Trends in a Downturn
From time to time on thesniffer, Nora Young and Cathi Bond have talked about what might happen to trends like enviro-chic and localism if there’s a downturn in the economy. Well, now that it looks as though the chickens may be coming home to roost, Cathi and Nora talk trends in an economy of lowered expectations. Nora refers to this PSFK article on SEDE magazine, a mag about slow living, which started in Argentina after the economic collapse there. They also discuss this article from GigaOm, up at Business Week, speculating on the problems startups may face if their business model rests exclusively on ads.
And what of the art market during a downturn? Damien Hirst snubbed gallerists by offering his work directly at auction at Sotheby’s, and made buckets of dosh doing so. Is this a model others could follow?
Tags: art, economic downturn, green trends
October 28th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Amid this enjoyable discussion, the art auction part caught my attention in particular. I thought again of that “new media” issue du jour–the problem of curation.
One thing that digital culture has added to our understanding of culture as a whole is a new set of perspectives on whom shall be the arbiters of taste and value. Part of this is less an aesthetic, qualitative matter than a matter of better technology showing us that things we assumed about the marketplace are not true. For instance, I understand that while eBay created a new market for lots of collectibles, it also showed that some collectibles believed to be rare, as in the case of some baseball cards,
were not in fact rare at all. Similarly, the idea that qualitatively some musicians are doing “one of a kind” technical work is belied by each new youtube showing an as-yet-undiscovered prodigy playing some new instrument in some daring and original way.
In the case of art and publishing, analog culture created the notion that a set of elite galleries and elite publishers were arbiters of taste whose very
imprint gave rise to not only quality but also “value”. This was particularly true as to art, in which discovery by this gallery or that gallery helped create a cachet for work which helped the market value of pieces and created “investment grade” art.
This gives rise to a “tulip boom” problem, if, indeed, the investment value is based upon curation by “established experts” in an analog world, and then a new digital age arises.
When Damien Hirst “cuts around” the galleries to get a better economic deal, then he is trading on the notoriety and curation that was provided by an analog art world to cut out the middleman in a digital art marketplace.
Sotheby’s can give him as much publicity as being “known” at a gallery could–and one can find his work on auction there without the need to visit Manhattan or London.
But this “analog-to-digital” form of marketing does not answer the real question, as I see it. The “real question” I imagine is:
“Can a form of on-line ‘curation’ arise which will help define value for art pieces”?
If the answer is “yes”, then the question arises what kind of market this form of curation could generate. It could be that the crowd-sourced nature of on-line curation could generate lots of support for more artists at relatively low price points, but little support for “big dollar” investment-grade artists. It could be, on the other hand, that investment-grade artists could sell more prints to the public at large.
I sometimes see the greater challenge on the arts-in-the-net issue to be
the “spreading of the word” (curation, networking) than the creation of content. What if a world of interesting art (music, literature, etc.) is on offer–and what is missing is the map?
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Hey Gurdonark,
Thanks for commenting. There was a project that Saatchi and Saatchi, along with The Guardian were involved in that had to do with creating an online gallery. I think the idea was that people would pick favourites and the results would hang in the (physical) gallery:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/
Dunno if people thought it was successful or not. Cheers, ny