Behind the canvas : Perception and the Price of Art
What I Learnt Today #187 I Art & Culture Saturdays
In 2013 Glafira Rosales, a relatively unknown art dealer, pleaded guilty to a $80mn forgery case that saw a $17mm Jackson Pollock loose all value as it was certified as fake. So what makes a painting, accepted as worth $17million loose all its value simply because it was found to have been painted by someone else (forger) in his garage rather than the artist who it was originally attributed to. The painting itself however, did not change. “An artwork’s aesthetics, the feelings it conveys, and anything else that derives from its physical appearance may influence its price, but as Qian’s paintings demonstrate, they cannot explain its extraordinary value.”
When you hear about painters and their works being auctioned for hundreds of millions of dollars you wonder how exactly was this value ascertained? In many ways it is careful curation by galleries and ensuring that all future transactions like reselling etc goes through the gallery so that the price can be kept at a level that the Gallery had set for it. Or higher. Secondary sales are frowned upon as the controlled narrative than looses its way.
“The answer is that the market for fine art is heavily “curated.” It is controlled by galleries and dealers who commit with astonishing discipline to keeping artwork prices predictable and pegged to signals of quality like the prestigiousness of the gallery selling the artist’s work. You could say the market for art is “rigged”; a more charitable explanation is that galleries and dealers act as tastemakers, deciding which art is good and therefore expensive. The end result is to turn artists into brands, which introduces enough certainty for the market to function.”
I stumbled upon this very interesting article in priceonomics.com by Alex Mayyasi, the editor of Gastro Obscura who was a writer and editor at Priceonomics at the time of writing this indepth piece which will certainly give you a peek into the world of Artonomics.
Where I learnt it #187
Why Is Art Expensive? https://priceonomics.com/why-is-art-expensive/
If you want to find my earlier posts and articles in this series check this link. I update this everyday. https://bit.ly/2KmLAc9