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The Storm Hits the Art Market
- ungreased0675 1y agoFrom the outside, so much of the art world looks like grifting and fraud. (Much like the NFT scene)
- krackers 1y agoSeems like a low interest rate phenomenon
- nick49488171 1y agoThat Kristina Reischl image looks a lot like stone toss comics for some reason
- ttoinou 1y agoIsn’t the money being invested in crypto instead? Rich people might prefer others better ways to protect their assets than the current art market
- yieldcrv 1y agofrom the article "Now that the bubble has burst, the speculators are out of the picture, off flipping meme coins, where no one makes them feel inadequate or insists that they buy three things they don’t want to get the one thing they do."
- woodruffw 1y agoI think it’s a decade too late for that to be the dominating factor.
- yieldcrv 1y ago> The question is how to “get people to understand that art isn’t an asset class,” Schwartzmann added. “That’s not how you should be collecting,” > 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!"
- relaxing 1y agoprice discovery happens at auction. 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.
- yieldcrv 1y agoA huge number of things receive either no bid or don't meet the reserve bid 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.
- tart-lemonade 1y agoI have a painting of a commuter train I used to ride to work every day. It's not a conversation starter (or rather, I'm always the one who starts talking about it) but I love it because it reminds me of when I discovered that I didn't need to be a slave to my car and how freeing that was. 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.
- mosura 1y agoThis is really the art as speculation fad coming home to roost. The people actually interested in art as art are now on things like Instagram buying direct from the artists with very little gatekeeping either by art schools or galleries. 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.
- gedy 1y agoIt's speculation, but tax avoidance too: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-fine-art-market-how-the-wealthy-use-art-for-tax-evasion https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f...
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoAnd money laundering… don’t forget the money laundering
- blitzar 1y agoPersonally I bid for the gasps, fainting and eventual standing ovation at the end of the auction along with the knowing nod and smile from someone who says indubitably a lot.
- mmaunder 1y agoI agree - a lot of art is sold via artists having a relationship with a stable of a few hundred people via insta. Completely bypasses the galleries and is far more compelling for the buyer because they can develop an emotional connection with the creator. Galleries can’t do that without having the artist present and even then they’re overwhelmed and buyers can’t make a connection. So this isn’t necessarily an art thing, it’s a gallery thing. Disintermediation strikes again.
- relaxing 1y agoThis has nothing to do with the art world the article is talking about.
- redwood 1y agoThe vanity of owning rare things is all too much... NFTs are really the culmination of the phenomenon. I'm all for owning beautiful things and paying if it's something handmade. But once it becomes such an extreme out of wack status symbol kept alive by a global elite it's just feeding the monster. The worst is when it's an expensive status symbol and still mass produced I suppose
- MontyCarloHall 1y agoWhen you're rich enough to live in what's effectively a post-scarcity world, scarcity itself becomes a valuable commodity. After all, we are the product of natural selection, a process shaped by scarcity. It is therefore such a fundamental part of our lives that its absence drives some to artificially recreate it.
- 101008 1y agoI collect rare books (and memorabilia related to them), and it is not about vanity at all. I consider them historical objects (in their niche, of course) in the sense they changed the industry, or affected a portion of society somehow. I consider myself a keeper and guardian of them.
- giveita 1y agoThere is going to be an element of affordability. I doubt someone worth $1bn would spend it all on art but maybe they would spend $10m or if you prefer the growth of $1bn invested in SPX for a month. So a month's "work". A bit like $10k to many of us (I bet many of us have $10k of furniture)... which seems rediculous to someone earning $50k/y. It's all relative.
- MontyCarloHall 1y agoHow much of this is due to anti-money laundering regulations enacted in the early 2020s [0], which much better vet the identities of the buyers/sellers? [0] https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-risk-management/eu-anti-money-laundering-directive https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-ri...
- nottorp 1y agoThat reminds me that I looked up gold custom iPhones once. They had various payment methods, including cash (highest price on their list was 300k usd) at their office in Dubai.
- cubefox 1y ago> Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said. It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoIt's a stretch. Basically the speculators moved into NFTs, which scratched the gambling itch, and NFTs and other forms of crypto made money laundering much more straightforward. 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.
- timcobb 1y ago> The question is how to “get people to understand that art isn’t an asset class,” he added. Got to love 'late stage capitalism'
- a_bonobo 1y agoWhat isn't an asset class for sale these days, with horrible consequences? Health? Housing? Water? Knowledge?
- p_ing 1y agoI've purchased plenty of art over the past couple years, mostly original paintings with a few prints. Very few of those came from galleries and when I walked in the galleries, I already knew what I wanted to buy. 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.
- jordanb 1y agoThe best evidence that art was going to crash is when Masterworks ads were everywhere. You know the bubble is stretched to its limit when they start hawking it to retail. "I've got an exciting bag-holding opportunity that you don't want to miss."
- mlinhares 1y agoWhenever you see a company trying to hawk ownership in itself to the general public you know it's going down the tubes. Unfortunately a lot of people believe in this and lose real money they couldn't afford to lose to these scams.
- Ekaros 1y agoI am always find concept of fractional ownership questionable. Unless very well controlled. And extremely so when you are dealing with physical non-fungible assets like art or collectibles. Maybe I am just too risk averse to see the money...
- blitzar 1y ago"I've got some sellers who know the market well, bought in early and want to get out - oportunity of a lifetime for you"
- impostervt 1y agoYou can buy shares on their secondary market pretty cheaply right now.
- AbstractH24 1y agoWas exactly my thought when reading this
- d_silin 1y agoMy sister started an independent artist career from 2022, and overall trends were fairly brutal to her (unemployment due to Russian-Ukrainian war, raise of AIs, tariff war), however the only solution in this circumstances is to climb up, raise the quality of one's art and aim for the higher price range.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoGood riddance. 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.
- neilv 1y ago> Now that the bubble has burst, the speculators are out of the picture, off flipping meme coins, where no one makes them feel inadequate or insists that they buy three things they don’t want to get the one thing they do. > “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.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoThis is very much a nouveau riche culture - infinite entitlement and self-importance that confuses marketing and narcissism for substance. The same illness infected the art world, and it was no more sustainable there than anywhere else.
- padjo 1y agoI feel like anyone who says about art “the juice has to be worth the squeeze” isn’t really into art.
- neilv 1y agoBut likely really into cocaine.
- indigodaddy 1y agoJust go to the smaller/community art shows and you can usually find a couple or five really excellent artists who put their life into their work and will talk to you one on one vs these high priced pompous ego exhibitions like Art Basel.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- coldcode 1y agoI make an unusual kind of art, but I haven't tried selling it, as you need a stable of interested people, and I can only post it in one place at the moment (a Facebook interest group on tiling, Instagram is overrun with AI, you can't start a new profile without lots of existing supporters). I've considered opening a gallery in my local area just to sell my art (5 million people in the metro, and barely a real commercial art gallery). My overhead would be just me and a location. The idea of selling art for tens or hundreds of thousands seems nuts. 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 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 https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
- andreareina 1y agoImages partially load and then turn into placeholders
- mulmen 1y agoMany local businesses in my neighborhood (there are very very few chains) post art for sale from community artists and the chamber of commerce for the neighborhood sponsors art walks. In that situation you don’t even need the overhead of the gallery. Local shops, bars, and restaurants are the gallery.
- zer00eyz 1y agoYour site is very much letting the work down. 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.
- causality0 1y agoThere are people who think the art world isn't 10% fools and 90% money laundering?
- qwertytyyuu 1y agoYeah if an artists needs to pay 50k rent + 50k staffing to show of their works something is wrong
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThe art world is just fine. Pretentious art speculation maybe not so much. 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.
- msegal 1y agoAny good account suggestions?
- irsagent 1y agoSecond
- earlyriser 1y agoI have been following: https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/ https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/ https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/ https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/ https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/ https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/ https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/ https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/ https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/ https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/ https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/ https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/ And curating: https://www.instagram.com/carriescottcurates/ https://www.instagram.com/carriescottcurates/ https://www.instagram.com/mary_lynn_buchanan/ https://www.instagram.com/mary_lynn_buchanan/
- sandspar 1y agoMy city has a medium size art gallery. Every couple of years, the curators will hold their nose and run an exhibit by "dead white males": figurative painters like Rembrandt. The gallery becomes packed with people. Afterward the curators go back to their usual fare of "Iranian-American textile artists" or whatever; the gallery sees no visitors for months. 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.
- MangoToupe 1y agoRembrandt is easy enough to see on my phone. I get it.
- darth_avocado 1y ago> My former Artnet colleague Tim Schneider’s analysis at the time of the deal revealed that the gallery was on the hook for $704,000 in monthly rent, or $8.5 million a year—$220 million over the course of the lease 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?
- CydeWeys 1y agoI'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP. The bursting of the art market bubble in mid 2022 coincides exactly with when interest rates started rising following the 'transitory' inflation caused by pandemic relief measures. This was also the same time that we started seeing hiring freezes in tech, the bursting of the luxury watch bubble, etc. It's all tied together, and has the same root cause: It stopped being cheap to borrow money, and it started being lucrative to lend it out for guaranteed returns (e.g. by buying Treasuries) rather than speculating on artworks, or NFTs, or whatever.
- jfengel 1y agoThe US stock market and cryptocurrencies are both going gangbusters. You don't need ZIRP to be awash in cash. Money can print itself when rich people are optimistic. 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.
- echelon 1y agoIt might be that anyone can generate "art" now. 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.
- csomar 1y agoPretty much every country is in conflict at their border. However, resolutions can happen peacefully. Nations are essentially pillaging structures and thus want to always expand their borders.
- red-iron-pine 1y agowhat does this have to do with the above points?
- 1y ago
- Tewboo 1y agoThe digital revolution is disrupting the art world, both for better and worse. It's fascinating to see how artists adapt.
- Tiktaalik 1y ago> Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. 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!)
- benbojangles 1y agowhen covid happened gold prices, crypto and art prices went through the roof; now that the covid situation appears under control and markets have returned back to normal, everything is predictable again - it makes sense that art markets are taking a steep decline back to normal levels. Being able to hide assets during a time of //war/plague/market crash/comet strike etc// is a skill which will make a man great wealth if he offers the service to whoever is rich and still alive. It therefore seems logical that art markets and shows can mothball themselves for the time being.
- jdkee 1y agoGold hit a record high priced in USD today.
- benbojangles 1y agoGold always goes up. It's the rate of increase you have to monitor.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago> markets have returned back to normal 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.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoImagine if the USG bailed out everything except AI. https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-natcon https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-...
- Mistletoe 1y agoMy brother is an up and coming artist in his field and has had many pieces bought by a billionaire that collects art extensively and has an amazing world-renowned collection. The billionaire has stopped buying art this year. Not just from my brother but stopped buying art completely. And there are many others like that that have stopped buying. That’s one canary in the coal mine to add to my collection that something bad is likely coming. The rich always know first. I’m just hoping we can make it until 2026.
- like_any_other 1y ago> The gallery had made international stars of artists like Harold Ancart, Korakrit Arunanondchai, and, more recently, Marguerite Humeau 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.
- jppope 1y agoAs I understand it, much of the art market is based around the ability to purchase a "valuable" piece of art on the private markets let it appreciate then "donate" it to a museum or non-profit for a lucrative tax write off. At least thats the hustle as I understand it. I could totally see that in jeopardy based on liquidity and the markets.
- kazinator 1y agoThe art world at large? Or the traditional business environment of pretentious art hucksters? 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?
- doug_durham 1y agoHow much is crypto currency to blame? Art has traditionally been a means to launder cash and evade taxes. The scarcity is what allows for this. Crypto is manufactured scarcity. Why go through the bother of buying and storing art when you can just buy crypto?
- throwaway422432 1y agoThis, there are now other options for moving large amounts of cash around. 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.
- tedggh 1y agoSelf inflicted. Both artists and the galleries representing them became too greedy. I have acquaintances who rather starve than accept their work is not worth 10K a piece.
- sheepybloke 1y agoAs mentioned by others, I think the art world has reached a major schism where there are two types of artists: those who target rich collectors and those who are more grassroots. I've been to a lot of the larger art shows in the US and it's always amazing to me how expensive so many of the pieces are. I couldn't even justify buying a cheaper piece I want on a software engineer's salary. Instead, I've found that local art fairs have been where so much of the growth is at. Things like Cherry Creek Art festival or the myriad of smaller markets around, you can find amazing artists selling interesting and beautiful works. Between markets and social media, there's a path to being a sustainable, working artist. And personally, I think being a collector of smaller artist's prints and works is more fun than the expensive ones!
- calebm 1y agoI’ve been trying to break into the art market as a complete outsider for the last year and a half (doing mathy lenticular holograms). What I have seen has stunned me - the level of groupthink and copying whatever the popular trends are and making up pretentious language to sound sophisticated is wild. And often the actual art is just ugly. 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”.
- non_aligned 1y agoCollecting big-ticket art is a weird hobby in that it's very passive. For most collectibles, you're supposed to go to garage sales, scout eBay, walk around with a metal detector, or even dumpster-dive. And if you find something unfamiliar, you form a hypothesis, do research, share your findings... and maybe get other folks excited about your find. It's all very make-your-own-adventure. 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.
- zkmon 1y agoOne need to look at it from view point of the buyers. Who are these buyers? Someone who has lots of floating money, not concerned about future of his people or country or economy, having completely predictable life routine and not too busy at work. And most importantly someone who is nostalgic about old times and old things and who can sense and admire the human effort that goes into art. 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. Another big problem is, the buyer now has hard time in sensing the raw human talent that went into the art vs the machine output. If it is a sculpture, we can't know whether it is 3d-printed. In old-times this trust issue wasn't there. It was raw human skill at display. I keep telling this story from pancha-tantra the folk-lore tales from India. Friends walking in a forest, come across a dead tiger. Having great skills in different branches of science, they decided to test their skills to bring the tiger back to life. Sure, it worked, but before they could celebrate, they were attacked by the tiger.
- justinator 1y agoGood riddance. Collecting art is yet another way for the ultra rich to avoid taxation. It's a complete and utter farce.
- pkdpic 1y ago> Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise. > “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.” Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
- spicyusername 1y agowhile its costs (for operating two spaces, in New York and Los Angeles) remained unchanged, about $150,000 a month. I mean... That's pretty insane. It's not hard to imagine why this business model might not work...
- runamuck 1y agoThe market for High Horology (vs. mass market watches like Rolex) hit high water marks the past couple of years. F.P. Journe, for example, released a (Quartz!) watch, the Elegante that retails for $12k and sells on the secondary market for $100k. Maybe rich buyers moved on to celebrating a different type of artist.
- NREA 1y agoThis article is part of a broader market report with more figures: https://news.artnet.com/market/mid-year-review-2025-2684554 https://news.artnet.com/market/mid-year-review-2025-2684554
- Kate5477 1y ago[dead]