The objective of this paper is to understand certain developments in contemporary arts from an economic point of view. The peculiarity of art is its aesthetic quality in combination with its value as ...an investment object. Accordingly, four segments of the art market may be distinguished: warehouse art, business art, connoisseur art and high art. Because of their high aesthetic quality, only the last two segments of the market are of interest in this paper. On the market for high art, a dominance of investors is to be expected because this art has to please the average taste of investors. The market for connoisseur art will be dominated by an art elite which is merely interested in aesthetic quality. One of the crucial elements of contemporary art is its chutzpah. The economic reason for this is the necessity to attract interest. This aspect of modern art is seen as a common feature of art and marketing. This may explain the alliances between art and enterprises as well as the blur of the boundaries between art, fashion and design. Reprinted by permission of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Existing estimates of rates of return on single art objects and whole collections are surveyed and critically evaluated. The psychic benefits from art are, in the few cases they are considered at ...all, derived from the difference to financial returns on other markets. This paper discusses determinants of psychic benefits and suggests rental fees and willingness to pay studies as a possible way to analyze and estimate the psychic benefits from art.
Everyday genius Fine, Gary Alan
2004., 2006, 2004
eBook, Book
From Henry Darger's elaborate paintings of young girls caught in a vicious war to the sacred art of the Reverend Howard Finster, the work of outsider artists has achieved unique status in the art ...world. Celebrated for their lack of traditional training and their position on the fringes of society, outsider artists nonetheless participate in a traditional network of value, status, and money. After spending years immersed in the world of self-taught artists, Gary Alan Fine presents Everyday Genius, one of the most insightful and comprehensive examinations of this network and how it confers artistic value. Fine considers the differences among folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, explaining the economics of this distinctive art market and exploring the dimensions of its artistic production and distribution. Interviewing dealers, collectors, curators, and critics and venturing into the backwoods and inner-city homes of numerous self-taught artists, Fine describes how authenticity is central to the system in which artists—often poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or mentally ill—are seen as having an unfettered form of expression highly valued in the art world. Respected dealers, he shows, have a hand in burnishing biographies of the artists, and both dealers and collectors trade in identities as much as objects. Revealing the inner workings of an elaborate and prestigious world in which money, personalities, and values affect one another, Fine speaks eloquently to both experts and general readers, and provides rare access to a world of creative invention-both by self-taught artists and by those who profit from their work.
Bien que peu connue, la collection Watson-Taylor fut indiscutablement l’une des plus importantes des années 1820 en Angleterre. Elle se distingue par la personnalité particulière de son inventeur qui ...réunit entre 1803 et 1821 une collection prestigieuse digne des grands ensembles aristocratiques. Cependant, la fortune de George Watson-Taylor reposant sur le marché du sucre de canne aux Antilles, instable et en déclin, il subit un revers de fortune en 1832 l’obligeant à vendre tous ses biens. Il acquit près de trois cent vingt tableaux parmi lesquels de nombreux chefs-d’œuvre aujourd’hui conservés dans les musées du monde entier. La recherche sur cette collection et ce personnage interroge de nombreux aspects de l’histoire de l’art et des collections à cette période charnière, notamment la question de la spéculation, du connoisseurship, du marché de l’art, du rôle du mécénat dans l’affirmation de l’école britannique de peinture dans son pays et à l’international. Elle s’intéresse également au mouvement historiciste de cette époque encore empreinte de la pensée et de l’esthétique romantique, mais aussi aux questions identitaires propres à l’émergence de nouvelles élites. Autant de sujets liés à un contexte très riche mêlant patriotisme, débat sur l’abolition de l’esclavage et réforme de la vie politique. Elle ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre sur le passage d’un collectionnisme d’Ancien Régime hérité du Grand Tour à un collectionnisme victorien davantage tourné vers l’art national et contemporain. Cette thèse a pour but d’analyser une collection célébrée puis oubliée et de déterminer sa place dans l’histoire du goût et des collections en l’Angleterre à la fin de la période Regency.
Even if it isn’t well-known nowadays, the Watson-Taylor collection was indisputably one of the most important collections of the 1820s in Great Britain. It distinguished itself by the distinctive personality of its founder who assembled between 1803 and 1821 a collection as prestigious as great aristocratic ones. However, George Watson-Taylor’s wealth resting on the instable and declining West Indian sugar market, he suffered a reversal of fortune in 1832, forcing him to sell all his properties. He acquired nearly three hundred and twenty paintings including many masterpieces now exhibited in museums all over the world. Research on these collection and figure questions many aspects of the history of art and collections at this pivotal period, in particular issues like speculation, connoisseurship, art market, the role of patronage in the recognition of the British school of painting in its own country and internationally. It also treats of the historicist movement, still tinged with Romantic thought and aesthetic in that period, and of the identity issues related to the emergence of new elites. Many topics linked to a very rich context involving patriotism, debate about the abolition of slavery and political reform. It provides new information about the passage between the ways of collecting inherited from the Grand Tour, and the Victorian ones more focused on national and contemporary art. This doctoral thesis aims to analyze a celebrated then forgotten collection and to determine its place in the history of taste and collecting in Great Britain at the end of the Regency era.
Conclusion Yu, Leqi
Painting Architecture,
12/2022
Book Chapter
This book concludes with an alternative interpretation of Xia Yong’s art. By closely examining Xia’s calligraphic inscriptions on jiehua, this chapter explains how Xia Yong considered the ...relationship of texts to images and why he selected these literary sources. It also complements our discussion about modularity and addresses the issues of workshop practice, potential buyers, and art markets that existed for the late-Yuan jiehua in the Jiangnan area.
The complicity of the arts and the state in the mutual legitimation of corporate market practice is addressed in this critique of the so-called culture industries and 'Creative Class' of late ...capitalist imagination. The certification of the state-market couple as the dominant ideology of national, transnational, and post-national politics and economics is examined through an analysis of the Frieze Art Fair between 2006 and 2009. I contend that the decline of a culture-debating society and the rise of a culture-consuming society herald the waning of a habit of independent rationality and informed argument that characterized Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Enlightenment project'. The managerialist moment in the arts (as in education) signifies the diminishing status of culture as the cornerstone of an enlightened social formation.
ABSTRACT IN FRENCH: À l'époque néoclassique, les antiquaires de Rome nourrirent l'ambition de déterminer avec certitude l'appartenance des statues anciennes au giron grec ou romain. Favorisant des ...échanges entre savoir scientifique et culture des humanités, des expertises et contre-expertises furent menées à Rome puis à Paris. L'article analyse les enjeux esthétiques, politiques et économiques que sous-tend ce dialogue d'experts, en s'appuyant sur la controverse ayant opposé l'antiquaire Visconti et le géologue Dolomieu autour du marbre de l'Apollon du Belvédère. // ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: During the neoclassical period, antique dealers in Rome harboured the ambition of determining with certainty whether ancient statues came from Greece or Rome. This aim fostered an exchange between scientific knowledge and the culture of the humanities, together with the performance of expertise and counter-expertise, first in Rome and later in Paris. The article analyses the aesthetic political and economic issues underlying this dialogue of experts, focusing on the controversy opposing Visconti, an antique dealer, and Dolomieu, a geologist, over the marble statue, the Apollo of Belvedere. Reprinted by permission of Éditions BELIN
We study steady-state relationships between prices for paintings obtained by three groups of painters (Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary European Masters, Other minor European painters, ...Contemporary US painters) at public auctions in New York, London and Paris between 1962 and 1991. The analysis is carried out by estimating vector autoregressive models, using the recent techniques developed by Johansen. The results show that the various markets move closely together, and are, even in New York, led by what happens to the group of European Great Masters, whose prices are not influenced by other prices. We also examine the relation between art and stock markets; we find that there is no long-run relation between these two assets, though in the short-run, financial markets do influence art markets.
