Why is art so expensive? Blake Gopnik has an superb article outlining five reasons why art defies economics:
I asked the great New York collector Agnes Gund how she would feel about her artworks if their value suddenly halved. “I wouldn’t feel they would have changed,” she said, explaining that most of her pictures are promised to museums. Then I asked how she’d feel if their value doubled instead, and her story changed. “Obviously, it’s wonderful to see the price rise,” she said, since that’s confirmation of the object’s cultural worth.
I’m convinced that most collectors spend their surplus millions on art because they have a genuine belief in its aesthetic value. “We don’t consider art an investment. We get a psychic reward—I love to come home and look at our walls,” says Eli Broad, a prominent collector from Los Angeles, taking a break from shopping with his art-loving wife at the fair in Miami. (They’d just bought some early Cindy Sherman photos, for sale at Metro Pictures for a modest $150,000.) Aesthetics are the bedrock the art market is built on. But, for want of any other reliable measure, they often get tallied in dollars. One of New York’s biggest dealers told Velthuis, the Dutch sociologist, that collectors “permanently have to explain to themselves why they spend so much money on art, sometimes up to 40 percent of their total net worth. So that they want to hear all day long that it makes sense what they do.” And the easiest way to gauge the aesthetic “sense” of an art purchase is to check out the “cents” the thing is selling for. When you’re looking for great art, you may spot it by its price tag.
December 7th, 2011 | 12:19 pm
From the linked article: At this moment, when the 1 percent has the cash to burn, buying art is less about finance than about the cultural value of money, and of art.
Joe Carter,
If I have understood your position on income inequality, it doesn’t really bother you. So why do you care that there are a relatively small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on one photo or tens of millions of dollars on a single painting? It’s their money. Why shouldn’t they be able to buy what the want with it?
It still all boils down to supply and demand. If people with huge sums of money are bidding against each other for works of art, then art prices will be high. Sure, demand can be manipulated to a certain extent, but that’s true in any marketplace. That is what a good advertising campaign does.
How should the price of de Kooning or a Rothko or a Cézanne be determined?
December 7th, 2011 | 12:49 pm
Can this mean you’re re-evaluating your previous view?
“[T]he photography branch of the Art World is comprised of clever souls. They realized that to truly shock us requires paying obscene amounts of money for work that exhibits no discernible talent.”
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/11/10/the-world%E2%80%99s-most-expensive-photograph-is-very-straight-and-slightly-overpriced/
December 7th, 2011 | 1:10 pm
David Nickol Why shouldn’t they be able to buy what the want with it?
I never said they shouldn’t. While a moral argument can be made against such conspicuous consumption, I was making it. My beef with the high prices is that, as the article notes, it is used as a marker of aesthetic judgment. As someone who thinks that there is such a thing as high culture, it irks me that we’re expected to treat these works as “serious art” just because someone paid several million dollars to impress their friends.
J.W. Cox Can this mean you’re re-evaluating your previous view?
My previous post was meant to be mostly tongue-in-cheek. (To believe that they were really setting out to shock us would be to subscribe rational motives where there really are none.)
But I think that my jest and the reasons mentioned in the article aren’t that far off.
December 8th, 2011 | 4:38 pm
My beef with the high prices is that, as the article notes, it is used as a marker of aesthetic judgment.
No, it is used as a form of social currency, which is not the same thing.
We just can’t say so out loud because we have taboos on the way social class – and the markers that signal social class – operate.
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