This Fox Business News interview with Larry Gagosian isn’t earth shattering. Fox chose to emphasize the oddest part of it, when Gagosian goes off on a tangent qualifying art as something that isn’t a luxury good. They might have as easily chosen his comment that he prefers not to view art as an asset class even if he observes that his clients do. They could have gone with the assertion that it is different in the art market now with the influx of Chinese, Middle Eastern and Latin American collectors who are buying at a new level; or, even, the assertion below about what’s different now:
“Naturally, liquidity is a big factor in any market … there seems to be a lot of money in the world, and there’s a lot of discretionary money. Art has become at the same time a much more popular pursuit [or] hobby. Some people buy art because they’re confident that it’ll be a good store value, and this is kind of a recent phenomenon,” he said.
“So what’s different now is that you can transmit information very quickly […],” he said. “It’s also allowed collectors to have more communication and to have access to more transparency about prices, which gives the market more confidence.”
That last bit seems terribly mundane but it really ought to get more emphasis. There is a push-pull in the art market where value often comes from works of art trading with exceptional infrequency even as the fact of repeated sales of art in general and an artist’s work or even a specific work, in particular, gives buyers greater confidence in art as a store of value (or an asset class.)
Art is not a luxury product like Hermes bags: Larry Gagosian (Fox Business)
