I was reading an article today about the development of the online art market. The gist of this article is that the investors are as yet unsure if the online market will become viable economically. There is talk about turnover sums and traceability as well as all sorts of indicators about how all this is supposed to work.
In my humble opinion this is the wrong way to look at this market.
The art market is a derivative of a very specific interactive process. That process has almost nothing to do with money, at least initially. The arts have always been a tool for education, or maybe explanation. True is that the people who create the work need to live, and as such need to get paid. The money being spoken about in the article, or indeed in most articles about the art world in the last years, is not the money the artists get though. The talk is about the money people are earning by buying and selling the work. I am part of this world of course. The work I buy for little money and sell for a lot of money is the profit I live from. Not all the work I buy and sell falls into this model. And certainly not all work I buy can be sold easily. That is a topic in an of itself. That being said there are percentual returns on sales made through things like auctions or web sites. All of these people have a large apparatus to finance and as such must focus on the numbers, of course. But in the end that is putting the carriage in front of the horse.
What I see missing in the online market is the place where people get a chance to understand the work they buy. Of course artnet and co. will tell you that they can show you how an artist has developed based on the statistical….. and so on.. and the horse is looking at the trunk again. We seem to have lost the places where the artwork and the artist is the instigator. Where it is ok to like or dislike a work regardless of it market position. I would love to say that this is the role of the gallery, but considering how many galleries are nothing more than showrooms for the famous or the fashionable I honestly cannot say that this is true.
Maybe this place defies specific definition. Maybe it is a bit like defining what makes a good character. I do think that we should place the entities that service this, our art market in the right place in the hierarchy of our understanding. That place is certainly not in front. If we can do that, and return to our own understanding, then maybe we can get the horse to pull the wagon again.
