Understanding the Contemporary Art Market
“The $12 million stuffed shark” by Don Thompson is a book about understanding what seems incompressible, the market of contemporary art.
If you get surprised while reading the news about art by contemporary artists [or not contemporary] being sold at obscene prices. If you wonder what makes some artists like Damien Hirst sell work that is done by assistants but “conceived by the artist” in high volume of units at extremely high prices. If you ask yourself why some few artists find the path to success while others struggle to make a living for life, even when the work seems comparable. If you feel that you need to understand who would drop more that “$12 million” for a stuffed shark, a piece of taxidermia that could be replicated any time. Work that weights more than two tons and it is entitled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. If you wonder why Richard Prince can photograph a photograph and sell it for millions.
If you wonder about all this things, then this is a book for you. This is is a book you will enjoy reading.
The stuffed shark in formaldehyde. Art piece by Damien Hirst entitled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”
The book describes the market of contemporary art and it reads like a thriller. Extremely well documented, very well organized and conceived. This is the book that explains the art market as a product of brands and branding. Branded artists, branded galleries, branded collectors, branded dealers, branded museums. It is all about creating the assurance to the buyer that it is worth to pay millions of dollars (or thousands of dollars) for a material piece of art that the buyer may not even like, but they need to think it will give them prestige. Money for multimillionaires means nothing, all of them have it. Art is prestige.
And even when this is about the market of high-end contemporary art, the book will serve to gain unique insights that may benefit any photographer immersed in the world of fine art photography and to anyone willing to pay thousands of dollars for a photograph. The psychology and the forces that shape the market are similar at the high-end and the middle/low end, just the scale changes.
If you are curious about art, but you are foreign to the intricacies of dealing with art, you will find this book revealing and fascinating.
Not knocking the book- I”m sure it”s full of insights, just as you say. But as you so aptly demonstrated, the main question it poses can be answered in less than a paragraph…
A more important question- why did my apostrophes turn into quotation marks?
quotation marks – this is a bug of wordpress in my server, very annoying indeed. Each time the text is edited will ad more punctuation to the initial apostrophe creating something like ”””””””” I can”t figure out why … it even happens if I try to modify the code, so it is not just in the posts and comments.
Regarding the book, yes, lots of insights and very well connected and analyzed. It really gives knowledge of the art market that is difficult to get from the outside.
Thanks much Stan.