #22
mosura wrote: 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.

Nah, man. I work in the space and I was there. NFTs were the second attempt on an earlier idea that had already been discarded as pointless: supply chain management. The problem with NFTs was the same as with supply chains; there's no link between the blockchain and IRL, so the blockchain doesn't really add anything, just makes things more complicated. NFTs were therefore a tool to part fools from their money right from the start, because they couldn't be anything else.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#42

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cubefox wrote: post #14

> Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in…

It's a stretch. Basically the speculators moved into NFTs, which scratched the gambling itch, and NFTs and other forms of crypto made money laundering much more straightforward.

The art part of the market - in the sense of original creativity that means something to someone - had become a footnote. And large parts of it were more about performance than craft.

So resale values collapsed, and now everyone is walking through the rubble and wondering if there's anything left to rebuild.

AI is both completely irrelevant to this and absolutely central, but for non-obvious reasons.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#43

Post by [deleted] »

mmaunder wrote: post #16
mosura wrote: 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…

I agree - a lot of art is sold via artists having a relationship with a stable of a few hundred people via insta. Completely bypasses the galleries and is far more compelling for the buyer because they can develop an emotional connection with the creator. Galleries can’t do that without having the artist present and even then they’re overwhelmed and buyers can’t make a connection. So this isn’t necessarily an art thi…

[deleted]

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#44

Post by andreareina »

coldcode wrote: post #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 commerc…

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Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#45

Post by zer00eyz »

coldcode wrote: post #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 commerc…

Your site is very much letting the work down.

You dropped me onto a page with no sense of range or scope. Clicking around results in some very "odd" perceptions about what it is your putting out.

Categorize them so they can be filtered (colored, geometric, organic), load randomly by those tags or at least put a breadth of samples out front.

I like your stuff, but you need to have a better introduction and better access for it.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#46

Post by mulmen »

coldcode wrote: post #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 commerc…

Many local businesses in my neighborhood (there are very very few chains) post art for sale from community artists and the chamber of commerce for the neighborhood sponsors art walks. In that situation you don’t even need the overhead of the gallery. Local shops, bars, and restaurants are the gallery.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#48

Post by mlinhares »

jordanb wrote: post #24

The best evidence that art was going to crash is when Masterworks ads were everywhere. You know the bubble is stretched to its limit when they start hawking it to retail. "I've got an exciting bag-holding opportunity that you don't want to miss."

Whenever you see a company trying to hawk ownership in itself to the general public you know it's going down the tubes. Unfortunately a lot of people believe in this and lose real money they couldn't afford to lose to these scams.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#49

Post by slaughtr »

coldcode wrote: post #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 commerc…

I have no idea how it works, but if you sold/licensed/created your art to fabric patterns, theres almost certainly a small market there. Clicking through your site (others are right, you could present your work better), I see plenty of “I’d buy a decently priced cool shirt of that pattern”. Sample size of one and all.

Re: The Storm Hits the Art Market

#50

Post by giveita »

redwood wrote: post #9

The vanity of owning rare things is all too much... NFTs are really the culmination of the phenomenon. I'm all for owning beautiful things and paying if it's something handmade. But once it becomes such an extreme out of wack status symbol kept alive by a global elite it's just feeding the monster. The worst is when it's an expensive status symbol and still mass produced I suppose

There is going to be an element of affordability. I doubt someone worth $1bn would spend it all on art but maybe they would spend $10m or if you prefer the growth of $1bn invested in SPX for a month. So a month's "work". A bit like $10k to many of us (I bet many of us have $10k of furniture)... which seems rediculous to someone earning $50k/y. It's all relative.
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