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 stopped being cheap to borrow money, and it started being lucrative to lend it out for guaranteed returns (e.g. by buying Treasuries) rather than speculating on artworks, or NFTs, or whatever.
> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
I do wonder if one of those reasons is that the general sentiment of the public is moving beyond contempt and towards sharp objects not dissimilar to how friends across the channel tended to handle things.
I doubt wealthy people are afraid to shop at London galleries or auctions. There are street robberies but they target watches and phones, not so much antiques.
Maybe my comment didn't capture the zeitgeist - it's not that they're afraid of robberies per se, but rather simply living as a wealthy individual in a society with massive inequalities of income has much more social pushback than say, twenty-five years ago.
What do you think the social pushback would look like from the wealthy person's point of view? If you get chauffeured from your London home to your country house and all your social circle are in the same bracket then you won't encounter much of it. And their children might be following activists on social media but they'll still join the family heli-skiing trip to Canada.
Not only China and they didn't stop because of national pride (wouldn't have bought them in the first place). The reason is that they were using them as financial instruments and now they have less confidence on the West. So they are moving to other things.
> The reason is that they were using them as financial instruments and now they have less confidence on the West. So they are moving to other things.
Only partially correct. The reason why so many Chinese invested into the West is because the Chinese Government has strict monetary policies in place.
We have all seen news of people becoming miljonairs, billionaire's and then they leave for another country. The issue is that this was happening a lot in China. Rich folks made their money in China and then took the money outside the country. The issue was that they converted that money into foreign assets, what drain the national currency reserve (mostly dollars).
Like 12+ years ago the government implemented strict rules, disallowing money to be transferred out of the country, if it exceeded a specific amount. Its been a long time and i do not remember the exact limit. But there is used to be a backdoor, that if you knew the right people, and it was a company investment or other investment that build up soft power of China in the West. And voila, money flowed out that way. Of course, not for normal citizens ;)
O, you are investing a million or 5 into some painting. Well, now that money got transferred out of the country but the value (as in the painting) is now in the US, EU, ... Its the same reason why we had a TON of movies being made with Chinese backers. It was all used as a way to launder money out of China.
That means, if the Chinese government confiscated your assets at home, you had value in other countries to be tapped. Its not coincidence that a lot of rich folks their families study in the west and live in the west but the husband/family head works in China. Its a way of protection. And the West where if you leave a country, there is no real check on you leaving, China is different.
A few years ago, with Covid, China was in constant lockdowns, areas sealed off. The big cities like Shanghai, entire area's felt like prisons the moment somebody tested positive. So a lot of people with money tried even harder to get out.
It was around that time, even more stricter laws got introduced regarding "foreign investments". The whole backdoor regarding "foreign investments" has been restricted and is under much more scrutiny if you want to bring money out of China.
Hong Kong used to be a exit door but that has also been under a lot more pressure.
Its not that Chinese have less confidence in the West but that the government has "advised" that investing at home is the "better choice" for you and your family.
That means, if you do not want to be investigated and jailed. A lot of rich celebrities have been publicly investigated and jailed for short times. Charges like tax evasion was a thing. Until they paid a nice big sum to the government (with some money sticking on the edges), and a very, VERY public apology about their bad behavior. What in turn keeps the rest in place. As in, sure, you can play around but do not get too big for your bridges and think about moving money out of the country.
Getting money out of China, unless you have some connections is a hard thing. The level of control is much larger then 2010, and has only gotten worse with time.
You think about setting up a company in the West? You better be sure its registered in China (forgot the branch) or you can enjoy jail time when found out. Its all about tracking where money goes and ensuring control.
Its the same reason you see a lot of Chinese companies that used to be in China, now having head seats in Singapore etc. People using that route to get assets out.
So no, its not just about the West becoming less interesting, and people being more patriotic, its literally about way more financial and people control, what in turn affects that massive money flow from China into outside assets.
Funny thing, you ever wonder why so many, just BAD movies have been coming out the last 15 years. Check the investments and the money trail.
Its because even if the movie loses money, what then gets reported as a lost value in China, part of the money is still transferred out sideways. O, we spend 20 million on X movie (but it looks like a 2 million budget movie). O, ... i wonder what happened to those other million. We earned only 1 million from the movie sales, so we "lost" 19 million. Reality is that a lot of that money simply flowed somewhere else. 101 money laundry ..
I'm not convinced that the first point has necessarily affected the premium art space unless you're referring to the spill in effects. TFA talks about a space in Art Basel costing 100k - the target clientele for all intents and purposes are completely unaffected by the recent economic problems. Some have gotten even richer if anything
> - it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
Sure art sales can be used to launder money, but that can't be the majority of sales. Doesn't laundering rely on being masked by a larger legitimate cash flow?
I think a much more significant portion of the art market is people speculating on prices and people collecting to look cool. Both of which are highly sensitive to changes in mood and sentiment as described in the section of the article talking about Beth Rudin DeWoody .
The US stock market and cryptocurrencies are both going gangbusters. You don't need ZIRP to be awash in cash. Money can print itself when rich people are optimistic.
I don't know what causes bubbles to pop, but I don't think it's directly related to US monetary policy. I suspect that the bubble just moved elsewhere.
While canvas, sculpture, and other media are far removed from jpegs, the scarcity of adjacent digital forms going away may have reduced the interest in the market for "shaped aesthetic things".
The attention, and thus money, has moved elsewhere.
Pretty much every country is in conflict at their border. However, resolutions can happen peacefully. Nations are essentially pillaging structures and thus want to always expand their borders.
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 buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
> 2022 is also when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza started in earnest
This is just wrong for Gaza; either you take the "conflict has been running continuously since 1948" approach, or you date the present intense fighting to October 2023.
> AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry
Not to the "fine art" part of it, no. It's taken out the lower and middle tiers; people doing commissions for a few hundred dollars are squeezed out, and there's much more slop to sell to tourists, but any business which cares about uniqueness and provenance (sometimes more than the content of the art!) is not going to notice.
The only peaceful resolution is Russia accepting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors.
Otherwise there will be no peace, just oppression and torture of the occupied population. And more war down the line, when Russia feels it can take another bite.
It's just lie. If, for example, NATO gives clear guarantees to join in for Ukraine in the case of next attack(if any agreement on ending the war is reached), then there will definitely not be a next attack.
Roman Empire, or Genghis Khan, or Nazi Germany did not have a "conflict" with neighbors, some kind of quarrel that can end in a compromise. They had a desire to conquer, subdue, and consume the neighbors. There could be no resolution beside a complete capitulation and becoming annexed.
Russia is currently acting in this mode. There can be no "resolution", only a devastating military defeat of one of the sides.
Empires have often grown without any desire to grow. Quite often empires have grown by moving against a threat close to its borders or trade routes and ends up in control of new areas, which then become part of its territories, which are then threatened....
Expansion is not uncontroversial either. The Roman Empire had periods of a non-expansionist policy, and the British Empire in the 19th century had a fairly popular Little Englander movement that opposed expansion of the empire.
So, having proved my point, I’ll note that (1) this war could certainly end in compromise, and (2) even a devastating military defeat would be a resolution.
And I’ll appreciate not being called an invasion-sympathizer when I’m only pointing out that using the word “conflict” is not a political statement.
My intention was not to redefine the word, but to merely offer my opinion that this war is very unlikely to end with any kind of resolution, other than a complete defeat of one of the sides. This conflict is not like e.g. Soviet-Finnish war of 1940, when USSR annexed 10% of Finland and hostilities stopped. It's more like the Napoleonic wars on early 19th century, when Napoleon would not stop attacking, no matter how much land he had already conquered, until a comprehensive and total military defeat.
Of course things could become different if the current Russian leader dies, or is deposed.
This, so much this. Even many smart folks don't realize this, or refuse to acknowledge since its pretty bleak viewpoint with no bright future. This war won't end just because its getting annoying, or sad, or shocking whats happening.
Russia switched fully to war economy, on purpose, there is no easy way back even if they wanted. Their goal is to conquer as much Europe as possible, losing few millions of its sub-citizens from rural remote regions is not such a concern that we in the west think about. Nobody there cares. Their enemy is whole western world, doesn't matter how much trump licks putin's a*, not a zilch.
In fact, I strongly believe that almost nobody in the west fully understands how depraved and primitive russian thinking is, think about white heroin addicted trash or common slums folks, and spread it on the level of largest nation in the world and give them huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. On top is good old mafia (and I don't mean Coppola's idealized version, I mean real murder-whole-family-in-acid-vat type), nothing more.
Now what good do you expect from that, now or in 10 years? Whatever you do, you are naive.
> how depraved and primitive russian thinking is, think about white heroin addicted trash or common slums folks, [...] and give them huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
:s/russian/american/
can we not label whole nationalities as depraved, primitive heroin addicted trash!?!
If I was going to buy art as an investment I would only buy the absolute best - old master, Picasso, ancient artifacts with absolutely no question to their authenticity or provenance that would restrict its resale.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
The problem with your strategy is that the items you listed have very little upside; yes, the prices won't collapse, but they also wont go up a ton. Their prices have reached somewhat of an equilibrium.
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
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 of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
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 :)
Collectibles have a lot of friction, and being physical they have a lot of middlemen and questions. If I want to speculate on an investment, even property would be far more liquid, let alone something disambiguated like company stock. I think investing in physical collectibles for a quick flip is pretty dumb. Why not buy domains related to the same subject? Far easier
Ok, then I guess I don't understand your point in your first comment. You seemed to be explaining what approach you would take to invest in collectible in your first comment, by saying you would only buy something that has established value.
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
I'm saying as an investor, collectibles are very difficult and highly speculative, and the friction makes them even less attractive. I disagree that buying old, consistent collectibles cannot themselves be speculative - if you wait for the right moment they can make significant returns. But the downside is significantly reduced if you restrict your investments to something that has been consistently valuable across the longterm.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
When I had that level of friends the ones that collected art very much wanted to be part of a fad with some of their collection. It was the intro to getting to show the rest of their collection off to people. It was the piece that guests would know the artist of, or were able to get excited about when giving the current story.
> 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.
How would one measure "the art market" in a way that can be graphed?
> should have collapsed
Through what mechanism would it "collapse? Laundering tricks don't involve bidding wars or high volumes of items. Consider this scenario:
1. Alice wants to transfer $5m to Bob in exchange for something off the books.
2. Bob goes and buys anything he can find that seems to have a consistent ~50m price point. Since Bob's task doesn't require any specific item, he doesn't get into bidding wars to drive up prices.
3. Bob privately sells it to Alice, who deliberately pays a higher amount of $55m. No auction, no bidding wars.
4. Alice can either resell the item to unrelated people for probably ~$50m, or keep it around for a bit to provide either plausible-deniability or a future tool for an inbound cloaked transaction with someone else.
How would that kind of activity charge up "the art market" in a way that is easy to measure?
> when NFTs were booming
Most of that boom was other speculation. My point is that an NFT by cyber-Rembrandt is a lot more convenient than certificate a real Rembrandt held in a freeport as its ownership shifts.
The trick is getting something where the generally-accepted value is high enough that transactions can plausibly be hidden as noise in the signal.
The art world is just fine. Pretentious art speculation maybe not so much.
In a way, we are actually in a golden age. I lurk on social media accounts of amateur art enthusiasts around the globe with (IMHO) good taste who seek out interesting little known artists and post it on their feeds. I am introduced to so much great art that I probably would have never known about otherwise. If I see something I like, I search for the artist online and see if they have something available in their portfolio for sale that I love.
I’ve bought amazing art from talented artists around the globe that speak no common language with me. We get it done (Google Translate to the rescue). I don’t filter on price but virtually everything I’ve bought is always in a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars range. The fact that you can talk to the artist just adds to the story.
Forget the “tastemakers” in art. I can give my money to excellent artists directly, including many that never attracted the attention of tastemakers or who weren’t deemed worthy by said people. I received a huge piece from Denmark today. The whole experience is lovely and the artists really appreciate that someone loves their work. This is the future.
Roughly a twentieth of all humans who have ever lived were born in just the past 50 years. I agree some of the best painters ever might actually be alive right now.
I've attended local art festivals (i.e. Atlanta Dogwood Festival) where I've bought some incredible prints and paintings in the hundred dollar range which are subjectively more beautiful compared to some of the stuff I've seen in the High Museum of Art in downtown Atlanta. For example:
You can also just commission the art you need, a few hundred dollars is damn good money in much of the world( even in the US, if a small painting takes a few hours to make, 400$ can be a fair price).
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
Until recent times, commissioning was how it worked. This was why we only had paintings of kings and that guy called Jesus until Bruegel came along and painted peasants. Nobody was just painting whatever they wanted to paint, hiring a gallery and selling their 'art'.
The title of 'artist' is also an interesting one. Some titles have to be earned, for example, you can't call yourself a 'genius', an 'intellectual' or a 'hero' for obvious reasons. Yet creatives can call themselves an 'artist' as job description without society deeming them to be an 'artist'. In the olden days, before mass production, artists were just tradesmen doing a good job at whatever their trade was.
Our idea of art is deeply tied into capitalism. Compare the art of indigenous peoples with Western art. Art is all about fame and fortune rather than a love of the subject material and the craft.
One problem with the current status quo is that most artists are not in the commissioning game. Artists want to paint whatever their thing is, not some patron's dog, fancy house, religious deity or elderly relatives. If you do know someone making a living from painting people's dogs, then the question has to be asked, are they a real artist, or just a craftsperson?
Take the case of the architect, where the client is invariably calling the shots. Are they an artist? They don't need to be since they have the title of 'architect', however, few of them are called 'artist'.
Being 'artist' also comes with some understanding that the 'artist' doesn't have to work in the conventional sense, and therefore an 'artist' is high status. It works a bit like 'foot binding' in that regard since some people will want their kids to grow up to be 'artists', as in high status and not working for a wage. Sometimes this is just to validate the parent's life choices and shore up their status.
The real art of the age is all around us and made by commercial artists.
The commercial artist has a client and patron in the company they work for. They make adverts, packaging designs and such like, working within constraints. If working for Ford, the commercial artist isn't going to redesign the blue oval, they have to stick to the style guide, working within the constraints to make something new, in time and on budget.
So yes, commission what you want from an artist that puts the customer first.
Regarding the article, in the UK we had an art movement at the turn of the century with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and their ilk, pushed by Saatchi into art superstardom. However, about a year before 2008, this hustle came crashing down. If we currently have some cooling off in the art market then that is an indicator that the economy as a whole is heading for tough times.
the materials (custom canvas, paints, brushes, multiple layers of varnish, packaging, shipping) are expensive and they have been getting very much more expensive since COVID. so a few hundred $ for a small painting is not a lot.
Damn it sucks that instagram is the defacto second internet. My gf finds so much cool stuff on IG. Local bands post their show dates, a brewery in my neighborhood posts their hours (it’s just a husband and wife, and their hours are whenever-I-feel-like-it). I don’t have instagram, so I’m just totally in the dark on all that stuff.
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
Exactly my feelings. I don't have fb and IG, and I feel left out. Also when I go to India, the local shops, unless they are really big, don't accept credit card or cash. The physical wallet has vanished. But in fairness, it is far easier for them to have online presence via IG or fb and reach their actual customers (not you and me).
Yeah I feel this too. All of these artists have websites with the standard art format, but as RSS is dead outside our tech circle the only way to stay up to date is Instagram which all artists have, even those without a standard website. Cara is mainly illustrators, Artsy is for galleries (not artists).
I had a quick look at these instagram links and except for the last two, they do not feel like 'Art', just like most novels are not considered literature. In the past years, I have visited a lot of art exhibitions (at museums and art galleries) and graduation shows of art schools here in the Netherlands. See: https://iwriteiam.nl/Exhibitions.html Even at those, I feel that a lot is crap, too conceptual. But there always some artists that stick out for some (often unexplained) reason. They have some new idea or make you view the world in a different way. They are not just repeating some gimmick or showing (exceptional) craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is not equal to art.
Sadly I don't think this perspective will ever be accepted on HN.
Commercial galleries and the art school pipeline are awful in so many ways, but one thing that many people fail to understand is that art in its best light is an ongoing conversation.
Yes you can be incredibly skilled and build an aesthetically beautiful hand made work of art without ever being part of the larger art world. And as a viewer, you can appreciate that art and buy it and cherish it. This is good, great in fact.
But to say that is all that art should be is sort of missing the forest for the trees or whatever. We have this thousands of years old conversation going about form, color, concept, story, material, humanity, etc and when its working correctly the art world cultivates and encourages that conversation.
We can absolutely have this conversation without financializing art to the extreme as has been done the past 10 years, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Let me add something to this. If you buy a painting (or some other work of art) because it is captivating you, and you put it into your house, to enjoy, than that is great. I myself have bought some works of art, that are not be considered as 'Art', but that captivated me. For me that is the only reason to buy some work of art, if it captivates me, not if is a good investment.
There are myriad accounts. Who you follow is taste specific, you need to do your own work. Mine are exclusively on Twitter and I mostly found them by randomly clicking through art things on Twitter. My tastes in art cover a very broad spectrum. Gotta both explore and curate the feed.
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
That's actually great! This comment thread is such a breath of fresh air. We moved this year to a new place and was looking at art, and I had the feeling that art also became some sort of mass produced low cost product, and I wanted to look into smaller artists and original pieces. Loved the works of the artist you mentioned as well as some of the other ones mentioned above.
Hi,
Can you plz tell me the places where you lurk around for the beautiful art pieces.
I have a friend who does amazing "slice of Life" photography. I want to showcase it somewhere that can sell their work.
Also please let us see a photo of your art pieces from Denmark.
Thank you
I never understood those ridiculous prices for artworks that look like poop. "Here's a few random splashes of yellow paint on red background, €300 000 please". I used to think that maybe I'm just too stupid to understand the truly fine art, but no, it's all just speculation and dick measuring contest for people with too much money.
I just finished decorating my living room. Majority are prints of pictures that I found on the internet and then pushed through an AI upscaler, which means the costs are equal to the printing service and they look amazing. Two pieces have been commissioned, and total cost of both of them with printing is below a thousand. Just recently I saw a beautiful painting in a gallery and it cost me a thousand. Art doesn't need to be expensive to be beautiful.
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 speculator crowd.
The "art as speculation" fad is just a consequence of "inflation is good" economic theory, the same as "real estate as an investment".
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
I don't think so. Speculative markets would arise even in a 0% inflation economy, for the same reason that casinos would. Speculation isn't about storing value, it's about gambling. You have a stronger point with real estate, but real estate isn't as volatile or speculative, usually.
There would be very little reason to speculate on art. There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value. In a zero inflation environment you'd expect the market to average zero growth. Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
>There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value.
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
It's only really in the latter half of the 20th century that inflation has actually been held to 0-2% by the active manipulation of interest rates to increase unemployment, and yet everyone acts like inflation is the end of the world.
Personally I bid for the gasps, fainting and eventual standing ovation at the end of the auction along with the knowing nod and smile from someone who says indubitably a lot.
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 thing, it’s a gallery thing. Disintermediation strikes again.
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.
I remember IBM making huge claims about using the blockchain for supply chain management. For instance[1]:
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
Theoretically, if there could be a 1:1 relationship between events in the real world and events on the blockchain, the idea makes sense. If you had two pieces of a machine represented by objects on the blockchain, and when you combined them into a new component that automatically, cryptographically, created a new object on the blockchain, you could track provenance precisely just by having the final assembled product.
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
Not to mention companies don't like sharing their supply chain data because they consider it a competitive advantage. Even if they're required to share it by law, many companies are highly motivated to do the tampering you describe.
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.
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.
People pay money to join fan clubs for K-pop. If there were some electricity sheet will record their name forever, I'm sure someone would pay their money.
How much of this is due to anti-money laundering regulations enacted in the early 2020s [0], which much better vet the identities of the buyers/sellers?
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.
I am always find concept of fractional ownership questionable. Unless very well controlled. And extremely so when you are dealing with physical non-fungible assets like art or collectibles. Maybe I am just too risk averse to see the money...
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!
I have heard, and believe: successful galleries are a location thing. People with deep pockets will pick up a piece by anyone in Aspen, Colorado, and probably not look twice if they (somehow) saw a Koons in a Topeka gallery.
Gallery owners are taste makers like stock brokers used to be before people could just point and click directly.
They put you into a good piece of artwork at a good price, build a raport, look after their good clients, perform well over time and take a couple of points on the way in and out
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.
What do you think the market is for this kind of digital art? Do you see this style of work attracting an audience elsewhere? How much is it selling for?
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
I didn't want to criticize, but since you've already opened the door: these are interesting to me as sheer sensory stimulation, but the problem that might dissuade a lot of people is that there's no structure to most of the pieces (save for the ones that are based on distorting an existing image). Without structure there's no narrative, and no reason for someone to become interested in any given piece beyond, as I said, sensory stimulation. On that note, most the color palettes are very tasteful; if coldcode is picking them algorithmically, that's pretty impressive.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
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.
You’re much better off selling shirts. The markup on custom printed fabrics isn’t great, and there are plenty of professional fabric pattern designers out there which companies that commission fabric hire as-needed.
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
Take this as a additional point of reference: I don't have formal education in art and not an artist, but I find your work interesting enough that I would stop at a store to look at and probably buy something (printed and fabric) if I can afford to (especially the cover art on the home page).
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> 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.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> 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!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
As mentioned by others, I think the art world has reached a major schism where there are two types of artists: those who target rich collectors and those who are more grassroots. I've been to a lot of the larger art shows in the US and it's always amazing to me how expensive so many of the pieces are. I couldn't even justify buying a cheaper piece I want on a software engineer's salary. Instead, I've found that local art fairs have been where so much of the growth is at. Things like Cherry Creek Art festival or the myriad of smaller markets around, you can find amazing artists selling interesting and beautiful works. Between markets and social media, there's a path to being a sustainable, working artist. And personally, I think being a collector of smaller artist's prints and works is more fun than the expensive ones!
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
When you're rich enough to live in what's effectively a post-scarcity world, scarcity itself becomes a valuable commodity. After all, we are the product of natural selection, a process shaped by scarcity. It is therefore such a fundamental part of our lives that its absence drives some to artificially recreate it.
I collect rare books (and memorabilia related to them), and it is not about vanity at all. I consider them historical objects (in their niche, of course) in the sense they changed the industry, or affected a portion of society somehow. I consider myself a keeper and guardian of them.
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.
As I understand it, much of the art market is based around the ability to purchase a "valuable" piece of art on the private markets let it appreciate then "donate" it to a museum or non-profit for a lucrative tax write off. At least thats the hustle as I understand it. I could totally see that in jeopardy based on liquidity and the markets.
> My former Artnet colleague Tim Schneider’s analysis at the time of the deal revealed that the gallery was on the hook for $704,000 in monthly rent, or $8.5 million a year—$220 million over the course of the lease
Seems like it’s not an art problem but an art dealer problem. If you rent a $100k/month restaurant space that seats 20 people, is the food industry dying if you can’t turn a profit and close?
My sister started an independent artist career from 2022, and overall trends were fairly brutal to her (unemployment due to Russian-Ukrainian war, raise of AIs, tariff war), however the only solution in this circumstances is to climb up, raise the quality of one's art and aim for the higher price range.
I’ve been trying to break into the art market as a complete outsider for the last year and a half (doing mathy lenticular holograms). What I have seen has stunned me - the level of groupthink and copying whatever the popular trends are and making up pretentious language to sound sophisticated is wild. And often the actual art is just ugly.
I have found that the higher priced galleries seem to sell worse art. The emperor has no clothes. And just like the Impressionists revolted against the Academy, us artist shall revolt at the Art market system that says “your work only matters if you have an MFA from a top school”.
Collecting big-ticket art is a weird hobby in that it's very passive. For most collectibles, you're supposed to go to garage sales, scout eBay, walk around with a metal detector, or even dumpster-dive. And if you find something unfamiliar, you form a hypothesis, do research, share your findings... and maybe get other folks excited about your find. It's all very make-your-own-adventure.
For mainstream "rich person" art, all of this is outsourced. Curators discover the artist, promote the work, and set the price. Glossy trade journals tells you what the artwork means and how to talk about it to others in a way that's more erudite than any thoughts you can form on your own. Your function, really, is just to show up with money and then hang the piece.
> Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard.
Just one example, one of the biggest Canadian collectors of contemporary art is condo marketer Bob Rennie, who during the foreign wealth lead boom in Canadian real estate, was making so much money that he opened up an entire personal downtown museum to show off his art works.
After layers of regulation against foreign buying amongst many other shifts in the economy (hi interest rates), condo sales are now in retreat with developers on the ropes and Rennie Marketing laying off staff.
Things change.
(I have no idea if Rennie has stopped buying, but given the sorts of big shifts in his industry, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd eased off!)
I've purchased plenty of art over the past couple years, mostly original paintings with a few prints. Very few of those came from galleries and when I walked in the galleries, I already knew what I wanted to buy.
Etsy and reddit are easy ways to find rather good art for what I can tell is a consistent price based on the size of the piece.
The only time I 'browse' art offline is during special events, which have all been wander from house to house or small art studio to studio. I love the experience, it's much more personal as you know the artist will be there and you can discuss the piece with them.
My brother is an up and coming artist in his field and has had many pieces bought by a billionaire that collects art extensively and has an amazing world-renowned collection. The billionaire has stopped buying art this year. Not just from my brother but stopped buying art completely. And there are many others like that that have stopped buying. That’s one canary in the coal mine to add to my collection that something bad is likely coming. The rich always know first. I’m just hoping we can make it until 2026.
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.
> Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.
> “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
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.
The market for High Horology (vs. mass market watches like Rolex) hit high water marks the past couple of years. F.P. Journe, for example, released a (Quartz!) watch, the Elegante that retails for $12k and sells on the secondary market for $100k. Maybe rich buyers moved on to celebrating a different type of artist.
> 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 the NY art scene, by osmosis (by having an SO who previously was accomplished in it, and could mingle well at gallery openings and cocktail parties, infinitely better than I could ever learn to)...
I wonder whether the "rude, rude, rude" means that the market had come to depend on nouveau riche speculators (who'd typically have neither the intellectual and artistic background, nor old-money social graces/conventions).
If you didn't respect your customers, and didn't make them feel valued, then the ones who only cared about money or status games have other options.
from the article "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 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 beginning to happen in the pandemic era flush with cash
when you question the price or try to find any rational trend, the gallery director gaslights you into the prior quote "you should just love the piece!" okay but why should I love it at this price "because it will be another price in the future!" but why will it be another price who sets that price "we the gallery do! it moves up over time!" how does that work "you should just love the piece!"
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 never felt any work speak that loudly to me.
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.
Yeah art has objective value and subjective value. Every once in a while you'll find something with a lot of subjective value. Finding something with both is also a thing but it's not easy to find them for a low price.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
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.
I'm sure there is some art you'd shell out for. Maybe an original prop from your favorite movie or a collectors item from a time period you're nostalgic for...
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.
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.
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 if he offers the service to whoever is rich and still alive. It therefore seems logical that art markets and shows can mothball themselves for the time being.
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.
Self inflicted. Both artists and the galleries representing them became too greedy. I have acquaintances who rather starve than accept their work is not worth 10K a piece.
My city has a medium size art gallery. Every couple of years, the curators will hold their nose and run an exhibit by "dead white males": figurative painters like Rembrandt. The gallery becomes packed with people. Afterward the curators go back to their usual fare of "Iranian-American textile artists" or whatever; the gallery sees no visitors for months.
Bleeding money, the gallery recently laid off half their staff.
It's almost as if the curators would rather lose their jobs than exhibit art that the public enjoys.
The art world at large? Or the traditional business environment of pretentious art hucksters?
I just want to know the bottom line: is this good, bad or indifferent for the actual struggling artists. Or upside for some, downside for others? And, which struggling arists; how many out of the multitude associated with what outcome?
Anything worthy of the concept of art isn't likely to be found in these places.
If you like making shit that looks cool and you want to sell it, have at it. Just please drop the intellectual pretence that anything other than "it looks cool" is going on.
> 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 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.
It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
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.
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 stopped being cheap to borrow money, and it started being lucrative to lend it out for guaranteed returns (e.g. by buying Treasuries) rather than speculating on artworks, or NFTs, or whatever.
Yes and no - 2022 also drastically changed taxation of software development
https://www.resourcefulfinancepro.com/news/irs-section-174-c...
Tech firms lobbied this change because they care about EBITA it makes their numbers look better
My tax accountant said every one of his clients was freaking out about it. So, I have to disagree.
If there was any lobbying incentive, it would be anticompetitive suppression of smaller companies that can't afford the tax increase.
This change has zero effect on your EBITA.
How would that make EBITA look better? (Even if you meant EBITDA, same question)
You are right reporting is via GAAP rules this only affects tax accounting
> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
The end of ZIRP definitely hit the contemporary art market — what the article is referring to — harder than the fine art market.
I do wonder if one of those reasons is that the general sentiment of the public is moving beyond contempt and towards sharp objects not dissimilar to how friends across the channel tended to handle things.
I doubt wealthy people are afraid to shop at London galleries or auctions. There are street robberies but they target watches and phones, not so much antiques.
Maybe my comment didn't capture the zeitgeist - it's not that they're afraid of robberies per se, but rather simply living as a wealthy individual in a society with massive inequalities of income has much more social pushback than say, twenty-five years ago.
What do you think the social pushback would look like from the wealthy person's point of view? If you get chauffeured from your London home to your country house and all your social circle are in the same bracket then you won't encounter much of it. And their children might be following activists on social media but they'll still join the family heli-skiing trip to Canada.
Hasn't seemed to stop the rich at all
Someone in the space told me that China were big buyers of art but suddenly they stopped.
This could be because of capital controls, financial stress or increasing sense of national pride - take your pick
Not only China and they didn't stop because of national pride (wouldn't have bought them in the first place). The reason is that they were using them as financial instruments and now they have less confidence on the West. So they are moving to other things.
> The reason is that they were using them as financial instruments and now they have less confidence on the West. So they are moving to other things.
Only partially correct. The reason why so many Chinese invested into the West is because the Chinese Government has strict monetary policies in place.
We have all seen news of people becoming miljonairs, billionaire's and then they leave for another country. The issue is that this was happening a lot in China. Rich folks made their money in China and then took the money outside the country. The issue was that they converted that money into foreign assets, what drain the national currency reserve (mostly dollars).
Like 12+ years ago the government implemented strict rules, disallowing money to be transferred out of the country, if it exceeded a specific amount. Its been a long time and i do not remember the exact limit. But there is used to be a backdoor, that if you knew the right people, and it was a company investment or other investment that build up soft power of China in the West. And voila, money flowed out that way. Of course, not for normal citizens ;)
O, you are investing a million or 5 into some painting. Well, now that money got transferred out of the country but the value (as in the painting) is now in the US, EU, ... Its the same reason why we had a TON of movies being made with Chinese backers. It was all used as a way to launder money out of China.
That means, if the Chinese government confiscated your assets at home, you had value in other countries to be tapped. Its not coincidence that a lot of rich folks their families study in the west and live in the west but the husband/family head works in China. Its a way of protection. And the West where if you leave a country, there is no real check on you leaving, China is different.
A few years ago, with Covid, China was in constant lockdowns, areas sealed off. The big cities like Shanghai, entire area's felt like prisons the moment somebody tested positive. So a lot of people with money tried even harder to get out.
It was around that time, even more stricter laws got introduced regarding "foreign investments". The whole backdoor regarding "foreign investments" has been restricted and is under much more scrutiny if you want to bring money out of China.
Hong Kong used to be a exit door but that has also been under a lot more pressure.
Its not that Chinese have less confidence in the West but that the government has "advised" that investing at home is the "better choice" for you and your family.
That means, if you do not want to be investigated and jailed. A lot of rich celebrities have been publicly investigated and jailed for short times. Charges like tax evasion was a thing. Until they paid a nice big sum to the government (with some money sticking on the edges), and a very, VERY public apology about their bad behavior. What in turn keeps the rest in place. As in, sure, you can play around but do not get too big for your bridges and think about moving money out of the country.
Getting money out of China, unless you have some connections is a hard thing. The level of control is much larger then 2010, and has only gotten worse with time.
You think about setting up a company in the West? You better be sure its registered in China (forgot the branch) or you can enjoy jail time when found out. Its all about tracking where money goes and ensuring control.
Its the same reason you see a lot of Chinese companies that used to be in China, now having head seats in Singapore etc. People using that route to get assets out.
So no, its not just about the West becoming less interesting, and people being more patriotic, its literally about way more financial and people control, what in turn affects that massive money flow from China into outside assets.
Funny thing, you ever wonder why so many, just BAD movies have been coming out the last 15 years. Check the investments and the money trail.
Its because even if the movie loses money, what then gets reported as a lost value in China, part of the money is still transferred out sideways. O, we spend 20 million on X movie (but it looks like a 2 million budget movie). O, ... i wonder what happened to those other million. We earned only 1 million from the movie sales, so we "lost" 19 million. Reality is that a lot of that money simply flowed somewhere else. 101 money laundry ..
These aren’t limited to China:
- fewer people can afford a home, let alone multiple = less wall space for premium art
- it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
I'm not convinced that the first point has necessarily affected the premium art space unless you're referring to the spill in effects. TFA talks about a space in Art Basel costing 100k - the target clientele for all intents and purposes are completely unaffected by the recent economic problems. Some have gotten even richer if anything
> - it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
Sure art sales can be used to launder money, but that can't be the majority of sales. Doesn't laundering rely on being masked by a larger legitimate cash flow?
I think a much more significant portion of the art market is people speculating on prices and people collecting to look cool. Both of which are highly sensitive to changes in mood and sentiment as described in the section of the article talking about Beth Rudin DeWoody .
> it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
Art was always a favorite way to launder money. This is a good point.
The US stock market and cryptocurrencies are both going gangbusters. You don't need ZIRP to be awash in cash. Money can print itself when rich people are optimistic.
I don't know what causes bubbles to pop, but I don't think it's directly related to US monetary policy. I suspect that the bubble just moved elsewhere.
It might be that anyone can generate "art" now.
While canvas, sculpture, and other media are far removed from jpegs, the scarcity of adjacent digital forms going away may have reduced the interest in the market for "shaped aesthetic things".
The attention, and thus money, has moved elsewhere.
Pretty much every country is in conflict at their border. However, resolutions can happen peacefully. Nations are essentially pillaging structures and thus want to always expand their borders.
what does this have to do with the above points?
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 buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
> 2022 is also when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza started in earnest
This is just wrong for Gaza; either you take the "conflict has been running continuously since 1948" approach, or you date the present intense fighting to October 2023.
> AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry
Not to the "fine art" part of it, no. It's taken out the lower and middle tiers; people doing commissions for a few hundred dollars are squeezed out, and there's much more slop to sell to tourists, but any business which cares about uniqueness and provenance (sometimes more than the content of the art!) is not going to notice.
The conflict started long before 1948. Hint: creation of the State of Israel is an effect of the conflict, not its cause.
The public is not conscious of how big of a deal the war in Ukraine is.
> 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.
The only peaceful resolution is Russia accepting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors.
Otherwise there will be no peace, just oppression and torture of the occupied population. And more war down the line, when Russia feels it can take another bite.
By saying this, you must understand that many more people may die for this purpose, and even yourself.
It's Russia's purpose to attack its peaceful, friendly and neutral neighbors.
No one forces Russia to attack its neighbors.
As long as Russia insists on waging war against its sovereign neighbors, Russia is a threat to Europe.
you put your life on the line now, or you put everyone's on the line, later.
WW2 didn't have to happen, and the UK and France could have interviened sooner, before the Nazi war machine took over the Czechs, the Poles, etc.
ounce of prevention vs. a pound of cure
Did you read what he said? You are guaranteeing the war will continue if you reward an invasion with land.
It's just lie. If, for example, NATO gives clear guarantees to join in for Ukraine in the case of next attack(if any agreement on ending the war is reached), then there will definitely not be a next attack.
It's not a lie. It's exactly the same reason you don't let a burglar keep the stolen goods.
NATO does not even consider applicants in the middle of conflicts or even with disputed borders.
According to your theoretical, Russia could attack and immediately invalidate Ukraine's ability to join NATO by re-triggering a conflict.
Come on is this stuff really that hard?
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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.
Roman Empire, or Genghis Khan, or Nazi Germany did not have a "conflict" with neighbors, some kind of quarrel that can end in a compromise. They had a desire to conquer, subdue, and consume the neighbors. There could be no resolution beside a complete capitulation and becoming annexed.
Russia is currently acting in this mode. There can be no "resolution", only a devastating military defeat of one of the sides.
Empires have often grown without any desire to grow. Quite often empires have grown by moving against a threat close to its borders or trade routes and ends up in control of new areas, which then become part of its territories, which are then threatened....
Expansion is not uncontroversial either. The Roman Empire had periods of a non-expansionist policy, and the British Empire in the 19th century had a fairly popular Little Englander movement that opposed expansion of the empire.
The desire to grow is simply hidden behind the supposedly defensive posture of wanting to have a peaceful "buffer zone".
Why are you trying to redefine a word? My most low-effort refutal is simply to consult Webster’s Dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conflict
> Definition #1: : Fight, battle, war
So, having proved my point, I’ll note that (1) this war could certainly end in compromise, and (2) even a devastating military defeat would be a resolution.
And I’ll appreciate not being called an invasion-sympathizer when I’m only pointing out that using the word “conflict” is not a political statement.
My intention was not to redefine the word, but to merely offer my opinion that this war is very unlikely to end with any kind of resolution, other than a complete defeat of one of the sides. This conflict is not like e.g. Soviet-Finnish war of 1940, when USSR annexed 10% of Finland and hostilities stopped. It's more like the Napoleonic wars on early 19th century, when Napoleon would not stop attacking, no matter how much land he had already conquered, until a comprehensive and total military defeat.
Of course things could become different if the current Russian leader dies, or is deposed.
I guess a robbery can be called a conflict too.
This, so much this. Even many smart folks don't realize this, or refuse to acknowledge since its pretty bleak viewpoint with no bright future. This war won't end just because its getting annoying, or sad, or shocking whats happening.
Russia switched fully to war economy, on purpose, there is no easy way back even if they wanted. Their goal is to conquer as much Europe as possible, losing few millions of its sub-citizens from rural remote regions is not such a concern that we in the west think about. Nobody there cares. Their enemy is whole western world, doesn't matter how much trump licks putin's a*, not a zilch.
In fact, I strongly believe that almost nobody in the west fully understands how depraved and primitive russian thinking is, think about white heroin addicted trash or common slums folks, and spread it on the level of largest nation in the world and give them huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. On top is good old mafia (and I don't mean Coppola's idealized version, I mean real murder-whole-family-in-acid-vat type), nothing more.
Now what good do you expect from that, now or in 10 years? Whatever you do, you are naive.
> how depraved and primitive russian thinking is, think about white heroin addicted trash or common slums folks, [...] and give them huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
:s/russian/american/
can we not label whole nationalities as depraved, primitive heroin addicted trash!?!
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If I was going to buy art as an investment I would only buy the absolute best - old master, Picasso, ancient artifacts with absolutely no question to their authenticity or provenance that would restrict its resale.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
The problem with your strategy is that the items you listed have very little upside; yes, the prices won't collapse, but they also wont go up a ton. Their prices have reached somewhat of an equilibrium.
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
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 of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
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 :)
This is such a beautiful piece. How did you learn about it? How does one get further into this world?
Collectibles have a lot of friction, and being physical they have a lot of middlemen and questions. If I want to speculate on an investment, even property would be far more liquid, let alone something disambiguated like company stock. I think investing in physical collectibles for a quick flip is pretty dumb. Why not buy domains related to the same subject? Far easier
Ok, then I guess I don't understand your point in your first comment. You seemed to be explaining what approach you would take to invest in collectible in your first comment, by saying you would only buy something that has established value.
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
I'm saying as an investor, collectibles are very difficult and highly speculative, and the friction makes them even less attractive. I disagree that buying old, consistent collectibles cannot themselves be speculative - if you wait for the right moment they can make significant returns. But the downside is significantly reduced if you restrict your investments to something that has been consistently valuable across the longterm.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
Labubu
When I had that level of friends the ones that collected art very much wanted to be part of a fad with some of their collection. It was the intro to getting to show the rest of their collection off to people. It was the piece that guests would know the artist of, or were able to get excited about when giving the current story.
> 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.
> the art market
How would one measure "the art market" in a way that can be graphed?
> should have collapsed
Through what mechanism would it "collapse? Laundering tricks don't involve bidding wars or high volumes of items. Consider this scenario:
1. Alice wants to transfer $5m to Bob in exchange for something off the books.
2. Bob goes and buys anything he can find that seems to have a consistent ~50m price point. Since Bob's task doesn't require any specific item, he doesn't get into bidding wars to drive up prices.
3. Bob privately sells it to Alice, who deliberately pays a higher amount of $55m. No auction, no bidding wars.
4. Alice can either resell the item to unrelated people for probably ~$50m, or keep it around for a bit to provide either plausible-deniability or a future tool for an inbound cloaked transaction with someone else.
How would that kind of activity charge up "the art market" in a way that is easy to measure?
> when NFTs were booming
Most of that boom was other speculation. My point is that an NFT by cyber-Rembrandt is a lot more convenient than certificate a real Rembrandt held in a freeport as its ownership shifts.
The trick is getting something where the generally-accepted value is high enough that transactions can plausibly be hidden as noise in the signal.
This seems dubious, because the NFT market peaked and collapsed _before_ the art market did.
Well, that's very dead now.
The art world is just fine. Pretentious art speculation maybe not so much.
In a way, we are actually in a golden age. I lurk on social media accounts of amateur art enthusiasts around the globe with (IMHO) good taste who seek out interesting little known artists and post it on their feeds. I am introduced to so much great art that I probably would have never known about otherwise. If I see something I like, I search for the artist online and see if they have something available in their portfolio for sale that I love.
I’ve bought amazing art from talented artists around the globe that speak no common language with me. We get it done (Google Translate to the rescue). I don’t filter on price but virtually everything I’ve bought is always in a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars range. The fact that you can talk to the artist just adds to the story.
Forget the “tastemakers” in art. I can give my money to excellent artists directly, including many that never attracted the attention of tastemakers or who weren’t deemed worthy by said people. I received a huge piece from Denmark today. The whole experience is lovely and the artists really appreciate that someone loves their work. This is the future.
Roughly a twentieth of all humans who have ever lived were born in just the past 50 years. I agree some of the best painters ever might actually be alive right now.
I've attended local art festivals (i.e. Atlanta Dogwood Festival) where I've bought some incredible prints and paintings in the hundred dollar range which are subjectively more beautiful compared to some of the stuff I've seen in the High Museum of Art in downtown Atlanta. For example:
https://www.instagram.com/alejandro_munoz_art
https://www.instagram.com/marirosafineart
https://www.instagram.com/s.carterscreations
https://www.instagram.com/shealeyartworks
https://www.instagram.com/salazarartes
http://bryanyung.com/ (no instagram)
Artists are the most interesting people you can ever talk to.
You can also just commission the art you need, a few hundred dollars is damn good money in much of the world( even in the US, if a small painting takes a few hours to make, 400$ can be a fair price).
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
I’ve never commissioned art but I am sorely tempted with a couple artists I’ve bought from. This may actually be the future for them.
Until recent times, commissioning was how it worked. This was why we only had paintings of kings and that guy called Jesus until Bruegel came along and painted peasants. Nobody was just painting whatever they wanted to paint, hiring a gallery and selling their 'art'.
The title of 'artist' is also an interesting one. Some titles have to be earned, for example, you can't call yourself a 'genius', an 'intellectual' or a 'hero' for obvious reasons. Yet creatives can call themselves an 'artist' as job description without society deeming them to be an 'artist'. In the olden days, before mass production, artists were just tradesmen doing a good job at whatever their trade was.
Our idea of art is deeply tied into capitalism. Compare the art of indigenous peoples with Western art. Art is all about fame and fortune rather than a love of the subject material and the craft.
One problem with the current status quo is that most artists are not in the commissioning game. Artists want to paint whatever their thing is, not some patron's dog, fancy house, religious deity or elderly relatives. If you do know someone making a living from painting people's dogs, then the question has to be asked, are they a real artist, or just a craftsperson?
Take the case of the architect, where the client is invariably calling the shots. Are they an artist? They don't need to be since they have the title of 'architect', however, few of them are called 'artist'.
Being 'artist' also comes with some understanding that the 'artist' doesn't have to work in the conventional sense, and therefore an 'artist' is high status. It works a bit like 'foot binding' in that regard since some people will want their kids to grow up to be 'artists', as in high status and not working for a wage. Sometimes this is just to validate the parent's life choices and shore up their status.
The real art of the age is all around us and made by commercial artists.
The commercial artist has a client and patron in the company they work for. They make adverts, packaging designs and such like, working within constraints. If working for Ford, the commercial artist isn't going to redesign the blue oval, they have to stick to the style guide, working within the constraints to make something new, in time and on budget.
So yes, commission what you want from an artist that puts the customer first.
Regarding the article, in the UK we had an art movement at the turn of the century with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and their ilk, pushed by Saatchi into art superstardom. However, about a year before 2008, this hustle came crashing down. If we currently have some cooling off in the art market then that is an indicator that the economy as a whole is heading for tough times.
the materials (custom canvas, paints, brushes, multiple layers of varnish, packaging, shipping) are expensive and they have been getting very much more expensive since COVID. so a few hundred $ for a small painting is not a lot.
Digital art it is!
That's actually the only art I've commissioned so far.
Any good account suggestions?
I have been following:
https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/
https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/
https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/
https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/
https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/
https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/
And curating:
https://www.instagram.com/carriescottcurates/
https://www.instagram.com/mary_lynn_buchanan/
Damn it sucks that instagram is the defacto second internet. My gf finds so much cool stuff on IG. Local bands post their show dates, a brewery in my neighborhood posts their hours (it’s just a husband and wife, and their hours are whenever-I-feel-like-it). I don’t have instagram, so I’m just totally in the dark on all that stuff.
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
Exactly my feelings. I don't have fb and IG, and I feel left out. Also when I go to India, the local shops, unless they are really big, don't accept credit card or cash. The physical wallet has vanished. But in fairness, it is far easier for them to have online presence via IG or fb and reach their actual customers (not you and me).
Yeah I feel this too. All of these artists have websites with the standard art format, but as RSS is dead outside our tech circle the only way to stay up to date is Instagram which all artists have, even those without a standard website. Cara is mainly illustrators, Artsy is for galleries (not artists).
I had a quick look at these instagram links and except for the last two, they do not feel like 'Art', just like most novels are not considered literature. In the past years, I have visited a lot of art exhibitions (at museums and art galleries) and graduation shows of art schools here in the Netherlands. See: https://iwriteiam.nl/Exhibitions.html Even at those, I feel that a lot is crap, too conceptual. But there always some artists that stick out for some (often unexplained) reason. They have some new idea or make you view the world in a different way. They are not just repeating some gimmick or showing (exceptional) craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is not equal to art.
Sadly I don't think this perspective will ever be accepted on HN.
Commercial galleries and the art school pipeline are awful in so many ways, but one thing that many people fail to understand is that art in its best light is an ongoing conversation.
Yes you can be incredibly skilled and build an aesthetically beautiful hand made work of art without ever being part of the larger art world. And as a viewer, you can appreciate that art and buy it and cherish it. This is good, great in fact.
But to say that is all that art should be is sort of missing the forest for the trees or whatever. We have this thousands of years old conversation going about form, color, concept, story, material, humanity, etc and when its working correctly the art world cultivates and encourages that conversation.
We can absolutely have this conversation without financializing art to the extreme as has been done the past 10 years, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Let me add something to this. If you buy a painting (or some other work of art) because it is captivating you, and you put it into your house, to enjoy, than that is great. I myself have bought some works of art, that are not be considered as 'Art', but that captivated me. For me that is the only reason to buy some work of art, if it captivates me, not if is a good investment.
damn that's very cool stuff
There are myriad accounts. Who you follow is taste specific, you need to do your own work. Mine are exclusively on Twitter and I mostly found them by randomly clicking through art things on Twitter. My tastes in art cover a very broad spectrum. Gotta both explore and curate the feed.
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
That's actually great! This comment thread is such a breath of fresh air. We moved this year to a new place and was looking at art, and I had the feeling that art also became some sort of mass produced low cost product, and I wanted to look into smaller artists and original pieces. Loved the works of the artist you mentioned as well as some of the other ones mentioned above.
Second
Hi, Can you plz tell me the places where you lurk around for the beautiful art pieces. I have a friend who does amazing "slice of Life" photography. I want to showcase it somewhere that can sell their work. Also please let us see a photo of your art pieces from Denmark. Thank you
I never understood those ridiculous prices for artworks that look like poop. "Here's a few random splashes of yellow paint on red background, €300 000 please". I used to think that maybe I'm just too stupid to understand the truly fine art, but no, it's all just speculation and dick measuring contest for people with too much money.
I just finished decorating my living room. Majority are prints of pictures that I found on the internet and then pushed through an AI upscaler, which means the costs are equal to the printing service and they look amazing. Two pieces have been commissioned, and total cost of both of them with printing is below a thousand. Just recently I saw a beautiful painting in a gallery and it cost me a thousand. Art doesn't need to be expensive to be beautiful.
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 speculator crowd.
The "art as speculation" fad is just a consequence of "inflation is good" economic theory, the same as "real estate as an investment".
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
I don't think so. Speculative markets would arise even in a 0% inflation economy, for the same reason that casinos would. Speculation isn't about storing value, it's about gambling. You have a stronger point with real estate, but real estate isn't as volatile or speculative, usually.
There would be very little reason to speculate on art. There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value. In a zero inflation environment you'd expect the market to average zero growth. Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
>There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value.
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
It's only really in the latter half of the 20th century that inflation has actually been held to 0-2% by the active manipulation of interest rates to increase unemployment, and yet everyone acts like inflation is the end of the world.
It's speculation, but tax avoidance too: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f...
And money laundering… don’t forget the money laundering
Personally I bid for the gasps, fainting and eventual standing ovation at the end of the auction along with the knowing nod and smile from someone who says indubitably a lot.
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 thing, it’s a gallery thing. Disintermediation strikes again.
This has nothing to do with the art world the article is talking about.
I don't think it has to. The greater art world is abstracted from the value it provides, so much so its obviously seedy.
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.
I remember IBM making huge claims about using the blockchain for supply chain management. For instance[1]:
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/solutions/blockchain-supply-chain
People have a tendency to uncritically take techies' claims as facts.
[Stares aggressively in the direction of gen AI.]
A blockchain is the world's slowest database. The idea that a blockchain could speed up anything is laughable.
Theoretically, if there could be a 1:1 relationship between events in the real world and events on the blockchain, the idea makes sense. If you had two pieces of a machine represented by objects on the blockchain, and when you combined them into a new component that automatically, cryptographically, created a new object on the blockchain, you could track provenance precisely just by having the final assembled product.
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
Not to mention companies don't like sharing their supply chain data because they consider it a competitive advantage. Even if they're required to share it by law, many companies are highly motivated to do the tampering you describe.
> A blockchain is the world's slowest database.
It's dependent on how performant the underlying protocol is, not all blockchains are the same.
NFTs make more sense as digital signatures.
Digital signatures make a lot more sense as digital signatures.
And you can counter-sign the time if you need to prove that.
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.
pgp keys already took care of that 35 years ago
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.
Not the image, the spreadsheet cell next to the image has their name in it
People pay money to join fan clubs for K-pop. If there were some electricity sheet will record their name forever, I'm sure someone would pay their money.
> that replace jurisdictions/authorities
without any enforcement with sanctioned violence, this is merely symbolic. It's why so much scam happens with the NFT space.
More like 99% scam with a tiny kernel of legitimacy lost in the margins.
Non-fungible tokens are not about payment, they are about cryptographic ownership of uniqueness.
>they are about cryptographic ownership of uniqueness
My web browser has a novel and advanced attack on the cryptosystem built into it I have dubbed the right-click-copy-image attack.
I’ve even managed to replicate it on my phone.
Non-fungible tokens are not about images.
Non-fungible tokens are about ownership in the same way those $40 certificates that say a star is named for you are about ownership.
Nobody cares about your precious little certificate, but if it makes you happy, buy it.
How much of this is due to anti-money laundering regulations enacted in the early 2020s [0], which much better vet the identities of the buyers/sellers?
[0] https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-ri...
That reminds me that I looked up gold custom iPhones once.
They had various payment methods, including cash (highest price on their list was 300k usd) at their office in Dubai.
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.
I am always find concept of fractional ownership questionable. Unless very well controlled. And extremely so when you are dealing with physical non-fungible assets like art or collectibles. Maybe I am just too risk averse to see the money...
You can buy shares on their secondary market pretty cheaply right now.
Was exactly my thought when reading this
"I've got some sellers who know the market well, bought in early and want to get out - oportunity of a lifetime for you"
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.
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.
I have heard, and believe: successful galleries are a location thing. People with deep pockets will pick up a piece by anyone in Aspen, Colorado, and probably not look twice if they (somehow) saw a Koons in a Topeka gallery.
Gallery owners are taste makers like stock brokers used to be before people could just point and click directly.
They put you into a good piece of artwork at a good price, build a raport, look after their good clients, perform well over time and take a couple of points on the way in and out
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.
What do you think the market is for this kind of digital art? Do you see this style of work attracting an audience elsewhere? How much is it selling for?
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
I didn't want to criticize, but since you've already opened the door: these are interesting to me as sheer sensory stimulation, but the problem that might dissuade a lot of people is that there's no structure to most of the pieces (save for the ones that are based on distorting an existing image). Without structure there's no narrative, and no reason for someone to become interested in any given piece beyond, as I said, sensory stimulation. On that note, most the color palettes are very tasteful; if coldcode is picking them algorithmically, that's pretty impressive.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
[1] https://andrewwulf.com/detail/the-pinecone.html
They're not just algorithmic. There's a lot of manual effort in each image: https://thecodist.com/my-art-and-color-after-tiling/, https://thecodist.com/why-i-use-swift-to-make-generative-art...
> In my process, generation is supplemented by many manual processes, including image manipulation, digital painting, and occasionally even AI
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.
You’re much better off selling shirts. The markup on custom printed fabrics isn’t great, and there are plenty of professional fabric pattern designers out there which companies that commission fabric hire as-needed.
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
Have you considered making _actual tiles_? Not sure of the feasibility of this, but some of these would make great designs for tiles.
Can you please let us see your art and enjoy it
Images partially load and then turn into placeholders
Take this as a additional point of reference: I don't have formal education in art and not an artist, but I find your work interesting enough that I would stop at a store to look at and probably buy something (printed and fabric) if I can afford to (especially the cover art on the home page).
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> 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.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> 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!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
As mentioned by others, I think the art world has reached a major schism where there are two types of artists: those who target rich collectors and those who are more grassroots. I've been to a lot of the larger art shows in the US and it's always amazing to me how expensive so many of the pieces are. I couldn't even justify buying a cheaper piece I want on a software engineer's salary. Instead, I've found that local art fairs have been where so much of the growth is at. Things like Cherry Creek Art festival or the myriad of smaller markets around, you can find amazing artists selling interesting and beautiful works. Between markets and social media, there's a path to being a sustainable, working artist. And personally, I think being a collector of smaller artist's prints and works is more fun than the expensive ones!
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
When you're rich enough to live in what's effectively a post-scarcity world, scarcity itself becomes a valuable commodity. After all, we are the product of natural selection, a process shaped by scarcity. It is therefore such a fundamental part of our lives that its absence drives some to artificially recreate it.
I collect rare books (and memorabilia related to them), and it is not about vanity at all. I consider them historical objects (in their niche, of course) in the sense they changed the industry, or affected a portion of society somehow. I consider myself a keeper and guardian of them.
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.
As I understand it, much of the art market is based around the ability to purchase a "valuable" piece of art on the private markets let it appreciate then "donate" it to a museum or non-profit for a lucrative tax write off. At least thats the hustle as I understand it. I could totally see that in jeopardy based on liquidity and the markets.
> My former Artnet colleague Tim Schneider’s analysis at the time of the deal revealed that the gallery was on the hook for $704,000 in monthly rent, or $8.5 million a year—$220 million over the course of the lease
Seems like it’s not an art problem but an art dealer problem. If you rent a $100k/month restaurant space that seats 20 people, is the food industry dying if you can’t turn a profit and close?
My sister started an independent artist career from 2022, and overall trends were fairly brutal to her (unemployment due to Russian-Ukrainian war, raise of AIs, tariff war), however the only solution in this circumstances is to climb up, raise the quality of one's art and aim for the higher price range.
I’ve been trying to break into the art market as a complete outsider for the last year and a half (doing mathy lenticular holograms). What I have seen has stunned me - the level of groupthink and copying whatever the popular trends are and making up pretentious language to sound sophisticated is wild. And often the actual art is just ugly.
I have found that the higher priced galleries seem to sell worse art. The emperor has no clothes. And just like the Impressionists revolted against the Academy, us artist shall revolt at the Art market system that says “your work only matters if you have an MFA from a top school”.
Collecting big-ticket art is a weird hobby in that it's very passive. For most collectibles, you're supposed to go to garage sales, scout eBay, walk around with a metal detector, or even dumpster-dive. And if you find something unfamiliar, you form a hypothesis, do research, share your findings... and maybe get other folks excited about your find. It's all very make-your-own-adventure.
For mainstream "rich person" art, all of this is outsourced. Curators discover the artist, promote the work, and set the price. Glossy trade journals tells you what the artwork means and how to talk about it to others in a way that's more erudite than any thoughts you can form on your own. Your function, really, is just to show up with money and then hang the piece.
> Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard.
Just one example, one of the biggest Canadian collectors of contemporary art is condo marketer Bob Rennie, who during the foreign wealth lead boom in Canadian real estate, was making so much money that he opened up an entire personal downtown museum to show off his art works.
After layers of regulation against foreign buying amongst many other shifts in the economy (hi interest rates), condo sales are now in retreat with developers on the ropes and Rennie Marketing laying off staff.
Things change.
(I have no idea if Rennie has stopped buying, but given the sorts of big shifts in his industry, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd eased off!)
I've purchased plenty of art over the past couple years, mostly original paintings with a few prints. Very few of those came from galleries and when I walked in the galleries, I already knew what I wanted to buy.
Etsy and reddit are easy ways to find rather good art for what I can tell is a consistent price based on the size of the piece.
The only time I 'browse' art offline is during special events, which have all been wander from house to house or small art studio to studio. I love the experience, it's much more personal as you know the artist will be there and you can discuss the piece with them.
My brother is an up and coming artist in his field and has had many pieces bought by a billionaire that collects art extensively and has an amazing world-renowned collection. The billionaire has stopped buying art this year. Not just from my brother but stopped buying art completely. And there are many others like that that have stopped buying. That’s one canary in the coal mine to add to my collection that something bad is likely coming. The rich always know first. I’m just hoping we can make it until 2026.
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.
> Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.
> “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
There are people who think the art world isn't 10% fools and 90% money laundering?
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.
This article is part of a broader market report with more figures: https://news.artnet.com/market/mid-year-review-2025-2684554
Seems like a low interest rate phenomenon
The market for High Horology (vs. mass market watches like Rolex) hit high water marks the past couple of years. F.P. Journe, for example, released a (Quartz!) watch, the Elegante that retails for $12k and sells on the secondary market for $100k. Maybe rich buyers moved on to celebrating a different type of artist.
> 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 the NY art scene, by osmosis (by having an SO who previously was accomplished in it, and could mingle well at gallery openings and cocktail parties, infinitely better than I could ever learn to)...
I wonder whether the "rude, rude, rude" means that the market had come to depend on nouveau riche speculators (who'd typically have neither the intellectual and artistic background, nor old-money social graces/conventions).
If you didn't respect your customers, and didn't make them feel valued, then the ones who only cared about money or status games have other options.
I feel like anyone who says about art “the juice has to be worth the squeeze” isn’t really into art.
But likely really into cocaine.
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.
Isn’t the money being invested in crypto instead? Rich people might prefer others better ways to protect their assets than the current art market
I think it’s a decade too late for that to be the dominating factor.
Well now it’s mainstream and safe. It wasn’t 10 years ago
For some definitions of "mainstream" and "safe," in both temporal directions.
from the article "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 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 beginning to happen in the pandemic era flush with cash
when you question the price or try to find any rational trend, the gallery director gaslights you into the prior quote "you should just love the piece!" okay but why should I love it at this price "because it will be another price in the future!" but why will it be another price who sets that price "we the gallery do! it moves up over time!" how does that work "you should just love the piece!"
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 never felt any work speak that loudly to me.
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.
Yeah art has objective value and subjective value. Every once in a while you'll find something with a lot of subjective value. Finding something with both is also a thing but it's not easy to find them for a low price.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
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.
I'm sure there is some art you'd shell out for. Maybe an original prop from your favorite movie or a collectors item from a time period you're nostalgic for...
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.
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.
Yeah if an artists needs to pay 50k rent + 50k staffing to show of their works something is wrong
> The gallery had made international stars of artists like Harold Ancart, Korakrit Arunanondchai, and, more recently, Marguerite Humeau
I'll be blunt. I've looked at their works, and those in the article itself.
I won't be losing any sleep over this.
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 if he offers the service to whoever is rich and still alive. It therefore seems logical that art markets and shows can mothball themselves for the time being.
Gold hit a record high priced in USD today.
Gold always goes up. It's the rate of increase you have to monitor.
> 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-...
That Kristina Reischl image looks a lot like stone toss comics for some reason
Self inflicted. Both artists and the galleries representing them became too greedy. I have acquaintances who rather starve than accept their work is not worth 10K a piece.
My city has a medium size art gallery. Every couple of years, the curators will hold their nose and run an exhibit by "dead white males": figurative painters like Rembrandt. The gallery becomes packed with people. Afterward the curators go back to their usual fare of "Iranian-American textile artists" or whatever; the gallery sees no visitors for months.
Bleeding money, the gallery recently laid off half their staff.
It's almost as if the curators would rather lose their jobs than exhibit art that the public enjoys.
Rembrandt is easy enough to see on my phone. I get it.
The digital revolution is disrupting the art world, both for better and worse. It's fascinating to see how artists adapt.
The art world at large? Or the traditional business environment of pretentious art hucksters?
I just want to know the bottom line: is this good, bad or indifferent for the actual struggling artists. Or upside for some, downside for others? And, which struggling arists; how many out of the multitude associated with what outcome?
Good riddance. Collecting art is yet another way for the ultra rich to avoid taxation. It's a complete and utter farce.
From the outside, so much of the art world looks like grifting and fraud. (Much like the NFT scene)
Good riddance.
Anything worthy of the concept of art isn't likely to be found in these places.
If you like making shit that looks cool and you want to sell it, have at it. Just please drop the intellectual pretence that anything other than "it looks cool" is going on.
> The question is how to “get people to understand that art isn’t an asset class,” he added.
Got to love 'late stage capitalism'
What isn't an asset class for sale these days, with horrible consequences? Health? Housing? Water? Knowledge?
> 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 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.
It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
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.
This seems ahistorical; by the summer of 2022 the NFT market had already collapsed (it died somewhat _before_ the art market did).
The quote is about art supplies, not speculation.