This week, a little summer reading to tide you over while the industry lights out for Basel and yours truly lights out for a week of much-needed vacation...

As longtime readers know, the Gray Market is always ready to road-test alternative business models for contemporary artists, hoping to determine which, if any, are worth traveling. That impulse has led me to crowdfunding twice before––first as a standalone topic, then as one leg in a longer journey through the new arts philanthropy. In both cases, I came away cautiously optimistic that, for some artists, the concept could be a viable off-ramp from the Autobahn to misery that is the 21st-century gallery system (by the numbers, anyway).

But after reading Keith A. Spencer's essay "Against the Crowdfunding Economy" this week, I'm pumping the brakes a bit on my earlier opinions. Because I'm now convinced that one variant of the model is actually just a side route to the same compromised artistic destination.

This week, a collection of stories about choosing who or what matters most...

Since the turn of this century, collecting contemporary art has become both a trend and a social necessity among the world's global elites, particularly the new money most desperate to portray itself as a lasting, worthy part of the cultural status quo. Back in 2014, I began referring to this class of art buyers as COINs, or "Collectors Only In Name." Their stockpiles of cash and thirst for legitimacy in the art world have inspired major shifts in the business models of all manners of industry insiders––including artists themselves, even at the highest levels of the market.

Some of these artists' attempts to cash in on the COINs have been particularly blatant. As Georgina Adam notes in her excellent book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century, it's not a cosmic coincidence that Cai Guo-Qiang presented a 2011 body of work in Qatar that “included galloping Arabian horses… desert landscapes, robed Arabs, and a suspended camel: not themes he has explored in the rest of his work." But a few artists have conceptualized their way into the COINs' pockets much more subtly and cleverly: by creating works that send up the absurdity of the 21st-century collecting lifestyle––and that, in a telling indictment of today's art market, therefore become most appealing to the very people they're targeting.

This week, a fistful of stories about leverage, its illusion, and its consequences...

Although I've developed a near-pathological fear of making absolute statements, I feel totally confident saying this: You'll always be more popular if you tell people that things will change for the better than if you warn them about the status quo's staying power. But since most problems also can't be solved until they're fully acknowledged, let's have a head-on confrontation with the prospect of fair pay for artists commissioned by nonprofits, specifically via a recent proposal made to the New Museum by New York-based artist-advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE). Because as worthy a cause as it is, art-industry economics have built one hell of a fortress against the revolution.  

This week, packing the fuselage with art economics lessons from the macro to the micro... 

Since I devoted last week's post to an enduring art-market phenomenon, it's only right to devote this week's to a recent change in the industry's landscape (literally and figuratively). 

Last Tuesday saw the unveiling of blue-chip Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone's "Seven Magic Mountains," an installation of monumental, fluorescent-painted stone totems in Nevada's Ivanpah Valley, roughly 30 minutes south of downtown Las Vegas. The piece will remain on view at its current site until 2018. And while there's certainly truth to the press release's claim that the seven towers "mark [Rondinone's] place in the history of Land Art," it's also fair to say that they mark something of an inflection point in that history, too. 

This week, an attempt to extract the meaning from beneath the New York auctions' avalanche of noise...

It's now industry dogma that attitudes toward fine art have never been more crass or commercialized than in our current era. Visual culture is on a Hyperloop to Hell––or at least that's the party line (even if you're a massively profitable artist like Gerhard Richter). 

But as longtime readers of the blog know, I'm always probing for evidence that the doomsday mindset, and the market activity that tends to inspire it, have been around longer than we tend to realize. And in honor of the spring New York auctions this week, it felt appropriate to dig through the rubble of an alleged apocalypse at Sotheby's 43 years ago, to see whether the conventional wisdom about its impact on contemporary art holds up.