I'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.
> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
The 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.
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.
2022 is also when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza started in earnest
When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections.
2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
It is invasion and land grab, not "conflict". And lets define peace in a way that dont leave large swats population in a situation of torture and oppression.
If I was going to buy art as an investment I would only buy the absolute best - old master, Picasso, ancient artifacts with absolutely no question to their authenticity or provenance that would restrict its resale.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
The problem with your strategy is that the items you listed have very little upside; yes, the prices won't collapse, but they also wont go up a ton. Their prices have reached somewhat of an equilibrium.
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
Collectors are different from speculators or investors. Collectors want something for personal reasons, whatever they are.
Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.
I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
When buying etchings, beware of fakes. Since Rembrandt is very popular, people have found ways to make additional prints, by using the same copper plates in or after his lifetime.
The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.
One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.
Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)
Collectibles have a lot of friction, and being physical they have a lot of middlemen and questions. If I want to speculate on an investment, even property would be far more liquid, let alone something disambiguated like company stock. I think investing in physical collectibles for a quick flip is pretty dumb. Why not buy domains related to the same subject? Far easier
Ok, then I guess I don't understand your point in your first comment. You seemed to be explaining what approach you would take to invest in collectible in your first comment, by saying you would only buy something that has established value.
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
I'm saying as an investor, collectibles are very difficult and highly speculative, and the friction makes them even less attractive. I disagree that buying old, consistent collectibles cannot themselves be speculative - if you wait for the right moment they can make significant returns. But the downside is significantly reduced if you restrict your investments to something that has been consistently valuable across the longterm.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.
There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.
I think that art-to-NFT flow is not really about storing value long-term, but about money laundering.
To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.
A popular hot take, but if that were the case, the art market should have collapsed when NFTs were booming, and recovered after they disappeared. Unless you can give a credible alternative that has eclipsed both.
The 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.
You can also just commission the art you need, a few hundred dollars is damn good money in much of the world( even in the US, if a small painting takes a few hours to make, 400$ can be a fair price).
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
Hi,
Can you plz tell me the places where you lurk around for the beautiful art pieces.
I have a friend who does amazing "slice of Life" photography. I want to showcase it somewhere that can sell their work.
Also please let us see a photo of your art pieces from Denmark.
Thank you
I had a quick look at these instagram links and except for the last two, they do not feel like 'Art', just like most novels are not considered literature. In the past years, I have visited a lot of art exhibitions (at museums and art galleries) and graduation shows of art schools here in the Netherlands. See: https://iwriteiam.nl/Exhibitions.html Even at those, I feel that a lot is crap, too conceptual. But there always some artists that stick out for some (often unexplained) reason. They have some new idea or make you view the world in a different way. They are not just repeating some gimmick or showing (exceptional) craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is not equal to art.
Damn it sucks that instagram is the defacto second internet. My gf finds so much cool stuff on IG. Local bands post their show dates, a brewery in my neighborhood posts their hours (it’s just a husband and wife, and their hours are whenever-I-feel-like-it). I don’t have instagram, so I’m just totally in the dark on all that stuff.
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
Exactly my feelings. I don't have fb and IG, and I feel left out. Also when I go to India, the local shops, unless they are really big, don't accept credit card or cash. The physical wallet has vanished. But in fairness, it is far easier for them to have online presence via IG or fb and reach their actual customers (not you and me).
There are myriad accounts. Who you follow is taste specific, you need to do your own work. Mine are exclusively on Twitter and I mostly found them by randomly clicking through art things on Twitter. My tastes in art cover a very broad spectrum. Gotta both explore and curate the feed.
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
This 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.
The "art as speculation" fad is just a consequence of "inflation is good" economic theory, the same as "real estate as an investment".
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
I don't think so. Speculative markets would arise even in a 0% inflation economy, for the same reason that casinos would. Speculation isn't about storing value, it's about gambling. You have a stronger point with real estate, but real estate isn't as volatile or speculative, usually.
There would be very little reason to speculate on art. There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value. In a zero inflation environment you'd expect the market to average zero growth. Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
>There's no reason to believe that the average painting would continually go up in value.
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
I 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.
NFTs were about transparency in provenance, using public, tamper-proof records, that replace jurisdictions/authorities with the type of math that enabled cross-border digital payments. Sure there was a spin-off scam industry but there remains a kernel of legitimacy in the concept.
Nah, man. I work in the space and I was there. NFTs were the second attempt on an earlier idea that had already been discarded as pointless: supply chain management. The problem with NFTs was the same as with supply chains; there's no link between the blockchain and IRL, so the blockchain doesn't really add anything, just makes things more complicated. NFTs were therefore a tool to part fools from their money right from the start, because they couldn't be anything else.
I remember IBM making huge claims about using the blockchain for supply chain management. For instance[1]:
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
Theoretically, if there could be a 1:1 relationship between events in the real world and events on the blockchain, the idea makes sense. If you had two pieces of a machine represented by objects on the blockchain, and when you combined them into a new component that automatically, cryptographically, created a new object on the blockchain, you could track provenance precisely just by having the final assembled product.
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
Sure, it does do that. But I can't think of many scenarios where proving something was signed at least at a certain date is particularly useful. Usually when you are signing something you have two parties involved so you can just write the date on the document and if you lie the other party will call it out.
NFTs seem like a solution to a non existent problem. Or a problem you have to search really really hard to find.
NFTs? They didn’t really solve a problem other than providing something else to gamble with. Nobody bought a low-res pixelated ape image because it stirred something deep in their soul.
People pay money to join fan clubs for K-pop. If there were some electricity sheet will record their name forever, I'm sure someone would pay their money.
How 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?
The 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."
Whenever 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.
I 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...
I 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, 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!
I have heard, and believe: successful galleries are a location thing. People with deep pockets will pick up a piece by anyone in Aspen, Colorado, and probably not look twice if they (somehow) saw a Koons in a Topeka gallery.
What do you think the market is for this kind of digital art? Do you see this style of work attracting an audience elsewhere? How much is it selling for?
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
I didn't want to criticize, but since you've already opened the door: these are interesting to me as sheer sensory stimulation, but the problem that might dissuade a lot of people is that there's no structure to most of the pieces (save for the ones that are based on distorting an existing image). Without structure there's no narrative, and no reason for someone to become interested in any given piece beyond, as I said, sensory stimulation. On that note, most the color palettes are very tasteful; if coldcode is picking them algorithmically, that's pretty impressive.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
I have no idea how it works, but if you sold/licensed/created your art to fabric patterns, theres almost certainly a small market there. Clicking through your site (others are right, you could present your work better), I see plenty of “I’d buy a decently priced cool shirt of that pattern”. Sample size of one and all.
You’re much better off selling shirts. The markup on custom printed fabrics isn’t great, and there are plenty of professional fabric pattern designers out there which companies that commission fabric hire as-needed.
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
Many 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.
Take this as a additional point of reference: I don't have formal education in art and not an artist, but I find your work interesting enough that I would stop at a store to look at and probably buy something (printed and fabric) if I can afford to (especially the cover art on the home page).
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> 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!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
As 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!
> 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?
As 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.
One 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.
The 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
When 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.
I 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.
There 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.
I’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”.
Collecting 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.
My 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.
> 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!)
I'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.
Self 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.
Just 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.
How 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?
This, 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.
> 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.
when 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.
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.
from 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."
My 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.
The 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?
My 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.
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.
> 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!"
I 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.
Yeah art has objective value and subjective value. Every once in a while you'll find something with a lot of subjective value. Finding something with both is also a thing but it's not easy to find them for a low price.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
I think it depends on the piece. I have a piece that I love and spent about $5k on. It's relatively large and has a lot of detail. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the equivalent of a month's work full time for the artist so the price seems reasonable to me.
I didn’t end up buying it - it went for a price I could afford but did not want to pay - but I have seen an original Al Bean painting. Twelve men walked on the moon. One painted it. If it had gone for $10k it would have been mine.
I'm sure there is some art you'd shell out for. Maybe an original prop from your favorite movie or a collectors item from a time period you're nostalgic for...
A 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.
> 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.
It'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.
I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.
Jewelry sales are doing fine too.
There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.
This could be because of capital controls, financial stress or increasing sense of national pride - take your pick
- fewer people can afford a home, let alone multiple = less wall space for premium art
- it’s way easier and cheaper to launder money through cryptocurrency casinos than art auctions
https://www.resourcefulfinancepro.com/news/irs-section-174-c...
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.
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.
When wars are going on, most people in affected countries are thinking about heavier things than going to an art exhibit and boosting their collections.
2020 and 2021 was when the pandemic happened. Businesses started feeling the crunch all over the world from the lockdowns. Supply chains got bullwhipped. People weren’t exactly interested in going to buy artworks after their one-time UBI checks and PPP funds ran out. And other countries didn’t send those out at all.
Oh yeah, and AI has now sent a supply shock to the whole art industry. But we can’t say that on HN, there will always be someone popping out of the woodwork claiming AI is a non-factor and saying things were always like that.
My sincerest desire is that there’s a peaceful resolution to this conflict before they’re forced to realize it.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.
I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
No idea the price, but I would much prefer this to a Charizard pokemon card!
The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.
One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.
Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
There's a bigger culprit: NFTs. They sucked away a huge portion of art spending, with a promise of a fungible growth asset that you can just sell as needed. Art has always been considered a safe long-term investment (along with a means of conspicuous consumption), but it has always been non-liquid.
To be more specific, the main purpose of the "object" is to provide plausible-deniability for one half of an exchange where the other half can't be shown because it's illicit.
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.
That said, I feel this article is really about our active recession. Rich people are cutting back too it seems.
https://www.instagram.com/piperbangs/
https://www.instagram.com/lauren.krasnoff/
https://www.instagram.com/artcarolinegaudreault/
https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_scherer/
https://www.instagram.com/jakeclarkjakeclark/
https://www.instagram.com/hilary_pecis/
And curating:
https://www.instagram.com/carriescottcurates/
https://www.instagram.com/mary_lynn_buchanan/
And I get it. Not everybody is going to make a website or blog or whatever. But it totally sucks that everybody and their dog is on instagram and it’s like this walled garden club that you just can’t access if you don’t want to support Facebook. The internet is cool! Why did we make it suck!!
I wonder if the instagram API lets you download enough data to make a public mirror of a user’s posts. It’d be cool to make a service that does something like that. Help people break their instagram dependency. Not that any meaningful amount of people would care to use it lol
My favorite piece acquired in the last few months is Olivier Neuray’s “L’Empire des Lumières”. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.
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.
If you don't let people hold onto cash, they will just find something else to replace it (and of course, it is always the lower classes that have to suffer the secret taxation that is money supply inflation targets).
If I had to guess, on average works of art go down in value, simply because of how much is produced.
>Some random pieces blowing up in value if the artist becomes famous later, but most would go nowhere.
That's exactly where speculation comes from. It's the same as any form of gambling. On average you're losing money, but every once in a while one lucky guy makes off like a bandit.
> A recent pilot by KPMG, Merck, Walmart and IBM using blockchain injects new trust into the system by reducing the time it takes to trace prescription drugs from 16 weeks to just two seconds.
It was impressive how many people uncritically took these claims as facts.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/solutions/blockchain-supply-chain
[Stares aggressively in the direction of gen AI.]
The problem is that that relationship doesn't exist and is impossible. If someone wants to tamper with a supply chain, all they need to do is tamper with the real world without letting that reflect on the ledger. And that destroys the entire point of the concept.
And you can counter-sign the time if you need to prove that.
NFTs seem like a solution to a non existent problem. Or a problem you have to search really really hard to find.
without any enforcement with sanctioned violence, this is merely symbolic. It's why so much scam happens with the NFT space.
My web browser has a novel and advanced attack on the cryptosystem built into it I have dubbed the right-click-copy-image attack.
I’ve even managed to replicate it on my phone.
Nobody cares about your precious little certificate, but if it makes you happy, buy it.
[0] https://www.lseg.com/en/risk-intelligence/financial-crime-ri...
They had various payment methods, including cash (highest price on their list was 300k usd) at their office in Dubai.
"I've got an exciting bag-holding opportunity that you don't want to miss."
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, 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 if interested.
I'm far from an expert, but I do occasionally buy original artwork. The sheer multitude of works you are displaying (more than one a day!) devalues what you are doing. It suggests that these can be churned out with relatively little effort.
If you are really posting this for other people, and not just yourself, try posting fewer pieces. If you had to pick the single best work from July, which one would it be? If nothing stands out to you, then how is a potential customer supposed to pick you out from the crowd of similar artists?
I personally like the Persistence of Structure series, but they're each pretty interchangeable.
Let's be honest here: the craft here is not on the images themselves. It's on the algorithms that are producing them. A solution to the problem of quantity would be to make the algorithms available to play with. I could see someone going "okay, I want something sort of like [1], but made my own. I'll toy with the parameters until I get something I like and then order a print." Two or three sample images for each algorithm, instead of six years' worth of images, would work way better.
[1] https://andrewwulf.com/detail/the-pinecone.html
Honestly though, unless you’re pretty much only selling in person or too small to notice, someone is probably just going to rip you off using AI and sell shitty knockoffs on Etsy
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.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you are actively sabotaging yourself by convincing yourself that you shouldn't just try (perhaps due to a subconscious fear of rejection). How do you get an audience if you don't actively promote your work and/or try to sell them?
There is no guarantee that you will "succeed" (whatever that looks like to you — success could mean having a lot of people appreciate your work and/or selling your art for lots of money) if you try your hardest but if you don't try you will never succeed at all. I'll break down the second last paragraph as an example below.
> I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit.
Audience don't just suddenly appear because you have created something. You need to put in the effort to create an audience to begin with.
> I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there.
You need an incredible amount of luck for people to just "discover" your work and just suddenly like it (especially with abstract art?), so having need "to drag people there" is just what you should do if you want exposure for your work whether or not you host them on saatchiart.com.
Don't fall into the trap of "if you build it, they will come".
Focus on creating a compelling narrative behind your art and keep iterating to attract a small, loyal audience first (1000 people is already a lot).
> Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries).
This is irrelevant if nobody knows your work and would buy them to begin with. It's just another excuse to not try. By the time this is a problem you can migrate to something more personal. Many people that support independent artists want the artists they like to get more money from them.
> 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!
I enjoy engaging with artists at markets because the personal connection with them is actually the most valuable thing for me and the most compelling reason for me to make purchases. I also appreciate the artists who show up consistently at related events particular those who remember me well, which also becomes a reason for me to introduce their work to my friends.
Good luck with your work and I hope you will find success with it! ^^
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
> “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.
The same illness infected the art world, and it was no more sustainable there than anywhere else.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-...
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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!"
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.
The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.
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.
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.
Got to love 'late stage capitalism'
It might be a stretch, but Dall-E 2 came out in April 2022.
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.