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Magazine of the American Association of Museums, professional association , Spring 2005. Anna
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Magazine of the American Association of Museums, professional association, Spring 2005
Anna “In different ways, each of the readings points to and struggles with the position of contemporary art as a commodity that defies commodification in the sense that there appears to be little rhyme or reason to how much exchange value is attributed to it (if the high priests of positivism at RAND can't disagggregate art valuations, who can?). If critical authority, hegemonic aesthetic values, artisinal skill, and the conditions of production of art objects all seem to have lost weight in determining the price of art, what is left?”
Natalie “how does this type of art [contemporary fabricated works) derive its value (market value, aesthetic value, etc. ? Can this type of art only be produced and recognized by artists who already have market and aesthetic "legitimacy" in the art world, and if so, does that mean that art-making itself is an exclusive act?”
Diana “Does the structure of the market itself [--the institution-academia-market "triumvirate" of the high-art world--] inhibit increased demand [and increased democratization of art] ?”
* artist/producers* critics and historians * collectors* dealers* advisors * administrators=============* auction houses * journals and conferences * museums, biennials, exhibition spaces * university, college, and related art programs * foundations (private --corporate and individual– and public)
“The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art work that art world is noted for.”Howard Becker (Art Worlds)
“With so many wealthy collectors competing for the work of a few dozen international art stars, top galleries are in a position to handpick their clientele these days, keeping long and closely guarded waiting lists for new work…”“The art world is a world of winners and losers. It’s not a world of small, incremental changes. The hits are astounding, but the misses are also astounding.”(Mia Fineman, October 15, 2006 NY Times) Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Time
Untitled (1984, Robert Gober “I didn’t understand it or have any desire to own it,” she said by telephone from California. “Then something clicked.”
Power in the art world is shifting away from the tenured stasis of academia to cultural actors plugged directly into the entrepreneurial sector. And with this transformation, subversive ‘anti-institutional’ institutional changeability has become the defining cultural mandate of the neo-liberal world order. • Matthew Jesse Jackson, Managing the avant-garde, New Left Review, 32, March April, 2005. p. 114
“Is this value placed on "trendiness" necessarily a negative development, or can we see it as simply part of the socio-historical tendency to value different things in art over time (i.e. classicalism, representationalism, expressionism, abstraction, etc.)? In other words, in an increasingly media and image-driven pop culture economy, is it valid to consider "trendiness" a legitimate movement?”Angela
The new vogue for art investing has got a boost from a number of recent studies of the global art market’s profitability. The Belgian economists Nathalie Buelens and Victor Ginsburgh looked at the prices of paintings between 1700 and 1961, and found that for long stretches of time certain schools of art were a better investment than bonds. More strikingly, Jiangping Mei and Michael Moses, economists at N.Y.U., examined the records of paintings with a previous auction history which Christie’s and Sotheby’s had sold since 1950 and used the data to put together the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. Over the past hundred and thirty years, the paintings in that index have outperformed bonds by a wide margin, and over the past fifty years they’ve performed about as well as stocks, too. CASH FOR CANVAS by James Surowiecki OCTOBER 17, 2005 The New Yorker
So much for spending years toiling in obscurity -- or even starving -- to catch the fancy of the art world. With global auction sales hitting $4.2 billion last year and scores of new galleries fighting for inventory, some dealers are reaching out to a largely untapped group of American artists: the impossibly precocious. From art hubs like New York to spots like Fort Wayne, Ind., dealers, collectors and museum curators are scouting artists still in their teens and early 20s. Painters who aren't old enough to rent a car are hiring personal assistants, turning down interviews and having their work snapped up by such major collectors as Michael Ovitz and Charles Saatchi. Hot art market stokes prices for artists barely out of teens Monday, April 17, 2006By Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal
Funds To Please The EyeBut with subjective valuations and steep costs, the new art funds look rather riskyFEBRUARY 14, 2005 Art is hot, but collectors aren't the only ones generating the heat. Financiers, eager to profit from escalating prices, aim to turn art into more of a mass-market asset class -- much as they did for real estate through real estate investment trusts starting in the 1960sFormer Sotheby's Holdings (BID ) and Christie's International auction-house directors, bankers, and Wall Street money managers have plans to launch at least six investment funds in the first half of 2005. They will acquire works in various segments of the art market and hold them for up to 10 years. At least another half-dozen funds are expected to go public this year. The funds are targeting individuals with at least $5 million in investable assets, private banks, family offices, universities, and pension funds. Minimums start at $250,000, but some sponsors are talking about eventually lowering the cost of entry to $50,000.
Diana “How does the artist identity counter the artist-as-laborer scenario, or should it? What does this mean about how we value artists, and not just art, in our society?”
Julia “how does this growing rift between "thinker" and "maker" effect the work produced -- first in a purely aesthetic sense, and second in a more critical/analytical one? Is the potential gloss/sheen of the object dampened by our knowledge that it was fabricated by outsiders? Does this knowledge even matter?”
Julia “Does the conceptual artist -- one who conceives, rather than fabricates -- fall within any of [Plato’s] categorizations [ie. philosopher v. carpenter/ creator v. imitator], or does he require a new framework?”
“Katy Siegel, a critic and professor of contemporary art history at Hunter College, points out that while some art schools train students to philosophize, others concentrate on more traditional skills like carpentry, welding, stone carving and metalwork. "Places like Ohio State versus, say, the Whitney program, still teach manual labor skills in addition to — or as opposed to — conceptual problem solving and networking," she said, "and there is a real class divide in the art world between the art workers andthe art thinkers."Looks Brilliant on Paper. But Who, Exactly, Is Going to Make It? By MIA FINEMAN - New York Times 05/06/2006 11:25 PMament model and consumption capital
our art world Artist as creative worker (?)
“Never hire anyone without an aberration in their background.” • Tom Peters, quoted by Stefan Stern in “A Guru Aims • High on Prozac,” New Statesman, 12/18/2000
First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world. People Power: Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing – the peer production era has arrived. Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine)
Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine)
Anna “Keyser sells her advice to the 'dark matter' of the art world, targeting Plattner's "identity producers" who make art in spite of money. Is she merely capitalizing on what you might call an exploitative social reality?”
Sara“Did early net.art influence any of the processes that broke down older models of luxury brand exclusivity in the first place?”
“You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub.” Chris Anderson from The Long Tail
Sara“can we consider some contemporary “parafictional” projects that create a hierarchy of viewership based on “insider” knowledge (of a project’s fiction) as art world examples of similar new models of exclusivity”
Sonia “More than ever, an exclusive slice of society controls the contemporary art market. Can the "lifelike art" intervention, grounded in the notion of art as undistinguishable from life, put art back on the list of recurrent desirable products of the market?”
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