What is the price to pay to have priceless artworks?

 

The amount of information related to art is increasing enormously, thus becoming extraordinary persistent, and actually accessible, if compared to that once provided by art magazines and books. The comparison in terms of numbers between the customers of a main art library and an on-line art magazine would tell you about a big difference.

 

As it has been happening to many sector-based info, also in the art realm info and related info have been circulating very fast, mainly thanks to the social networks. Each main museum, private gallery or archive has, and must have, not only its own web site, but also its producers of contents. It is clear that nowadays it is not enough to provide some images, an email contact, and a press release. Each art institution needs to meet this growing demand of knowledge and the web sites of the Met or the Louvre have millions of visitors each day. The public is expanding rapidly both in the contemporary and in traditional art spheres. In this scenery the competition to reach the audience and to influence it is thus very high.

 

In the current digital information-based environment, the traditional journalistic logic of the “breaking news” effect is of course not the only one at work. Other forces, and many different types of info, are to be taken into consideration.

 

Among these forces, the most attractive news for the audience seems to have become the one related to the price. Every insider will tell you that the most influential info about a certain artwork is indeed how much a certain collector or institution has paid to have it. The price overwhelms the form, the provenance, the size, the quality, or any critical reading of a certain painting for that matter.

 

This point partially explains the huge communication power in the hands of the auction houses’ web sites and their growing influence. But it also questions the roles that currently other producers of information are playing. Then, assuming that both exhibitions and auction results are necessary to the artwork’s existence, the question is: to what extent has the gap widen in terms of influence between the news of an auction result at Sotheby’s, for example, and that of a solo show at the MoMA? To a very large extent in favour of the former, especially when the audience is made of individuals hoping for profitable investments above all.

 

On the other side, following the internet public’s high demand for art market related info could quickly lead a fragile ecosystem still based on certain unwritten ethical values to a deep crisis of identity. In the end we should bear in mind that high tax reductions and lavish personal monuments are socially tolerated – and possibly also effective in terms of marketing – because they are perceived as something completely different from real estate business or stock markets. What will happen if art starts to resemble too much other ways of making money is easy to predict: who is the art lover that doesn’t have a bad feeling when visiting web sites like Larry’s List or Art Rank? Are these communication devices really needed by an art dealer to make his business? Also in this case the answer is quite predictable.

 

As observers say, one of the main characteristics of the art market is that of being extremely opaque and mainly unregulated. But art, unlike economy, is not a science. A museum director once told us that it takes a few weeks to teach someone how to write an annual financial report, but you need years to form a scholar. The intellectual devices required to properly manage the value of an artwork are different from those employed to manage a share or an hedge fund. In art the price can perfectly sum up the value of a masterpiece, but in no case can actually produce that masterpiece itself.

January 21, 2015