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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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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On Monday morning, the eminent New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz dipped his pen in poison and penned a searing open letter to MoMA imploring the museum to halt its controversial expansion plans. For anyone who hasn’t been following the story, those plans include the imminent demolition of the American Folk Art Museum (owned by MoMA), which would be replaced by new structures from starchitects (and modernist punctuation champions) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, most recently lauded in NYC for their redevelopment of Lincoln Center.
More details on the MoMA proposal, including images, can be found here. For the purposes of this post, I think it’s fair enough to define the new art exhibition spaces as slick glass boxes. This even includes the sculpture garden, which would actually go one step further than the enclosed structures by leaving one side completely open to West 54th Street. The intention is for passersby to be able to walk right into the sculpture garden, spontaneously and gratis, rather than paying an admission fee for access to what would traditionally be a walled-in area.
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Artnet’s Katharine Markley put together a list of 25 artists, split between Impressionist (the ones I’ve colored greenish); Modern (yellowish); and Contemporary (purplish).
Clicking through the title of this post (or the link I'll put here) will take you to an interesting (at least, to my twisted mind) post by Felix Salmon centered on a chart created via auction data from artnet. According to Salmon, his original goal was to try to find out if different big name artists’ respective values at auction differed over the same time period, and if so, by how much. What he found instead is that all of the artists for which he had data within three different cohorts (Impressionist, Modern, and Contemporary) pretty much all followed the exact same course relative to one another. In other words, when Rauschenberg’s prices climbed, so did Warhol’s; when Picasso’s prices dropped, so did Matisse’s.
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