If you keep an eye out, practically every day brings another reminder that an artistic career is a results-based business. Rules, expectations, and consensus all too often shift based on final outcomes rather than creative merit or a sound process.
And yet the game isn't ENTIRELY Russian roulette, either. It's more like craps or blackjack: Anyone playing can make certain moves to try to tilt the odds closer to even than they would otherwise be. The question, as always, is how.
I was reminded of all of this yesterday, when I listened to Marion Maneker's latest Artelligence podcast, this time with vaunted collector (and sometimes dealer) Stavros Merjos.
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Earlier this week, DNA Info reported that New York’s City Council had approved a bill that would strengthen the community review hurdle in Gotham’s public art commission process. And ironically, this populist move risks replicating the same conditions that have been undermining visual innovation in blue chip galleries and elite art fair booths for the past several years.
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During a recent episode of Marion Maneker’s excellent (for wonks like myself, anyway) Artelligence podcast, New York Times art market columnist Scott Reyburn presented an analogy that I thought was worth publicizing and unpacking a bit.
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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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While I can’t pass a day without at least one moment of paranoia about Twitter’s long term effects on my cerebral wiring, occasionally a legitimate insight springs out of the frantic, schizophrenic way it forces me to process competing streams of information. Yesterday, the sky cracked open and revealed one of those Halley’s Comet flashes.
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For all the bile-spewing and garment-rending over a possible new art market bubble, the froth may have a silver lining, even for the most committed art purists.
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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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If you didn’t barricade yourself into an art news bunker to wait out the Art Basel Miami Beach carpet bombing last week, then you may have seen the announcement that Brooklyn’s celebrated Galapagos Art Space will be moving to Detroit in 2016. Their migration will end roughly 20 years of eclectic for-profit performances and cultural events in the borough, ranging from a weekly cabaret circus to an ongoing series of booze-friendly science lectures–as well as a variety of programs aimed at engaging with and assisting the city’s developing young artists.
According to Robert Elmes, Galapagos’s Director, the reason for the migration is simple: The rent is too damn high to stay in Dumbo, or anywhere else in New York for that matter. As he told Colin Moynihan of the New York Times, "A white-hot real estate market is burning a hole through [NYC’s] affordable cultural habitat. And it’s no longer a crisis, it’s a conclusion.”
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