What do you think?
Rate this book
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.
This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.
This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2008
About the author
Don Thompson
4 books11 followersDon Thompson is an economist and Emeritus Nabisco Brands Professor of Marketing and Strategy at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. He is the author of The Supermodel and the Brillo Box. He has taught at Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics, and is the author of 11 books. He writes on the economics of the art market for publications as diverse as The Times (London), Harper’s Magazine, and The Art Economist. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 306 reviews
September 12, 2019
Only yesterday, Tracey Emin's installation "My Bed" was sold at auction for £2.5 million.
Saatchi Gallery.
This book explains such phenomena. It was written for people who read about multi-million dollar prices for contemporary artworks and wonder how such eye-watering figures are reached. Most of the art discussed in the book is conceptual, but then a lot of contemporary art is conceptual.
It looks at artists like On Kawara. His did thousands of pictures of dates - literally pictures of dates - have sold at great prices - for instance in 2007 one of them sold for $1.8 million at Christies in New York.
Yvon Lambert website.
Or Felix Gonzales-Torres, whose sculpture "(Untitled) Lover Boys" made of 355 lbs of individual wrapped blue and white candies, sold for $456,000.
Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Gonzales-Torres also did another sculpture of a pile of 10,000 fortune cookies. This did not reach its reserve price at auction, but the bidding went up to $520,000. In both instances of course there were ideas behind these works. They weren't just cookies or just sweeties. But for some of us the accusation that the emperor is not wearing any clothes cannot help but float to mind.
The author is an economist who has taught marketing at both Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics. He obviously enjoys contemporary art, both as a collector and an observer, and he casts a wide net. He looks at artists, dealers, auction houses and art fairs, and he follows the funnel that sucks in newbie artists at the top, and pops the lucky ones, (the very lucky ones), out at the bottom, as huge iconic branded figures like Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky or David Hockney. We follow the artists' journey - which is mostly one of patronage, from when they leave art school to when they reach the big time, and each step of the way is analysed.
Points of interest I noted from the book....
1) I realised how woefully ignorant I was when it comes to contemporary art. The book mentioned many successful artists with whom I was unfamiliar, and it was good to google their work, and get an idea of what they were doing.
2) It really alerted me to the power of branding, of making oneself into a megga celebrity whose casual signature - let alone artworks - would be treasured for posterity.
3) It gave me a taste of how the super rich wheel and deal. I'm a pore pore woman from sleepy middle England, and I found this eye-opening stuff. These multi-millionaires can be surprisingly insecure though, often relying on the taste of their dealers to tell them what they need to buy. Sometimes they even buy blind, without actually seeing the artwork.
4) Snobbery and status. This would seem to be the underlying impulse for a lot of people buying expensive art. To be seen to have a Damian Hirst on one's wall is big time kudos. Think of owning a Gucci handbag, but bigger, brighter, bolder and sexier.
I have done little to describe the full compass of this book - it really is wonderfully researched and detailed, whilst still being hugely fun and readable. Its ultimate message ? Buy the art you like, and enjoy it. The likelihood of it being a good investment is small. The author says that eight out of ten works purchased directly from an artist, and half the works purchased at auction, will never again re-sell at their purchase price. Even Charles Saatchi falls over on a regular basis. So just go for things that give you pleasure.
Absolutely fascinating and highly recommended.
----------------------------------
In tandem with reading this book, I listened again to Grayson Perry's fantastic series of Reith Lectures on contemporary art. If Thompson explains the backstage mechanics of today's art market, then Perry explains the heart, creativity and excitement of modern art and artists. Both compliment one another beautifully.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtehJ3...
And here is a write up I have just found concerning the video "What Makes Art Valuable", by the journalist Alastair Sooke. It shines a light on another odd quirk in this bizarre world.
"One of the more intriguing phenomena touched on in the film is the concept of provenance, which is the added value a piece of art has above and beyond what it otherwise would be worth due to the prestige and/or wealth of its previous owners. A painting previously owned by David Rockefeller.......can and does fetch considerably more than a comparable piece without the same ownership track record."
Saatchi Gallery.
This book explains such phenomena. It was written for people who read about multi-million dollar prices for contemporary artworks and wonder how such eye-watering figures are reached. Most of the art discussed in the book is conceptual, but then a lot of contemporary art is conceptual.
It looks at artists like On Kawara. His did thousands of pictures of dates - literally pictures of dates - have sold at great prices - for instance in 2007 one of them sold for $1.8 million at Christies in New York.
Yvon Lambert website.
Or Felix Gonzales-Torres, whose sculpture "(Untitled) Lover Boys" made of 355 lbs of individual wrapped blue and white candies, sold for $456,000.
Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Gonzales-Torres also did another sculpture of a pile of 10,000 fortune cookies. This did not reach its reserve price at auction, but the bidding went up to $520,000. In both instances of course there were ideas behind these works. They weren't just cookies or just sweeties. But for some of us the accusation that the emperor is not wearing any clothes cannot help but float to mind.
The author is an economist who has taught marketing at both Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics. He obviously enjoys contemporary art, both as a collector and an observer, and he casts a wide net. He looks at artists, dealers, auction houses and art fairs, and he follows the funnel that sucks in newbie artists at the top, and pops the lucky ones, (the very lucky ones), out at the bottom, as huge iconic branded figures like Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky or David Hockney. We follow the artists' journey - which is mostly one of patronage, from when they leave art school to when they reach the big time, and each step of the way is analysed.
Points of interest I noted from the book....
1) I realised how woefully ignorant I was when it comes to contemporary art. The book mentioned many successful artists with whom I was unfamiliar, and it was good to google their work, and get an idea of what they were doing.
2) It really alerted me to the power of branding, of making oneself into a megga celebrity whose casual signature - let alone artworks - would be treasured for posterity.
3) It gave me a taste of how the super rich wheel and deal. I'm a pore pore woman from sleepy middle England, and I found this eye-opening stuff. These multi-millionaires can be surprisingly insecure though, often relying on the taste of their dealers to tell them what they need to buy. Sometimes they even buy blind, without actually seeing the artwork.
4) Snobbery and status. This would seem to be the underlying impulse for a lot of people buying expensive art. To be seen to have a Damian Hirst on one's wall is big time kudos. Think of owning a Gucci handbag, but bigger, brighter, bolder and sexier.
I have done little to describe the full compass of this book - it really is wonderfully researched and detailed, whilst still being hugely fun and readable. Its ultimate message ? Buy the art you like, and enjoy it. The likelihood of it being a good investment is small. The author says that eight out of ten works purchased directly from an artist, and half the works purchased at auction, will never again re-sell at their purchase price. Even Charles Saatchi falls over on a regular basis. So just go for things that give you pleasure.
Absolutely fascinating and highly recommended.
----------------------------------
In tandem with reading this book, I listened again to Grayson Perry's fantastic series of Reith Lectures on contemporary art. If Thompson explains the backstage mechanics of today's art market, then Perry explains the heart, creativity and excitement of modern art and artists. Both compliment one another beautifully.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtehJ3...
And here is a write up I have just found concerning the video "What Makes Art Valuable", by the journalist Alastair Sooke. It shines a light on another odd quirk in this bizarre world.
"One of the more intriguing phenomena touched on in the film is the concept of provenance, which is the added value a piece of art has above and beyond what it otherwise would be worth due to the prestige and/or wealth of its previous owners. A painting previously owned by David Rockefeller.......can and does fetch considerably more than a comparable piece without the same ownership track record."
December 7, 2023
کتاب خیلی دوست داشتنی و پربار و حرفی برای گفتن داشت واقعا؛کتاب کلا درباره اقتصاد دنیای هنر هست، درباره بازاریابی آثار هنری، درباره حراجی ها گالری ها دلالان و واسطه گرای هنر و این که چه دلایلی باعث میشه یه اثر هنری فیمتش بالاتر و بالاتر بره و ارزشش بیشتر بشه و این که آیا همهی زمان هایی که این آوار قیمتشون بیشتر میشه به دلیل ارزش خود آثار هست یا به دلیل چیزای دیگه مثل دلالان و واسطه ها. توی کتاب میبینید که چقدر موارد غیرقانونی در دنیای هنر وجود داره و چقدر ممکنه سوءاستفاده بشه و قیمتش بیشتر شه.
دنیای هنر و بازار هنر دو چیز متفاوتاند. بازار همیشه باید نسبت به دنیای هنر اولویت دوم باشد. در بیشتر کشورها مسئله به همین شکل است. اما در طول 25 سال گذشته، در آمریکای شمالی و اروپا، مسئله بر عکس شده است. وقتی عموم مردم یا رسانهها در مورد دنیای هنر صحبت میکنند، تمرکز آنها معمولاً روی مبالغ زیادی است که برای یک اثر هنری در جدیدترین حراجی صرف شده است.
دنیای هنر و بازار هنر دو چیز متفاوتاند. بازار همیشه باید نسبت به دنیای هنر اولویت دوم باشد. در بیشتر کشورها مسئله به همین شکل است. اما در طول 25 سال گذشته، در آمریکای شمالی و اروپا، مسئله بر عکس شده است. وقتی عموم مردم یا رسانهها در مورد دنیای هنر صحبت میکنند، تمرکز آنها معمولاً روی مبالغ زیادی است که برای یک اثر هنری در جدیدترین حراجی صرف شده است.
May 17, 2011
The art business seems to me like this weird cross-section of fashion and property. I read this book for a class that I loved with this really great professor who has the quietest, most monotone voice of any professor I’ve had. It was a lovely class, though. I played Bejeweled 3 through most of the class sessions so that I wouldn’t space off from what the professor was saying, and it worked. He is one of those professors who has been doing this for so long that it seems almost boring to him, except you can tell he loves it so much. He’s great. Anyway, I’m not in love with this book, but it does give a helpful overview of the art business, if that's something that interests you.
It makes me kind of sad to discuss art in this way, I guess, because, despite whatever the harsh reality is, I do still think of it as sacred or religious in some way. Thompson talks a lot about Damien Hirst (as you can tell from the title) and other branded artists. The art business sucks because, as with a lot of other creative ways to make money (I’d think), the actual artists aren’t really the ones making money. For example, say an artist makes a painting (or a pile of gumdrops, or whatever we’re calling art at the time), and sells it on this cool website, artquest.com, that the book talks a little about. So, that artist sells the painting, or pile of gumdrops, for, like $1,000, which is a pretty good price, I’d think, if you’re making money from something you love. Then, it turns out that the pile of gumdrops is total genius and changes the way artist work for all eternity, so the dude who bought it for $1,000 now sells it for $12 million. According to this book, that’s pretty typical in the art business. So, the people who know what art to buy are the one’s making the money, not the artists.
In Europe, they’ve tried to counteract this somewhat by making it law that every time art gets sold, the artist gets a cut. That’s nice, except it really only benefits artists who are already famous. Also, the cut the artist gets isn’t very much money. It’s not often that art changes hands frequently, especially if the artist is not branded, so the law really only increases the wealth (very slightly) of older artists. As a rule, it doesn’t help younger ones. It’s pretty rare that art sells for millions of dollars, and it seems like the high prices have more to do with marketing than with the value the art community places on the work.
The parallels to literature are not lost on me. Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is what I would imagine to be a sort of A Million Little Pieces of art.
It’s not uncool. It’s definitely cool. But its coolness lies more in its shock value than its technique. I probably shouldn’t talk, being one of the only people in the universe to have not read A Million Little Pieces when Oprah said to, or when she said not to. I don’t hear the book discussed for its writing, though, I hear it discussed for its content. The shark is similar, I think. It is, as they say, conceptual. Anyway, both artists made a shit-ton of money for their concepts where artists relying on technique can fail in the business of it all.
I guess the lesson here is that you get money if you understand money, not necessarily if you do things that are socially valuable. It’s kind of cynical, but probably true.
It makes me kind of sad to discuss art in this way, I guess, because, despite whatever the harsh reality is, I do still think of it as sacred or religious in some way. Thompson talks a lot about Damien Hirst (as you can tell from the title) and other branded artists. The art business sucks because, as with a lot of other creative ways to make money (I’d think), the actual artists aren’t really the ones making money. For example, say an artist makes a painting (or a pile of gumdrops, or whatever we’re calling art at the time), and sells it on this cool website, artquest.com, that the book talks a little about. So, that artist sells the painting, or pile of gumdrops, for, like $1,000, which is a pretty good price, I’d think, if you’re making money from something you love. Then, it turns out that the pile of gumdrops is total genius and changes the way artist work for all eternity, so the dude who bought it for $1,000 now sells it for $12 million. According to this book, that’s pretty typical in the art business. So, the people who know what art to buy are the one’s making the money, not the artists.
In Europe, they’ve tried to counteract this somewhat by making it law that every time art gets sold, the artist gets a cut. That’s nice, except it really only benefits artists who are already famous. Also, the cut the artist gets isn’t very much money. It’s not often that art changes hands frequently, especially if the artist is not branded, so the law really only increases the wealth (very slightly) of older artists. As a rule, it doesn’t help younger ones. It’s pretty rare that art sells for millions of dollars, and it seems like the high prices have more to do with marketing than with the value the art community places on the work.
The parallels to literature are not lost on me. Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is what I would imagine to be a sort of A Million Little Pieces of art.
It’s not uncool. It’s definitely cool. But its coolness lies more in its shock value than its technique. I probably shouldn’t talk, being one of the only people in the universe to have not read A Million Little Pieces when Oprah said to, or when she said not to. I don’t hear the book discussed for its writing, though, I hear it discussed for its content. The shark is similar, I think. It is, as they say, conceptual. Anyway, both artists made a shit-ton of money for their concepts where artists relying on technique can fail in the business of it all.
I guess the lesson here is that you get money if you understand money, not necessarily if you do things that are socially valuable. It’s kind of cynical, but probably true.
August 7, 2019
پادشاه لخت است
شاید باور کردن اینکه اثری با مدفوع فیل را به عنوان اثر هنری تماشا کنید و حتی برای آن پول پرداخت کنید دشوار باشد ولی باید برخلاف باور همگانی بگویم چنین آثاری در دنیا هنر معاصر خلق میشوند و برای آنها هزینههای سنگین نیز پرداخت میشود.
برای مثال «کریس اوفیلی» نقاشی «افرودیتزیا» را به جامعه جاتنورشناسی انگلستان اهدا کرد؛ چون باغ وحش لندن مقدار زیادی از مدفوع مورد نیاز این هنرمند! را از سه فیل موجود در این باغ وحش تامین میکرد تا بتواند آثارش را خلق کند. این انجمن بلافاصله نقاشی را برای فروش به یک حراجی سپردند و اثر با قیمت ۱۰۵ هزار دلار فروش رفت. این در حالی است که اگر آنها چهار سال این نقاشی را نگهداری میکردند میتوانستند آن را به قیمت یک میلیون دلار بفروشند (کاری که خریدار کرد).
یا بیایید با هم یک اثر هنری دیگر را مرور کنیم. در سال ۲۰۰۳ حراج کریستیز اثری بدون عنوان مشهور به «untitled fortune cookie corner» از «فلیکس گونزالز» را ارائه کرد. اثر شامل دههزار طالعبینی بود. البته هنرمند تعداد آنها را «بینهایت» توصیف کرده بود. این شیرینیها میبایست در یک کنج تلنبار میشدند و ابعاد اثر در جاهای مختلف متفاوت بود. برآورد قیمت اثر بین ۶۰۰ تا ۸۰۰ هزار دلار بود، این اثر فروش نرفت ولی یکی از پیشنهادهای خرید ۵۲۰ هزار دلار بود.
حال این را بگذارید کنار یک کُت چرم که گوشهای از یک گالری آویزان شده و به عنوان یک اثر هنر معاصر به شما معرفی میشود. حتی میتوان اثر «زمستان لالایی» متعلق به دیمن هرست را نام برد، این مجسمه در واقع یک قفسه دارو است که از انواع قرصها پر شده و هدف نمایش آنها این است که دارو عُمر را افزایش میدهد در حالی که مرگ اجتناب ناپذیر است. این اثر با قیمت ۷ میلیون ۴۰۰ هزار دلار فروش رفت.
این روایتها بخشهایی از کتاب ۴۴۰ صفحهای «کوسه شکم پر ۱۲ میلیون دلاری» است که دُن تامپسون آن را نوشته و اشکان زهرایی آن را به فارسی برگردانده و نشر بیدگل آن را منتشر کرده است. اثری که آن را میتوان تصویر بیروتوش غرب نامید. روایتی که تامپسون سالها در حراجیها و گالریها رفت و آمد کرده و با فروشندگان، دلالها و مجموعهداران آثار هنری نشست و برخاست کرده تا بتواند آن را گردآوری کند. اثری که درباره اقتصاد سردرگم هنر معاصر است که در بخشهایی سوالات بسیاری مطرح میکند و در پی یافتن پاسخ مثالهایی طرح میکند تا بتواند در یافتن پاسخ مسیر را هموار کند.
هنر معاصر مفهومی که تعریف دقیقی از آن وجود ندارد و همانطور که دیدید مثالهایی از کتاب نقل شد تا متوجه شویم که تعریف درستی از این رده و دوره هنری وجود ندارد. نکته جالب این بود که مخاطبان نیز در مواجهه با این هنر سردرگم هستند و تکلیف خود را در قبال یک کوه از شکلات نمیدانند و تنها سعی میکنند با سکوت، آتش سردرگمی خود را سرد کنند. «همانطور که در نمایشگاههای هنر معاصر معمول است، به نظر نمیرسید هیچکس حاضر باشد اعتراف کند که آنچه را میدید، دوست نمیداشت و نمیفهمید. در نهایت مردم از درها بیرون میرفتند، به آرامی صحبت میکردند و تجربه خود را هضم میکردند؛ نه خوششان آمده بود و تکان خورده بودند.»
چیزی که در این کتاب توجه هر خوانندهای را به خود جلب خواهد کرد ابتذال و پوچی هنر معاصر در غرب است. ابتذالی که غرب به عنوان هنر با الفاظ و القاب رنگارنگ به مخاطب قالب میکند و حتی اجازه درک و دریافت دقیق و درست را نیز از او میگیرد.
در دنیای هنر معاصر تنها تعیین کننده اصلی «پول» است. ثروت داشته باش، صاحب اثری هنری میشوی، حتی اگر نتوانی خودت را قانع کنی که با اثری هنری سر و کار داری! در واقع کافی است یک مجموعهدار یا صاحب سرمایه دست روی یک اثر هنری بگذارد آنوقت است که خالق آن تبدیل به یکی از چهرههای مطرح عالم هنر میشود و قیمتش روز به روز بالا میرود و داشتن آثارش در بین علاقهمندان به این دوره هنری مایه فخرفروشی میشود.
هرقدر جلوتر میرویم متوجه میشویم حتی برای تصاحب یک اثر هنری پول هم تعیین کننده نیست و عوامل دیگری نیز در این اتفاق نقش دارند. «وقتی پای یک هنرمند «داغ» در میان است، قیمتگذاری دشوارتر میشود. ممکن است یک مجموعهدار که آثار چنین هنرمندی را میخواهد و قدرت خرید آنها را نیز دارد، نتواند به آنها دست یابد، چون مجبور است در یک فهرست انتظار طولانی بماند، که در آن موزهها، مجموعهداران مهم و مشتریان درجه یک گالری، اولویت بالاتری دارند. مجموعهداران تازهکار مجبور به طی کردن فرایندی طولانیاند تا بتوانند در فهرست انتظار یک هنرمند خاص قرار داده شوند. گالری از این افراد رزومه، توضیحی در مورد اینکه میخواهند با آثار چه کنند و قول این را که مدت یک سال حوصله به خرج بدهند تا نوبت به آنها برسد، میخواهد. اینکه خریدار حاضر باشد کل مبلغ را بدون تخفیف و یکجا پرداخت کند، اهمیت زیادی ندارد؛ به هر حال ممکن است در نهایت برای او تخفیف در نظر گرفته شود. وقتی خانمی قصد خرید یکی کیف دستی سری «بیرکین» (این کیفها نام خود را از بازیگر مشهور «جِین بیرکین» گرفتهاند قیمتی بین ۴۸۰۰ تا ۱۰۰ هزار پوند داشته و خریدار ممکن است برای خرید آنها مجبور به انتظاری شش ساله شود) هرمس را دارد بسیار محتمل است که فروشنده از او در مورد میهمانیها یا مراسمی که به آنها میرود سوال کند و جای او در فهرست انتظار را بر همین اساس تعیین نماید.»
پس دیدید که عبارت «هنر معاصر» تا چه اندازه عبارت و لقبی گَل و گشاد است و هرچیزی را میتوان به عنوان هنر معاصر به مخاطب قالب کرد. موارد بسیاری که گفتن آنها شرمآور است ولی به عنوان یک اثر هنری به فروش میروند و دلالها و مجموعهدارها برای آنها سر و دست میشکنند.
کتاب «کوسه شکم پر ۱۲ میلیون دلاری» را باید به قصه «لباس پادشاه» تشبیه کرد که حقیقت غرب را عریان و بیپرده به خواننده نشان میدهد. لباسی که بر قامت ابتذال غربی پوشانده شده و هنرمندانه آن را به خواننده نشان میدهد و فریاد میزند که پادشاه لخت است!
این را باید اضافه کنید به اختلاف طبقاتی حاکم بر جوامع، در همین کتاب مولف مینویسد: «در نیویورک به شوخی گفته میشود وظیفه حمل قطعهها [آثار هنری] به عهده تنها سیاهپوست داخل سالن است در لندن نیز قطعهها توسط تنها فرد فقیر داخل سالن حمل میشوند» که این نشاندهنده جو حاکم بر مجامع هنری و حراجها است که رنگینپوستها و فقرا ابزاری برای شوخی و تفریح بهشمار میروند. یک هنرمند اسپانیایی-مکزیکی به موزهای در وین پیشنهاد میکند کارمندان موزه (هم مرد و هم زن) به صف، پشت سرهم، براساس میزان درآمد بایستند و تا کمر لخت شوند، تا بازدیدکنندگان ببینند که تغییر رنگ پوست از روشن (کارمندان اجرایی) به تیره (نگهبانان) چگونه بر میزان درآمد تاثیر میگذارد. همانطور که میبینید در حالی تراکنش حراجیها سر به فلک میزند که رنگینپوستها از پایینترین سطح دستمزد در گالریها و حراجیها برخوردارند.
مولف با رفتن سراغ اقتصاد حاکم بر بازار هنر معاصر تلاش کرده تا تصویری بیروتوش به خواننده نشان دهد و پوچی و توخالی بودن هنر غربی را به خواننده نشان دهد، اتفاقی که حالا توجه پولهای نفتی اعراب حاشیه خلیج فارس را به خودجلب کرده و سرمایههای کلانی را برای تصاحب آثار هنری روانه این بازار کرده است.
شاید باور کردن اینکه اثری با مدفوع فیل را به عنوان اثر هنری تماشا کنید و حتی برای آن پول پرداخت کنید دشوار باشد ولی باید برخلاف باور همگانی بگویم چنین آثاری در دنیا هنر معاصر خلق میشوند و برای آنها هزینههای سنگین نیز پرداخت میشود.
برای مثال «کریس اوفیلی» نقاشی «افرودیتزیا» را به جامعه جاتنورشناسی انگلستان اهدا کرد؛ چون باغ وحش لندن مقدار زیادی از مدفوع مورد نیاز این هنرمند! را از سه فیل موجود در این باغ وحش تامین میکرد تا بتواند آثارش را خلق کند. این انجمن بلافاصله نقاشی را برای فروش به یک حراجی سپردند و اثر با قیمت ۱۰۵ هزار دلار فروش رفت. این در حالی است که اگر آنها چهار سال این نقاشی را نگهداری میکردند میتوانستند آن را به قیمت یک میلیون دلار بفروشند (کاری که خریدار کرد).
یا بیایید با هم یک اثر هنری دیگر را مرور کنیم. در سال ۲۰۰۳ حراج کریستیز اثری بدون عنوان مشهور به «untitled fortune cookie corner» از «فلیکس گونزالز» را ارائه کرد. اثر شامل دههزار طالعبینی بود. البته هنرمند تعداد آنها را «بینهایت» توصیف کرده بود. این شیرینیها میبایست در یک کنج تلنبار میشدند و ابعاد اثر در جاهای مختلف متفاوت بود. برآورد قیمت اثر بین ۶۰۰ تا ۸۰۰ هزار دلار بود، این اثر فروش نرفت ولی یکی از پیشنهادهای خرید ۵۲۰ هزار دلار بود.
حال این را بگذارید کنار یک کُت چرم که گوشهای از یک گالری آویزان شده و به عنوان یک اثر هنر معاصر به شما معرفی میشود. حتی میتوان اثر «زمستان لالایی» متعلق به دیمن هرست را نام برد، این مجسمه در واقع یک قفسه دارو است که از انواع قرصها پر شده و هدف نمایش آنها این است که دارو عُمر را افزایش میدهد در حالی که مرگ اجتناب ناپذیر است. این اثر با قیمت ۷ میلیون ۴۰۰ هزار دلار فروش رفت.
این روایتها بخشهایی از کتاب ۴۴۰ صفحهای «کوسه شکم پر ۱۲ میلیون دلاری» است که دُن تامپسون آن را نوشته و اشکان زهرایی آن را به فارسی برگردانده و نشر بیدگل آن را منتشر کرده است. اثری که آن را میتوان تصویر بیروتوش غرب نامید. روایتی که تامپسون سالها در حراجیها و گالریها رفت و آمد کرده و با فروشندگان، دلالها و مجموعهداران آثار هنری نشست و برخاست کرده تا بتواند آن را گردآوری کند. اثری که درباره اقتصاد سردرگم هنر معاصر است که در بخشهایی سوالات بسیاری مطرح میکند و در پی یافتن پاسخ مثالهایی طرح میکند تا بتواند در یافتن پاسخ مسیر را هموار کند.
هنر معاصر مفهومی که تعریف دقیقی از آن وجود ندارد و همانطور که دیدید مثالهایی از کتاب نقل شد تا متوجه شویم که تعریف درستی از این رده و دوره هنری وجود ندارد. نکته جالب این بود که مخاطبان نیز در مواجهه با این هنر سردرگم هستند و تکلیف خود را در قبال یک کوه از شکلات نمیدانند و تنها سعی میکنند با سکوت، آتش سردرگمی خود را سرد کنند. «همانطور که در نمایشگاههای هنر معاصر معمول است، به نظر نمیرسید هیچکس حاضر باشد اعتراف کند که آنچه را میدید، دوست نمیداشت و نمیفهمید. در نهایت مردم از درها بیرون میرفتند، به آرامی صحبت میکردند و تجربه خود را هضم میکردند؛ نه خوششان آمده بود و تکان خورده بودند.»
چیزی که در این کتاب توجه هر خوانندهای را به خود جلب خواهد کرد ابتذال و پوچی هنر معاصر در غرب است. ابتذالی که غرب به عنوان هنر با الفاظ و القاب رنگارنگ به مخاطب قالب میکند و حتی اجازه درک و دریافت دقیق و درست را نیز از او میگیرد.
در دنیای هنر معاصر تنها تعیین کننده اصلی «پول» است. ثروت داشته باش، صاحب اثری هنری میشوی، حتی اگر نتوانی خودت را قانع کنی که با اثری هنری سر و کار داری! در واقع کافی است یک مجموعهدار یا صاحب سرمایه دست روی یک اثر هنری بگذارد آنوقت است که خالق آن تبدیل به یکی از چهرههای مطرح عالم هنر میشود و قیمتش روز به روز بالا میرود و داشتن آثارش در بین علاقهمندان به این دوره هنری مایه فخرفروشی میشود.
هرقدر جلوتر میرویم متوجه میشویم حتی برای تصاحب یک اثر هنری پول هم تعیین کننده نیست و عوامل دیگری نیز در این اتفاق نقش دارند. «وقتی پای یک هنرمند «داغ» در میان است، قیمتگذاری دشوارتر میشود. ممکن است یک مجموعهدار که آثار چنین هنرمندی را میخواهد و قدرت خرید آنها را نیز دارد، نتواند به آنها دست یابد، چون مجبور است در یک فهرست انتظار طولانی بماند، که در آن موزهها، مجموعهداران مهم و مشتریان درجه یک گالری، اولویت بالاتری دارند. مجموعهداران تازهکار مجبور به طی کردن فرایندی طولانیاند تا بتوانند در فهرست انتظار یک هنرمند خاص قرار داده شوند. گالری از این افراد رزومه، توضیحی در مورد اینکه میخواهند با آثار چه کنند و قول این را که مدت یک سال حوصله به خرج بدهند تا نوبت به آنها برسد، میخواهد. اینکه خریدار حاضر باشد کل مبلغ را بدون تخفیف و یکجا پرداخت کند، اهمیت زیادی ندارد؛ به هر حال ممکن است در نهایت برای او تخفیف در نظر گرفته شود. وقتی خانمی قصد خرید یکی کیف دستی سری «بیرکین» (این کیفها نام خود را از بازیگر مشهور «جِین بیرکین» گرفتهاند قیمتی بین ۴۸۰۰ تا ۱۰۰ هزار پوند داشته و خریدار ممکن است برای خرید آنها مجبور به انتظاری شش ساله شود) هرمس را دارد بسیار محتمل است که فروشنده از او در مورد میهمانیها یا مراسمی که به آنها میرود سوال کند و جای او در فهرست انتظار را بر همین اساس تعیین نماید.»
پس دیدید که عبارت «هنر معاصر» تا چه اندازه عبارت و لقبی گَل و گشاد است و هرچیزی را میتوان به عنوان هنر معاصر به مخاطب قالب کرد. موارد بسیاری که گفتن آنها شرمآور است ولی به عنوان یک اثر هنری به فروش میروند و دلالها و مجموعهدارها برای آنها سر و دست میشکنند.
کتاب «کوسه شکم پر ۱۲ میلیون دلاری» را باید به قصه «لباس پادشاه» تشبیه کرد که حقیقت غرب را عریان و بیپرده به خواننده نشان میدهد. لباسی که بر قامت ابتذال غربی پوشانده شده و هنرمندانه آن را به خواننده نشان میدهد و فریاد میزند که پادشاه لخت است!
این را باید اضافه کنید به اختلاف طبقاتی حاکم بر جوامع، در همین کتاب مولف مینویسد: «در نیویورک به شوخی گفته میشود وظیفه حمل قطعهها [آثار هنری] به عهده تنها سیاهپوست داخل سالن است در لندن نیز قطعهها توسط تنها فرد فقیر داخل سالن حمل میشوند» که این نشاندهنده جو حاکم بر مجامع هنری و حراجها است که رنگینپوستها و فقرا ابزاری برای شوخی و تفریح بهشمار میروند. یک هنرمند اسپانیایی-مکزیکی به موزهای در وین پیشنهاد میکند کارمندان موزه (هم مرد و هم زن) به صف، پشت سرهم، براساس میزان درآمد بایستند و تا کمر لخت شوند، تا بازدیدکنندگان ببینند که تغییر رنگ پوست از روشن (کارمندان اجرایی) به تیره (نگهبانان) چگونه بر میزان درآمد تاثیر میگذارد. همانطور که میبینید در حالی تراکنش حراجیها سر به فلک میزند که رنگینپوستها از پایینترین سطح دستمزد در گالریها و حراجیها برخوردارند.
مولف با رفتن سراغ اقتصاد حاکم بر بازار هنر معاصر تلاش کرده تا تصویری بیروتوش به خواننده نشان دهد و پوچی و توخالی بودن هنر غربی را به خواننده نشان دهد، اتفاقی که حالا توجه پولهای نفتی اعراب حاشیه خلیج فارس را به خودجلب کرده و سرمایههای کلانی را برای تصاحب آثار هنری روانه این بازار کرده است.
July 20, 2012
Disclaimer, cause I might as well just get it out of the way: If contemporary art makes your blood boil, your hopes for western civilization sputter, or gag reflex engage, this is not the book for you. If you’re in this group, it might be better to just go on your merry way and pretend you never heard of Chris Ofili or Damien Hirsch or Tracy Emin or Charles Saatchi.
None of which is to say that you have to like contemporary art to read this book. Thompson isn’t particularly interested in getting your dander up with an endless list of shock art (though he does describe some shocking works, some so because they’re tasteless, some because they’re, well, shocking). He’s not interested in the what of contemporary art—he’s interested in the how of the contemporary art market, and he even dabbles in the why. While the book didn’t offer any answers about the importance or meaning of any particular piece of art (and I was kinda hoping it would), it is an enjoyable, informative, often eyebrow raising tour of the high-end market for contemporary art.
For my part, the book caught my eye because of the titular shark, which I saw while it was on display at the Met. I’ve always liked sharks and enjoyed being able to examine one up close, but it says something that I’d never bothered thinking about its meaning (it’s a symbol that unifies the ideas of life and death and challenges a gallery-goer’s disinclination to honesty consider mortality… or something like that) until I read the present book. I followed up on the book because I was curious. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like contemporary art, but I was willing to give it a shot. It helped that Thompson is a fan of contemporary art (and so wouldn’t spend 200 pages bashing it) that and has a background in economics, a decidedly non-artsy field (if you’ve ever read art history books or Sotheby’s catalogues you’ll realize that the writing is mostly about keeping idiots who have to ask why a canvas painted uniformly blue has a different price than a canvas painted uniformly white (ie, me) out of the debate).
I wanted someone who’d talk about CA in a sane, reasonable way, and while Thompson isn’t completely devoid of reactions to the works, any deviations from his usually unbiased tone work in his favor (you can practically hear hear his tendons strain as he discusses On Kawara’s day paintings: “Consider the attraction of a work by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, whose Today series involves painting a date on canvas… the work Nov. 8, 1989 (just those letters and numerals, in block white against a black background)… sold for £310,000… There is no rarity factor… there are more than two thousand Kawara day paintings in existence… One dealer told me that so long as collectors will pay high auction prices for Kawara’s day paintings, there is hope for everyone.” (14). (Whether the dealer means there is hope for dealers or artists is unclear; there are plenty of instances in which Thompson lets his enthusiasm for, uh, nontraditional works shine through; Rothko’s White center (Yellow, Pink and Lavendar on Rose) is “spectacular” 21).
Thompson isn’t trying to explain anything about art; he’s just trying to sketch a picture of how the market works. Along the way he touches on some pretty serious issues involving art (consider, for one, that while most collectors are super rich and are perhaps blowing so much money on weird shit because they’ve got money to burn, some museums are publicly funded, a situation that is rife with conflicts of interest when artists and dealers are all still living and perfectly willing and able to game the system). And Thompson succeeds, reporting some amazing facts, interesting observations, and stimulating arguments along the way:
1) Having bought Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Japanese collector Ryoei Saito wanted it to be cremated with his body.
2) Fans of Traditional Art Have Only Themselves to Blame for the Rise of Contemporary Art
Think of it this way: there are a limited number of paintings and sculptures by da Vinci, Michelangelo, JMW Turner, and all the rest, and most of them have been bought up by museums. And even of the famous works, how many can you name from each artist? One? Two? Five? Even if you can name ten from each artist, there are well more than ten museums in the world, and who’s gonna want the Michelangelo’s eleventh most well known painting, assuming it is available and assuming a museum could afford it?
The reality is that every museum needs an anchor for its collection, a piece that people will come to see whenever they’re in New York or LA or Berlin or Dubai. But as the supply of old art is fixed, and as the Louvre ain’t selling the Mona Lisa any time soon, all those museums are stuck. Contemporary art can fill the gap.
3) Supply and Demand Explain the Market, Except When They Don’t
The supply of Old Masters is practically nonexistent, which explains why a museum is willing to look to other periods. But supply and demand go out the window with contemporary art. If an artist is hot, representation in multiple galleries helps build buzz. Greater supply feeds greater demand and higher prices; it helps stimulate the herd mentality.
4) There’s a Good Reason Why Collectors and Dealers Look for Outrageous Art
Thompson uses the genius example of a BlackBerry to explain the appeal of “disruptive products.” The markets for computers and cell phones were relatively stable. Rather than compete with established players in either, Research in Motion introduced a new product that created a new sector that it could dominate because it was the first player in that market.
The same thing goes on in art. Everything is stable, and smaller dealers and new artists find space in the sun by inventing new segments of the art world and upsetting the apple cart.
4) If That Makes the Art World Sound a Little Business-y, Or Even Corporate, That’s Because It Is and Always Has Been. Kinda.
It’s no coincidence that Charles Saatchi, one of the world’s most recognized art dealers, built his fortune in advertising. He’s a master at branding himself and his artists, in addition to exploiting the brands of auction houses like Sotheby’s.
His reputation helps him because so many art collectors, the kind of people who spend so much of their time making insane amounts of money that they can afford to drop $12 mill on a poorly taxidermied shark, don’t have the time to become experts on contemporary art. That’s not to say that one can’t become such an expert, or that these folks couldn’t become such experts if they had the time too—merely that they have so much money they are willing to pay dealers like Saatchi a premium so that they don’t need to spend precious time examining what they are buying. (if that sounds absurd to you, think whether you’ve ever spent $6 on a birthday card from a cute, trendy bookshop, or $3 on a drip coffee from Starbucks). And the role of the art dealer has been around for awhile. Gauguin dealt art (and stocks) until the the market crash of 1882 dried up the market for both and he had to go back to painting to make money (!).
Saatchi is a branded dealer, but a few artists managed to brand themselves as well. You can be reasonably sure that Jeff Koons or Damien Hirsch could sell a work sight unseen just on the strength of their name—people think the works will accrue value.
Some museums are getting in on the branding and marketing trend; the Guggenheim has lent its name and some of its artwork to other Guggenheims, chiefly the Frank Gehry monsterwork in Bilbao, Spain. Thompson leaves it to us to decide is having a museum function like a business is a good thing. I have the gut feeling it isn’t, and I think Thompson might agree with me. There are too many conflicts of interest.
But if dealing an art can be a great business, collecting art sure isn’t. One of the most eye-opening sections of the book is on art as investment. In the 80s the Dutch government supported Dutch artists by buying their artwork at three times the rate that the private sector paid for it. No one seems to remember the names of any Dutch artists from the 80s, and when the government resold the paintings they took an 80% loss (which means that for every 100 they spent they got 20 cents back. A private buyer would have spent 33 cents on the same work and gotten 20 cents back—not exactly good, but not quite as bad). Nevertheless, some intrepid mutual fund managers have created art-based mutual funds, and the returns always trail those of the market at large (perhaps because the market for high end art is made up of people who make their money off the stock market to begin with). Even some of the most eye-popping numbers (so and so bought the piece in 1950 for $40,000… now it is $50 million!) don’t represent good appreciation rates—and that is for the one-in-a-million piece that is an absolute masterwork fifty years after the initial investment.
5) There’s a Dodgy Side to Art Dealing
A dealer named Ely Sakhai attempted to pass of a forged copy of Gauguin’s Vase des Fleurs to a Japanese collector even as he tried to sell the original through Christie’s; he was caught when the Japanese buyer tried to flip the Gauguin through Sotheby’s at the same time. A Montreal art “expert” named Biro made something of a specialty of finding artist’s fingerprints on pieces whose authenticity was doubtful. It turns out that he may have been forging his “proof” that the works weren’t themselves forgeries.
Those are the most extreme examples, and obviously no one in the art world openly condones them. There are, however, a great many activities in the art world that wouldn’t pass muster anywhere else. Say a museum decides to do a mid career retrospective. The directors can go out to art dealers and get discounts for passing on this inside knowledge; the dealers can pass it on to their clientele. It’d be insider trading anywhere else, but in the art world it’s okay.
5) The Auction House is an Amazing Place
Thompson is at his best talking about Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They pester and henpeck collectors with notable works until they’re dead, then they send representatives to the funeral. They guarantee returns from auction, and offer to send consigned artwork around the world to drum up interest, sometimes with the consignors’ children along for the ride. Then they churn up prestige, advertising, vanity, greed, and entitlement to sell the art at the highest price. Picking almost at random, he explains how auctioneers exploit the bidders’ weaknesses. One phenomenon is the endowment effect—if you bid, you start to feel like you own the work—and it becomes more valuable to you. Another is the simple fact that many people want to own the most expensive piece of art in the world. All you need to do is be willing to outbid the others. And if someone else outdoes you by paying more at another auction, all you need to do is wait a few months and pay through the nose for something else. Couples exhibit some of the most interesting behavior when bidding. The man bids, but must ask the wife’s permission, most often by body language. One auctioneer holds that it is because bidding is a “pseudo-orgasmic experience” (124).
Weirdly, auction houses have been immune to charges against their good taste: “traditional auction humor holds that the lots are carried in by the only black person in the room. In London they are carried in by the only impoverished person.” (119).
Auctioneers report that there are also rules for what makes art more valuable at auction:
Attractive woman or child > older woman, unattractive man
Red>white>blue>yellow>green>black (Warhol is the exception)
Bright>pale
Horizontal>vertical
Nudity>modesty (female nudes>male nudes)
Figurative>landscape
Flowers>fruit
Roses>chrysanthemums
Calm water>rough water
Shipwrecks are the worst
Pureblood dogs>mongrels
Racehorses>cart horses
If it features a game bird, birds that are expensive to hunt do better.
Cows never sell. (unless you’re Damien Hirsch and you cut one in half)
So a nude, bright red woman with a child holding roses in calm water with a pure bred dog looks good. Check.
6) Christie’s and Sotheby’s Effects on the Market Ecology
Auction houses are getting so good at what they do, and there are so many chances to make money off of third party guarantees,* that they are taking up most of the market. They’re even encroaching on the primary art market by selling the artist’s works directly in some cases. Some dealers worry that they will be squeezed out, though this might not be a valid fear. Christie’s and Sotheby’s reputations rely partly on their reputation for taste—they only offer a certain number of lots per auction. If they got in on the primary art market they’d have so much to sell that other auction houses might have to handle the overflow, and if great artists went with other houses, it would destroy C and S’s competitive advantage, their brand. Also, dealers help establish baseline prices for the auction houses. They are a necessary layer for the auction houses.
*third party guarantees are a way for the house to hedge its bets on what a painting will bring in. Effectively they offer a way for a third party to bid on a piece of art ahead of time (the downside is that the third party might is that it might pay more than it would have in the actual auction). The system works out great for the auction house, assuming it can get third parties to cover the guarantees it gives out to the people who consign the work to be auctioned in the first place.
7) Museums are Part of the Branding Circle Too
Musuems hold way more art than they can show, but they can’t often sell it. If they do the public sees it as a loss or as a sign of bad financial management, and then there are internal political cans-of-worms as well: if you sold a Renoir to buy, say a dismembered cow preserved in formaldehyde, the curators of late 19th century French art would, to say nothing of the public, be upset.
So say someone consigns a painting to a museum, no strings attached. Rather than putting it in storage, the museum can flip it at auction. The donor is happy because the value of the charitable donation went up (she can write off the value of the painting plus the auction house’s fee), the value of any other works in her collection may go up as a result of the sale now that her brand has been crossed with that of the museum and that of the auction house. The auction house gets to sell something from a name brand museum. The museum gets money to buy other art to fill in the gaps. As Thompson puts it: “If everybody gains, what is the harm? I will leave that question to the reader.” (229)
8) If That Sounds Like the Makings of a Bubble to You, You’re Not the Only One to Think So
Thompson’s described at least two “Everyone wins cause values keep going up!” situations (third party guarantees and museum’s flipping art donations based on their name). He reports that dealers avoid using the word crash, almost as if they were superstitious (they also prefer the term “extended boom” to “bubble.” To-mA-to, to-MAH-to), but it does seem to be the unspoken concern. Thompson himself thinks there are so many nouveau riche around the world lusting for contemporary art produced in the west that the bubble won’t burst.
I wonder if people were writing similar things before the art-market crash of ’90, which began when Japanese buyers stopped buying, and which spread to the rest of the market. It seems foolish to think that this time around will be any different. At some point enough works won’t get bids, and the whole thing will come tumbling down. Looks like I’ll find some other way to spend that $120 million I’ve got laying around.
None of which is to say that you have to like contemporary art to read this book. Thompson isn’t particularly interested in getting your dander up with an endless list of shock art (though he does describe some shocking works, some so because they’re tasteless, some because they’re, well, shocking). He’s not interested in the what of contemporary art—he’s interested in the how of the contemporary art market, and he even dabbles in the why. While the book didn’t offer any answers about the importance or meaning of any particular piece of art (and I was kinda hoping it would), it is an enjoyable, informative, often eyebrow raising tour of the high-end market for contemporary art.
For my part, the book caught my eye because of the titular shark, which I saw while it was on display at the Met. I’ve always liked sharks and enjoyed being able to examine one up close, but it says something that I’d never bothered thinking about its meaning (it’s a symbol that unifies the ideas of life and death and challenges a gallery-goer’s disinclination to honesty consider mortality… or something like that) until I read the present book. I followed up on the book because I was curious. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like contemporary art, but I was willing to give it a shot. It helped that Thompson is a fan of contemporary art (and so wouldn’t spend 200 pages bashing it) that and has a background in economics, a decidedly non-artsy field (if you’ve ever read art history books or Sotheby’s catalogues you’ll realize that the writing is mostly about keeping idiots who have to ask why a canvas painted uniformly blue has a different price than a canvas painted uniformly white (ie, me) out of the debate).
I wanted someone who’d talk about CA in a sane, reasonable way, and while Thompson isn’t completely devoid of reactions to the works, any deviations from his usually unbiased tone work in his favor (you can practically hear hear his tendons strain as he discusses On Kawara’s day paintings: “Consider the attraction of a work by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, whose Today series involves painting a date on canvas… the work Nov. 8, 1989 (just those letters and numerals, in block white against a black background)… sold for £310,000… There is no rarity factor… there are more than two thousand Kawara day paintings in existence… One dealer told me that so long as collectors will pay high auction prices for Kawara’s day paintings, there is hope for everyone.” (14). (Whether the dealer means there is hope for dealers or artists is unclear; there are plenty of instances in which Thompson lets his enthusiasm for, uh, nontraditional works shine through; Rothko’s White center (Yellow, Pink and Lavendar on Rose) is “spectacular” 21).
Thompson isn’t trying to explain anything about art; he’s just trying to sketch a picture of how the market works. Along the way he touches on some pretty serious issues involving art (consider, for one, that while most collectors are super rich and are perhaps blowing so much money on weird shit because they’ve got money to burn, some museums are publicly funded, a situation that is rife with conflicts of interest when artists and dealers are all still living and perfectly willing and able to game the system). And Thompson succeeds, reporting some amazing facts, interesting observations, and stimulating arguments along the way:
1) Having bought Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Japanese collector Ryoei Saito wanted it to be cremated with his body.
2) Fans of Traditional Art Have Only Themselves to Blame for the Rise of Contemporary Art
Think of it this way: there are a limited number of paintings and sculptures by da Vinci, Michelangelo, JMW Turner, and all the rest, and most of them have been bought up by museums. And even of the famous works, how many can you name from each artist? One? Two? Five? Even if you can name ten from each artist, there are well more than ten museums in the world, and who’s gonna want the Michelangelo’s eleventh most well known painting, assuming it is available and assuming a museum could afford it?
The reality is that every museum needs an anchor for its collection, a piece that people will come to see whenever they’re in New York or LA or Berlin or Dubai. But as the supply of old art is fixed, and as the Louvre ain’t selling the Mona Lisa any time soon, all those museums are stuck. Contemporary art can fill the gap.
3) Supply and Demand Explain the Market, Except When They Don’t
The supply of Old Masters is practically nonexistent, which explains why a museum is willing to look to other periods. But supply and demand go out the window with contemporary art. If an artist is hot, representation in multiple galleries helps build buzz. Greater supply feeds greater demand and higher prices; it helps stimulate the herd mentality.
4) There’s a Good Reason Why Collectors and Dealers Look for Outrageous Art
Thompson uses the genius example of a BlackBerry to explain the appeal of “disruptive products.” The markets for computers and cell phones were relatively stable. Rather than compete with established players in either, Research in Motion introduced a new product that created a new sector that it could dominate because it was the first player in that market.
The same thing goes on in art. Everything is stable, and smaller dealers and new artists find space in the sun by inventing new segments of the art world and upsetting the apple cart.
4) If That Makes the Art World Sound a Little Business-y, Or Even Corporate, That’s Because It Is and Always Has Been. Kinda.
It’s no coincidence that Charles Saatchi, one of the world’s most recognized art dealers, built his fortune in advertising. He’s a master at branding himself and his artists, in addition to exploiting the brands of auction houses like Sotheby’s.
His reputation helps him because so many art collectors, the kind of people who spend so much of their time making insane amounts of money that they can afford to drop $12 mill on a poorly taxidermied shark, don’t have the time to become experts on contemporary art. That’s not to say that one can’t become such an expert, or that these folks couldn’t become such experts if they had the time too—merely that they have so much money they are willing to pay dealers like Saatchi a premium so that they don’t need to spend precious time examining what they are buying. (if that sounds absurd to you, think whether you’ve ever spent $6 on a birthday card from a cute, trendy bookshop, or $3 on a drip coffee from Starbucks). And the role of the art dealer has been around for awhile. Gauguin dealt art (and stocks) until the the market crash of 1882 dried up the market for both and he had to go back to painting to make money (!).
Saatchi is a branded dealer, but a few artists managed to brand themselves as well. You can be reasonably sure that Jeff Koons or Damien Hirsch could sell a work sight unseen just on the strength of their name—people think the works will accrue value.
Some museums are getting in on the branding and marketing trend; the Guggenheim has lent its name and some of its artwork to other Guggenheims, chiefly the Frank Gehry monsterwork in Bilbao, Spain. Thompson leaves it to us to decide is having a museum function like a business is a good thing. I have the gut feeling it isn’t, and I think Thompson might agree with me. There are too many conflicts of interest.
But if dealing an art can be a great business, collecting art sure isn’t. One of the most eye-opening sections of the book is on art as investment. In the 80s the Dutch government supported Dutch artists by buying their artwork at three times the rate that the private sector paid for it. No one seems to remember the names of any Dutch artists from the 80s, and when the government resold the paintings they took an 80% loss (which means that for every 100 they spent they got 20 cents back. A private buyer would have spent 33 cents on the same work and gotten 20 cents back—not exactly good, but not quite as bad). Nevertheless, some intrepid mutual fund managers have created art-based mutual funds, and the returns always trail those of the market at large (perhaps because the market for high end art is made up of people who make their money off the stock market to begin with). Even some of the most eye-popping numbers (so and so bought the piece in 1950 for $40,000… now it is $50 million!) don’t represent good appreciation rates—and that is for the one-in-a-million piece that is an absolute masterwork fifty years after the initial investment.
5) There’s a Dodgy Side to Art Dealing
A dealer named Ely Sakhai attempted to pass of a forged copy of Gauguin’s Vase des Fleurs to a Japanese collector even as he tried to sell the original through Christie’s; he was caught when the Japanese buyer tried to flip the Gauguin through Sotheby’s at the same time. A Montreal art “expert” named Biro made something of a specialty of finding artist’s fingerprints on pieces whose authenticity was doubtful. It turns out that he may have been forging his “proof” that the works weren’t themselves forgeries.
Those are the most extreme examples, and obviously no one in the art world openly condones them. There are, however, a great many activities in the art world that wouldn’t pass muster anywhere else. Say a museum decides to do a mid career retrospective. The directors can go out to art dealers and get discounts for passing on this inside knowledge; the dealers can pass it on to their clientele. It’d be insider trading anywhere else, but in the art world it’s okay.
5) The Auction House is an Amazing Place
Thompson is at his best talking about Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They pester and henpeck collectors with notable works until they’re dead, then they send representatives to the funeral. They guarantee returns from auction, and offer to send consigned artwork around the world to drum up interest, sometimes with the consignors’ children along for the ride. Then they churn up prestige, advertising, vanity, greed, and entitlement to sell the art at the highest price. Picking almost at random, he explains how auctioneers exploit the bidders’ weaknesses. One phenomenon is the endowment effect—if you bid, you start to feel like you own the work—and it becomes more valuable to you. Another is the simple fact that many people want to own the most expensive piece of art in the world. All you need to do is be willing to outbid the others. And if someone else outdoes you by paying more at another auction, all you need to do is wait a few months and pay through the nose for something else. Couples exhibit some of the most interesting behavior when bidding. The man bids, but must ask the wife’s permission, most often by body language. One auctioneer holds that it is because bidding is a “pseudo-orgasmic experience” (124).
Weirdly, auction houses have been immune to charges against their good taste: “traditional auction humor holds that the lots are carried in by the only black person in the room. In London they are carried in by the only impoverished person.” (119).
Auctioneers report that there are also rules for what makes art more valuable at auction:
Attractive woman or child > older woman, unattractive man
Red>white>blue>yellow>green>black (Warhol is the exception)
Bright>pale
Horizontal>vertical
Nudity>modesty (female nudes>male nudes)
Figurative>landscape
Flowers>fruit
Roses>chrysanthemums
Calm water>rough water
Shipwrecks are the worst
Pureblood dogs>mongrels
Racehorses>cart horses
If it features a game bird, birds that are expensive to hunt do better.
Cows never sell. (unless you’re Damien Hirsch and you cut one in half)
So a nude, bright red woman with a child holding roses in calm water with a pure bred dog looks good. Check.
6) Christie’s and Sotheby’s Effects on the Market Ecology
Auction houses are getting so good at what they do, and there are so many chances to make money off of third party guarantees,* that they are taking up most of the market. They’re even encroaching on the primary art market by selling the artist’s works directly in some cases. Some dealers worry that they will be squeezed out, though this might not be a valid fear. Christie’s and Sotheby’s reputations rely partly on their reputation for taste—they only offer a certain number of lots per auction. If they got in on the primary art market they’d have so much to sell that other auction houses might have to handle the overflow, and if great artists went with other houses, it would destroy C and S’s competitive advantage, their brand. Also, dealers help establish baseline prices for the auction houses. They are a necessary layer for the auction houses.
*third party guarantees are a way for the house to hedge its bets on what a painting will bring in. Effectively they offer a way for a third party to bid on a piece of art ahead of time (the downside is that the third party might is that it might pay more than it would have in the actual auction). The system works out great for the auction house, assuming it can get third parties to cover the guarantees it gives out to the people who consign the work to be auctioned in the first place.
7) Museums are Part of the Branding Circle Too
Musuems hold way more art than they can show, but they can’t often sell it. If they do the public sees it as a loss or as a sign of bad financial management, and then there are internal political cans-of-worms as well: if you sold a Renoir to buy, say a dismembered cow preserved in formaldehyde, the curators of late 19th century French art would, to say nothing of the public, be upset.
So say someone consigns a painting to a museum, no strings attached. Rather than putting it in storage, the museum can flip it at auction. The donor is happy because the value of the charitable donation went up (she can write off the value of the painting plus the auction house’s fee), the value of any other works in her collection may go up as a result of the sale now that her brand has been crossed with that of the museum and that of the auction house. The auction house gets to sell something from a name brand museum. The museum gets money to buy other art to fill in the gaps. As Thompson puts it: “If everybody gains, what is the harm? I will leave that question to the reader.” (229)
8) If That Sounds Like the Makings of a Bubble to You, You’re Not the Only One to Think So
Thompson’s described at least two “Everyone wins cause values keep going up!” situations (third party guarantees and museum’s flipping art donations based on their name). He reports that dealers avoid using the word crash, almost as if they were superstitious (they also prefer the term “extended boom” to “bubble.” To-mA-to, to-MAH-to), but it does seem to be the unspoken concern. Thompson himself thinks there are so many nouveau riche around the world lusting for contemporary art produced in the west that the bubble won’t burst.
I wonder if people were writing similar things before the art-market crash of ’90, which began when Japanese buyers stopped buying, and which spread to the rest of the market. It seems foolish to think that this time around will be any different. At some point enough works won’t get bids, and the whole thing will come tumbling down. Looks like I’ll find some other way to spend that $120 million I’ve got laying around.
August 30, 2016
This is a marvelous book – like “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
The whole spectacle of the current art world is all here – it’s lavish, sordid, secretive, pretentious... Its’ about the lust of collecting and the thirst for status.
The more the work is “branded” the more its’ craved.
“Branded” is at several levels:
- a “name” artist
- exhibited by a “name” museum
- a “name” collector (always somebody very wealthy)
- exhibited at a “name” gallery (usually in New York or London)
- bought at a “name” auction (usually an evening auction of Sotheby or Christie).
If the painting has some of the above its’ a “work of art” that the rich, and possible famous, will want to hang in their villas, luxury apartments... to impress.
But art critics have no sway in the art world. This book is packed with wonderful observations. Here’s another :
From page 143 (my book)
“why, [5 to 10 minutes towards] the end of any evening auction, are there a group of women[trophy wives?] in the first few rows who, ... unrelated to the quality of work remaining, stand up and slowly depart..., husbands in tow. Perhaps their departure, like their arrival, is intended to make sure the crowd knows they were present [look at me]...
The author takes us through the different environs.
Many galleries do not last – there are very few status galleries. Many artists do not last.
In general art is not good investment. Unlike general media news, art news is about good news - of paintings that have sold well; we never hear (and the art world does not want us to hear) about paintings that don’t sell, that the price has diminished...
If one wants to buy a major painting at a major gallery – you have to be a known collector; otherwise you will be put on a “waiting list”, you will be asked for financial credentials – i.e. a casual (or not so casual) brush-off. Nobody wants to sell a “branded painting” to a “non-branded purchaser” – for one thing it will bring down the value of the art work.
Page 115
“Every day clerks at Christie’s and Sotheby’s clip obituary pages and forward the clippings to the appropriate directors. After the death of a major collector, both auction and dealer representatives offer condolences and assistance to the estate. One former auction house specialist tells of taking a call concerning a death late in the evening and flying overnight to call on the heirs at noon the next day. He found a representative of the other auction house sitting in the reception room.”
The buying and selling at galleries, auction houses and art fairs is hardly transparent. It’s not like buying at Sears or Wal-Mart. A major art fair will have a private viewing for its’ preferred customers before the normal folks can attend.
This book is very readable with hilarious art world anecdotes. We are provided with an inner sanctum view. I loved the quotes at the beginning of every chapter.
Over six years have passed since this book was written. The author stated that with the new millennium the growth and preponderance of art fairs was escalating – as opposed to the decline of art galleries. I don’t know how much has changed since.
A companion book to this is To Have and to Hold.
And to end off, some of the stuff people buy is mind-boggling! Would you pay $72.8 million for this?!
White Center by Mark Rothko
Here is a quote from Andy Warhol
From page 184:
“Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting, I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
June 26, 2020
همین اول بگم، این کتاب تقریبا هیچ ربطی به من نداشت، به جز یه قسمتهای کوچیکش ربطی به علائق من و حوزه ی من نداشت و خیلی دور بود
اما چرا رفتم سراغش؟
چند باری پیش اومده بود گالری رفته بودم یا این ور اون ور تصاویر تابلوهای معروف و گرون رو دیده بودم، سوال بود برام این چیش هنره؟ وقتی منی که عامی حساب میشم هیچ درک زیبایی از این ندارم چرا پس اینقدر پول میدن بابتش...
خوب این کتاب به خوبی به این مسئله پرداخته بود
نکته دیگه هم برای منی که اخیراً یه کم به اقتصاد علاقه مند شدم، شکل سرمایه داری تو این بخش ��ز هنر هستش
فکر کنم اهالی هنر و علاقه مندان به این حوزه خیلی لذت زیادی خواهند برد
هر چند کتاب برای من نبود، اما کتاب خوبی بود...
اما چرا رفتم سراغش؟
چند باری پیش اومده بود گالری رفته بودم یا این ور اون ور تصاویر تابلوهای معروف و گرون رو دیده بودم، سوال بود برام این چیش هنره؟ وقتی منی که عامی حساب میشم هیچ درک زیبایی از این ندارم چرا پس اینقدر پول میدن بابتش...
خوب این کتاب به خوبی به این مسئله پرداخته بود
نکته دیگه هم برای منی که اخیراً یه کم به اقتصاد علاقه مند شدم، شکل سرمایه داری تو این بخش ��ز هنر هستش
فکر کنم اهالی هنر و علاقه مندان به این حوزه خیلی لذت زیادی خواهند برد
هر چند کتاب برای من نبود، اما کتاب خوبی بود...
April 3, 2023
Two months ago I saw Damien Hirst's dot painting for the first time, I was curious as to why it was so expensive. I did some research on this and discovered that Damien did not even touch the canvas and that it was created by technicians under Damien's supervision.
When I realised how different contemporary art is from what I had initially assumed as art, I was astounded. Don Thompson's book assisted me in acquainting myself with these new art forms and altered my perspective on contemporary art.
“As is true with much contemporary art, no one seemed anxious to admit they neither understood nor liked what was being shown. At the end people filed out, talking softly, absorbing the experience, neither pleased nor shocked.”
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark explains the role of dealers, auction houses, collectors and museums in the art world and shows how artists interact with them and how an artist becomes famous. The author raises important questions and answers them to some extent like: Why would anyone even consider paying this much money for the shark? what is more important—the original artwork or the artist’s intention? Will this art be important twenty-five years from now? Does Hirst command power and high prices because he is good, or because he is branded? What is the value of a “Damien Hirst” spin painting created after hours by his technician Rachel, with Hirst’s knowledge but without his inspection or signature?
Two consecutive chapters of the book discuss the most famous contemporary artists -Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Tracey Emin, providing a brief biography as well as a chronological explanation of their works, and finally explaining how they became iconic. The history of Christie's and Sotheby's has given us a good understanding of how these two massive auction houses influence and represent contemporary art. I didn't give as much thought to the collectors and art fairs section of the book. Perhaps artists or serious art collectors appreciate this level of detail.
Having the sources listed in the footnote would be handy. In this regard, the author stated:
“It is not footnoted because the book was intended as a journey of discovery in the economics of contemporary art, not as an academic reference.”
Apparently, “journey of discovery” and inline referencing don't go together.
When I realised how different contemporary art is from what I had initially assumed as art, I was astounded. Don Thompson's book assisted me in acquainting myself with these new art forms and altered my perspective on contemporary art.
“As is true with much contemporary art, no one seemed anxious to admit they neither understood nor liked what was being shown. At the end people filed out, talking softly, absorbing the experience, neither pleased nor shocked.”
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark explains the role of dealers, auction houses, collectors and museums in the art world and shows how artists interact with them and how an artist becomes famous. The author raises important questions and answers them to some extent like: Why would anyone even consider paying this much money for the shark? what is more important—the original artwork or the artist’s intention? Will this art be important twenty-five years from now? Does Hirst command power and high prices because he is good, or because he is branded? What is the value of a “Damien Hirst” spin painting created after hours by his technician Rachel, with Hirst’s knowledge but without his inspection or signature?
Two consecutive chapters of the book discuss the most famous contemporary artists -Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Tracey Emin, providing a brief biography as well as a chronological explanation of their works, and finally explaining how they became iconic. The history of Christie's and Sotheby's has given us a good understanding of how these two massive auction houses influence and represent contemporary art. I didn't give as much thought to the collectors and art fairs section of the book. Perhaps artists or serious art collectors appreciate this level of detail.
Having the sources listed in the footnote would be handy. In this regard, the author stated:
“It is not footnoted because the book was intended as a journey of discovery in the economics of contemporary art, not as an academic reference.”
Apparently, “journey of discovery” and inline referencing don't go together.
March 16, 2024
I had so many thoughts bubbling up in my mind while I was listening to this and after I had finished the book…
This might be a very opinionated view, not towards the book itself but the subject matter…
When my friend visited The Broad earlier this year and sent me a picture with a roomful of Jeff Koons’ pieces, all I could say was …” that’s a lot of money!”.
I am a lover of modern art and a lot of contemporary stuff…but I have never been a big fan of either Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, two of the most well known and expensive contemporary artists.
One part of this book mentions that an issue museums that have acquired ultra-expensive pieces of art face is how to make the audience see past the monetary value of the works and view them as the artworks they are.
Yes, pre-conception about the artworks / artists do affect the viewer’s perception. Although for me personally, it’s not the money attached to the artworks that leaves me feeling cold towards Koons and Hirst, but their practice of actively using shock value and exposure in media to establish themselves as brands thus increase the value of their art that exasperates me.
Yes, I know, I do have a probably overly romanticized and idealized view of artists and art…
Having had a little basic knowledge of the economics of the contemporary art market, I knew what I was getting myself into when I started listening to this …but I didn’t expect how uncomfortable and even repulsed I felt while listening to certain parts of the book.
What the book sets out to do is to explain why certain contemporary artworks can be worth so much money. A very overly simplified answer to this is :
This is a result of a combination of the need of the rich buyers to acquire contemporary artworks as both an investment and a statement of their unique taste and the branding of both the artists and collectors and the increased monetary value that comes with the branding ( much like the power of Logo on luxury brands? Google the price of a white T-shirt with a balenciaga logo…you will be in for a shock).
But of course, there is more to it, eg, the role prestigious museums (eg artworks that have made rounds in those museums immediately increase in value) and the auction houses play.
So my issue with all this is, to the average folks outside of the art circle, people like Koons and Hirst have become THE face of contemporary art scene …most of them end up dismissing contemporary art as a “ scam “, as they are left baffled as to why those artworks worth so much …when there is so much more to be appreciated and explored in contemporary art.
I probably would have appreciated some of Koons and Hirst’s works more, if I had no idea of their worth or how they had become worth so much…are some of their art interesting? Absolutely. Should they worth that much? Absolutely not, in my personal opinion.
Then there are the “branded” collectors…two of the most prominent ones are Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian.
They are so powerful that they can easily make an artist or decrease the market value of the works of an artist in the blink of an eye ( eg, the rise of Hirst and the beef between Saatchi and Sandro Chia; ). Probably just like the stock market, if the news broke that Saatchi was buying the works of an artist, the market would react and the value of the works from the artist would increase sharply; on the contrary if he dumped the works from one, well you know what would happen.
Another example of how powerful their branding is the term “buying with your ears”, meaning buying art by reputation, without looking at the works with genuine interest, because the brand and reputation of the owner might be as important as the art. And what those buyers seek is probably return in their “investment”.
Saatchi’s background is in advertising. Gagosian does have a degree in English literature but is also known as a great sales person.
I do miss it when people like Clement Greenberg contributed to an art movement. Now a lot of critics are paid to write on works that powerful collectors, dealers and auction houses are trying to promote.
Other than the above mentioned, the book also discusses many aspects of how money affects the art world.
One thing that I had never considered was how donations of artworks can affect what we see in art museums. Basically a lot of donors want the works they donate to always be on display as a prerequisite for their donations, but there is only so much space. So money, instead of curatorial preferences, to an extent, dictates what we see in museums.
This is a well-researched book and the writing is very clear and accessible.
But after this, would I read another book on the topic? probably not.
I recently had a beautiful experience at an art museum.
I was looking at this young Japanese artist’s paintings with the biggest smile on my face, a lady also viewing the art saw me and smiled back. She understood.
I will leave art as that, something that invigorates, heals, provokes, moves, and challenges.
This has been enough money talk for me.
This might be a very opinionated view, not towards the book itself but the subject matter…
When my friend visited The Broad earlier this year and sent me a picture with a roomful of Jeff Koons’ pieces, all I could say was …” that’s a lot of money!”.
I am a lover of modern art and a lot of contemporary stuff…but I have never been a big fan of either Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, two of the most well known and expensive contemporary artists.
One part of this book mentions that an issue museums that have acquired ultra-expensive pieces of art face is how to make the audience see past the monetary value of the works and view them as the artworks they are.
Yes, pre-conception about the artworks / artists do affect the viewer’s perception. Although for me personally, it’s not the money attached to the artworks that leaves me feeling cold towards Koons and Hirst, but their practice of actively using shock value and exposure in media to establish themselves as brands thus increase the value of their art that exasperates me.
Yes, I know, I do have a probably overly romanticized and idealized view of artists and art…
Having had a little basic knowledge of the economics of the contemporary art market, I knew what I was getting myself into when I started listening to this …but I didn’t expect how uncomfortable and even repulsed I felt while listening to certain parts of the book.
What the book sets out to do is to explain why certain contemporary artworks can be worth so much money. A very overly simplified answer to this is :
This is a result of a combination of the need of the rich buyers to acquire contemporary artworks as both an investment and a statement of their unique taste and the branding of both the artists and collectors and the increased monetary value that comes with the branding ( much like the power of Logo on luxury brands? Google the price of a white T-shirt with a balenciaga logo…you will be in for a shock).
But of course, there is more to it, eg, the role prestigious museums (eg artworks that have made rounds in those museums immediately increase in value) and the auction houses play.
So my issue with all this is, to the average folks outside of the art circle, people like Koons and Hirst have become THE face of contemporary art scene …most of them end up dismissing contemporary art as a “ scam “, as they are left baffled as to why those artworks worth so much …when there is so much more to be appreciated and explored in contemporary art.
I probably would have appreciated some of Koons and Hirst’s works more, if I had no idea of their worth or how they had become worth so much…are some of their art interesting? Absolutely. Should they worth that much? Absolutely not, in my personal opinion.
Then there are the “branded” collectors…two of the most prominent ones are Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian.
They are so powerful that they can easily make an artist or decrease the market value of the works of an artist in the blink of an eye ( eg, the rise of Hirst and the beef between Saatchi and Sandro Chia; ). Probably just like the stock market, if the news broke that Saatchi was buying the works of an artist, the market would react and the value of the works from the artist would increase sharply; on the contrary if he dumped the works from one, well you know what would happen.
Another example of how powerful their branding is the term “buying with your ears”, meaning buying art by reputation, without looking at the works with genuine interest, because the brand and reputation of the owner might be as important as the art. And what those buyers seek is probably return in their “investment”.
Saatchi’s background is in advertising. Gagosian does have a degree in English literature but is also known as a great sales person.
I do miss it when people like Clement Greenberg contributed to an art movement. Now a lot of critics are paid to write on works that powerful collectors, dealers and auction houses are trying to promote.
Other than the above mentioned, the book also discusses many aspects of how money affects the art world.
One thing that I had never considered was how donations of artworks can affect what we see in art museums. Basically a lot of donors want the works they donate to always be on display as a prerequisite for their donations, but there is only so much space. So money, instead of curatorial preferences, to an extent, dictates what we see in museums.
This is a well-researched book and the writing is very clear and accessible.
But after this, would I read another book on the topic? probably not.
I recently had a beautiful experience at an art museum.
I was looking at this young Japanese artist’s paintings with the biggest smile on my face, a lady also viewing the art saw me and smiled back. She understood.
I will leave art as that, something that invigorates, heals, provokes, moves, and challenges.
This has been enough money talk for me.
May 9, 2019
I can allocate only 3 stars to this book. At best.
It's a curious book, somewhat informative, yet quite sketchy and superficial at most of the times.
It's not art, not science, it's marketing that rules the world, and the world of art is no exception. Good marketing, smart publicity and an artist has a good chance of getting on top of the wave.
All the inside, the "behind the closed doors" stuff.... well, i personally have little interest in it.
i either like something or not... I do not care whether it was good marketing, the right gallery, or just an incident... oh, well, on a rare occasion it might be even talent:))
Nothing really new in this book. If you follow art news, then you are most likely have read/heard most of the things described. If you are not into it, the great revelations will have little or none impact on you.
It's a curious book, somewhat informative, yet quite sketchy and superficial at most of the times.
It's not art, not science, it's marketing that rules the world, and the world of art is no exception. Good marketing, smart publicity and an artist has a good chance of getting on top of the wave.
All the inside, the "behind the closed doors" stuff.... well, i personally have little interest in it.
i either like something or not... I do not care whether it was good marketing, the right gallery, or just an incident... oh, well, on a rare occasion it might be even talent:))
Nothing really new in this book. If you follow art news, then you are most likely have read/heard most of the things described. If you are not into it, the great revelations will have little or none impact on you.
July 3, 2022
“Da quando ho iniziato questo viaggio nel mondo dell’arte contemporanea, ci sono due cose che nu hanno sempre lasciato perplesso. Chi determina cose rende l’opera di un particolare artista richiesta e desiderata da tutti? E in base a quale alchimia la scultura di uno squalo o un dipinto contemporaneo valgono milioni di dollari piuttosto che milioni o dollari? Come può un collezionista intelligente ed esperto considerare un buon investimento l’acquisto di uno squalo imbalsamato realizzato da tecnici e di facile riproducibilità? Parlando con galleristi ed esperti di case d’asta mi è sorto anche un altro dubbio: da che parte sta andando il mercato dell’arte contemporanea con i suoi prezzi in continua ascesa?”
Qualche mese fa, ad un incontro con Nicolas Ballario sull’arte contemporanea, ha citato questo libro consigliandolo a chi volesse comprendere i meccanismi che muovono l’economia dell’arte contemporanea. Cosa che ho fatto perché, seppur da profano della materia, è un mondo che mi ha sempre affascinato.
Il libro, prende le sue mosse dalla vicenda che gli da il titolo. Damien Hirst, un artista all’epoca sconosciuto, vendere uno squalo sotto formaldeide a 12 milioni di dollari attraverso l’intermediazione di Larry Gagosian, uno dei galleristi più importanti. Thompson parte da qui per raccontare come funziona il mercato dell’arte contemporanea analizzandone tutte le componenti: collezionisti, artisti, gallerie, musei, case d’asta e fiere d’arte. Analizza tutti gli aspetti che possono determinare il successo o l’insuccesso di un artista, ciò che influisce nella determinazione dei prezzi e i motivi che portano un collezionista, che spesso non ne capisce molto di arte, a spendere una fortuna per un’opera d’arte piuttosto che per un’altra. In un mondo, quello dell’atte concettuale, nel quale la tecnica non è determinante, ma lo sono le idee innovative, appare davvero difficile arrivare a determinare come tutti questi fattori debbano concorrere. In effetti le strade possono essere molteplici per arrivare al successo dell’artista, quindi a prezzi elevati delle sue opere. Gli attori sono tanti e spesso hanno interessi contrapposti. Resta la certezza che diventare artisti superstar significa incarnare un brand. E lo si diventa passando attraverso gallerie d’arte famose, case d’asta importanti, esposizioni in musei di prim’ordine e fiere d’arte internazionali. Perché, in fondo anche la fiera di Basilea, White cube, Sotheby's, Centre Pompidou ecc. sono dei brand.
Il volume è scorrevolissimo e piacevole. Ricco di aneddoti e curiosità che rendono interessante la lettura anche ad un completo profano. Per quanto mi riguarda ha demolito molte mie certezze e ha chiarito molti interrogativi. Consigliatissimo ha chi ha un minimo di interesse per l’argomento.
Qualche mese fa, ad un incontro con Nicolas Ballario sull’arte contemporanea, ha citato questo libro consigliandolo a chi volesse comprendere i meccanismi che muovono l’economia dell’arte contemporanea. Cosa che ho fatto perché, seppur da profano della materia, è un mondo che mi ha sempre affascinato.
Il libro, prende le sue mosse dalla vicenda che gli da il titolo. Damien Hirst, un artista all’epoca sconosciuto, vendere uno squalo sotto formaldeide a 12 milioni di dollari attraverso l’intermediazione di Larry Gagosian, uno dei galleristi più importanti. Thompson parte da qui per raccontare come funziona il mercato dell’arte contemporanea analizzandone tutte le componenti: collezionisti, artisti, gallerie, musei, case d’asta e fiere d’arte. Analizza tutti gli aspetti che possono determinare il successo o l’insuccesso di un artista, ciò che influisce nella determinazione dei prezzi e i motivi che portano un collezionista, che spesso non ne capisce molto di arte, a spendere una fortuna per un’opera d’arte piuttosto che per un’altra. In un mondo, quello dell’atte concettuale, nel quale la tecnica non è determinante, ma lo sono le idee innovative, appare davvero difficile arrivare a determinare come tutti questi fattori debbano concorrere. In effetti le strade possono essere molteplici per arrivare al successo dell’artista, quindi a prezzi elevati delle sue opere. Gli attori sono tanti e spesso hanno interessi contrapposti. Resta la certezza che diventare artisti superstar significa incarnare un brand. E lo si diventa passando attraverso gallerie d’arte famose, case d’asta importanti, esposizioni in musei di prim’ordine e fiere d’arte internazionali. Perché, in fondo anche la fiera di Basilea, White cube, Sotheby's, Centre Pompidou ecc. sono dei brand.
Il volume è scorrevolissimo e piacevole. Ricco di aneddoti e curiosità che rendono interessante la lettura anche ad un completo profano. Per quanto mi riguarda ha demolito molte mie certezze e ha chiarito molti interrogativi. Consigliatissimo ha chi ha un minimo di interesse per l’argomento.
August 7, 2015
این کتاب به نوعی مشهورترین کتاب حوزهی اقتصاد هنر شناخته میشود. نویسندهی آن، دُن تامپسون، که خود مجموعهدار آثار هنری و و استاد بازاریابی و اقتصاد است، با شیوهای جذاب به بررسی سازوکارهای موجود در دنیای هنر معاصر میپزدارد
چه میشود که یک نقاشی از «جکسون پولاک» که با پاشیدن رنگ بر روی یک تختهی چوبی آفریده شده به قیمت 140 میلیون دلار فروخته میشود؟ درحالیکه برخی هنرمندان در طول عمر خود حتا نمیتوانند یک اثر را بفروشند؟ سازوکار حراجیهای هنر چگونه است؟ نقش دلالان، مجموعهدارن و گالریها در بازار هنر معاصر چیست؟ آیا سرمایهگذاری در هنر سودآور است؟ اگر علاقهمندان به دانستن پاسخ چنین پرسشهایی هست مطالعهی این کتاب را از دست ندهید. خصوصا دانشجویان هنر و هنرمندان میتوانند از این کتاب بهرهی بسیار برند
چه میشود که یک نقاشی از «جکسون پولاک» که با پاشیدن رنگ بر روی یک تختهی چوبی آفریده شده به قیمت 140 میلیون دلار فروخته میشود؟ درحالیکه برخی هنرمندان در طول عمر خود حتا نمیتوانند یک اثر را بفروشند؟ سازوکار حراجیهای هنر چگونه است؟ نقش دلالان، مجموعهدارن و گالریها در بازار هنر معاصر چیست؟ آیا سرمایهگذاری در هنر سودآور است؟ اگر علاقهمندان به دانستن پاسخ چنین پرسشهایی هست مطالعهی این کتاب را از دست ندهید. خصوصا دانشجویان هنر و هنرمندان میتوانند از این کتاب بهرهی بسیار برند
July 16, 2017
The most important aspect of the contemporary art market (roughly, art created since 1960 or so) is revealed in the penultimate chapter of The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. It's worth an extended quote, because it helps everything else make some weird kind of sense.
These are the people who spend $690,000 for a leather jacket tossed in a gallery corner, secured to the wall by a web of thin silver chains (1992, by Jim Hodges), or, yes, $12 million for a dead shark floating in a vat of formaldehyde (1991, by Damien Hirst). And that's why you keep asking yourself, "All that money... for that?"
A particularly outre 2006 Royal Gallery of Art exhibition inspired Don Thompson, the author, to start his trip down the rabbit hole of the contemporary art market. Thompson isn't an art insider; he's a Canadian economist who has taught at the London School of Economics and the Harvard Business School. This accounts for both the book's subtitle and the care Thompson uses to define most of the artspeak shot through the narrative.
"Branding" is the critical term he uses to explain everything. There are branded artists (Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Basquiat, Bacon); branded museums (MoMA, the Guggenheim, both Tates, the Louvre); branded dealers (Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman); branded auction houses (Christie's, Sotheby's); and branded collectors (Saatchi, Pinault, Broad). When you put any two or three of these together, wallets (and brains) explode. Artists become branded by being represented by a branded dealer, or being bought by a branded collector. A branded collector can maximize his return by selling a branded artist's work through a branded auction house (at the evening auction, not the more plebian afternoon one), preferably to a branded museum or another branded collector. Prices keep going up (even if they don't -- nobody admits that) because the players in this game never run out of money. And so it goes.
Keep in mind that none of this has anything to do with you or me. Thompson makes the point more than once: that pretty picture you buy in your Main Street gallery or from the artist's studio during the annual Art Walk will never sell for more than it does at the moment you buy it, no matter how long you hold onto it. Make sure it looks good on your wall.
Despite being both an academic and an economist, Thompson writes clearly, often engagingly, and most important, understandably. He examines the underpinnings of each piece of this self-reinforcing money mill in turn, discussing not only how they work but also why, and how it all goes together. Outside of some artist name-dropping, you likely won't get lost even if your only exposure to contemporary art is Warhol's soup cans.
Probably because he isn't an art insider and was discovering all this stuff while he was researching this book, Thompson includes an unusual (for these kind of books) amount of detail about the everyday workings of dealers, auctions, art fairs, and the like. We learn about chandelier bids, waiting lists, "buying with your ears," private treaty sales and "Very Ordinary People" (the other 99.9%), often while these concepts are in narrative play. Given what I write, I found this the most useful aspect of this book; you may too, especially if you've seen one too many art-auction scenes in movies and wondered if it really goes down that way.
If you read my last art-book review, you may be asking, "Isn't this just a rehash of Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century?" Yes, they do cover a lot of the same territory. However, Georgina Adam came at the subject from an insider's perspective and wasn't nearly as interested in the nuts-and-bolts as she was about broad trends. Shark and Big Bucks are companion pieces, not duplicates.
The other difference between the two books: Shark is almost ten years old, while Big Bucks is only three. Thompson's data ended just as the 2007-8 crash began. This renders most of his discussion about absolute prices (rather than trends) moot; nearly all the records he reports have been broken by now, and a few of the power players have changed. (Thompson visited the post-crash art world in 2014's The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art .) This, as well as a spotty index and not nearly enough pictures, shaved off enough of the fifth star to make me call it four stars and change.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is an accessible, readable explanation of how the stratospheric end of the art market works. It's a better entry point than Adam's Big Bucks; you'll get more ground-level details along with the lurid bits, at the cost of looking at the world as it was a few years ago. By the end, you'll know why you should buy a contemporary female nude with lots of red, and why it doesn't matter whether you actually like (or understand) the piece you've spent your retirement fund on. You'll also learn that "more money than sense" isn't just a cliché.
The value of art often has more to do with artist, dealer, or auction-house branding, and with collector ego, than it does with art... the boom in trophy art prices reflects both the buoyancy of the financial markets and the concentration of income that has occurred all around the world in the past twenty years. In the United Kingdom and the United States, the share of income held by the top 1 percent of the population has doubled since the start of the 1980s. In Italy and France... the income share of the top 1 percent has tripled. In Russia, China and India, the share may be fifty times higher... In 2007, Forbes magazine reported a record 946 billionaires...
These are the people who spend $690,000 for a leather jacket tossed in a gallery corner, secured to the wall by a web of thin silver chains (1992, by Jim Hodges), or, yes, $12 million for a dead shark floating in a vat of formaldehyde (1991, by Damien Hirst). And that's why you keep asking yourself, "All that money... for that?"
A particularly outre 2006 Royal Gallery of Art exhibition inspired Don Thompson, the author, to start his trip down the rabbit hole of the contemporary art market. Thompson isn't an art insider; he's a Canadian economist who has taught at the London School of Economics and the Harvard Business School. This accounts for both the book's subtitle and the care Thompson uses to define most of the artspeak shot through the narrative.
"Branding" is the critical term he uses to explain everything. There are branded artists (Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Basquiat, Bacon); branded museums (MoMA, the Guggenheim, both Tates, the Louvre); branded dealers (Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman); branded auction houses (Christie's, Sotheby's); and branded collectors (Saatchi, Pinault, Broad). When you put any two or three of these together, wallets (and brains) explode. Artists become branded by being represented by a branded dealer, or being bought by a branded collector. A branded collector can maximize his return by selling a branded artist's work through a branded auction house (at the evening auction, not the more plebian afternoon one), preferably to a branded museum or another branded collector. Prices keep going up (even if they don't -- nobody admits that) because the players in this game never run out of money. And so it goes.
Keep in mind that none of this has anything to do with you or me. Thompson makes the point more than once: that pretty picture you buy in your Main Street gallery or from the artist's studio during the annual Art Walk will never sell for more than it does at the moment you buy it, no matter how long you hold onto it. Make sure it looks good on your wall.
Despite being both an academic and an economist, Thompson writes clearly, often engagingly, and most important, understandably. He examines the underpinnings of each piece of this self-reinforcing money mill in turn, discussing not only how they work but also why, and how it all goes together. Outside of some artist name-dropping, you likely won't get lost even if your only exposure to contemporary art is Warhol's soup cans.
Probably because he isn't an art insider and was discovering all this stuff while he was researching this book, Thompson includes an unusual (for these kind of books) amount of detail about the everyday workings of dealers, auctions, art fairs, and the like. We learn about chandelier bids, waiting lists, "buying with your ears," private treaty sales and "Very Ordinary People" (the other 99.9%), often while these concepts are in narrative play. Given what I write, I found this the most useful aspect of this book; you may too, especially if you've seen one too many art-auction scenes in movies and wondered if it really goes down that way.
If you read my last art-book review, you may be asking, "Isn't this just a rehash of Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century?" Yes, they do cover a lot of the same territory. However, Georgina Adam came at the subject from an insider's perspective and wasn't nearly as interested in the nuts-and-bolts as she was about broad trends. Shark and Big Bucks are companion pieces, not duplicates.
The other difference between the two books: Shark is almost ten years old, while Big Bucks is only three. Thompson's data ended just as the 2007-8 crash began. This renders most of his discussion about absolute prices (rather than trends) moot; nearly all the records he reports have been broken by now, and a few of the power players have changed. (Thompson visited the post-crash art world in 2014's The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art .) This, as well as a spotty index and not nearly enough pictures, shaved off enough of the fifth star to make me call it four stars and change.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is an accessible, readable explanation of how the stratospheric end of the art market works. It's a better entry point than Adam's Big Bucks; you'll get more ground-level details along with the lurid bits, at the cost of looking at the world as it was a few years ago. By the end, you'll know why you should buy a contemporary female nude with lots of red, and why it doesn't matter whether you actually like (or understand) the piece you've spent your retirement fund on. You'll also learn that "more money than sense" isn't just a cliché.
July 9, 2018
A lot of modern art seems like a scam to me. People pay huge sums for a Damien Hirst or an Andy Warhol, but, frankly, much of their art is boring, ugly, and insulting to both intelligence and common sense. Damien Hirst’s least ugly works, like his spot and spin paintings, could be done by anyone and, in fact, some are made by other people under his direction without Hirst adding anything but a signature. How is selling a Hirst painting of colorful spots for $300,000 (that Hirst didn’t even paint) not a scam? How could convincing someone to buy a sculpture made from some artist’s own frozen blood for 1.5 million pounds be anything other than a con job?
The galleries, auction houses, collectors, dealers, artists, and critics involved in the contemporary art industry are participating in all kinds of chicanery, some of which would be illegal in other contexts. The art market looks suspiciously like a financial bubble, like the Dutch tulip mania or the South Sea Company, that could pop at any moment just like any other market not based on rational behavior.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark does a great job of explaining how the high end contemporary art market works, revealing all the tricks of the trade that successful artists and dealers use to pump up the value of their work. Don Thompson details how artists become trusted brands, like Coke or Xerox, who art collectors can trust to get them a good return on their investment. He explains how the art trade is becoming less the realm of art historians and more the domain of financial advisors. He explains how marketing and provenance can have a greater impact on the value of a work than the quality of the work itself. For many art collectors the most important things about a work of art are its cost and the likelihood that it might be sold for more in the future. For these people art is above all a status symbol, a way of letting everyone know you’re crazy rich.
This book is eye opening and interesting. I may never understand how 300 pounds of candy purchased in bulk and then heaped into a pile can be called a work of art and then sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I’m closer to understanding than I was before.
The galleries, auction houses, collectors, dealers, artists, and critics involved in the contemporary art industry are participating in all kinds of chicanery, some of which would be illegal in other contexts. The art market looks suspiciously like a financial bubble, like the Dutch tulip mania or the South Sea Company, that could pop at any moment just like any other market not based on rational behavior.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark does a great job of explaining how the high end contemporary art market works, revealing all the tricks of the trade that successful artists and dealers use to pump up the value of their work. Don Thompson details how artists become trusted brands, like Coke or Xerox, who art collectors can trust to get them a good return on their investment. He explains how the art trade is becoming less the realm of art historians and more the domain of financial advisors. He explains how marketing and provenance can have a greater impact on the value of a work than the quality of the work itself. For many art collectors the most important things about a work of art are its cost and the likelihood that it might be sold for more in the future. For these people art is above all a status symbol, a way of letting everyone know you’re crazy rich.
This book is eye opening and interesting. I may never understand how 300 pounds of candy purchased in bulk and then heaped into a pile can be called a work of art and then sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I’m closer to understanding than I was before.
March 31, 2019
"در دنیای هنر معاصر تا وقتی کسی شما را برند نکند ، کسی نیستید ، یا تا وقتی خودتان خود را برند نکنید ، آن وقت مهم ترین روزنامه ها و مجلات دنیا عکس مجسمه "پلنگ صورتی " شما را چاپ کند و آن را به عنوان چیزی که باید به خانه ببرید تا با آن استمنا کنید ، تبلیغ میکنند، ارزان نا قابل 1.8 میلیون دلار"
شاید بشه گفت کتاب بیش از انکه درباره اقتصاد هنر باشه میتونه به عنوان راهنمایی برای نزدیک شدن به مفهوم هنر معاصر تلقی بشه. توش بحث های جذابی داره به طور مثال : عوامل تاثیر گذر در مهم شدن یک آرتیست و ...
من ترجمه خوب و روون و پاورقی های مترجم روهم از یکی از عامل مهم در جذابیت کتاب میدونم. و اشنایی خود مترجم با دنیایی که داره ازش حرف میزنه هم یه اطمینان خاطری برام ایجاد میکرد.
نکات منفی : فونت خیلی ریز و خطوط نزدیک به هم
نایاب بودن کتاب ( معتقدم که آخرین دونه اش در بازار رو خودم خریدم )
پ.ن : پیشنهاد میشود هنگام مطالعه گوگل رو بذارید بغل دستتون شاید لازم شد
شاید بشه گفت کتاب بیش از انکه درباره اقتصاد هنر باشه میتونه به عنوان راهنمایی برای نزدیک شدن به مفهوم هنر معاصر تلقی بشه. توش بحث های جذابی داره به طور مثال : عوامل تاثیر گذر در مهم شدن یک آرتیست و ...
من ترجمه خوب و روون و پاورقی های مترجم روهم از یکی از عامل مهم در جذابیت کتاب میدونم. و اشنایی خود مترجم با دنیایی که داره ازش حرف میزنه هم یه اطمینان خاطری برام ایجاد میکرد.
نکات منفی : فونت خیلی ریز و خطوط نزدیک به هم
نایاب بودن کتاب ( معتقدم که آخرین دونه اش در بازار رو خودم خریدم )
پ.ن : پیشنهاد میشود هنگام مطالعه گوگل رو بذارید بغل دستتون شاید لازم شد
April 19, 2017
The middle 50% or so is way too in-depth about the auction process itself rather than the implications that auctions and the auction process have on the art world. Not to mention all the auction talk gets pretty repetitive. I also find it funny (kind of hard to knock the book on this, just wish it were revised or something) how much Thompson talks about the resilience of the market and compares it to stocks and mentions it only took slight hits from the 1990 recession and the dot com bubble but also later admits the contemporary art market has struggled to reach where it used to be... but then this was all researched and written between 2006 and 2007. So now I really want to know what the effects of the 2008 housing bubble on the art market ended up being, because my takeaway is that it was drastic. Did it affect sales? Museums? Auctions? Art fairs? Private sales? Did any of those markets collapse? Did the contemporary art world change because of the market crash? Or maybe it changed because of the ripple effect the housing bubble caused on the art market. Kind of leaves a lot up in there as a product of its time.
April 24, 2023
Smutný "konec" umění. Prachy určují, co je tím pravým uměleckým dílem.
Umění není uměním proto, že je například obraz hezký na pohled, výjimečně dobře vymyšlený / zpracovaný... Ne, jde o reklamu, marketing, boj pracháčů mezi sebou, adrenalin na prestižních aukcích. O dílo samotné tu vlastně nejde. Nemusí ho dokonce stvořit ani ten "umělec", který je pod ním podepsán. Moderní umění se nám jaksi vzdálilo od toho, že by se snad mělo dílo líbit tomu, kdo si ho kupuje. Nevadí, že je hnusné, hlavně, že má "rodokmen".
Chce se mi blejt, velebnosti.
Knížka je to výborná. Popisuje poslední fázi životního cyklu uměleckého díla - jeho koupi, prodej, koupi, prodej... Ani po přečtení se mi ale nedaří chápat astronomické ceny některých (podle mého) nesmyslů.
Jsem ráda, že už mám načteno i něco o těch předešlých fázích a tak ve mně nezůstane po přečtení tohoto jen trvalé znechucení z umění.
Poslední část knihy mi přece jen blikla trochou světélka na konci tunelu. S tím, že jako investice se umění ještě až tak nevyplatí. Tak aspoň, že většina těch šílenců, kteří toto financují, na tom nevydělá, jinak by se to točilo ještě do větších otáček a absurdna.
Umění není uměním proto, že je například obraz hezký na pohled, výjimečně dobře vymyšlený / zpracovaný... Ne, jde o reklamu, marketing, boj pracháčů mezi sebou, adrenalin na prestižních aukcích. O dílo samotné tu vlastně nejde. Nemusí ho dokonce stvořit ani ten "umělec", který je pod ním podepsán. Moderní umění se nám jaksi vzdálilo od toho, že by se snad mělo dílo líbit tomu, kdo si ho kupuje. Nevadí, že je hnusné, hlavně, že má "rodokmen".
Chce se mi blejt, velebnosti.
Knížka je to výborná. Popisuje poslední fázi životního cyklu uměleckého díla - jeho koupi, prodej, koupi, prodej... Ani po přečtení se mi ale nedaří chápat astronomické ceny některých (podle mého) nesmyslů.
Jsem ráda, že už mám načteno i něco o těch předešlých fázích a tak ve mně nezůstane po přečtení tohoto jen trvalé znechucení z umění.
Poslední část knihy mi přece jen blikla trochou světélka na konci tunelu. S tím, že jako investice se umění ještě až tak nevyplatí. Tak aspoň, že většina těch šílenců, kteří toto financují, na tom nevydělá, jinak by se to točilo ještě do větších otáček a absurdna.
September 27, 2022
Got this book recommended by a friend who suggested "the public is grossly overreacting to the NFT craze of 2021 as a new phenomena -- this is exactly how the contemporary art markets have worked for a century!".
Finishing the book I'm convinced that this observation was correct. Well-researched deep journalism on everything from brand name collectors and museums, to the virtual duopoly of top auction houses, the squeeze that middle-man art dealers feel on their margins, to the venture capital like structure of few winning artists and a long tail that never sell a single piece on increasing prices.
I will still enjoy -- and buy -- contemporary art (and NFTs).
But not as a market beating portfolio. ;)
Finishing the book I'm convinced that this observation was correct. Well-researched deep journalism on everything from brand name collectors and museums, to the virtual duopoly of top auction houses, the squeeze that middle-man art dealers feel on their margins, to the venture capital like structure of few winning artists and a long tail that never sell a single piece on increasing prices.
I will still enjoy -- and buy -- contemporary art (and NFTs).
But not as a market beating portfolio. ;)
January 1, 2017
Насправді чи не єдина книга про економічну історію мистецтва, написана живою та легкою мовою. Автор намагається розкрити усі приховані й невідомі факти про ринок сучасного мистецтва, оперуючи не тільки загальними фактами, але й власним досвідом, адже він неодноразово був присутній при великих аукціонах. Може насторожити те, що Томпсон скептично ставиться до сучасного мистецтва, проте це не так (точніше, не зовсім так). Для автора важливо розкрити максимально об'єктивно механіку штучного підвищення ціни на ті чи інші види мистцетва, а також маніпулювання їх же естетичною оцінкою. Ін��ими словами, Томпсон переконаний, що далеко не все мистецтво заслуговує статусу мистецтва, бо капіталізм перетворив його на черговий товар. Водночас уже на початку критик і журналіст дає власне визначення сучасного мистецтва як такого, що починається із 60х і визначене аукціонами як власне contemporary art. Така дефініція пояснює багато авторських коментарів і висновків.
Книжка може бути корисна там, кого цікавить історія мистецтва, а особливо його кураторська та фінансова/менеджерська складова, адже сьогодні це теж не менш важливий вимір культури (можливо, навіть той, що витіснив естетичний, тому доречно навіть згадати текст Жака Рансьєра про естетичне несвідоме). Великим недоліком книжки є відсутність ілюстрацій, адже Томпсон дуже часто апелює до багатьох зразків, тому читач щоразу змушений гуглити для огляду. Попри це, книжка читається дуже швидко й без перешкод, хоча й вимагає мінімальної мистецької бази.
Книжка може бути корисна там, кого цікавить історія мистецтва, а особливо його кураторська та фінансова/менеджерська складова, адже сьогодні це теж не менш важливий вимір культури (можливо, навіть той, що витіснив естетичний, тому доречно навіть згадати текст Жака Рансьєра про естетичне несвідоме). Великим недоліком книжки є відсутність ілюстрацій, адже Томпсон дуже часто апелює до багатьох зразків, тому читач щоразу змушений гуглити для огляду. Попри це, книжка читається дуже швидко й без перешкод, хоча й вимагає мінімальної мистецької бази.
January 2, 2010
I'm going to have to give this one a mixed-review. First of all, I was concerned by some of the mistakes that slipped past the book's editors (i.e. referring to Thomas Hoving as the former director of MOMA (instead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and references to the Whitney Museum of Modern (rather than American) Art, etc.) Such errors throw up all sorts of red flags for me. I wonder what other oversights I missed for not being familiar enough with the topics to start with. That said, I must admit that I did enjoy most of the book, especially the discussions of auction houses, the establishment of fair market values and the frank exploration of the existence and proliferation of art fairs in recent years. All in all, I would recommend this book for anyone whose professional life relies on, or exists in tandem with contemporary art. I do however caution you to double-check any of the facts yourself before relying on the book as a completely valid resource.
June 30, 2021
“The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art” – indeed “curious” sums up this particular non-fiction work… because the way numbers work and change in the art market is still a mystery to many.
Even though the catalysts to sky-rocketing prices can be identified, predicting how much a Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon work goes for at auction is a sheer impossibility.
Don Thomposon brings a book to the market that is definitely number-heavy and complex, so I will admit that I skipped a few pages. However, I can also say that the author knows how to write and makes numbers interesting! There is definitely some entertainment value there and I chuckled more than once.
Though first published in 2008, the conversations, market structures and ideas still add to a contemporary understanding of today’s art market.
Even though the catalysts to sky-rocketing prices can be identified, predicting how much a Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon work goes for at auction is a sheer impossibility.
Don Thomposon brings a book to the market that is definitely number-heavy and complex, so I will admit that I skipped a few pages. However, I can also say that the author knows how to write and makes numbers interesting! There is definitely some entertainment value there and I chuckled more than once.
Though first published in 2008, the conversations, market structures and ideas still add to a contemporary understanding of today’s art market.
October 27, 2015
A deep look at how art is sold at the highest levels. My biggest take away is that big art sales are often the result of wealthy people taking the advice of art dealers.
Unfortunately many expensive pieces of art are similar to "pump and dump" stocks. A great deal of excitement is generated among a wealthy populace that is largely ignorant of the future prospects of a particular artist.
In addition this book shows how the average artist is locked out of the upper reaches of the art market.
Unfortunately many expensive pieces of art are similar to "pump and dump" stocks. A great deal of excitement is generated among a wealthy populace that is largely ignorant of the future prospects of a particular artist.
In addition this book shows how the average artist is locked out of the upper reaches of the art market.
June 13, 2021
"The simple elegance of the work invites contemplation, even reverie."
Are you ever left flabbergasted by news of an artwork fetching millions of dollars in auction, when you cannot make even the slightest sense of it. If the exorbitant price tags of famous artworks intrigue you, this book would be a good read for you.
Using the examples of some of the most ridiculously priced artworks, the author comes to explain how these opaque prices are worked out through the complex mesh of branding, marketing, dealers, shock factor, auction houses, art fairs, collectors and others peculiar players of art world.
Author also attempts to provide its readers a guide to understanding contemporary art. A good portion of book is dedicated to understanding the highly complex and eccentric world of the auction houses, rules by Christies and Sotheby's.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, art is neither a good investment nor an efficient investment
This is not a book which would interest a lot of people and the abundance of references which would impress a connoisseur may become a little off putting for a idle reader.
Are you ever left flabbergasted by news of an artwork fetching millions of dollars in auction, when you cannot make even the slightest sense of it. If the exorbitant price tags of famous artworks intrigue you, this book would be a good read for you.
Using the examples of some of the most ridiculously priced artworks, the author comes to explain how these opaque prices are worked out through the complex mesh of branding, marketing, dealers, shock factor, auction houses, art fairs, collectors and others peculiar players of art world.
Author also attempts to provide its readers a guide to understanding contemporary art. A good portion of book is dedicated to understanding the highly complex and eccentric world of the auction houses, rules by Christies and Sotheby's.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, art is neither a good investment nor an efficient investment
This is not a book which would interest a lot of people and the abundance of references which would impress a connoisseur may become a little off putting for a idle reader.
April 18, 2024
I would have liked this more when it was published 15 years ago, but from my marginal knowledge little has likely changed except the size of the numbers. It's a bit of a time capsule, and with these books they rarely age well since things change and evolve.
I was disappointed that based on Don Thompson's credentials that it wasn't more technical, but he explains at the end that he set out to make a popularized book (inspired a bit by Freakonomics). I'm not sure deeper analytics were needed, but I doubt this would have ended up on my shortlist if I'd known that.
The lists of 25 artists, brokers, etc, etc is a bore and unnecessarily dates the book I'd guess. The overlying narrative likely hasn't changed though: Hyper competitive rich people live to one-up each other and this drives the modern art market even though it's not a great comparative investment. Global overall economic growth combined with what the lefties label income inequality continues to grow the population of the uber-rich and thus increases the high-end art market. Middle-men galore step in between the rich and the artist to capture significant shares of the monetary exchange.
Chief takeaway for the middle class and poor: Buy comparatively inexpensive art you like directly from artists and ignore other's tastes as much as humanly possible. What you buy will lose economic value, especially compared to the opportunity cost of a mutual fund.
Better yet, make the art yourself at materials cost. If you want to be a modern artist, make it from found objects and garbage and the costs magically become nil.
The end.
WTR = 709
ETA = 10/7/37
I was disappointed that based on Don Thompson's credentials that it wasn't more technical, but he explains at the end that he set out to make a popularized book (inspired a bit by Freakonomics). I'm not sure deeper analytics were needed, but I doubt this would have ended up on my shortlist if I'd known that.
The lists of 25 artists, brokers, etc, etc is a bore and unnecessarily dates the book I'd guess. The overlying narrative likely hasn't changed though: Hyper competitive rich people live to one-up each other and this drives the modern art market even though it's not a great comparative investment. Global overall economic growth combined with what the lefties label income inequality continues to grow the population of the uber-rich and thus increases the high-end art market. Middle-men galore step in between the rich and the artist to capture significant shares of the monetary exchange.
Chief takeaway for the middle class and poor: Buy comparatively inexpensive art you like directly from artists and ignore other's tastes as much as humanly possible. What you buy will lose economic value, especially compared to the opportunity cost of a mutual fund.
Better yet, make the art yourself at materials cost. If you want to be a modern artist, make it from found objects and garbage and the costs magically become nil.
The end.
WTR = 709
ETA = 10/7/37
June 10, 2018
Reads like a good detective story. Loved it.
October 11, 2019
The artworld is very much like a game of baseball. It can be predictable, but at the same time, there are times where it can change quickly and extremely. I agree with the good reads reviewer Meredith who talked about how this book gave several examples of how people profit for the art world. Meredith talked about how some art dealers will buy artwork for $1000. The artist was happy because they made $1000 from artwork, but then the dealer will use their connections to resell the artwork at a world-renowned auction, and it can sell for millions. Meredith thinks that it is slightly unfair because the artist does not see any of that profit. I can see where Meredith is coming from, but on the other hand, the dealer is the one using their connections to make the profit. In my opinion, this is fair, but if the dealer had a good faith, they should be sparing the artist a piece of their profit to encourage them to continue their dream.
This book was very well written, but some people may not see it that way. I found it very interesting with the different examples the author gave. He spoke about them in a way where if you found the topic interesting, it would not be annoying, but if you were forced to read the book, I see how someone could find the book very forced and annoying. I think that if this book had some of the pictures of the artwork, a lot more people would enjoy it. Overall, I enjoyed this book and thought everyone who has any interest in business or the art world should read it. Any aspiring artists should read this to get a better understanding of how they can profit more off of their artwork and that anyone considering working as an art dealer NEEDS to read this book or something similar because it will give them so much insight on how the art world truly works.
A discussion question I think would work for this book is, “How far do you think the art sale business is right now? For what reasons?”. I think it is about as far as we can realistically expect it to get, but others might think that art dealers should be forced to give artists a percentage of their profit. Others might think that there is no reason for this and that if someone sells something, it is no longer their property, and the dealer has no responsibility to give the artist anything.
May 29, 2021
یکی از بحثهای مهم که بارها موقع خواندن کتاب به ذهنم رسید، مسئلهی جایگاهِ منتقدانِ هنر است. در این بازارِ شلوغ و در این تئاترِ کسبوکار که جوگیری و هیجاناتِ روانی ارزشِ هنری را مشخص میکنند، منتقدانِ هنری کجا هستند؟ شاید پاسخ این باشد که آنها سرجایشان هستند، اما دههها گذشته از اهمیتی که داشتند. روزگاری کلمنت گرینبرگ توانست جکسون پولاک را به شهرت برساند، اما امروزه دیگر روزنامهنویسان و نویسندهگانِ هنری در بازار تعیینکننده نیستند، جز در مواردی بسیار استثنایی. امروزه حرفِ اول را برندها و موزهها میزنند و اهمیتشان آنقدر بالاست که حتی آثاری که احتمالِ جعلیبودنشان میرود هم در چنین فضایی فروخته میشود. بنظرم ، جایگاهِ منتقدِ هنری در دنیای امروز را می توان به پیانیستی در فاحشهخانه تشبیه کرد که هیچ نقشی در اتفاقاتِ اطراف ندارد.
اما آیا واقعا بازارِ هنر بازاریِ سودده است یا ما تنها بخشِ معروفِ آن را میبینیم؟ حقیقت این است که همانطور که ناگهان چندین صفر مقابلِ قیمتِ اثری مینشیند، این بازی طرفِ دیگری هم دارد و بارها و بارها اتفاق افتاده که اثری بعد از چند سال قیمتاش بسیار افت کرده و خریدار ضرری هنگفت را تجربه کرده. اینها سرمایهگذاریهای فاجعهباری هستند که کسی دربارهشان صحبت نمیکند. با توجه تجربه ی که تو بازار بورس دارم ، سودِ سرمایهگذاری در سهام بارها بیشتراز
خرید تابلویی از پیکاسو میتواند باشد.
کتابِ «کوسهی شکمپُرِ ۱۲میلیون دلاری» با ترجمهی روانِ اشکان زهرایی، گزارشی جذاب است و شیوهی نوشتنِ نویسنده هم بر پایهی روایتهایی بوده که اهمیت داشتهاند و بر اساسِ موضوع تفکیک شدهاند. و برای مخاطبی که علاقهمند به هنرِ معاصر است، کتابی مهم برای ورود به بحث است. البته مقدمهای که برای ترجمهی فارسی کتاب نوشته شده خیلی ربطی به بازارِ هنرِ ایرانی ندارد. اما سیستمِ روابطی که شرح میدهد بسیار شبیهِ امروزِ هنرِ ایران است اگرچه چند دهه دیرتر، اما تقریبا امروز ما هم همان راهی را طی میکنیم که دلالان و هنرمندان و حراجیها برندشده از سر گذراندهاند.
اما آیا واقعا بازارِ هنر بازاریِ سودده است یا ما تنها بخشِ معروفِ آن را میبینیم؟ حقیقت این است که همانطور که ناگهان چندین صفر مقابلِ قیمتِ اثری مینشیند، این بازی طرفِ دیگری هم دارد و بارها و بارها اتفاق افتاده که اثری بعد از چند سال قیمتاش بسیار افت کرده و خریدار ضرری هنگفت را تجربه کرده. اینها سرمایهگذاریهای فاجعهباری هستند که کسی دربارهشان صحبت نمیکند. با توجه تجربه ی که تو بازار بورس دارم ، سودِ سرمایهگذاری در سهام بارها بیشتراز
خرید تابلویی از پیکاسو میتواند باشد.
کتابِ «کوسهی شکمپُرِ ۱۲میلیون دلاری» با ترجمهی روانِ اشکان زهرایی، گزارشی جذاب است و شیوهی نوشتنِ نویسنده هم بر پایهی روایتهایی بوده که اهمیت داشتهاند و بر اساسِ موضوع تفکیک شدهاند. و برای مخاطبی که علاقهمند به هنرِ معاصر است، کتابی مهم برای ورود به بحث است. البته مقدمهای که برای ترجمهی فارسی کتاب نوشته شده خیلی ربطی به بازارِ هنرِ ایرانی ندارد. اما سیستمِ روابطی که شرح میدهد بسیار شبیهِ امروزِ هنرِ ایران است اگرچه چند دهه دیرتر، اما تقریبا امروز ما هم همان راهی را طی میکنیم که دلالان و هنرمندان و حراجیها برندشده از سر گذراندهاند.
February 1, 2018
I've started reading this book with little information about contemporary art. I only know about the ridiculous installations that cost a fortune and Andy Warhol's easy-to-imitate silkscreens.
This book was a great insight to everything you need to know about contemporary art, not just the economical aspect of it. It goes through major artists, major auction houses, major collectors, and major art installations.
Although its a slow read, the information it exposes about the art world is interesting and in some places surprising. It opens up the discussion to what constitutes as art, how can art be valued, and the inevitable reality of commercialized and mass produced art.
Its sad when its put into perspective how the art world is basically a game for the rich. Billionaires buy and sell art like its stock. Non-the-less, we ordinary people can still go to museums (thank God for that) and enjoy art for free. Now with a better understanding of how the art world works, I can witness art being sold for extravagant amounts of money and be amused rather than shocked.
This book was a great insight to everything you need to know about contemporary art, not just the economical aspect of it. It goes through major artists, major auction houses, major collectors, and major art installations.
Although its a slow read, the information it exposes about the art world is interesting and in some places surprising. It opens up the discussion to what constitutes as art, how can art be valued, and the inevitable reality of commercialized and mass produced art.
Its sad when its put into perspective how the art world is basically a game for the rich. Billionaires buy and sell art like its stock. Non-the-less, we ordinary people can still go to museums (thank God for that) and enjoy art for free. Now with a better understanding of how the art world works, I can witness art being sold for extravagant amounts of money and be amused rather than shocked.
June 8, 2017
This is by no means an easy read. The author packs in a lot of information, including economics and a bit of art criticism. Nonetheless, the topic is fascinating. Some parts are obvious: when the ultra rich compete for rare commodities, then the "value" goes up. The obvious, however, is balanced with a behind-the-scenes look at how auction houses, dealers, and art fairs work. It certainly gave me a new appreciation of why museums dislike talking about cost and value when talking about art--the auction prices have little to do with the quality of the art.
November 1, 2012
Early on in this book I spotted one or two inaccuracies, which really put me off the whole thing. Thompson might know his economics, but he doesn't really know his art and he appears to present the iniquities of the art market with no sense of disopprobrium or satire. I will say this book is highly readable, but nothing really sunk in. Ultimately it was a bit depressing.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 306 reviews