What can the Apple Watch–particularly a $17,000 Edition model–tell us about fine art sales right now?
I started thinking about this question after watching the video embedded above. (Note: You'll have to click through the 'Read more' button to see it if you're just on the general blog page.) It’s a 16-minute presentation by NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway at this year’s DLD (Digital-Life-Design) Conference. Galloway’s topic is what he calls the Four Horsemen, or the four most dominant companies in digital today: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
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Another week, another reminder that the art market is a make-up mirror reflecting the world economy–for better and worse, depending on who (and where) you are.
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Last Friday, Scott Reyburn of the New York Times introduced much of the art industry to Larry’s List, a subscription-fueled online database offering detailed profiles of over 3,100 prominent collectors worldwide. Co-founded by writer/curator Christoph Noe and London School of Economics postdoc / Chris Hemsworth stunt-double-in-waiting Magnus Resch, Larry’s List lies somewhere between an art industry LinkedIn and a mass doxing repository. And if accurate, some of the data it presents basically doubles as a mood ring for your feelings about the market’s future.
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Just under two weeks from today, Christie’s will slam a rare early Caravaggio painting onto the auction block, and the piece’s pre-sale estimate speaks to an illuminating inconsistency in the “art as asset” mythos.
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Earlier this week I was introduced to the trailer for BBC Films’ upcoming feature The Woman in Gold, a screen dramatization of Holocaust survivor Maria Altmann’s real life efforts to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s renowned portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, from Austria’s state-owned Belvedere Gallery. Altmann, Bloch-Bauer’s niece, was named as an heir to the painting in her uncle’s will, but the Nazis seized the piece–along with four other Klimts–from the family’s home in Vienna in 1938. The Third Reich later installed the portrait at the Belvedere and made the institution its formal owner through some convenient interpretations of competing legal documents.
The movie charts Altmann’s seven-year courtroom cage match against the Republic of Austria, and it’s being marketed as your classic underdog tale of truth, justice, and art’s relationship to both. For this reason, I assume The Woman in Gold climaxes with the Austrian judges’ decision to award Altmann the painting rather than with Altmann and the other heirs’ decision to sell it for $135M only a few months after it was legally returned to the family. Not exactly a snug fit with the pure-hearted ideals and grand swells of emotion featured in the trailer, but certainly not a move I’m going to criticize.
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As the digital birthday cupcake emailed to me by Tumblr this morning verifies, The Gray Market turned one today. I can’t say exactly how much time feels like it’s passed since I was frantically trying to come up with a name for the blog with only minutes to go until my brother picked me up for my flight to Art Basel Miami last December 3rd…but it’s not a year. Time is a wrecking ball.
While I paced around my apartment yesterday afternoon wondering what I should write to commemorate the anniversary, my brain jumped back to a couple of questions asked by art industry pundits during last week’s blitz of Basel Miami prep pieces. I’m paraphrasing, but the essence was something like...
“Will the global art market continue its torrid sales pace in south Florida during the week’s slate of fairs, exhibitions, and celebrity-sponsored events? Or will we see signs that the alleged bubble is finally leaking air?”
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With the 2014 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach now just a little over a week away, I’ve been thinking about how long for this world the current art fair exhibitor model really is. I’ve read and listened to so many gallerists this year lamenting the same increasingly hellish reality: that the all-in costs associated with running a booth at any fair, let alone the top tier set, are obscenely high…and yet the sales revenue those booths generate now makes up such a colossal proportion of their annual grosses that most sellers can’t afford NOT to participate in them.
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As we turn the corner into the major fall contemporary auctions this week, I wanted to take a moment to direct your attention to a flare recently sent up in the secondary market’s lingering darkness. That flare is an online conversion calculator called GAVEL–an acronym for “Generate Auction Valuation Extra Levy”–which will be helpful to anyone trying to maintain a little extra perspective in the sector during this season’s public resale bonanza.
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Like common ghosts, writers sometimes find themselves drifting back again and again to a location of unconscious relevance. You can’t easily say why this thing suddenly matters so much–you just find yourself floating around it and making mischief to attract notice. And the haunting simply rages on until the full meaning behind the object of attention is completely unearthed.
This is the situation I’ve found myself in recently regarding globalization’s effects on the art market.
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