On Sunday I headed to the Hammer to see Made in LA 2014, the newest incarnation of their biennial exhibition series aimed at highlighting some of the most forward-thinking and under-hyped artists working in the city. I walked away from the show more convinced than ever about the importance of a core component to building a career in the arts today: a strong, unifying narrative for one’s work.

Counterintuitively, though, my newfound conviction came from some of the included artists’ resistance to this theme rather than their adoption of it.  

Two days after I first posted about it, “Barbarians at the Auction Gates? Not to Worry”–the procedurally flawed New York Times piece on art flipping–is still lodged in my brain like a piece of shrapnel the doctors haven’t figured out how to safely remove. And after some thought, I realized that it’s because, as critical as I may have been in my initial analysis, the blind spot in the story’s framing of the phenomenon is actually even broader than the one provoked by its methodological mysteries alone. 

This past Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece by Lorne Manly and Robin Pogrebin that Ice Bucket Challenged one of the new dogmas of the contemporary art market: that a nascent tribe of collectors is flipping artwork by emerging talent at a blistering pace, fundamentally changing the way business is done in the industry. 

Titled “Barbarians at the Art Auction Gates? Not to Worry,” the story concludes that quick and frequent resales are vastly less prevalent in the market now than perceived, and that the ‘flip rates’ are broadly comparable to those in the recent past. The authors base their conclusions on two separate analyses of post-war auction results–one by a Brussels-based art advisory called Tutela Capital S.A., the other by fellow New Yorkers Beautiful Asset Advisors. 

If, like me, the excitement gathering behind the next generation of VR devices–led by the Oculus Rift–has allowed your imagination to soar to a near future where an immersive, fully interactive, photo-real museum or gallery experience is available to you anytime, anywhere, from the comfort of your own home, then let me be the first to tell you that we are at the threshold…

…of a cold storage chamber, where you should set that dream on a chilled shelf until some distant point on the time horizon. Because we’ve still got a long, long way to go before we get there. 

As dissatisfied as many spectators are with the mingling of money and fine art in the industry’s commercial sectors, the dissatisfaction tends to ramp into outrage even quicker when the conversation shifts to money and museums.

Two recent news stories–one at the Delaware Art Museum, the other at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston–have reinforced this idea yet again. But despite the Xenon floodlights aimed at the surface issues, some crucial context has largely remained in the shadows. Teasing it out, as usual, reveals both situations to be somewhat more complex and uncomfortable than they first appear. 

Anyone (like me) who has walked away from his ouija board convinced that online sales are poised to become the next great art market frontier got another booster shot in the past 24 hours, as Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina broke the story that billionaire art collector Leon Black has officially acquired online marketplace Artspace for an as-yet undisclosed price. 

Artspace qualifies as what I’ve previously termed an online middleman: an e-commerce platform that partners with existing physical galleries and dealers rather than directly with artists. I’ve been bearish on that model up to now, but Black’s involvement could eventually wrinkle the fabric enough to make me reconsider. 

There’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head for the past two weeks or so, just as I do every year at about this same time: 

If you’re a gallery, why not try to own August?

A few weeks back I ran across a short piece from the Wall Street Journal about a transfusion of venture capital into an arts-tech startup called ArtBinder. Their product is a cloud-based, image-centric, inventory management app meant to eliminate the need for gallerists to assemble and laboriously update Necronomicon-sized binders of physical print-outs for presentation purposes. Instead, ArtBinder equips them with far more options digitally through the convenience of an iPad. 

Led by Index Ventures–whose website portrays them as both a prominent VC fund and, unwittingly, an emporium of awkward press photos–investors had taken an interest in ArtBinder to the tune of $3.17M in Series A funding. And for the life of me, I couldn’t tell whether or not this was an intelligent choice.

This is a thought I’ve had on my mind for a while. Art people who hate professional sports: Bear with me for a moment. I promise this won’t get bro-y. 

Over the weekend, I was asked if I’d ever heard of a billionaire named Les Wexner, on the basis that he is allegedly one of the world’s top art collectors. I admitted that I hadn’t. But I was less curious about Wexner himself than about where this declaration about his exalted standing in the arts came from, because it’s another example in a much larger pattern I’ve been noticing.

These laurel wreaths for “top collectors” seem to be getting handed out more and more often by more and more sources as the art market expands its presence in pop culture. Most recently, ARTnews released the 2014 edition of its annual 200 Top Collectors list. However, you can find about as many other ad hoc hierarchies as you might want if you fire up your favorite search engine. Everyone from the luxury class research firm Wealth-X to Wikipedia to The Hollywood Reporter has put together power rankings of one kind or another, and for surface-level context, phrases like “one of the world’s top art collectors” get passed around in the press like a skunky joint at a college house party.