> Valentine said ... "Asking $20,000 for a work in an artist’s first show is unsustainable"
none of the separate participants in this article are willing to acknowledge that these are related problems.
there is no price discovery in the art world, and it was only just beginning to happen in the pandemic era flush with cash
when you question the price or try to find any rational trend, the gallery director gaslights you into the prior quote "you should just love the piece!" okay but why should I love it at this price "because it will be another price in the future!" but why will it be another price who sets that price "we the gallery do! it moves up over time!" how does that work "you should just love the piece!"
It cost me $50 and I've taken it with me every time I've moved.
I really don't get dropping thousands on a single piece, I've never felt any work speak that loudly to me.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
otherwise yes, it’s the gallery’s job to preserve a level of value for the artist, and they work hard to maintain the house cards.
And yet the price of the piece is still set above the reserve bid for all intents and purposes, and if the piece is part of a collection that one future trade is setting the price of the whole collection - just like with any low float asset like illiquid shares
but I find the artists, dealers, and galleries to be doing the most to prevent price discovery. Doing the most to not be compared to other kinds of markets.
It would be tempting to see if there is a correlation in when the “legit” art world price going off a cliff and the NFT bubble, because that suckered in a lot of the idiot end of the speculator crowd.
without any enforcement with sanctioned violence, this is merely symbolic. It's why so much scam happens with the NFT space.
My web browser has a novel and advanced attack on the cryptosystem built into it I have dubbed the right-click-copy-image attack.
I’ve even managed to replicate it on my phone.
Nobody cares about your precious little certificate, but if it makes you happy, buy it.
NFTs seem like a solution to a non existent problem. Or a problem you have to search really really hard to find.
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
[Stares aggressively in the direction of gen AI.]
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
[0] https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-ri...
It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
The art part of the market - in the sense of original creativity that means something to someone - had become a footnote. And large parts of it were more about performance than craft.
So resale values collapsed, and now everyone is walking through the rubble and wondering if there's anything left to rebuild.
AI is both completely irrelevant to this and absolutely central, but for non-obvious reasons.
Etsy and reddit are easy ways to find rather good art for what I can tell is a consistent price based on the size of the piece.
The only time I 'browse' art offline is during special events, which have all been wander from house to house or small art studio to studio. I love the experience, it's much more personal as you know the artist will be there and you can discuss the piece with them.
Got to love 'late stage capitalism'
"I've got an exciting bag-holding opportunity that you don't want to miss."
Anything worthy of the concept of art isn't likely to be found in these places.
If you like making shit that looks cool and you want to sell it, have at it. Just please drop the intellectual pretence that anything other than "it looks cool" is going on.
> “The juice has got to be worth the squeeze,” one collector-trader said. “And there’s no juice in the art market. It’s just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Rude, rude, rude.”
From what little I know of the NY art scene, by osmosis (by having an SO who previously was accomplished in it, and could mingle well at gallery openings and cocktail parties, infinitely better than I could ever learn to)...
I wonder whether the "rude, rude, rude" means that the market had come to depend on nouveau riche speculators (who'd typically have neither the intellectual and artistic background, nor old-money social graces/conventions).
If you didn't respect your customers, and didn't make them feel valued, then the ones who only cared about money or status games have other options.
The same illness infected the art world, and it was no more sustainable there than anywhere else.
I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.
I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
Mentioned it here before, https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
You dropped me onto a page with no sense of range or scope. Clicking around results in some very "odd" perceptions about what it is your putting out.
Categorize them so they can be filtered (colored, geometric, organic), load randomly by those tags or at least put a breadth of samples out front.
I like your stuff, but you need to have a better introduction and better access for it.
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
In a way, we are actually in a golden age. I lurk on social media accounts of amateur art enthusiasts around the globe with (IMHO) good taste who seek out interesting little known artists and post it on their feeds. I am introduced to so much great art that I probably would have never known about otherwise. If I see something I like, I search for the artist online and see if they have something available in their portfolio for sale that I love.
I’ve bought amazing art from talented artists around the globe that speak no common language with me. We get it done (Google Translate to the rescue). I don’t filter on price but virtually everything I’ve bought is always in a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars range. The fact that you can talk to the artist just adds to the story.
Forget the “tastemakers” in art. I can give my money to excellent artists directly, including many that never attracted the attention of tastemakers or who weren’t deemed worthy by said people. I received a huge piece from Denmark today. The whole experience is lovely and the artists really appreciate that someone loves their work. This is the future.
https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/
https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/
https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/
https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/
https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/
https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/
And curating:
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
Bleeding money, the gallery recently laid off half their staff.
It's almost as if the curators would rather lose their jobs than exhibit art that the public enjoys.
Seems like it’s not an art problem but an art dealer problem. If you rent a $100k/month restaurant space that seats 20 people, is the food industry dying if you can’t turn a profit and close?
I don't know what causes bubbles to pop, but I don't think it's directly related to US monetary policy. I suspect that the bubble just moved elsewhere.
While canvas, sculpture, and other media are far removed from jpegs, the scarcity of adjacent digital forms going away may have reduced the interest in the market for "shaped aesthetic things".
The attention, and thus money, has moved elsewhere.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.
I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
No idea the price, but I would much prefer this to a Charizard pokemon card!
The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.
One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.
Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)
https://www.resourcefulfinancepro.com/news/irs-section-174-c...
When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections.
2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
My sincerest desire is that there’s a peaceful resolution to this conflict before they’re forced to realize it.
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.
To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.
This could be because of capital controls, financial stress or increasing sense of national pride - take your pick
Just one example, one of the biggest Canadian collectors of contemporary art is condo marketer Bob Rennie, who during the foreign wealth lead boom in Canadian real estate, was making so much money that he opened up an entire personal downtown museum to show off his art works.
After layers of regulation against foreign buying amongst many other shifts in the economy (hi interest rates), condo sales are now in retreat with developers on the ropes and Rennie Marketing laying off staff.
Things change.
(I have no idea if Rennie has stopped buying, but given the sorts of big shifts in his industry, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd eased off!)
From my readings and general pulse checks, it’s quite the opposite. Old risk calculations have been thrown out, and there is no new normal. Everyone operates under the assumption that market is god, and it will be bailed out in case if things go sideways, so exposure to equity is high.
https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-...
I'll be blunt. I've looked at their works, and those in the article itself.
I won't be losing any sleep over this.
I just want to know the bottom line: is this good, bad or indifferent for the actual struggling artists. Or upside for some, downside for others? And, which struggling arists; how many out of the multitude associated with what outcome?
Art used to be a good way to get around currency controls - David Walsh who built the MONA art museum I believe once said he first bought art and artifacts as a way to get cash winnings out of some countries.
I have found that the higher priced galleries seem to sell worse art. The emperor has no clothes. And just like the Impressionists revolted against the Academy, us artist shall revolt at the Art market system that says “your work only matters if you have an MFA from a top school”.
For mainstream "rich person" art, all of this is outsourced. Curators discover the artist, promote the work, and set the price. Glossy trade journals tells you what the artwork means and how to talk about it to others in a way that's more erudite than any thoughts you can form on your own. Your function, really, is just to show up with money and then hang the piece.
That species of humans is getting extinct or do not have control of their investment decisions anymore. Someone who was born in the 70's and later is likely to be less interested in collectible than someone who was born in the 50's.
krackers•5h ago