Price and the Perceived Value of Art: Open Thread
Comments OffThere’s a great scene in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous in which Edina buys some art, has it installed in her apartment, and then invites her boozy friend Patsy over to see it. The scene plays out like this:
The bit in particular that sprung to mind this morning was this exchange:
Patsy: [looking at what Edina bought]: Are you mad?Edina: Well you don’t have to like it, that’s not the point, Darling
Patsy: Well how much did this lot set you back?
Edina: Well, I just spent as much as I could, Darling. It cost me hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Patsy: Ah well, in that case, it’s fabulous.
The AbFab bit sprung to mind after reading this short article by Anna Somers Cocks, General Editorial Director of The Art Newspaper, entitled: We Like Art Less When Its Price Goes Down. Actually, I think this walking-into-the-room-backwards approach to discussing what folks should expect from the bear market was rather clever of The Art Newspaper, but all the same, it’s good food for thought:
Now it’s scientifically proven: we really do enjoy expensive things more. In an experiment conducted by Antonio Rangel at the California Institute of Technology, the brains of 20 volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they tasted five different wines costing $5 to $90 a bottle. But Rangel fibbed, telling them that the cheap wine was the most expensive, or giving the same price to two different wines.The scanner showed consistently that the flow of blood to the part of the brain that registers pleasure, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, increased when the price was declared to be high, not according to the quality of the wine. In case this got attributed simply to the ignorant palates of the volunteers, Rangel repeated the experiment with members of the Stanford University wine club and got widely similar results.
What this does is to explain the effect first described by the economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 when he noted that certain goods become more in demand as their price rises. Diamonds and luxury cars are an obvious example of this, but so is art, especially contemporary art.
Yes, yes, that’s all well and interesting, but here’s what I suspect was the true take-away message of the piece, lobbed into the room softly:
Rangel’s discovery will be relevant when the recession hits. Here at The Art Newspaper, we have survived two recessions, 1990 and 2000, and we know that a fall in the art market follows a bear market, but always with a certain time lag (in the past this has been as long as nine months, but we think the cycle will speed up now).
Of course, I might be reading too much into the fact that the article was short and didn’t seem to provide much to support its headline…and Anna did wrap it all up nicely, even coining a phrase in the process:
The speculators will try to unload their art, but will have difficulty doing so because the art market not only falls but freezes, except for the rarest and most widely admired works. This is for two reasons. The thousands of people who still have money to spend choose not to do so until they are certain that the market has bottomed out. But they are almost certainly also affected by what we should call the Veblen-Rangel effect from now onwards: they actually find works of art less attractive as their price goes down.
But whether the point was to open up a discussion about the 800-lb. gorilla in the room or to merely explain why folks should be conscious about the irrationality of the “Veblen-Rangel” effect, it does offer a good launch pad for a discussion about perceived value. What in particular I’m curious about (having just worked an art fair) is: If art is less attractive when it’s price goes down, why do some collectors work so hard to get as big a discount as they can?
Just kidding. I understand the difference.
Consider this an open thread on the connection between price and the perceived value of art.
What to do about Art Scams
Comments OffRecently an artist (Sarah) posted the comment below on this scam artists post from last year.
I am in the midst of the exact negotiations - I have actually received the certified check in the mail, from a person calling herself Nicole Roane. All the other details are the same, except that she says she is relocating to Johannesburg from the Georgia address. I also have a cell phone number for her.
I want to un-earth something beneficial from this otherwise shitty experience.
It would be interesting to create an exhibit of “stolen” works - posting calls online through craigslist and other free ad spaces to see if we could get a solid group of us who have interacted with this same scam. I wonder if there is any thread between the artists’ whose work has been chosen within the scam. She chose “Think about that while I am gone”, from my “collage” section, and “Untitled 7″ from the color paintings section. I’d love links to people whose work has been scammed - to the specific pieces, when possible - just out of artistic curiosity.
My local law enforcement will do nothing - they say it happens too often for them to care.
In Reply to the Comment..
I don’t know how the art scammers operate (or why they have to exist on the same earth as us!), but they are generally easy to notice, so I wouldn’t bother wasting time or energy on them. The important thing is that artists are aware of these cockroaches and the tactics that they use.
Their main objective seems to be the money from the artist (don’t cash their check/cheque), rather than amassing a booty of hot art. Listing the titles of your artwork is just a way of making them look genuine. Their most common tactic is to send their scams to a list of artist emails, asking them for their website address and the price of their works. Here’s a really crude art scam that I received recently from Maxwells Brown.
I have never had a genuine request from a buyer that insists on using their own courier and using a check/cheque or money order (that is always more than the agreed amount).
Just don’t send any art until the cash is physically sitting in front of you. Go and buy a coffee with their money before you even think about wrapping a painting to send. The buyer will understand if they are genuinely interested in your art.
I have used Paypal, Escrow.com, and bank to bank transfers with no problems at all. I wouldn’t accept a check or money order as it just isn’t worth the risk. Genuine buyers are flexible with their payment methods.
Don’t go bothering law enforcement either as I have heard from people in the UK, USA and Australia that have tried to do something about these people, and none of them will do anything about it. I would love to hear from people that have had more luck with prosecuting the scammers.
>> Art Scam Emails
Tuesday links, Pittsburgh edition
Comments Off- The Carnegie International has its own Flickr stream, complete with behind-the-scenes pix and a sense of humor.
- Digging Pitt has been smartly, methodically previewing the show with a series of posts on CI08 artists.
- Pittsburgh alt-space Mattress Factory has its own blog.
- Curator Douglas Fogle and Pittsburgh-area NPR station WDUQ have recorded a bunch of short videos about the CI and CI08.
Q&A with Carnegie Int’l curator Douglas Fogle, part two
Comments Off
Continuing from this morning with 2008 Carnegie International curator Douglas Fogle…[Photo at left: Thomas Hirschhorn waiting to happen.]
MAN: So did artists understand your theme, the ‘Life on Mars’ idea, or did you get some strange looks?
Douglas Fogle: When I mentioned David Bowie, 90 percent of the people laughed, got it, and said, ‘Oh my God, I love it.’ No one has not liked it actually. A lot of the people who are really into music loved it, they all get it.
I think the best contemporary art takes us to other worlds. It’s not a show about extra terrestrials, it’s a metaphor. When I discuss the idea around Pittsburgh I have to be extra-clear because the Carnegie has a science center. I always say that the theme was just an interesting way of hooking on to some ideas that could form a bit of structure for the exhibit.
MAN: It’s one of those ‘-ennial’ years in America: You and the Carnegie, the Whitney, Lance Fung is doing a show in Santa Fe, Dan Cameron in New Orleans. Given that biennials are whatever they are now, did you feel any need or impetus to re-examine what a biennial was, to re-create?
DF: No, I didn’t. The Carnegie International is really different. It has its own character. It’s comes along only every 3-4 years, so it’s not Documenta, but it’s not like the Venice Biennial either. It’s also the oldest one other than Venice, and Venice has the Carnegie by only six months. It has a legacy. It’s never more than 40 artists. It’s a third as many artists as I had in my group shows at the Walker, so each artist gets more room. I feel like the show, because of the ideas behind it, because of how I did the show: It’s an exhibition, it’s not a survey. [Photo: Pre-Barry McGee.]
It’s also like Munster and those kinds of places in the sense that it’s very much a show for the city of Pittsburgh and people here get very excited. It’s such a part of the history and the legacy of the institution. It was set up as a way for the institution as a way to collect — that’s how they wanted to build the collection, so there are always works bought out of the show and always work by artists you bring in before the show by artists you want to invite.
I don’t have anxiety about the form of the biennial, if you want to call it that, because [the CI] doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels like a big group show we’d have done at the Walker.
MAN: How is it very much a show for Pittsburgh? How is the city a part of the project?
DF: I’m on the circuit here. The assistant curator on the project and I are out all the time. We do stuff over at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh. And not just about the show, but interacting and doing crits. We’re trying to make ourselves part of the community because we are and we love it. I do as many studio visits as I can. I go give talks leading up to the CI around town and try to get people excited. We have had a series of great pieces on the local NPR station.
MAN: Do you know what you’re doing next yet? Aren’t CI curators expected to leave when the show does?
DF: No, there’s no booting out the door. It’s more de facto than any kind of written code. People do the show and then people call them. I have no future. Starbucks is always hiring.
Q&A with Carnegie Int’l curator Douglas Fogle
Comments OffThe Carnegie International opens this weekend. The curator of the show is Douglas Fogle. For the first time the show comes with a subtitle: “Life on Mars.” Today I’ll feature a Q&A with Fogle and then I’ll have a roundup of Carnegie- and Pittsburgh-centric links. [Photo, with , er, accompanying explanation.]
MAN: What is the origin of the title and, well, why?
Douglas Fogle: It’s from David Bowie. “Life on Mars” is on the album Hunky Dory. The show has never had a title — it’s always had the title of ‘Carnegie International,’ and every show I’d done at the Walker had a title. There was a bit of a contact sport among my colleagues at the Walker with titling shows, and so I wanted to do one here.
For me the Bowie reference is important. I was a big fan as a kid, and he was a big influence on me in terms of art rock and art and rock. I learned a lot about visual art through music.
It was also a chance to post a question before [visitors] get into the show, to prepare you for where you are. The song sort of talks of a world - either a personal world or the world itself - spinning out of control and the protagonist asks if there’s life on Mars. It can be read in many ways: It can be hopeful. It can be utopian, or it can be ‘can we get out of this place?’, which is a darker reading.
When I wrote notes about what this show could be about, I thought of the Pioneer 10 space probe. It’s not a show about sci-fi or a space exhibit. I just loved that Carl Sagan and a bunch of scientists had put a plaque on Pioneer 10, a little drawing etched on metal of a man and a woman, a mathematical rendering of our place in the Milky Way galaxy, and a little diagram of the solar system. It’s a mini-Lascaux cave for the 20thC and it was strapped on the back of this thing that went up . It did its job, and was slungshot out of the solar system. it was the first object that went literally into interstellar space, the first man-made object to leave the solar system.
And so for me it became this metaphor for this human desire to connect with another person or another world in a way. That was sort of a tip-off point for me thinking about what contemporary art should and could be about. I ended up thinking it should be a show about humanity and have a human quality, that it should be about connections, about the idea of trying to connect with someone else. You don’t want artists to be Legos in your argument, but it’s helpful for the audience to have a loose way of engaging the show.
MAN: So how does ‘humanity’ and ‘human quality’ get into a show? What about the show is those things?
DF: Work being done by hand being emphasized. Unlike with Sol LeWitt - who I love - the art in the show doesn’t come from anything like a mathematical formula. It’s very much a medieval, Renaissance way of approaching it: Work made by hand or directly onto the wall, that kind of ephemerality. Like with Richard Wright, who’s doing a wall-piece. That kind of ephemerality - when you’re done with the show, you paint over Richard’s piece and it’s gone. A month’s worth of work by three people: It’s there for a moment and then it’s gone.
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