Art: The Usual Exaggeration
Blackout. When the financial crisis was exposed in 2008, the art market went from frenzied to petrified, as if it had looked Medusa in the eye. Liquidity dissolved in New York and London, but especially in emerging markets: it stopped. In 2009 ArtBasel was a triumph of small proposals and gallery owners unofficially halved prices for the great masters. Then the markets rediscovered a tendency for records and the "normal exaggeration" of international capitalism. Prices of tens of millions of euros reappeared for the work of individuals such as the Transylvanian Andy Warhol, the champion of a despairing and irredeemable marginality who is today on the altars of a value devoid of humanly comprehensible parameters.
Is everything back to normal? Maybe, but was it normal before? Maybe not. The framework of the pre-recession contemporary and modern art system was characterized by three main drivers of change.
Increase in demand: the number of collectors has changed over the past decade, along with their economic availability and their choices. The nouveau riche in finance and emerging countries have come into the limelight: first promoting European and American art and then projecting new artists from various countries to skyrocketing values. Market dynamics caused new actors (funds) to be created that emphasized the financialization of the art system.
Transformation of the brokerage system: an increase in demand occurred along with technologies that could disintermediate the system's traditional gatekeepers, that is, galleries, museums and critics. The particular nature of the art system has prevented this disintermediation from reducing the length of chains of distribution, increasing market efficiency. On the other hand, the role of galleries has increased with the creation of large international organizations capable of integrating production and promotion by increasing the overall supply of works. If other intermediaries capable of hybridizing museum and commercial areas have been developed they are trade fairs. Their presence on an international scale has multiplied, producing opportunities for dramatic presentations, collectors imitating behaviors, and new forms of expression.
The third driver is the concentration on repertoire and icons. The complexity of the system that has increased both in size and the extent of its range of action in a short time has concentrated collective attention on a narrow repertoire of global icons, simplifying greatly.
All three of these transformational elements are still active today. What has changed is the overall system, because the recession has reacted differently on the private sector of galleries compared to what has happened in the public area of museums. The scarcity of resources touches upon the public sector – partly due to the sheer number of institutions (over 200 new buildings in ten years) – much more drastically and less reversibly.
In the medium term the system will be more private and more oriented toward the market. Will this be positive or negative? Research projects and experiments will plausibly focus on larger museums or they will get lost in independent projects with low budgets. Cultural institutions will be more bound to tasks of sophisticated entertainment.
But the main challenge will remain in the background because the art market is not simply a trade system. It is a way of establishing art in the contemporary, making art possible and making it able to withstand (at least a little) the fierce game that extracts art from the artistic and philosophic fields. This reduces it to a simulacrum of the possibility of redeeming the interchangeable and provisory nature of the meaning of life, part of a time in which all metaphysical substances, from objects to everyday gestures, tend to be uprooted.
Therefore, the question for the future is: Can the market be a cure for nihilism? For the answer, we have to wait for the fall sales...