Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What drives the art market, some people say, is the desire to invest. Of course, it is more than that; genuine love of art, and even a curious yearning for transcendence, fuel it as well. But does art-investment success have an upper limit? Is there a limit to demand? Economists Bruno Frey and Angel , Serna, in an excellent inquiry in the October issue of Art & Antiques, examine the case of Yo Picasso. Humana Inc. president Wendell Cherry, who bought it in 1981 for $5.83 million and sold it in 1989 for $47.85 million, got a "real net rate...
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied...
...guess what kind of dealing structure will emerge from this mud wrestling in the '90s? Pessimists think the world contemporary art market, just like the communications industry, could implode into six or seven megadealers, each with an international corporate base formed by gobbling up aging or lesser competitors. The middle rank of dealers will have been squeezed out by the raids on their artists and stock, and at the bottom of the heap a litter of small galleries, treated as seedbeds by those on top, will be kept to service the impression of healthy diversity...
...will have their tame resident critics, as princes their poetasters. There will no longer be much distinction between collectors and dealers, and the collector-as-amateur will be extinct. On the boards of many museums, a new breed of broker, the collector-dealer-trus tee, will hold sway. And art will keep draining out of America toward Japan and Europe. Welcome to the future: a full-management art industry. Most of it is here already...
...relation to collecting as it was once understood. They are, quite simply, investment-buying on a huge scale, with limitless quantities of cheap credit: one zaibatsu offers open- ended loans of any size at 7% (3.5 points below the U.S. prime rate) to Japanese who want to buy Western art...