Art Market Monitor

The debate between the critic and the art market took an  unexpected turn earlier this week when Peter Plagens wrote this response to Robert Hughes’s angry film about the art market, “The Mona Lisa Curse:”

Big money has always been entwined with fine art, because fine art is expensive and has to be purchased with funds that don’t have to be strictly accounted for. The pharoahs could go off-books for their palace and temple blings, so could the ancient Greeks and Romans, so could the medieval church, so could Renaissance counts and dukes, so could Enlightenment kings, so could wealthy Dutch burghers, so could American robber-barons (whose collections and founded institutions make possible much of the art-for-art’s-sake sentiment Hughes longs for), and so can–with some intricate accounting–the likes of Steven A. Cohen. Auction prices in the millions are startling, but they shouldn’t be any more startling than Federal budgets in the trillions or AOL’s tip-sheet bulletin to economizing home-buyers, “What you can get for $900,000.” In the art world as everywhere else, the money required to play is bigger, hours are longer, the competition sharper, and the tolerances closer. In the old days when Robert Rauschenberg (in the film, Hughes’s seeming favorite artist) was a revelation, one could rent a downtown storefront for a couple of hundred bucks a month, slap some flat white latex paint on the walls, put up some track lights, and get your significant other to sit at the reception desk, and you had a shot at becoming an “important” gallery. Today, the up-front money is half a mil to a mil, backers (who want to make a profit) are needed, sophisticated networking and public relations are required, and the gallery needs to be able to run in the red for three years. [Read more...]

Ben Lewis is a foe of the art market. He’s been on a one-man campaign to deflate the art bubble. So you’d think he might have taken a victory lap this last year as art prices collapsed and sales ceased for a time. Instead, he displays a muddled understanding of basic economics in a story on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s £10m art collection. Lewis is quoted as calling for a distressed sale of the bank’s art:

Ben Lewis, an art commentator, said: “All the banks who received state aid should have firesales of their art collections. In fact, governments should enforce these sales. That would take some of the heat out of the inflated art market, and put a bit more money back into government balance sheets.” [Read more...]