The Changing Ways Art is Bought and Sold
When wealth and the economy was up, in 2019, art sales were down by 20%. How can this happen, you might ask? Isn't it that when people have money, they buy art? Yes, they do. If they love it. But is what's currently exhibited in the galleries and on art fairs actually able to elicit emotions? Where is the crisis, in the marketing or in the product, and maybe it has become too much of a product for people to love it?
Art has become an investment vehicle. Gigantic art fairs have streamlined the sales process. It's well marketed to reflect current changes to the society in performance type reaction, always ready to excite and challenge.
But is it beautiful? I think it doesn't want to be. Is it captivating in the strong personal statement of the artist? Does it risk something? Does it open up a new world of experience an spawn thought and inspiration?
The current art market and its product does not have this intention. There is a standard of cool disengagement, stemming from the original "l'art pour l'art" movement, which was all personal and did not want to be beautiful, tell a story, create an experience, or picture a world.
That's alright, and it can be amusing to walk through such exhibitions and see artists defy expectations of art. But over the half century and longer that this has been around the attitude has become a bit stale, like a model posing for an artist gets the palsy from the long posing.
At the same time, this emotional and intellectual disengagement has taken the heart and soul out of art, and it has been traded and sold like stocks and bonds. Maybe art needs all of those cynically shunned characteristics like individuality, sensuality, and, above all, personal expression in a highly emotional and individual world.
Originality is another much shunned quality of art. In the above Selbstportr?t, by Albrecht Dürer you see wonderful light and an painterly attitude and craft that is impossible to imitate in original work (of course a master painting can be copied, but no new work of any standing can be created by copying the master's style)
In an article in the Wall Street Journal about the art sales site "Artsy" its owner, Mike Steib, localizes the problem with the opaqueness of the art market and the difficulty to find out how much a work of art is worth.
This is taking the symptoms for the cause. What the art market really needs is art in a classic sense. It has to be beautiful, inspiring, engaging, it has to show a quality that you actually want to see.
A good example of why the art market is what it is is one of its favorite kids: Jeff Koons, who shot porn movies with sex performer Cicciolina in the eighties to get attention, runs a kitsch factory that sells tourist souvenir quality objects whose key quality is that it is much larger than the original.
Why should an investor think that the "Balloon Dog" would hold its excited value over time and give a fair return?
It's almost impossible to paint a new painting like Caravaggio and not fall flat on your nose, but it is easy to copy Jeff Koons. Art has not just an emotional and intellectual dimension. It's value is also contained in the fact how hard or easy it is to copy. And would an easy to copy Balloon Dog ever be more than a cynical statement of what a sculpture is?
There have been crashes of the stock market when the stock prices were inflated. There has not been a true crash of the art market as it is now, but it is to be expected. A Caspar David Friedrich will never lose its value, but people might think twice to buy some obscure "Avantgarde" art that has been stuck so long in its cynical and nay-saying attitude that it's now trailing behind the times by 50 years.
The crisis of the art market is also self-inflicted by its demonstrated elitism that cannot be pinned down to what this feeling of being an elite is actually based on. And isn't there an attitude of arrogance in all art venues that can only be matched by a booker in a model agency? Art fairs and galleries will have to come to term that they are sales people and their job is customer service. And which arrogant sales men can expect to make a lot of sales? That it has worked for such a long time, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. And the signs are here that it won't. Time for change. It will do art and artists (but no Koon Men) good.
