Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be much logic to it–how art is valued on the commercial market, I mean. You hear of paintings, sculptures, and photographs being sold for small and even large fortunes, but how did the buyer and seller arrive at such prices? (As an example, see my February 22, 2015 blog Peter Lik…Artist? Or, slick businessman? Or both? Or…something else?)
I guess, like someone told me about the real estate market, the value of whatever is being sold is determined by whatever someone is willing to pay. Period.
In art, it seems like marketing, gossip, connections, peer opinion, gallery opinions and prejudices, social appearances, bragging rights, and sometimes even the quality of the actual work, all have something to do with the monetary value of a piece.
Here’s my plan (at least, until I can get to be really, really good): I am going to ask a rich friend to buy one of my photographs for, say, $500,000. I’ll give him the money back the next day, of course. But what we’ll do in the meantime is hold some sort of press conference for the art crowd and throw around phrases like “emerging artist”, “incredible potential”, “recently discovered”, “passionate”, “inspired”, “endowed with rich layers of meaning and Freudian symbolism”, “nihilistic pseudo-psychological analysis of contemporary capitalist-consumer society”, and so on.
We’ll let the art market take it from there.
In that vein, I offer up today’s hilarious video (3 minutes). It’s in Dutch, but if you can read English subtitles, you’ll be just fine as a frog’s hair. The idea here is to place an IKEA painting worth about $20.00 in a museum, act like it is some sort of masterpiece, then ask the opinions of passersby. I love the references to “IKE Andrews” (the artist), and some of his other works: Ektorp, Norden, and Dalskär. A real gut buster.
Is this the state of today’s art market?
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