With its image-focused user interface, which allows artists and other art professionals to express themselves ‘visually’ (rather than Twitter, which favours the verbose), Instagram is the dominant social media platform for the art world – by a long way. Collectors, dealers, curators, artists – they are all there, however begrudgingly in some cases.

The platform is particularly useful for discovering artists. According to a survey of 595 ‘art buyers’ done by the Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2021, 71% of them use Instagram for art-related purposes, particularly for following and discovering artists to collect.

Since 2019, Critical Edge has been conducting research into the art world’s use of social media in order to better understand its shape and interactions. Part of that research has been to understand which artists the ‘insiders’ in the art world follow on Instagram, and highlighting how the art world’s values may differ from those of the wider Instagram audience (and the world at large).

By taking a sample of 5,000 prominent art-world insiders, we have ranked the 3,000 artists who are most followed by this sample group on Instagram. The sample group of ‘insiders’ are a mixture of collectors, curators, museum directors, dealers, and other art world professionals, from prominent museum directors like Klaus Biesenbach to ‘insider’s outsider’ curator Matthew Higgs and trendsetting dealers like Gavin Brown and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (of LGDR).

The most followed artist within the ‘insider’ sample group was German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who is followed by 46% of the sample. In second place is another photographer, Cindy Sherman, with 43%. This isn’t a tremendous surprise as both artists are widely respected and valued by museums, collectors, and the market.

These top ‘insider’ artists do not, however, have a proportionately high number of followers in general. Most hover around the 100,000 mark – some higher, some lower. Glenn Ligon has just over 44,200 followers. Sherman has 366,000.

Nothing to be sniffed at, but small fry compared to the artists on Instagram with the greatest overall following – who all have audiences of over 1 million. At the top, Banksy commands 11.1m followers, followed by KAWS, Mr Doodle, Beeple and Takashi Murakami.

By comparing the top artists for the art world ‘insiders’ to the top artists by total following on Instagram, we can glimpse how the art world differs from the world at large. Or, to put it another way, the chasm that exists for artists between the art world of institutional validation, respect from peers, and the popular, high-demand, market-driven artists driven by social media, hype, and money.

This chasm can be seen in the very little correlation between ‘insider’ following and total following. We can observe two ‘paths’ taken by artists once they have passed a certain point in their career (audience growth), illustrative of two very separate systems of validation.

Looking at the cluster of artists with the highest overall follower count, we see the path to ‘fame’. Here are names that make headlines over and over in popular culture. Aesthetically, street art dominates within this group: think of figures such as Banksy, KAWS, JR, Osgemeos, Mr Brainwash and Mr Doodle. Mr Doodle is a useful example: his simple ‘graffiti spaghetti’, as he calls it, and his making-of videos are perfect for attracting engagement on Instagram.

These artists do not need the respect of museums, curators, galleries or even other artists, and many of them arguably don’t have it. They are followed by comparatively few art-world insiders, often in one concentrated region. The insiders following Mr Doodle, for example, are mostly art market actors in Asia. Only one curator within the insider sample follows him: the famously voracious Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Two of the most recognised ‘famous’ artists among ‘insiders’ are KAWS, who recently had an exhibition at the Serpentine in London, and Takashi Murakami, who has made a couple of appearances at the Venice Biennale.

The other path available to artists on Instagram is one of recognition by insiders over the general public. Among them are prominent US black artists like Simone Leigh, Rashid Johnson, and Glenn Ligon, whose works engage with social issues, politics and identity. The work of Tillmans and Sherman, though photographic, has a similarly conceptual bent. An interesting outlier in this group is Tauba Auerbach, known for her interdisciplinary explorations of structure, pattern and gesture.

The difference in the artists within these two groups might be unsurprising to some, but rarely has it been quantified using data in this way. This data clearly tells us that what the art world values does not necessarily correspond with the size of an artist’s ‘fame’ in the wider world. Or, to put it another way, what the art world recognises as valuable can be drastically out of sync with what the general public appreciates.

Moreover, as Instagram – emulating its younger cousin, TikTok – focuses more and more on video content, those choosing to follow the path taken by Mr Doodles and his peers will no doubt succeed even more. How are Simone Leigh and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye meant to compete? Should they even bother? Or just be satisfied with playing to the smaller, more selective art world?

Most importantly, perhaps, is what this means for the collector base now and in the future. If 71% of art buyers are using Instagram to discover new artists, this is clearly an issue worth thinking about.

Art price indexes have long been used by anyone seeking to justify returns, prices, and portfolio diversification when buying into the art market. They regularly appear in the financial and art market press, as well as being published by banks and private companies. Through various methodologies, they aim to gauge the movement of markets – whether the art market as a whole, a sector, or a particular artist. But the people who know what they’re talking about tend to argue that indexes are at best meaningless and at worst completely misleading.

In recent years, during the art market ‘boom’ of the 2021/2022, the websites of new ‘art investment’ companies have had indexes front and centre to send a clear message: this is where the smart money is. The New York-based online platform Masterworks has been a clear example. An index of its own making sits on its website, showing that contemporary art has outperformed the S&P 500 stock market index for the past 25 years, achieving a 13.8% annual ‘appreciation’ versus 10.2% annualised returns for the S&P 500.

Of course, the platform is careful to comply with financial regulations. ‘Past performance is no guarantee of future returns,’ reads the disclaimer. But Masterworks and its competitors are part of a long tradition of businesses that have used indexes as a tool to persuade people more interested in profit than aesthetics to funnel their money into the art market. ‘Our investors aren’t art people,’ a Masterworks representative told Artnet in April. ‘They are just investors.’

The origin of art indexes can be traced to the 1960s. After two decades of post-war art market growth, Peter Wilson – chairman of Sotheby’s from 1958 to 1980 – set about revolutionising the auction house client base. He was aided by PR man Brigadier Stanley Clarke, who maintained that real revenue for Sotheby’s would come from the ‘common man’, not from the connoisseur.

Central to their efforts – alongside the introduction of black-tie events and other flourishes – was the creation of art indexes, published monthly in The Times of London and later syndicated to the New York Times, comparing the increased prices of selected artworks to stock market returns. Their reason was straightforward: actively bringing in a new group of clients – investors – would push up the price of art. All they had to do was encourage the perception of art as a viable investment. A young statistician and journalist, Geraldine Norman (née Keen), was hired to run the index.

As little more than advertising, it is unsurprising that the lines on the indexes always went up. But in 1971, Norman decided to report the fact that Sotheby’s and Christie’s were keeping unsold lots hidden, contributing to a false image of the market. Wilson, outraged with Norman, pulled the plug on the indexes.

By that time, Sotheby’s had accomplished its job of establishing the idea of art as an investable asset – even though the indexes received immediate backlash from dealers, journalists and, importantly, economists and academics. In 1986, during a boom in the art market, William J. Baumol of Princeton concluded that people ‘should not let themselves be lured […] by the illusion that they can beat the game financially’. But of course, in a market boom, these words of warning fell on deaf ears.

‘There is no superior approach to making an art index,’ says William N. Goetzmann, of the Yale School of Management. ‘What you’re really looking at is a statistical result that’s got lots of noise and error and problems.’ Goetzmann is one of a small pool of academics who have studied the problematic nature of indexes as tools to measure the viability of art as an investment.

One problem is survivorship bias. In the same way that unsold lots were excluded from the Times-Sotheby’s Index, the majority of indexes today still ignore them: only the ‘winners’ are counted. This bias is compounded by the major auction houses providing a ‘floor’ to the market through guarantees or by selectively withdrawing lots. Without reserves and guarantees, a work might sell for half or quarter of its low estimate, depending on the day. What this means in effect is that an index systematically underestimates the real risk of investing in art.

Then there is selection bias. Works of art in high demand are more likely to be sold at auction than those in low demand, which collectors tend to either keep or sell privately – activity that will never be tracked on the index. Goetzmann previously created an art index using the repeat sales methodology, which focuses on repeated sales of the same works of art over time. This approach is particularly vulnerable to selection bias, as Goetzmann now acknowledges: ‘I wish it had dawned on me back then that if something has sold twice, that may not be that common, and it could be that people don’t want to sell unless [the work] exceeds their own reservation price.’

Selection bias appears in other fields such as venture capital investing. For start-ups, valuations come when money is raised, an event that tends to happen when a company is doing well. Tracking company valuations and returns over time, you would only see the successes.

There are also other factors to consider, relating to the particular nature of art collecting. ‘One reason these indexes go up and up is that they aren’t showing net prices,’ says Melanie Gerlis, art-market columnist for the Financial Times and author of Art as an Investment? A Survey of Comparative Assets (2014). ‘Nowhere in these returns is the holding cost of art, the insurance, the shipping, the conservation, the auction house fees.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, indexes created by academics systematically generate far lower ‘returns’ on art at a higher risk than those created by art market businesses. In 2013, Christophe Spaenjers, Associate Professor of Finance at HEC Paris, and his co-author, Luc Renneboog of Tilburg University, examined more than one million paintings and works on paper that sold at auction between 1957 and 2007, finding an annualised return of 3.97% on works of art – similar to that of corporate bonds, but at a much higher risk and far below the 10%+ returns touted by advocates of art as investment. Spaenjers and Renneboog used the hedonic method, controlling for the differences in art (size, medium, artist) while maintaining a large data set, mitigating one of the failures of the repeat sales methodology.

Roman Kräussl of the University of Luxembourg and Stanford University, who is a frequent co-author of both Goeztmann and Spaenjers, puts it bluntly: ‘If you don’t collect for non-financial motivations, like aesthetic return, status, prestige, then don't get into art, it will just screw you.’ Kräussl co-authored a paper in 2016 that found that adjusting for selection bias in art indexes dropped returns to 6.3% per annum, and made investing in art ‘not attractive’.

If the range of artworks that comes to auction is random, selection bias is lower. Traditionally, consignments have been driven by certain random forces – known in the trade as the three Ds of death, debt and divorce. But if you are in a period when a certain type of profit-driven buyer is incentivised, the selection bias increases.

‘Today, only a very small portion of our sales are driven by the three Ds,’ said a senior contemporary art specialist at one of the leading global auction houses, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity. ‘Of course, the best items still come from estates, but the market right now is driven by people wanting to make money. People have paid crazy prices for art, especially in Asia. So now sellers expect prices twice or three times the low estimate.’

‘And the indexes themselves fuel the bias,’ Gerlis points out. ‘If you’re a buyer, perhaps you see Masterworks and all its SEC stuff, and you think “OK, I’ve got $100,000. I think it’s safer to own part of a Warhol [through fractional ownership] than to help support four contemporary artists.” And you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

Time and again, academics have thrown cold water on the accuracy of art indexes. Yet they have survived – supported by an industry that is terrible at understanding data as well as financial and legal professionals who don’t care to understand the idiosyncrasies of the art market.

The new generation of retail-investor-aimed platforms such as Masterworks and Yieldstreet in the US, 360X in Germany, or Mintus in the UK claim to be doing things differently from their failed antecedents. Their strategies for making art an attractive investment included only focusing on the top end of the market, avoiding middle men, and attempting to improve the liquidity of art through a share trading marketplace (although the extent to which this goal has been realised is not clear).

But what hasn’t changed is art indexes being used as marketing to lure people who don’t understand their flawed nature. If later down the line things don’t quite go to plan, those using these indexes could be accused of misrepresenting the truth, or even false advertising. Perhaps only then will non-academic audiences begin to examine them more closely – and realise that the emperors of art investment have been naked all along.

Judah, an art critic and writer, and Harrison, a curator and gallery worker, sat down with Critical Edge to discuss the genesis of the project – plus what the response has been like so far and what their future plans are for the AWP. Visit their website to register and find out more.

How and why did you embark on your research into the impact of parenthood on careers in the art world?

Hettie Judah: I was interested in this evident dropping-off that was happening to women artists in their thirties. At art school, and in early and mid-career, there is a roughly 50/50 split of male versus female and non-binary artists, but at the point when people are being represented by commercial galleries there is a sudden shift. In the Freelands Foundation’s 2019 report on representation of women artists in the UK, they found that 68% of artists represented by galleries in the UK are male. Of course, one thing that often happens to people in their thirties is that they start a family.

I started talking to the report’s then-editor, Dr Kate McMillan, and she commissioned me to write an essay on the experience of artist mothers. I started working on it in March 2020 as the pandemic hit. I put out an open call on Instagram and got an unbelievable response. I had time because of the lockdown so I ended up interviewing everyone who replied. I didn’t do any gatekeeping – if you self-identified as an artist and a mother that was good enough for me. All the interviewees were based in the UK although they had roots all over, from Peru through to South and East Asia. The picture that the essay painted was quite horrifying. Mothers felt extremely isolated, and that if they took any time out of the art world for caregiving, there was no route back in. You can read the essay, which was titled ‘Full, Messy and Beautiful’, on the Freelands website.

If you see something that’s going badly wrong, you start thinking about what you can do to make a difference. I started working co-operatively with a group of 30 artists on a manifesto called ‘How not to exclude artist parents’. We used a Google Doc so people could add suggestions and chime in if they agreed with other people’s contributions. From that I scrambled together 10 manifesto points, which we all worked on to reword until everyone was happy. It was released in spring 2021. Again, it really blossomed and ended up being translated into 16 languages. It’s freely available and open source, so you can republish it in any way you want: people have been using it as a supporting document in funding applications, it’s been cited in all kinds of cases. And then it turned into a book, and then Jo and I started talking…

Jo Harrison: My area of research as a curator has always been feminism, gender and work. I was interested in social reproduction theory and the work of Silvia Federici before I became a parent. During the pandemic I co-curated an online platform called Almanaccare, which explored questions of care and community and ecology. Out of that spawned my current ongoing research project, Repronomics, which looks at the intersection of reproduction and economics through the lens of the visual arts. I’m thinking about the overlaps between social reproduction and cultural reproduction as exploitable labours of love. There’s this idea that if something is your passion, if you love it and care about it, there is an expectation that you should be willing to do that work for little or no pay.

I’ve also worked in commercial galleries for 10 years and I have a kid. Theory is one thing but when you’re actually living it, it becomes much more urgent. When I returned to work I started seeing how the demands of working in the art world were at odds with childcare. There’s the lack of flexibility with your time, the frequent travelling for art fairs. I just thought, ‘How has everyone been doing this so far? I’m not alone in this: there are other parents in the art world who are somehow making this work. But are they making it work? Or are they struggling?’ I realised how valuable a peer network would be for people in the same situation as me. Hettie and I were already speaking over Instagram about some of these issues and we came together and decided to launch the AWP.

HJ: At this stage we hadn’t met in person! But when I was doing my work with artists I was fielding all these messages from people in considerable distress who were working in other sectors of the art world – in galleries, in academia and so on. There’s a serious problem across the board.

So how did you go about setting up the Art Working Parents Alliance?

JH: We started out by selecting around 20 ambassadors who were parents we knew in the art world based across the UK, who could make sure the message about the alliance was received. Then we put a call out on social media and via email and asked people to sign up as members, so we could form a mailing list where we could contact people. We also hosted an initial meet-up that Hettie organised with Hannah Watson at TJ Boulting. The idea was to find out what kind of grievances people had and what sort of thing they wanted us to do.

What are your main activities at the moment?

JH: We organise meet-ups, send out newsletters, and have a series of sector-based WhatsApp groups. The point is to allow people the space to meet with one another and talk about their day-to-day experiences. We also facilitate a mentoring scheme for people across different sectors and stages of their careers. And we’re working towards a symposium. I’m proud to say that we’re an activist organisation. We’re a proxy union in a way, it’s very solutions-oriented. One of our goals is to create a set of best practice guidelines for different sectors within the art world, that both individuals and organisations can use to help improve inclusivity for parents and caregivers.

HJ: At the moment we’re focused on getting a sense of what people are going through, what the current practices are within the art world and in different sectors. There are specific issues that vary from sector to sector – in auction houses there will be different issues to those in comms agencies, or art schools. But even just the fact of making ourselves visible to one another has been so important. Caregivers in the art world are the least visible people to one another because they're the people least likely to be going to the networking and social events: the after-hours private views, the lovely dinners, the press trips. They’re more likely having to dash home to do homework and dinner. I went through my whole active parenting span not knowing anybody else in my position.

There are times that Jo and I worry that things are a bit silent on the networks and then I’ll bump into someone and they’ll say they heard about someone else negotiating her maternity leave, and it made them feel so empowered and has completely changed their attitude towards dealing with their employer. If you’re on the outside of that, it might sound insignificant, but if you’re feeling very isolated then realising there are all these other people also going through it can have a huge impact.

JH: I’m in a couple of the WhatsApp groups. When it’s active I see people troubleshooting with each other. Someone might ask the group, ‘How do you use your holiday pay? Do you use it to cover days when your child is sick?’ And another person will respond by sharing the agreement they have with their employer, which is so helpful.

How have institutions and people in the art world responded so far?

JH: So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive; people have been keen to sign up as members and institutions have been coming forward to host events. Part of the reason we set up AWP is to challenge the hypocrisy that exists at the core of the art world: that it sets itself out as a very liberal and progressive industry, which is extremely inclusive, but the reality is quite the opposite.

HJ: We haven’t got to stage of challenging specific institutions at this point. I’m not going to name names, but at this stage we’re actually more concerned about care-washing. There are institutions that are associated with bad practice who have said they are interested in supporting AWP, but it feels like more of a gesture than a meaningful relationship. We have to be quite vigilant about who we align ourselves with. As Jo says, the art world is brilliant at talking the talk but not walking the walk.

We’ve also had interest internationally. Looking to the future there’s a likelihood that AWP networks will be started in places like Germany and the US. We’ve had lots of people from those countries try to join and we’re not able to accept then as we will be dealing with British contract law. But there’s no reason why people shouldn’t set up a sibling network.

How would you say the art world compares to other industries in terms of treatment of parents?

HJ: I think it’s pretty bad because it’s unregulated. And I’m afraid to say women aren’t necessarily always brilliant allies to one another or to parents. It does vary by sector, though: the public sector is mindful about things like parental leave. It goes back to what Jo was saying about the forms of labour that we are expected to do. There’s this overriding belief in the art world that we’re meant to feel special, and it’s a very competitive industry, so it gets away with things like unpaid labour. People feel that if they don’t accept bad treatment there is somebody else who is going to snap up their job.

I would also add that a lot of the issues that affect working parents indicate a much wider structural issue in the art world. Really bad pay in museums, for example, has a massive impact on anybody who’s a caregiver and supporting other people – but then it also indicates the fact that there’s going to be a lack of social mobility. There’s a canary in the coalmine aspect to what we’re doing.

JH: Even if you’re the most well-meaning director of an institution, you know you’re up against a board of trustees and criminally tight budgets. Trying to include access costs can seem impossible. But there are people who are speaking up against these kinds of oppressions. Scotland is leading the way in a lot of ways. People like Beth Bate at Dundee Contemporary have made lots of positive changes. I do feel optimistic, especially given how well AWP has been received so far.

‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists,’ Marcel Duchamp famously said. But what exactly does it mean to make a life – and a living – as an artist today? While a privileged few can expect to earn six figures or more through the commercial art market, the reality is vastly different for the majority, many of whom struggle to gain access not only to affordable studio space but also to exhibition fees amounting to above the minimum wage. Artists in the UK can expect to earn a median hourly rate of just £2.60 for their artistic labour, according to recent findings by research group Industria. ‘“How does the artist come to be?” is really a question about material conditions,’ writes Lola Olafemi in the accompanying report, published in 2023. ‘Namely, what social, political and economic environment does art arise from and how does it develop in relation to unfolding historical processes?’

Artists who find themselves working largely outside the market – especially those with typically non-commercial practices such as performance, digital media and installation art – must seek alternative methods of funding to survive. Many find regular work by teaching at art schools around the country or through a second job in another field entirely, balancing this alongside their artistic practice in order to make ends meet. Residencies, grants, prizes and public funding are also available, but the field is fiercely competitive and cuts to government funding has only made access to them even more challenging. The network of opportunities can create a feedback loop whereby only a select few who have already been awarded these opportunities early on continue to make gains, while others fail to break into the system at all.

Harold Offeh, a Cambridge-based artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice, argues that the ‘ecology’ of support available to artists is guided largely by how they choose to define themselves. Artists can consider wider frameworks in which their work could feature, he suggests, such as sexuality, race, nationality or politics: ‘You can define your own work and strategise around it, which gives you some agency.’ He explains that there are networks which can offer support to artists who sit outside the commercial economy; in his case, Autograph, founded to support Black photographers, and Gasworks, who offer affordable studio space to artists. ‘I was fortunate because I went through the pathway of open submission for [the annual exhibition for emerging artists] New Contemporaries, which helped to give me early visibility,’ he adds.

Offeh has taught in London at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art, and he is currently a tutor in MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. ‘I very much see teaching as part of my practice,’ he says. ‘I’m interested in pedagogy and strategies of learning, and the politics and dynamics of learning. It also means that my work is constantly challenged. Even if I didn’t have to teach, I would still choose to.’ He admits that his relationship to education differs from some of his peers, for whom teaching has a more pragmatic economic role and allows them to support themselves and their creative practice. ‘It is a mixed landscape but I believe in a diversity of relationships to the teaching model.’

Diana Ibanez Lopez, who leads the MA Cities programme at Central Saint Martins, encourages students to think about how public space can be shaped in partnership with artists, in community-led projects. Ibanez Lopez previously worked as a senior curator and co-artistic director at Create. She oversaw a major community-focused public art commission on the Becontree estate, the largest council housing estate in Britain, and led the development of A House For Artists, a new affordable housing model in which artists were invited to deliver free creative programmes for the local neighbourhood in exchange for reduced rent. What can programmes like these offer to artists seeking alternative ways of making a living? ‘I’m cautious to list a lot of really positive things because I think they can also offer disillusion and exhaustion. It can be a surprise that working in public or working in community isn’t immediately heartwarming,’ she says.

Nonetheless, these kinds of projects, which often receive local authority support and National Lottery funding, can have a far-reaching longer-term impact. ‘It's about collaboration, it's about production, and you get to learn different registers and ways of speaking about art which may not be present in a school or in a gallery context,’ Ibanez Lopez explains. ‘You begin to think about how artistic practice or process, and not necessarily artistic products, can contribute to public good.’ The methods of working prompted by these projects shift the focus from the cult of the individual artist and towards collaboration. Working as a collective can make it easier to secure public funding, Lopez points out, particularly with projects that offer multiple ways of working that extend into the local community, demonstrating how art can be used to bring about real change within their environment. ‘Some artists do incredibly well by working with, say, a craft network in a particular setting and shifting how they might produce a piece. Rather than creating work for a gallery, they might create a playground, an archway or a piece of public furniture.’

Residencies are another option for artists looking to develop their practice away from the pressures of the commercial cycle. However extended periods away, especially for international residencies, present challenges to those who also hold a regular job alongside their creative practice, or for those who have a family or a long-term illness. At Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire, flexible artist residencies have been at the heart of their programme for over 30 years, with an unusual remit: participants are not required to produce anything during their time in residence at all. ‘Wysing offers artists time and space outside the pressures of daily life, and outside the exhausting cycle of production, with a financial bursary attached,’ the institution’s director, Rosie Cooper, says. ‘Many have told us that time at Wysing is when their best ideas emerge. All artists need this, regardless of their practice.’ She adds: ‘I think it's important to say that a majority of artists are finding it incredibly difficult to make a living, whichever model they end up being most reliant on. Everyone who is responsible for artist pay and working conditions needs to be accountable.’

Cooper emphasises the remarkable resourcefulness of artists, but argues that this shouldn’t be the norm in order to survive. ‘During Covid lockdowns, when so many artists’ contracts were cancelled, and temporary jobs suspended, many groups of artists formed to share public funding they had received as individuals. This was about responding to an impossible circumstance, and it showed that the system is broken,’ she says. Like Ibanez Lopez, Cooper is interested in alternative methods of organising collectively, but remains concerned at the slow pace of change in the industry amidst rising rents and the spiralling cost of living.

For many artists, the ability to believe in their own work as a commercial enterprise is crucial to building relationships with commercial galleries. Gallerist Freddie Powell runs Ginny on Frederick, a tiny exhibition space in a former sandwich bar that sits in the shadow of London’s Smithfield meat market. He champions emerging artists whose work might not be seen as straightforwardly commercial, and has staged everything from performance art to ephemeral installation. ‘Once artists find the stability that an affordable studio provides, they can get to a place in their work that allows them to even start thinking about doing a show.’ he says. ‘And then I think it’s on the gallerist to be able to balance a programme that can continue to support work that might be challenging to the standard collector.’

Powell views his relationships with artists in the long term, providing support and an artist fee to cover the costs involved with putting together an exhibition. ‘I don’t ever advocate for an artist to make work for the market. My aim is to figure out a sustainable practice with artists.’ This can involve working with a performance artist to create additional elements for the gallery to sell or monetise, or even selling tickets for performances in a model borrowed from the music and theatre industry. ‘Selling performance or ephemeral work is always challenging at every level, whether you’re an emerging or a blue-chip gallery,’ he admits. ‘But it’s crucial to be able to support artists who work in that way. It also benefits the gallery by developing a wider commercial and critical audience. It diversifies the programme.’

The challenge for many artists remains the question of how to survive for long enough to get their foot on even the first rung of the ladder. It is a dilemma that has historically led to an overrepresentation in the arts of those with independent sources of wealth and income, and is a structural issue that cannot be resolved by the resourcefulness and economising of artists alone. Instead, galleries, institutions and public funding bodies must commit to change – not only by fundamentally rethinking their ways of working, but simply in their openness to risk and the unknown. ‘Working with these artists allows you to have conversations that can happen not only in different mediums but in different mindsets. That’s what a gallery should be doing,’ Powell concludes. Until artists are fully valued for the work that they do, the cultural landscape will remain vastly inequitable. If this does not change, there will be few artists left to believe in at all.

Louise Benson is Director of Digital at ArtReview.

The art market is estimated to be a $60 billion industry, and it has been that way since 2006 (give or take 10% and a few economic crashes). As is often pointed out, this figure is small in comparison to, say, the global luxury goods market.

But whereas the number of luxury goods consumers is estimated at around 400 million people worldwide, there are surprisingly few estimates and resources on the number of art collectors driving the demand side of the industry around the world. Even the leading annual art market report created by Art Basel and UBS only speaks to general high net worth individual (HNWI) wealth trends, rather than focusing specifically on art collectors.

But there are clues out there that give some indication of the number of art collectors worldwide.

Some surveys of HNWIs (net worth of $1 million plus) have asked the respondents whether they collect art. The 2017 UBS Investor Watch survey estimated that 15% of HNWIs engage in fine art collecting activity. That same year, the US-focused US Trust Insights on Wealth and Worth put this estimate at a slightly higher 20%. More recently, the 2021 WealthX Interests, Passion and Hobbies report gave an estimate of 7.6% for those with a net worth between $5m and $10m, rising to 35.8% of people with a net worth over $5bn.

These reports suggest that there is anywhere between 1 and 2.65 million people who could easily buy works of art that cost more than $10,000. The online art marketplace Artsy claims to have around 1.7 million users. That platform lists over 1.5 million works of art for sale, 77% of which are under $10,000.

But these collector figures start to look high when you survey art businesses, as in the annual art market reports created by Art Basel and UBS. Their 2022 report estimates that there are around 500 ‘second-tier’ auction houses based in over 250 different cities, who have an average of 1,434 clients each. This provides a maximum of 717,000 clients in total (likely an overestimate due to duplications and the inclusion of decorative arts and other collectibles). The report also surveys commercial galleries and dealers, focusing on established businesses that participate in art fairs. This pool of around 8,000–10,000 businesses has a median of 25 buyers each, giving us a pool of 200,000 to 250,000 gallery buyers. This, again, overestimates, as it doesn’t consider the fact that each collector buys from an average of 17 different galleries.

At the top end of the market, estimates get even smaller. In 2020, Sotheby’s was estimated to have approximately 30,000 clients bidding on all of its sales. One can assume that the numbers at Christie’s and Phillips are similar with a great deal of overlap. But bearing in mind this figure includes all the people bidding on watches and wine, who might have little interest in art, the number of clients for fine art is likely closer to 10,000. Of these, there are thought to be around 1,000 people who can be called upon to spend over $5m on a single work of art, an estimate provided by Georgina Adam in her 2014 book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century.

Using the numbers above, as well as other sources, Critical Edge has made an estimate of the number of art collectors in different categories worldwide (illustrated above). Employing a common methodology within the industry, these categories are organised according to the amount collectors will spend on a single artwork, from affordable art collectors to trophy hunters. It appears that art costing under $10,000 has the largest collector base of all. Our estimate has this base at 8.5 million, but this is assuming that those who are less wealthy than HNWIs still have the same enthusiasm for buying art. It may be an overestimate.

Why do these figures matter? In recent years, investors – mostly coming from outside of the art world – have poured significant amounts of money into new art-tech start-ups, often with the goal of ‘democratising’ the art market and massively expanding the number of people buying art. In the first half of 2022, FuelArts estimated that 640 investors gave $2.6bn in funding to 123 start-ups. This is more than 237% of the investment for the whole of 2021.

One such company, Limna, which is specifically targeted at people actively buying art, received over $2.6m in investment between 2020 and 2022. In an interview with FuelArts in June 2022, Limna’s co-founder Marek Claassen stated that its then business model was aiming at 3 million users in 4 years. This wildly optimistic projection means obtaining double Artsy’s users in a fraction of the time, and, by our estimates, 32% of all art collectors.

‘There’s a certain confidence among private collectors of performance art,’ says London-based curator and researcher Rose Lejeune. They’re confident in their understanding of artists who don’t feel bound to realising their ideas in any one medium. There’s a sense of following the different threads of an individual’s practice, and of archiving the spectrum of contemporary art. And then, of course, there’s the bonus that performance doesn’t take up much space. ‘A joke I make, and it’s really only half a joke, is that you start thinking about these more immaterial forms when your walls are full.’

Lejeune has spent the past two decades working with artists who explore ideas of process, duration, and viewer engagement. Several projects she’s been involved with have taken place in hospitals, schools, and other non-traditional gallery spaces. After stints at the Serpentine and Art on the Underground, she became interested in how living practices were being documented and situated within art history. ‘As public funding was getting harder to access, and the art market was getting bigger, I also wanted to confront my assumptions about the market and who and what it supported,’ she says. ‘For me, thinking about how performance, which historically comes from a non-commercial space, was going to fit into this new paradigm was really interesting.’

It’s a puzzle that museums have been trying to solve for some time. In 2012, Tate initiated Collecting the Performative, a two-year research project examining the challenges of collecting and conserving live work. In their fourth and final meeting, participating academics and museum professionals drew up The Live List, a set of prompts for institutions to consider when acquiring performance art. They range from the practical (‘Is any special lighting required?’) to the legal (‘Who owns the rights?’).

Art fairs such as Frieze, which established Frieze LIVE at its London edition in 2014, have attempted to help private collectors get in on the action. ‘But I think fairs tend to frame performance as a part of the public programme – as entertainment or marketing – rather than a commercial endeavour,’ says Lejeune. Part of the problem, she adds, is that it’s hard for galleries to take a risk on presenting live work at a fair when the costs of attending are so high. The world’s first fair devoted exclusively to the sale of live art, A Performance Affair, launched in Brussels in 2018 – but ended after its second outing the following year. The trouble, perhaps, was that rather than rethinking the fair structure, the organisers tried to fit live art into the old format, with booths standing empty, and viewers standing around waiting, between performances.

There is an audience for live art, just no clear framework for selling it. Enter Performance Exchange, a live art programme founded by Lejeune in London in 2020, which works with commercial galleries to give collectors a better idea of what it means to buy and own performance. Once a year, each gallery is invited to present work from an artist on its roster, along with a digital document that lays bare ‘a direct link from the live work shown to its acquisition’. ‘I developed this idea that alongside each performance, instead of just having an interpretative text, you would have more of an acquisitions document,’ Lejeune says. ‘Not a legal contract, but something that explains how a work would enter your collection.’ Also, how a work could be reactivated once acquired, and whether any residual objects used in the live work would be included in the purchase.

What, exactly, is being bought – the related documentation of performance art (scripts, films, props) or the rights to perform the piece – varies. With artists who were making work in the 1960s and ’70s, what’s being collected is mostly archival material. ‘Photographs and drawings are certainly an easier access point for collectors,’ says Alys Williams, founding director of Vitrine, one of the first galleries to join Performance Exchange. ‘But most of the artists we work with choose not to allow documentation or preparatory drawings to become the artwork. These would be part of the acquisition pack accompanying the live work, used as a guide for its presentation or as a score and a physical record.’ Take the Swiss artist Nicole Bachmann, who photographs all her live work, but instead of presenting the images as art, prefers to create objects alongside a performance – from neon works to benches – that can be acquired by collectors who follow her live pieces but aren’t prepared to buy them.

Performance has flourished in recent years, but it also has a rich history – and that history largely accounts for the lack of a secondary market. ‘Historically, lots of practitioners were interested in performance precisely because it was anti-establishment,’ says Lejeune. ‘They believed that something ephemeral and participatory could evade the market.’ In other words, its intangibility appealed to early practitioners in the underground and countercultural scenes as a means of preventing their work from becoming a commodity. ‘That founding myth has pervaded even as the economic foundations of the art world have changed, and even as performance has become more mainstream.’

The absence of a secondary market makes performance more suited to long-term collecting. ‘It’s not like with NFTs, or these young painters coming to auction, where you can just buy a work and flip it,’ says Lejeune. In fact, she believes that purchasing live art becomes especially interesting when viewed as an act of sponsorship – somewhere between collecting and patronage. Many collectors prefer to keep their commercial transactions and philanthropy separate, but performance has the potential to be a suitable bridge.

As a commercial gallery, representing artists who work with performance is a big commitment, says Williams. You have to be prepared ‘to give them equal space in your programme, [compared to] painters or sculptors, while knowing the return might take more time’. For collectors, acquiring live art is both a challenge and a chance to make sense of an artist’s oeuvre in its entirety. Since the mid 20th century, performance has become a crucial part of many contemporary artists’ work – both in and of itself, and within a broader practice. Think of someone like Ai Weiwei, says Lejeune: there’s no way you can truly understand his trajectory without having some grasp of his early performance pieces. ‘If you’re interested in building up a rich collection of a multidisciplinary artist, being mindful of how performance fits into it becomes almost necessary.’

It’s unsurprising, then, that many of the collectors Lejeune works with have art-historical and academic backgrounds, and that they’re often considering what it means to create a collection that will speak to a particular urgency or moment. Williams says there isn’t such a thing as a typical private collector of performance art (yet). ‘A number of the individuals who consider collecting live art are already collecting practices that traverse varied materials and have a linguistic and time-based aspect,’ she adds. ‘As the acquisition and staging instructions that surround most performances are relevant for institutional spaces, it needs to be a private collector who’s interested in museum loans and isn’t tied to owning a work that can exist in any environment – although a performance created for a domestic space would be interesting in this conversation.’

And so, if you do have a long-term view, now might be the time to take a leap. ‘There are lots of performance works that aren’t in collections, public or private, and there’s an opportunity to create a collection that’s unique,’ says Lejeune. ‘There aren’t many people collecting performance art right now, and because of that you could end up with something potentially important.’ Something with a legacy – and you won’t have to rehang your walls.

Chloë Ashby is an arts journalist and the author of the novel Wet Paint.

The creative industries in the UK would need to hire 263,200 more working-class people to be as socio-economically diverse as the rest of the country. That was the eye-opening headline of a recent report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, which also revealed that art is the thirteenth most elite profession in the country, with 62% of artists hailing from privileged backgrounds. It was a reminder of what many people in the sector already knew: that precarious work, low pay, gatekeeping, and closed social networks are all contributing to a massive erasure of artistic talent in the UK. Art has a serious class problem.

Opening up education

Barriers to the arts crop up early in life; most people I spoke to for this article cited education and unequal childhood opportunities as major concerns. Young people from working-class backgrounds are often less able to access cultural activities, less likely to have creative role models, less likely to believe or be told that an artistic career path is open to them. The costs of further study can be prohibitive. As collector James O’Hara, who is from a working-class background, puts it: ‘an industry that is so outwardly progressive should be having conversations as to why a massive demographic of students […] can’t afford the tuition fees.’ For those who do make it to art school, the culture shock can be profound. ‘I felt major imposter syndrome,’ recalls London-based artist Seren Metcalfe of her student days. ‘Most people went to private school or were already within the art world, whether because their parents were artists, their parents buy art, or they already had connections to galleries. It took me a while to see this as a class thing.’

‘There is a wealth of talent out there and so many people just can’t get on the ladder through education or networks,’ says the activist Neil Griffiths. ‘That’s such a loss to everyone in society.’ In 2011, Griffiths co-founded the charity Arts Emergency with comedian Josie Long in an effort to support people into and through arts education. The organisation pairs young talent from underserved communities with industry mentors to help them flourish in their chosen field, with a wider network of supporters (myself included) offering additional opportunities and ad hoc support. They helped 1,000 young people in 2021, and aim to at least triple that number over the next four years.

Creating communities

Arts Emergency helps service users access influential creative networks that some of their peers grow up with. Just as important are the grassroots networks artists are making for themselves – such as Metcalfe’s Working Class Creatives Database (WCCD). ‘I created the database during my final years at the Slade out of a necessity to find a community,’ Metcalfe explains. ‘There was a small handful of working-class students and probably two or three with a regional accent, which felt quite alienating.’ The volunteer-led platform has been operating since 2020 with three main aims: ‘to provide a platform, create a community, and tackle classism in the arts.’ Anyone who self-defines as a working-class creative can sign up to have their practice listed on the website and access member benefits including weekly newsletters, Zoom meetups and socials, a reading group, critical feedback sessions, and a say in how the community is run. WCCD features hundreds of artists and has a 10.8k following on Instagram, using its visibility to call out art-world elitism.

As Metcalfe was launching the WCCD, curator Beth Hughes was kickstarting the Working Class British Art Network (WCBAN) – a branch of the wider British Art Network dedicated to research, theory, and practice – after realising that ‘there wasn’t much sophistication in the conversation around class and contemporary British art’. Funded by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre, the network addresses fundamental yet complex questions and topics, including what it means to be a working-class artist, alternative funding models, and the importance of representative creative communities. ‘One thing that came out of our first year was this feeling of working-classness as quite single-narrative,’ notes Hughes. ‘Working-class art could only be about being poor, or about what you don’t have.’ Groups like the WCBAN and WCCN put people back in charge of their own narratives and celebrate their diverse, multifaceted art on its own terms.

Reconfigured funding

Networks alone won’t make an artist a living. For the art world to become truly inclusive, it must sort out the issue of artists’ pay. ‘As a curator, I don’t have a job unless artists make art,’ argues Hughes, ‘but we keep them at the bottom of the pile when it comes to how the art world is funded.’ Precarious, low-paid work is often seen as a rite of passage for creative professionals, but for those who lack financial or familial support, it can be an impossibility. ‘There is a lot of talk about the glass ceiling,’ says Griffiths, ‘but there is also a glass floor where people who can afford to work for less or free […] make it hard for everyone else to make a living wage through their practice.’ Second jobs, funding applications, and other admin tasks eat into hours that would otherwise be spent creating art.

Accessible funding can make a world of difference for artists feeling the squeeze. In 2020, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad – the writers and curators behind radical critical platform The White Pube – announced a series of £500 grants for working-class creatives, funded by Creative Debuts. The grant was originally offered to writers: ‘we share criticism on art, games and culture in general, and we have always wished there were more working-class voices in writing,’ says de la Puente. But in 2021 the pair widened the criteria to include all creative professionals.

Grant funding often involves lengthy application and reporting procedures, but The White Pube have kept theirs as simple as possible. And significantly, the awards have no strings attached. ‘It was important to all of us that the recipients could just take the money and run,’ explains de la Puente. ‘I’ve been critical of this new culture of micro grants because they feel like a plaster over the bigger problem of inaccessible arts funding, so the simplicity feels important. I hope it continues for many more years – or at least until this country figures out universal basic income so that more creative people are allowed to spend their time doing what they really want.’

A new class of gallery

Commercial gallery models could also do with a rethink. In 2020, Ellie Pennick – a Northerner living in London – set up Guts Gallery after being forced to turn down a master’s degree due to the cost. ‘I was on benefits at the time, living above a pub […] and working in the bar to pay off my rent,’ she recalls. She convinced the landlord to let her exhibit art on-site, and grew her gallery from there with the help of ‘a working-class business owner and artist, Kevin, from Glasgow […] who educated me in the business side of it.’ (Alongside other hurdles, working-class people are less likely to know someone with experience of running a creative enterprise.)

Pennick has adapted her gallery model to empower artists. Rather than ‘representing’ them, Guts ‘champions’ them. Artists and staff collaborate to set the gallery ethos, and a communally agreed Code of Conduct features prominently on the website that promises, among other things, to ‘check in with our privilege constantly’, pay above minimum wage, support artists with external opportunities, and take measures to prevent burnout. The gallery also takes less than 50% commission on sales – below the industry standard.

Guts started as an itinerant project, but Pennick opened a permanent space in Hackney recently and has been quick to share the benefits. The gallery office doubles as a project space for collectives and curators, who are also offered logistical support. ‘I was like: “We’ve got four walls around us, I worked in smaller spaces when I started curating, this could really help somebody,”’ Pennick explains of the decision. Guts got its big break when the blue-chip gallery Sadie Coles offered its shop as a display space. This was ‘a game changer’ for Pennick, who is adamant that gallerists ‘should pass on their knowledge to people starting out, because they’re going to be the ones making the change.’ ‘The idea of competition I just find… just a load of shit really,’ she adds. ‘I don’t know why people do it. It makes more sense to support.’

This belief in skills-sharing and mutual support was shared by everyone I spoke to. Grassroots initiatives are leading the way; the hope now is that the art market’s big hitters will follow suit. ‘There’s a new Cork Street space run by Frieze,’ muses the WCBAN’s Hughes. ‘Imagine if they handed that space over to the Working Class Creatives Database. They’ve got the real estate and that’s what these artists need.’

Collaborative collecting

Can collectors help alter the art-market ethos? O’Hara thinks so. ‘It’s the people who are spending the money who can make the change,’ he points out. ‘Spend your money with people who are looking after artists well.’ The collector notes that gallery gatekeeping can also exclude budding art buyers. ‘I found it really intimidating at first,’ he recalls. ‘These entities aren’t going to improve themselves. It might need working-class gobshites like me to bash the doors in a little bit.’ In an effort to make collecting more inclusive, Pennick offers buyers an interest-free payment plan. On a wider scale, the nationwide Own Art scheme works with 300 galleries to offer interest-free credit to collectors on smaller budgets.

For collectors looking to support working-class artists, the advice is clear: relationships beat transactions. ‘The consensus is that [a collector] is someone who buys and collects art,’ says Sheffield-based painter and poet Conor Rogers. ‘You’re way more than that. A collector can be a mentor; they can be someone who just turns out for you; they can be someone who puts you in connection with someone else.’ The best first step is simply to make contact. ‘Before you even get down to buying the work, start to build relationships.’

Getting outside of art-market comfort zones is also important. ‘All the main collectors are in London,’ says Rogers, ‘but there’s brilliant work elsewhere around the UK.’ He recalls one Bournemouth-based collector who drove to and from Sheffield in a single evening to see his work. ‘That, to me, speaks a thousand words.’ The White Pube’s de la Puente encourages collectors to look beyond traditional galleries and art fairs. ‘The majority of working-class artists are showing their art in artist-led spaces or in small art fairs where they have rented out their own booths. For some people, these are not seen as prestigious enough settings.’

For those who do make the effort, the benefits are clear. ‘Talk to the artists,’ says O’Hara. “Knowing the person just makes you connect to the work even more.’

A fairer arts ecosystem

In the last couple of years, grassroots creative communities have sprung up that credibly challenge the status quo and put working-class art in the spotlight. But it is up to everyone in the arts ecosystem – including curators, gallerists, critics, and collectors – to consolidate that change. ‘Invest not just in artworks but in artists themselves,’ urges Metcalfe. ‘Many are struggling to materialise ideas, buy resources, or afford studio spaces. Invest in arts charities and initiatives, invest in grants, scholarships and schemes that help artists to create art. Invest outside of London. Invest not just in artworks, but in ideas.’

Maggie Gray is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

In recent years, we have seen a few interesting moves by artists. Back in December 2022, Gerhard Richter left Marian Goodman Gallery after more than 30 years for David Zwirner. And in February 2023, Peter Doig left Michael Werner after 23 years.

While it is true that artists move between galleries all the time, these moves caught our eye for a few reasons. First, both of these departures came after many years of loyalty and commitment. Second, although Richter joined Zwirner, Doig is – for now, at least – ‘working independently … and has no plans at present to join another gallery’, which is unusual for an artist of his status. Third, both artists have close ties to a chap called Joe Hage.

Hage has been described as ‘the most powerful person in today’s art world’, who as well as being a high-flying lawyer, is also reportedly Doig’s business manager, and has a long-standing relationship with Richter. Media reports have described him as the ‘manager’ or ‘business partner’ of Damien Hirst, who, despite being represented by Gagosian and White Cube, does a lot of business through HENI, an art services enterprise owned by Hage – including assorted headline-grabbing NFT-and-painting project like The Currency, which saw him burning works of art.

The whole situation raises an interesting question for artists like Doig, Richter and Hirst, who are already well-known and with established markets for their work. Do they need a gallery, or might they be better off in business with someone like Joe Hage?

So what does Hage actually do for them? Well, in recent years, HENI has created multiple series of editions for artists that sell in the thousands. Peter Doig’s 2022 series ‘Zermatt’ saw six prints, each in an edition of 250, sell for $3,000 per print – that’s up to $4.5 million in sales. Hirst’s recent HENI print/NFT series ‘The Empresses’ appears to have grossed $54 million. It is unlikely that HENI is taking a 50% cut like a typical gallery would, but even if that were the case this would still be easy money.

As for Gerhard Richter, now 91 years old, Richter stopped painting in 2017, meaning that the market for his work is mostly secondary. But that doesn’t mean that editions can’t be made. HENI has produced 23 different projects editioning Richter’s work in the past decade.

Clearly revenue is not an issue, but there is also the question around ongoing recognition, validation, and respect from curators and museums, something that traditional galleries work hard for with their artists. But it is debatable whether all artists still need it. And Hage helps in other ways. He was instrumental in creating Richter’s website, which is an excellent online catalogue raisonné of his works. And his firm, Joseph Hage Aaronson, recently added art law as one of its specialties, making Jonathan Olsoff and Antonia Serra Clapes, both formerly at Sotheby’s, partners in February 2023.

In this way, Hage is like an artist’s agent, and indeed in 2021, HENI created HENI Artists Agency (HAA) and held some physical exhibitions in central Soho, although that project seems to be discontinued.

It would be too far to say that artists don’t need galleries any more, but having a gallery might only makes sense if artists want what a gallery can provide. This doesn’t just mean sales, but also carefully building recognition and validation within the art world. Some artists don’t need, or want, that.

Apart from artists (or artist’s estates) who are already recognised enough, what about street artists, NFT artists, or so called ‘red-chip’ artists? These types of artists are quite comfortable ‘outside’ the art world’s mainstream systems of validation. The crypto artist Ben Gentilli, who makes work under the pseudonym Robert Alice, has explained that he sells directly through Christie’s because doesn’t agree with ‘the hierarchies of collectors that come with galleries’.

What we are currently seeing in the art market is buyers paying less and less attention to the traditional expertise. New galleries seemingly prefer Instagram engagement over curatorial respect as a means of promoting their artists. Artists also might place less weight on the validation of museums if they fail to believe in them as institutions and instead pursue ‘fame’ on social media platforms like TikTok.

The next few years in the art market will be less about revolution and more about bifurcation, with different artists going in different directions. In a way, this will mean a more professionalised, revenue-generating industry for those artists who don’t want to be ‘part of’ the art world. But it might also mean that artists start demanding more from their galleries, not so much in terms of institutional validation, but in terms of generating revenue in ways that might have previously been seen as ‘below them’.

Like in the luxury industries where the expensive clothes and fashion shows are marketing for the revenue-generating perfumes, bags and jewellery, artists might start embracing a two-tiered system. Sure, they’ll keep creating a few original works to be sold to top collectors and placed in museums, but they’ll also have a constant stream of editions keeping the money rolling in.

Perhaps there is a way to get more money flowing into the art world after all. If more artists are willing to make art (even editions) for the masses, and not leave this business to the Hirsts and Koons of the world, then perhaps – with the assistance of galleries or not – more good artists will be able to make a proper living.

Wasn’t it Warhol who said ‘commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks’?

For over a century, art galleries have excelled at one major goal: selling art. But today selling art can sometimes seem beside the point, as galleries shift from promoting artists to promoting a brand – or, more all-encompassing, a lifestyle. From extensive publishing arms and retail stores to portfolios of hotels, restaurants and members’ clubs, galleries are expanding beyond the white cube.

The Gallery as Retail Environment

'Exit through the gift shop’ doesn’t just apply to museums anymore. A number of commercial galleries have introduced retail concept stores – featuring not only catalogues and books but also limited-edition prints, fashion collaborations, toys and even those museum-shop staples, posters and postcards. These shops offer a flavour of the gallery’s artists, and a chance for the casual visitor to walk away with something other than the press release. Among the first, in 2009, Gagosian opened its Selldorf Architects-designed retail space on the ground floor of 980 Madison Avenue, with top sellers like the Jeff Koons ‘Puppy Vase’, retailing at $7,500. Today a satellite can also be found in the prestigious Burlington Arcade in London. As a former Gagosian staffer explains, ‘Most people can't afford to buy a Cy Twombly painting, but maybe you can buy a poster or a T-shirt.’

Similarly, in New York and Paris, Perrotin has separate store entrances for its shops, brimming with objets d’art, books, T-shirts and more from artists like Takashi Murakami, JR and Maurizio Cattelan. In White Cube’s Bermondsey headquarters in London, a shop welcomes visitors with an array of publications as well as T-shirts, posters and prints. When an Eddie Peake painting is out of reach, grab a scarf! A recurring item across the gift shops is the gallery tote bag. In collaboration with the authoritative hype-beast brand High Snobiety, in 2021 Perrotin released a branded tote ‘to show off that you know what’s what in the world of kunst’ for €45 (now sold out). Hauser & Wirth, meanwhile, offers a sophisticated leather-and-canvas tote produced in collaboration with fashion brand Mansur Gavriel for $195.

What’s the end goal for galleries here? According to adviser Kristen Force Boswell of Ellis Force Art Partners, ‘The shops are good for gifts (art books, editions, etc. make great Christmas or birthday presents) but that’s essentially it.’ Beyond the promotion of artists, gallery stores reinforce the commercial attraction of the gallery brand in and of itself. The shops also offer a way for a larger portion of their audience to partake in collecting and present a more democratic intent in what can be an intimidating, exclusive environment. The Gagosian source adds: ‘I think democratisation is something that’s increasingly becoming important to art institutions of all kinds. In today’s environment, it’s “in” to embrace inclusivity and try to reach out to new and different audiences.’

The Gallery as Publisher

From Librairie Marian Goodman to Karma, some galleries are going beyond the occasional self-published catalogue to establish full-on publishing arms, distributing books and magazines to booksellers far and wide. Since 2018, Hauser and Wirth’s twice-yearly Ursula publishes poetry, interviews, essays, fiction, portfolios and photography. Editor Randy Kennedy tells Critical Edge: ‘We see the audience for Ursula very broadly as readers who love art and whose cultural interests extend beyond it, to film, fiction and poetry, architecture, music, performance and food. That readership includes not only collectors and people in the commercial art world but also artists, curators, writers, historians, students and casual gallery-goers.’

Similarly, introduced in 2017, Gagosian Quarterly features think-pieces, creative prose, curator interviews and previews of upcoming exhibitions. The most recent issue ranges from the political – reporting on artists protesting against mass incarceration – to the titillating: the Saint Laurent reedition of Madonna’s Sex book at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. This kind of content communicates the message that the gallery is politically engaged, diverse, and interested in more than just the selling of art by white, male, blue-chip artists. It allows the gallery to refocus conversation on critical discourse, and away from the overtly commercial aims of blockbuster shows.

These periodicals are not going to significantly drive the bottom line for a mega-gallery: a subscription for Ursula will cost you $32, or $17 for a single issue, while Gagosian Quarterly rings up at $20 per issue or $60 per year. Many articles and additional content (video, interviews) are available for free online. While slightly more expensive than newsstand glossies, these in-house tomes are regularly given away to collectors and function both as sales tools for exhibitions and as an easy way to expand gallery accessibility.

Stand-alone publications, not necessarily relating to the gallery’s roster of artists, serve a similar branding purpose, establishing both cultural authority and public relevance. At David Zwirner, the founder’s son Lucas Zwirner has been especially focused on growing the publishing arm of the gallery giant. In an interview with W magazine in 2018, he spoke about wanting to ‘extend the gallery’s reach beyond monographs’ and focus on the ‘intersection of writing and visual art and make something interesting happen’. He mentions the gallery publishing a diverse array of titles from the zeitgeist-y (Andrew Durbin’s Spiyt th'Words: Rereading Pettibon's Twitter) to the historical (Jarrett Earnest’s What It Means To Write About Art).

The Gallery as Hospitality

Now, you’ve read the magazine, bought the souvenir – how to further imbibe a gallery’s true essence? Perhaps with food, drink, and an overnight stay. ArtFarm, the hospitality company owned by Hauser & Wirth founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth, manages some eight properties across the UK and the US, with more openings planned in the coming months. At Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles, visitors can enjoy farm-to-table cuisine at Manuela, surrounded by specially commissioned artworks by both local artists like Raymond Pettibon and Mark Bradford and international stars like Franz West and Subodh Gupta. Last August, it was announced that ArtFarm had bought the Groucho Club in London’s Soho for around £40m. A club known for hosting, and collecting, the raucous Young British Artists (YBAs) in the ’90s, the Groucho is now set to enter a new era under the Wirths’ leadership. Located just down the street from the original Soho House, it is anticipated to attract more of the creatives, artists and buzz that follow the international art crowd from fairs to biennales and back. It will be interesting to see how the Wirths navigate the tension between the exclusivity of the member’s club model and ArtFarm’s own stated values: ‘Everyone in Mind / Community as the Way / Art at the Heart’.

But perhaps this particular aspect of galleries diversifying their portfolios is not about democratisation. The price points are certainly not always accessible. In New York, Kappo Masa, a joint venture between Larry Gagosian and chef Masayoshi Takayama, diners can contemplate works by Cy Twombly while feasting on omakase. Like the blue-chip gallery, the menu at Kappo Masa is best experienced with a healthy account balance; a chef’s tasting menu of 6 courses will set you back $295 before drinks, tax and tip. Meanwhile, the Fife Arms, also operated by ArtFarm, features an artist residency program as well as a collection of some 14,000 works in the Scottish Highlands. A two-night weekend stay ranges from £581–£1,332 per night.

Force Boswell notes: ‘I think part of the appeal of becoming collectors is that there is a lifestyle aspect to it as well: travelling to multiple fairs, befriending artists, travelling to see museum shows. Clients don't typically buy art and then not engage in the rest of the art world. It tends to be a full on “hobby” and they like to be engaged in the industry aside from just purchasing. I do think there is something to be said for creating meeting spaces for art enthusiasts outside of galleries.’

Indeed, in a world where access is everything, attempts at democratisation can feel forced, but many of the ancillary ventures that galleries are exploring provide a genuine space for the enthusiast or even student to feel like part of the art community. Gallery-generated content is often a sales tool, and success is ultimately measured in works sold, but creating more opportunities to reach a wider audience is a laudable benefit, whether it be an afterthought or the aim.

Madeleine Kramer is a consultant and client strategist who has worked at Sotheby’s, White Cube, and Gagosian.

What does it mean to be a famous artist? Just think of the brand recognition of historic figures like Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, whose work is constantly being copied, exhibited, and ‘experienced’ around the world. Many living artists also experience genuine ‘fame’ – consider, for instance, the ever-mystical Banksy. You might not know them if they walked past you on the street, but you know their work.

Headlines and mentions in the media are no doubt a key indicator of fame. But the extent to which different kinds of press coverage, whether within the general media or the art world media, have a causal effect on an artist’s career is unclear. Validation from art world publications such as Artforum is certainly something to include in an artist’s CV, and signals recognition among their taste-making peers. However, as we have previously discussed on Critical Edge, on social media the total ‘followers’ of an artist does not necessarily correspond with the number of ‘art-world’ followers – general exposure does not mean peer validation.

To this end, it is worth looking at which living artists are the most written about in different kinds of media today, so that we can figure out who is really considered a household name, and whether specialist art publications are taking a less populist approach – or giving exposure to the same artists again and again.

Articker, an art tech company that analyses millions of online articles from around the world, provided Critical Edge with data on the top 20 most ‘mentioned’ living artists in both ‘top general publications’ and ‘top art publications’ over the last 5 years (2018–22). Some of the top general publications include the New York Times, the BBC, Le Monde and The Guardian. Top art publications include the likes of Artforum, Hyperallergic, Artnet News and The Art Newspaper.

The lists are at first unsurprising, made up of the usual suspects – those you would expect to be included in a run-down of the most ‘famous’ living artists. Banksy, ironically for someone whose true identity is secret, occupies the top slot on both lists, and is twice as popular in both types of media as the number two artists – David Hockney in general publications and Jeff Koons in art publications.

Female artists are a minority across the broad, with half of both the lists made up of middle-aged white men. Yayoi Kusama is the top female artist on both lists, and Ai Weiwei the top non-white artist.

More surprisingly, perhaps, the two lists are quite similar overall, with 18 of the 20 slots on both filled by the artists, although in slightly different orders. Artists like KAWS, Takashi Murakami, and Beeple are given more exposure in the general media than in the art world media, while Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor are apparently less interesting to the general public than to the art world.

It is clear that certain artists, although talented, are on these top 20 lists more for their activities outside of their art than for their practice – Yoko Ono and Nan Goldin for example. Goldin’s battle with addiction and activism in the struggle against the opioid crisis in the US is no small contributor to her fame.

And there are some significant differences when you dig down. ‘Artforum really likes covering Jeff Koons,’ says Konrad Imielinski, co-founder of Articker, ‘but Banksy is practically absent.’ In the five-year period, a quick search on Artforum’s website shows over five times as many mentions of Koons than Banksy.

Those working ‘inside’ the art world can be guilty of thinking they are somehow different from the general public. But what these two lists show is that the art world – or at least the art press – pays attention to the same artists time and again, the same as everybody else. This might be frustrating for those who complain that there are many more deserving artists who are not receiving any exposure.

Perhaps what this demonstrates is that the art media is just as susceptible to the incentives that drive the general media. In a recent blog post, art market journalist Tim Schneider wrote about the recent media obsession with the accidental breaking of a $42,000 Jeff Koons sculpture of a dog at a minor art fair in Miami. The work is one of an edition of 799, and part of a much larger pool of similar works of varying sizes and colours: the media attention paid to it was significantly out of proportion to its singularity as a work of art. And yet, as Schneider wrote, ‘in a flattened media ecology, where legacy mastheads are as responsive to clickbait as cut-rate online news aggregators … masses will continue to associate contemporary art mainly with astronomical prices, viral stunts, or behaviour that deserves to be mocked.’

There are artists doing undeniably important work within these lists. Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono are both pioneers in their fields, and Olafur Eliasson and Nan Goldin have made major contributions through their activism as well as their art. But many of the artists on these lists – Koons, Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter – are there not because of their practice necessarily, but because of their markets. The seven- or eight-figure sales of their work quoted in headlines are what generates clicks and revenue for the media outlets.

The variables that need to be understood for people to know which artists will ‘stand the test of time’ are complex, but understanding which artists are most mentioned in the media is part of that equation. Although they do not paint the full picture, these lists nevertheless point out what is constantly pushed into the public’s consciousness, and, by extension, what they consider the ‘contemporary art world’ to be.

When R.B. Kitaj was invited to stage a retrospective at the Tate in 1994, he was a well-respected painter at the centre of the ‘School of London’, the term he had coined to describe a loose group of London-based figurative artists two decades earlier. In what would become known as the ‘Tate war’, the exhibition was derided by the British press. The Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell famously accused Kitaj of producing ‘thoroughly bad pictures at a prodigious rate’ while Andrew Graham-Dixon in The Independent wrote that the exhibition ‘presents the dispiriting, admonitory spectacle of an oeuvre ruined by fatal self-delusion’. Kitaj took it badly and blamed the stress of the situation for the death that year of his wife, Sandra Fisher, from a brain aneurysm. Following the artist’s own death by suicide in 2007, Jonathan Jones wrote an article titled ‘Did art critics kill R.B. Kitaj?’ ‘Why destroy an artist so cruelly?’ Jones asked. ‘What was gained?’

Though an extreme example, the Kitaj incident reveals some of the complexities surrounding criticism of living artists, raising the question of how a negative review might impact them personally – not to mention their careers. And indeed, with large amounts of money at stake, the issue has increasingly preoccupied not just artists but stakeholders across the industry, placing growing pressure on the opinion of the critic. As Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight tells me: ‘In my experience critics don’t shy away from negative reviews, editors do. In the trades, the managers have gallery and museum ad revenue to worry about.’

But should market players be worrying about negative reviews? In the 1999 book High Art Lite, the art historian Julian Stallabrass analysed the booming market for new British art in the 1990s, concluding that ‘[t]he realms of the mass media and the private art market are linked but distinct, each operating according to its own rules’. There are plenty of more recent examples that illustrate this distinction, with artists like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and KAWS frequently scorned or ignored by the press. Certainly, once an artist has already reached ‘blue-chip’ status, they are seemingly impervious to flack. Some have never known different and persevered anyway. With money rolling in, critical acclaim may not be their personal measure of success.

As Damien Hirst put it, when discussing the divided response to his installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2017: ‘As an artist, the best you can hope for is people arguing, mixed reviews. Love it and hate it. If you get that, then you’re on the right track. If everyone loves or everyone hates it, you’re in trouble.’

I recently spoke to an artist with a first-hand experience of critical disapproval. In the mid 1990s, just as Kitaj was falling out of favour with critics, the painter Marcus Harvey was beginning to make a name for himself amid the burgeoning scene of the YBAs. Though Harvey doesn’t believe he ever received a glowing review, he generally found critics willing to engage: ‘The interesting reviews understood the argument in the work and connected with it. It was an expected conversation around the boundaries of art, which I thought led to a fairly interesting debate.’

The tone shifted dramatically in 1997, when Harvey became the most reviled participant in ‘Sensation’, Norman Rosenthal’s provocative YBA showcase at the Royal Academy in London. Harvey’s image of Moors murderer Myra Hindley, a reproduction of her mugshot painted with child-size handprints, was attacked by protestors and had to be removed for restoration. The story was catnip for the tabloids in particular – The Mirror labelled it ‘sickening’ and several papers quoted the mother of one of Hindley’s victims, who called it ‘disgusting’. Harvey argued that the media had itself originally profited from the image that he’d ‘had forced down my throat since I was a toddler’. ‘There were death threats, so for me it was more than just criticism,’ he says. In terms of his standing in the art world, ‘it typecast me, and that was quite damaging’.

The denouncements weren’t enough to totally put buyers off. ‘Dealers are not really interested in even-handed art criticism, they are just interested in things that sell,’ says Harvey. Charles Saatchi, having purchased Myra for £11,000, later got an estimated £100,000 for it. Still, Harvey maintains that ‘notoriety doesn’t mean success in sales at all, it’s a much more complicated picture’. The sales figure for Myra certainly falls far short of the prices commanded by peers such as Hirst, whose Away from the Flock (1994) from the same exhibition last sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $4.5 million.

Comparing the criticism of the 1990s to that of the present day, Harvey believes art has become harder to criticise because ‘it’s now so closely tied to personal identity that to criticise the work is to criticise the person’.

One high-profile example of these shifting circumstances was New York’s Whitney Biennial in 2019. That year, the long-running survey of contemporary art featured a majority of artists of colour and women artists. Many of the works on view were politically engaged, with prominence given to themes of gender and race.

In an overall tepid review for The Art Newspaper, Linda Yablonsky accused the show of not being radical enough, writing that ‘some artists in the show identify as activists, but there are no revolutionaries among them’. The piece sparked a debate about who is qualified to assess work that relates to experiences tied to specific identities.

One of the show’s heavyweights, sculptor Simone Leigh, addressed the debate on her Instagram. ‘I need to say that if you haven’t read […] a single thing written by Saidiya Hartman or Hortense Spillers,’ the statement begins, referring to two Black American scholars, before reeling off other references including the Lagos-based arts festival FESTAC 77, Congolese activist Pauline Lumumba, and African American dancer Katherine Dunham. ‘If you thought I was being weird when I told you I was too busy sharpening my oyster knife. If you’ve never heard of the Herero Genocide. Then you lack the knowledge to recognize the radical gestures in my work. And that is why, instead of mentioning these things, I have politely said black women are my primary audience.’

Expanding on Leigh’s clear implications, the critic and curator Antwaun Sargent, who has since been appointed a director at Gagosian, wrote on Twitter: ‘it’s not that POC are not writing about art. They are! I read them all the time! It’s that they are never given the big assignments or positions at magazines and newspapers to do so consistently.’ Sargent went on to comment, ‘It’s 2019 and we are in the middle of a Renaissance in black artistic production. And you are telling me the best people to evaluate that are the same ones that basically ignored black artists for decades?’

What these observations foreground is the identity position not just of the artist but also of the critic. They expose the inherent bias of any commentator’s point of view – no longer can the (usually white, male) critic make any kind of claim to objective judgement. In the end it could be the critic who takes the fall rather than the artist.

If they totally miss the point of a work, reviewers fail to illuminate an artist’s motives or ideas. The risk is that an artist loses out on meaningful insight and commentary – even if this takes the form of less-than-positive critique. But should critics – who might certainly be expected to bring some level of expertise to the topic – not also be permitted some space for conjecture?

Responding to the Whitney Biennial controversy in Hyperallergic, Seph Rodney – who has been vocal about his own role as a Black art critic in an overwhelmingly white industry – was sympathetic to Leigh’s point of view and unimpressed by Yablonsky’s use of the undefined yardstick ‘radical’, but cautioned that ‘there are many valid responses to art’ and not all rely on an exhaustive knowledge of historical and theoretical references. ‘Despite my lack of knowledge, the work spoke to me and still keeps speaking,’ he wrote of Leigh’s sculpture in the exhibition. For Rodney, the defensive posture of artists and their advocates risks becoming a ‘kind of gatekeeping’. In a subsequent reflection on his career as an art critic, published upon his departure from Hyperallergic earlier this year, Rodney argued that ‘insightful criticism’ in fact ‘ignores the maker’s sentiments and intentional rhetorical framing of their work; it goes further than that’.

Other critics might choose to focus on evaluating the exhibition and its curatorial premise rather than art itself – perhaps more useful to a reader deciding whether to see a show featuring artists they already know and like.

Either way, the right audience for a work will likely identify itself. Perhaps, then, the industry’s gatekeepers ought to spend less time worrying about what one or two scathing reviews might do to an artist’s career – and instead focus on supporting systems of independent criticism that are separate from market forces. This applies to editors and dealers but also collectors, who may understand more than anyone how subjective the value of art can be. In the end, most will be willing to make their own minds up when looking at art rather than assuming that a single critic’s opinion is the right one.

Jo Lawson-Tancred is an art writer and part-time research associate at the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology in London.

After two years of pandemic disruption, when NFTs and record sales for young figurative painters dominated the art world headlines, biennials are back. The Venice and Whitney Museum events opened in April to great acclaim, and more than two dozen are scheduled to open before the end of the year.

Although biennials are non-selling events, they present an opportunity for collectors to discover emerging artists exploring today’s ideas. “Biennials, much more than art fairs, are crucial for giving lesser-known artists a stage and context to produce works that might set new standards in contemporary art,” says Christian Oxenius, acting head of research at the International Biennial Association.

It is no surprise then, that established collectors are often listed as patrons of biennials, much as they are for museums. Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition has 26 foundations and collectors supporting it, including Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Maja Hoffmann and Bob Rennie, who have also looked at biennials in the past to help build their own public art foundations.

What is perhaps less obvious to newer collectors choosing to travel to biennials are the pros and cons of using them as a tool for building an art collection. What is the longer-term career trajectory of biennial artists? Are biennials the place to find the next “hot” artist? Is a strong biennial track record an indicator of longer-term success?

Super-beings

To try and answer this, Critical Edge did research looking at the networks of 3,400 curators across 127 biennials over a 31 year period (1990 to 2021-2), and showing who curated what and which artists were shown. The list of biennials was headed by Documenta and the Venice Biennale, with the Gwangju, Whitney and São Paulo biennials just behind.

One of the many findings revealed by the data was the emergence of a highly visible group of 20 artists who, between 2000 and 2015, were chosen by a highly networked group of 15 curators. These artists were exhibited much more often than their peers - at between 8 and 14 biennials between 2000 and 2015.

Moreover, the group of 15 so-called “super-curators” curated 20% of all the biennials researched during that period. Mostly born in the 1950s and 1960s, they include Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, Nicolas Bourriaud, co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the late Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Munich's Haus der Kunst between 2011 and 2018, among others.

Although these super-curators showed a wide range of artists (more than 4,000 in total), the noticeable focus on the group of 20 “super-artists” could mean considering them among the best of the period. So how have their careers progressed as a result of this exposure?

Museums matter

Like being chosen to exhibit at biennials, an artist’s institutional exhibition history reflects how curators and museum directors regard their work. For the 20 super-artists the numbers speak for themselves. Since 2000 their work has been shown in more than 6,500 exhibitions, averaging 12 group exhibitions and three solo shows a year, more than half in museums (the rest have been shows in commercial and non-commercial galleries, biennials and other venues). Nine have had solo exhibitions at the Tate, and seven at the Centre Pompidou. They have also been nominated or won more than 100 awards or prizes. Half have been nominated by the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize. Four have won. These artists were mostly in their 30s and 40s, often considered the prime years for artistic creativity.

But all this hasn’t stopped them from being susceptible to changing fashions. As the following graphs show, between 2015 and 2019 total worldwide exhibitions for the super-artists fell to their lowest level since 2002. So did biennial appearances and the frequency of coverage by influential publications such as Artforum.

Our research explains this shift as well. A new generation of curators, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, began to take over as the creative voices in biennials from 2015. They include Defne Ayas (born 1976), who co-directed the 2020 Gwangju Biennale with Natasha Ginwala; Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977), the new director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Chus Martínez, director of the FNHW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. As they emerged, the number of biennials directed by the first generation of super-curators reduced by half, from six a year on average before 2015, to three a year afterwards.

And yet the frequent biennial presence and curatorial support for the super-artists does appear to guarantee longevity. Their work is in 280 public collections around the world, including major taste-making institutions. Fifteen of the 20 artists are in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York.

Market forces

Olav Velthius, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, says that the art market “looks at signals of quality. For instance, what an important curator is saying about an artist; if the artist has exhibitions in museums; if influential collectors are buying their work.”

By his reckoning, the super-artists should perform well in the auction market, so it is surprising that they do not. In 2020, auction price database ArtPrice compiled a ranking of the top 1,000 contemporary artists by total auction turnover from 2000 to 2019. Only one of the super-artists, Huang Yong Ping, appears on the list, with a total auction turnover (including premiums) of $4.1m, less than 1% of those at the top of the table (headed by Jeff Koons, with a massive total auction turnover of almost $940m).

Not only do few works by the super-artists come to market, when they do, they seldom perform well. Year after year, most works that have come to auction have either not sold or sold for below their pre-sale estimates.

And yet, as a group, the super-artists are represented by 32 of the world’s leading international commercial galleries such as the Lisson Gallery, Pace and Victoria Miro. Their works are still taken to major art fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze and often sell, according to their galleries and press reports. Galerie Chantal Crousel sold a work from After UUmwelt, 2021, by Pierre Huyghe at FIAC in October 2021 to an Asian collection for €275,000. Kamel Mennour, meanwhile, is presenting Huang Yong Ping’s large sculpture American Kitchen and Chinese Cockroaches, 2019, at Art Basel’s Unlimited section in June, an expensive undertaking that implies confidence

Labour of love

The failure of the auction market to ‘recognise’ these artists could be a result of a number of factors. Almost none of the super-artists work in the more buyer-friendly medium of painting. Instead, their works are often installations, video works, prints, or sculptures. But another, altogether more subtle reason may be that the collectors buying these artists, presumably combined with careful placement by the dealers, have a different perspective on collecting, and are less inclined to sell, at least at auction.

Kamel Mennour gallery says that it is “often well-established collectors with a wide knowledge of contemporary art and the market” who buy works by Huang. Stephen Friedman Gallery, which represents Kendell Geers, says that it is “more established collectors” who show interest in his work, priced at up to €250,000.

Thanks to the huge increase in online auctions since the pandemic it has never been easier for new collectors to start buying art, but biennials demand more effort. And while finding new works at biennials may not lead to short-term returns in the auction market, the experience can be more fruitful.

“Do I believe that buying based on biennials is a good financial investment? No,” says Alain Servais, a well-known Brussels-based collector. He says he is in the final stages of acquiring works by four or five artists exhibited in this year's Venice Biennale. “If you want to measure the quality of your collection by commercial performance, with a five- or ten-year perspective, look at the artists that sell well at auction. I buy with a 30-year horizon. That has nothing to do with the market. It’s art history.”

Methodology

How we used our data

1. We mapped 127 of the top contemporary art biennials* from 1990 to the present day (2021-2) along with approximately 3,220 curators who worked on them

2. We weighted every biennial based on the frequency, variety, and relative importance

3. We created an iteratively ranked data set that revealed the influential networks of biennial curators

4. We then looked at which artists the curators chose for their biennials

*Our research focused on contemporary art biennials directed by professional curators showing artists of an international standard. We excluded specialist architecture, theatre, local and purely marketing events from our list of more than 300 biennials, to focus on 127 national and international-level exhibitions

Ahead of the G20 conference that took place in Indonesia in November 2022, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided a report that cast a dark cloud over global economic performance. The report outlined high inflation, weak growth in China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and of course the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Europe, particularly vulnerable, is seeing a recession bite.

But on the surface, the art market seemed unaffected. The recent sales of the Paul Allen Collection at Christie’s and the David M. Solinger Collection at Sotheby’s achieved results 35% to 60% above their pre-sale estimates, and give justification to those who argue that the art world sits above all the gloom.

Meanwhile, the luxury industry remains bullish off the back of strong sales in 2021 and 2022. A 2022 forecast from Bain & Co and Altagamma predicted that the personal luxury goods sector will grow 22% from 2021 to 2022, because, despite the economic uncertainty, there is a concentrated wealth in luxury spenders (the top 2% of spenders now account for 40% of sales – up from 35% in 2009), and Gen Z had started buying luxury items five years earlier than millennials (from 15 as opposed to 20 years old).

But one luxury sector – champagne – already might be showing signs that the tides are turning, especially when it comes to speculative buying on the secondary market. From April 2021 to October 2022, LivEx’s Champagne 50 price index grew monthly by 3% on average. But since then, it has dramatically turned course, declining at an equal rate. LivEx creates indexes for wine investors whose approach to investment is not dissimilar to what we have seen a lot in the art world over the past two years – which suggests that champagne sales might also be a leading indicator for the contemporary art market.

Sales of champagne are historically one of the more unusual indicators of recession. The logic is that when times are good, people want to celebrate and splurge – less so during economic downturns. And although the business is not as glitzy or high-profile as the art sales, Christie’s and Sotheby’s sell a lot of champagne on the secondary market. The sales data is rarely scrutinised in the same way as with art sales, despite a crossover in client base.

The orange line on the graph above shows the estimate price ratio, which is essentially how the final sale price compares to what the pre-sale estimate was, for a sample of more than 8,000 lots of champagne sold at either Christie’s or Sotheby’s from 2006 to October 2022. This is effectively a reflection of how keen the bidding was – in other words, buyer demand.

The data shows that champagne was in low demand in 2009 during the post-2008 recession, although it recovered quickly – driven primarily by demand from China, which then crashed in 2014 due to the country’s crackdowns on luxury gifting. Then, in 2021 and 2022, the price of champagne on the secondary market reached another peak. In 2020 and 2021, the two auction houses sold more than 1,600 lots of champagne (which often contained multiple bottles or magnums), double what was sold in 2019 and 2018. But our findings show that there has been a drop in the estimate price ratio, indicating a drop in demand compared to 2021, which could be indicative of a drop as seen in 2008.

We can compare this estimate price ratio against the total turnover of contemporary artists under 40. Importantly, it seems that champagne stops selling well just before the market for emerging contemporary artists falls. And in 2022, despite sales for young contemporary artists remaining at a high (albeit less than 2021), the performance of champagne has lost its fizz slightly.

Similar ‘slowing’ can be seen in trade statistics. The UK is consistently one of the biggest importers of champagne (the US is the leader) to sell on the primary market. In the first half of 2022, the UK’s monthly imports were 49% higher than for the period in 2021, showing significant growth in demand. However, H2 2022 figures saw only a 10% increase, while H1 2023 vs H1 2022 saw a 1% drop. Although modest, this drop is likely indicative of a change in the wind, and indicative of the country’s current economic situation, as it faces ‘the longest recession since records began’, to quote the Bank of England.

There is, of course, a risk of comparing apples and oranges when trying to draw conclusions about the future of the contemporary art market by looking at champagne sales. But there are undeniable correlations between the markets that make it a fitting comparison, especially when it comes to artists under 40.

This may be because champagne and emerging contemporary art share an underlying market driver: speculation. According to Liv Ex, a London-based wine marketplace and insight company, the secondary market for champagne has completely shifted in its characteristics. Before 2021, top, ‘investment grade’ champagnes had seen steady, stable price growth of around 8% a year. There was a balance between what was drunk and what was produced on a yearly basis, meaning that prices were stable. But in recent years, the ‘speculators are active’, according to Liv Ex, and buyers are storing champagne and not drinking it, meaning that oversupply could soon collapse the market.

Looking at the contemporary art market over the same period, we can similarly witness an investor class buying art for the express purpose of making a profit, as opposed to for personal enjoyment, driving up the prices of young artists. Inevitably, profits will want to be realised, markets will be ‘flooded’ and prices will drop.

Champagne sales might then not only be a recession indicator, but also might be a leading indicator in showing where the contemporary art market is headed. And right now, it looks as though the bubbles might well be popping.

Another indicator might not be Christie’s or Sotheby’s but Phillips. Critical Edge has looked before at how day sales can sometimes be better indicators of market shifts than the marquee evening sales. The Phillips 20th-century and contemporary art day sales in November 2022 came in 23% below their expected performance.

But perhaps the one advantage of buying a case of Salon Le Mesnil-sur-Oger Grand Cru 2002 for £13,000 is that if you lose all your money, you can at least try drinking your sorrows away.

Rental and subscription services are everywhere – from music (Spotify) and film (Netflix) to fashion (Rent the Runway) and strollers (Strollme). In the past several years the art world has started to follow suit. Experimenting with flat-fee subscription models, rental schemes and “try before you buy” options, new companies are looking to radically transform the way collectors buy art. But just how novel are these supposed disruptors, and how do they distinguish themselves? What is the commercial feasibility of these projects, and what are their likely impacts on the budding art collector – not to mention the artists themselves?

Set up in 2021 by the artist-owners of London gallery The Sunday Painter, Gertrude is the latest and buzziest addition to the art rental sphere. The platform has been designed with an explicitly democratic aim: to expand access to great art. Co-founder and CEO Will Jarvis says the company’s mission is ‘to engage a wider audience via technology, transparency, affordable payment terms, and deep insight into artists' practices, and, in turn, support a broader and more diverse range of artists than can currently be supported by the existing commercial gallery-collector model’.

Potential collectors can rent artworks available on the platform for a minimum of three months, each month paying 3.3% of the total sales price. During this period the works remain publicly available for outright purchase by other buyers, although if an offer is made on a piece the renter is given first refusal on acquiring the work. After this period you can either return the work or continue renting it for nine additional months, at a higher rate of 10% of the sales price per month. At the end of the year, you will have paid for the work in full and will receive full ownership rights. Jarvis reports that ‘around 60% of subscriptions convert into a full acquisition of artwork’. Gertrude partners with The Sunday Painter and other commercial galleries to exhibit works in physical spaces while simultaneously promoting the works online. If a commercial gallery is interested in taking advantage of the site’s broad audience to advertise their own works, ‘Gertrude will promote and market the artworks and exhibition in return for 10% commission in the event of a sale’.

With a stylishly designed website complete with a trendy sans serif typeface and an accessible price point (works range from £50 to £12,000), Gertrude is aimed squarely at a digital-native audience with a taste for the ultra-contemporary. Unlike other art sales platforms, Gertrude looks explicitly to promote, and benefit financially, from the relationship with artists, offering plans for them to submit works and be ‘represented’ by Gertrude. This two-way profit model asks artists to choose between two plans costing £15 or £45 per month for their inclusion on the platform. In return, the artist has access to the Gertrude platform to offer works for rent and sale as well as other benefits, including yearly consultations and inclusion in gallery exhibitions. The overall cost of doing business for artists is less than with most traditional galleries, with Gertrude taking 30% (rather than the industry standard 50%) of any art sales.

‘Gertrude’s USP is that this is the first time respected industry insiders have created a route to access the cutting edge of contemporary art in a gentle, open-hearted, and inclusive way,’ says Jarvis. With just over two years in business, Gertrude may still be the new kid on the art subscription block – but with its hybrid model of online platform and in-person gallery space, and deep ties to the existing art establishment, it seems set to flourish.

Based in New York and founded in 2019 by Columbia Business School graduate Mio Asatani, Curina focuses more narrowly on a monthly subscription plan model. With over 1,500 works to choose from and flat-rate shipping for just $50, Curina is aimed at the cost-conscious millennial collector. Subscriptions range from $38 per month for a small work up to $348 per month for a larger painting. The flat monthly fee allows clients to try many artworks before committing to a purchase – an especially attractive offer for city-dwelling renters on the move. As with Gertrude, there is a minimum three-month rental period, with similar perks like the ability to put rentals fees towards the purchase of a work. While most of the artists are sought out by Curina’s in-house team, the service partners with Chelsea-based Kathryn Markel Gallery to supply around one fifth of the selection of works.

In interviews, Asatani has spoken about identifying a gap in the market for young professionals without the knowledge or time to explore brick-and-mortar galleries and navigate the intimidating process of asking about availability. Unlike The Sunday Painter, this start-up has something of an outsider’s perspective. The narrow focus on millennial women in the immediate vicinity of New York City is also a clear point of differentiation for the platform. For just $20 the company will even come and install a work for you, if you live in Manhattan. With Curina providing so many services at a low cost, it will be interesting to see how it scales.

It’s worth noting that Gertrude and Curina are hardly the first entrants to the art subscription business. In the early to mid 2010s there was a veritable boom in art rental subscription sphere. Back in 2011, Nahema Mehta (also a Columbia Business School alumna) launched Art Remba in New York City. Over ten years, the company cultivated relationships with artists and galleries to offer works to subscribers. With a focus on emerging and blue-chip contemporary and South-east Asian art, the site offered works in the five- to six-figure range – higher than Gertrude or Curina – with a rent-to-own model.

Mehta explains that she started the business with the belief that many ‘people wanted to collect art but were just too scared to do it – it was almost more of a psychological hurdle than anything else’. While she saw young professionals invest in watches, expensive vacations, and other luxury purchases, it seemed they needed more time and guidance when it came to art. The rental model gave potential collectors a psychological buffer so they could feel comfortable before making an investment. The idea paid off with Mehta reporting an 80% purchase rate after three months of rental.

The business transformed into an e-commerce platform following its acquisition in 2015 by Pernod Ricard, becoming Absolut Art. While the new business offered many more works for sale, the average price per work was lowered in keeping with Absolut’s brand identity, while the rental model pivoted towards a target audience of corporate clients. The online platform shuttered permanently in 2021.

Another forerunner in the rental space was Artsicle, founded in New York in 2010. In 2012, the New York Times designated Artsicle founders Alexis Tryon and Scott Carleton as ‘Gallerists to the People’, with rentals ranging from $25 to $65 a month and modest sales prices of $500 to $2,500. At its peak, the business represented some 6,500 artists. In a likely reach for greater profitability, Artsicle shifted in 2013 from subscriptions to a broader online space for ‘empowering artists to grow their own business’, only to shut down completely in 2017.

The history of the search for the next ‘Netflix for art’ is riddled with flash-in-the-pan ventures, many with impressive backing and support from art industry stalwarts. A 2015 Financial Times article heralded several now-closed enterprises including Artemus (co-founded by financier and art lending impresario Asher Edelman) and ArtMgt (focused on the film industry and interior designers). Even the San Francisco-based art rental venture Artify.it lasted just two years, despite securing funding from the likes of billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

Why do so many promising rental schemes seem to have burned brightly only to die out within a couple of years? The contemporary art market is fiercely resistant to change. The factors that make an artist successful are controlled mainly by a small group of resource-rich galleries, influential curators, and well-known institutional and private collectors. Outside of this closed system it is very difficult for young artists to break through, and for the merely art-curious to jump into the collecting ring.

Economies of scale are at play here, too – the less expensive the offering of a gallery, or an online platform sells, the less income it will bring in, unless the business is selling (or leasing) hundreds to thousands of pieces per year. Operating in crowded markets like New York and London is expensive, and logistics are costly whether you are photographing, cataloguing and shipping a piece that costs $5,000 or $500,000. With many of these new platforms taking far less than the standard 50% commission rate on rentals, the ultimate purchase of rented pieces is both more vital to their bottom line and still less advantageous than it would be for a traditional gallery.

Mehta adds that rental-based companies struggle with a low repeat purchase rate. She found that the sector with the most traction was corporate clients looking to fill offices and hotels with local artists, without burdening their balance sheets. Another complicating factor for rental start-ups is finding insurance that will cover the artworks moving frequently between different locations. In Mehta’s experience, many companies turned down policies for her company before she found one willing to create a new blanket solution.

Finally, perhaps the psychological dimension of feeling you are simply borrowing a work of art rather than owning it and cherishing it forever may simply not appeal to enough consumers long-term for these platforms to grow at scale. If this is the case, they are then dependent on art sales, bringing them potentially in direct competition with galleries and other art start-ups. Maybe that is not such a bad thing; the art world is in need of innovative ways to capture the imagination of the next generation of art collectors and patrons. Perhaps when we see art as something exchangeable and transitory, we assign it less value and take less responsibility for its care … but only time will tell.

Madeleine Kramer is a consultant and client strategist who has worked at Sotheby’s, White Cube, and Gagosian.

The opacity of the art market has long been considered a key reason why it has resisted the same data-driven analyses that have revolutionised other sectors. The art dealers who orchestrate this mysterious ecosystem of private sales may have been quite happy for the market to remain a world unto its own, but times are inevitably changing with the rapid rise of online marketplaces and ever more sophisticated AI.

Leading the charge in this new sphere is LiveArt, an ‘AI-powered data platform’ co-founded by Adam Chinn, former chief operating officer at Sotheby’s, John Auerbach, former head of e-commerce at Sotheby’s, and tech entrepreneur Boris Pevzner, who founded the digital collection management system Collectrium (sold to Christie’s in 2015). Positioning itself as a bastion of Web3 principles, LiveArt is eagerly disrupting the traditional gallery system by facilitating anonymous peer-to-peer online trading of artworks priced from around $20,000 to $3 million.

The platform’s shameless treatment of fine art as an asset class may ruffle feathers, but it has enticed would-be traders with a growing package of market analysis tools. For each artist, an almost perplexing array of indices and price history can be conjured in moments, presumably to help seasoned stock traders feel more at home. One service that sticks out is the LiveArt Estimate, which offers buyers and sellers an AI prediction of the approximate value range of an artwork. ‘Two people who don’t know each other want to transact an object that is unique,’ explains Pevzner to Critical Edge. ‘What is its current market value? What is the range that they should be confident negotiating around?’ In this Web3 context, AI approximates the trusted expertise of a dealer, or adviser, within the old centralised structure.

Some aspects of the art market will always be unpredictable to any form of intelligence, human or artificial. Pevzner is emphatic that the tool is just an indicator and not built to predict real auction prices – still a slippery objective owing to the indecipherable role of marketing or ‘hype’ in propelling some lots far beyond their estimates. ‘What’s most important is that our customers are satisfied with the predictions,’ Pevzner says of the company’s ultimate test. ‘If they end up doing a deal close to our suggestion then that’s a success.’

Unsurprisingly, Pevzner explains that this process works best for work priced in the data-rich mid-range. The AI’s estimate is calculated using a long list of data points that fall roughly into the following categories: artwork attributes such as size; artist attributes such as exhibition frequency; sales attributes such as how many times the work has been sold and where; and statistical features, or previously unknowable patterns in the data that have been detected and used by the model. Finally, external economic events also have a small part to play. ‘Even though people say that the art market is not correlated with the equities market, we find that there is some correlation,’ says Pevzner. ‘It doesn’t matter what the correlation is; the machine learning model figures that out once we feed various market indices into it.’

For the top 300 or so ‘high liquidity’ artists – those most frequently traded – the auction record alone is rich enough to generate apparently reliable estimates, so the model prioritises these figures. ‘Nothing beats sales data in terms of predictions,’ confirms Pevzner. ‘It’s only if you don’t have sales data that you have to rely on other stuff.’ One such case is the category of emerging artists, which accounts for about a third of sales on the platform. Here, quantitative data is necessarily buoyed by the measure of ‘cultural momentum’ – qualitative attributes relating to the artist such as exhibition history ranked by gallery venue, critical standing, and social media engagement.

A similar promise of being able to generate price predictions for emerging artists has been made by the phone app Limna. Limna charts cultural momentum according to extensive exhibition data collected by co-founder Marek Claaseen over the years since he founded the online database Artfacts.net in 2001. So far, it’s hard for an outsider to assess the accuracy of either company’s claims, but if cultural momentum does prove to be a strong indicator of market performance then they may both be getting a head start in the race to amass and make use of this data.

Understanding the patterns of artists’ trajectories from emerging to renowned means we can compare those who appear to be on similar paths and potentially predict where an early-career artist is likely to end up. LiveArt’s clusters of ‘similar’ artists tend to be determined by the model according to customer interest, disregarding traditional art-historical categorisations. ‘When we let the algorithm see what people actually buy together, there has been some divergence from the art-historical view – and this divergence is really what traders are after, right?’ says Pevzner of these newly emerging statistical measures of similarity. ‘What else is trending in a similar way? That is more useful than academic data.’

Correctly identifying and investing in tomorrow’s rising stars would be akin to winning the jackpot. There may not be much empirical evidence of these artists’ potential – they’ve likely not had the chance to build a reputation on the secondary market yet – but if platforms like LiveArt and Limna could win users’ trust in their predictions they would presumably be able to excite lucrative speculation.

Mapping out the future for still emerging artists might, however, feel a little presumptuous or even limiting. There’s the risk that their destinies are prematurely foretold by the data, as the model accelerates the popularity of some artists versus others due to factors over which they have little to no control. Think, for example, of the network scientist Albert-László Barabási’s The Art Network (2018), a graph showing how early exhibition venues determine the success of an artist’s career. But Pevzner insists that the pricing for emerging artists will, by the time they appear on the platform, already have been decided by the gallery system, with its own complex web of reasonings and more socially influenced dynamics. This may be true, but surely doesn’t rule out the possibility that data-driven analysis will have an outsized impact on the course of an artist’s career, with their initial gallery representation serving as a key data point for the model’s predictions.

Another key advantage for online marketplaces dabbling in AI is their access to primary sales data, formerly the preserve of tight-lipped gallerists. The short supply of this private intel has long stalled attempts to develop more sophisticated machine learning models, but companies like LiveArt may now be gaining a competitive edge by harvesting anonymous primary sales data from the transactions hosted on their sites. In a similar vein, Limna encourages users to enter into its app the prices they have been quoted in conversation with dealers, presumably in confidence. Over the coming years this kind of data should significantly improve overall accuracy of predictions, with the most significant advancements seen for emerging artists.

Historically, the elusive logic of pricing art has been strategically deployed by the old-fashioned art market. AI-generated valuations promise a more empirical underpinning, which will put at ease the growing number of online investors who are snapping up fine art as the latest fashionable asset. So far, these algorithms have been of little consequence to the wider art ecosystem but, as they get more sophisticated, it may be time to start paying attention.

Jo Lawson-Tancred is a freelance art writer living in London.

Confidence is key in the art market. For buyers to continue to participate in this most opaque of marketplaces, it must be seen to prosper. Given that the only accurate statistics reflecting the health of its various constituent parts are provided by public auctions, their results matter. It is almost irrelevant that far more important private transactions may be taking place in dealer’s galleries, at art fairs or even in the auction houses themselves.

With the increasingly curated blue-chip auctions of Impressionist and modern, post-war and contemporary art, third-party guarantees make the picture more complicated. (According to a recent report by ArtTactic, since 2017 between 40% and 60% by value and 20% to 30% by volume of evening sale lots at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips have been guaranteed to sell. And 2022 is forecast to set a new record in the value and number of guarantees.) The humble day sale has therefore come to be seen as a bellwether, a more reliable indicator of what was really happening in the market. But is this really the case? In light of recent statistics, it might be time to reconsider the day sale – as well as mid-season sales and the explosion of online selling platforms processing and promoting lower-value works of art.

On first look, it is true that the average lot value for day sales has remained relatively consistent – particularly in comparison to the famously orchestrated evening sales. Given the catastrophic financial risks of failure to sell a top lot, it is hardly a shock to find that the average lot value for the New York fall evening auctions of post-war and contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips has soared over the last 13 years. From just over $1m in 2008, the amount has risen and fallen in at times dramatic peaks and troughs to over $4m in 2021. In contrast to that mountainous ascent, where the mean value has risen by over 200 per cent, the day sale figures have remained more or less the same. The mean line here represents a gentle upward incline of around 36 per cent, beginning and ending in the foothills around $100,000, although individual prices have not infrequently passed $1m.

The relatively consistent day sale figures reflect not only the increasing polarity between the best and rest but also suggest lower prices embedded within the wide range of material coming to these auctions. ‘As the second tier struggled, [those] prices have been adjusted,’ observes seasoned art adviser Nick Maclean. A plausible second reason for the modest increase in day sale values is that the major auction houses are concentrating on high-profile names and the top end of the market. An increasing amount of good material that would otherwise be consigned to bread-and-butter day sales in London, New York or Paris is now being consigned to ambitious and efficient regional auctioneers. Ketterer Kunst in Münich, for instance, has become one of the most important salerooms in this category in Europe.

Perhaps more striking is that the number of unsold works of art has dropped for both the day and the evening sales for all post-war and contemporary auctions. Over the same period, the bought-in percentages of both fell from around an average of 30% to below 10% for the evening sales and just below 15% for the day sales. Both fell sharply after 2020. (The number of lots offered remained more or less stable – around 2,000 in evening auctions, and 5,000–6,000 in day sales). Like their evening counterparts, it appears that day sales are becoming increasingly choreographed.

‘If sell-through rates are improving, three things must be happening,’ says Matthew Stephenson, a former Christie’s director and now art adviser. ‘There must be better filtering of material, more effective means of reaching audiences, and realistic pricing. Buyers have access to more information than ever before, and the market will not tolerate over-estimating.’ Like Maclean, he believes that auction houses have become more selective in what they take for these sales and pragmatic about value. Perhaps most crucially, they have also been adept at harnessing technology to create competition online, benefiting from the ease and familiarity with which the world came to spend increasingly larger sums online during the pandemic, and massively expanding the global breadth and depth of the market. Their success has been predicated on what he describes as the ‘enormous confidence in the big brands’.

‘The digital revolution in the auction house is really what has driven the change in the data,’ confirms Sotheby’s Holly Braine. ‘We have been trialling strategies to engage maximum bidding interest and the make-up of our sales has changed considerably.’ In a bid to ‘cross-contaminate’ buyers, the two major day sales a year of Impressionist and modern art and contemporary art in London and New York were fused last year, with the usual 300 or so lots each pared back to around 100 to avoid buyer fatigue. As a result, sales have inevitably become more selective, with occasional high-value – even guaranteed – lots straying over from the evening sales and outperforming expectations as well as focusing the interest of those who would not normally look at the day offering.

Online sales have absorbed the residue – and generated more besides. ‘The flexibility of these online platforms has enabled us to be nimble in responding to current demand, and to accept a broader range of work as well as work at a much lower value than before,’ says Braine. ‘The sell-through rates for online sales are high, and we have accessed a far, far wider range of buyers and much younger buyers.’ Success has, she says, taken a huge amount of work, not least from enhanced online lot content and a dedicated marketing team that has hugely expanded over the last couple of years.

‘Having a successful day sale with strong results does give confidence in the market,’ agrees Anna Touzin of Christie’s. ‘We curate our sales as much as we can in the short window of our lead times: we think about what people are interested in and what will do well and invite owners to consign, trying to create groups.’ She adds: ‘What everyone wants to buy at the moment is emerging contemporary art.’

‘Demand for contemporary art is booming, and huge,’ confirms Rebekah Bowling of Phillips. ‘This is why we have seen our 20th-century and contemporary day sales and mid-season sales grow so much over the last few years,’ Between the fall sales of 2020 and 2021, 38% of day sale lots sold above their high estimates, often in multiples of their pre-sale estimates. Meanwhile, the auction house’s cutting-edge New Now sale in New York last month saw participation from 55 countries, and found record prices for some 14 mostly emerging artists. Says Bowling, ‘Five or six years ago, an artist entering the auction market might continue to outperform their estimates for a year or two but then you would see a tapering off in prices as demand was fulfilled. Over the last three years, a hot artist comes to the market and the prices just keep on getting bigger and bigger.’

Phillips is far from alone in moving aggressively into the territory of the primary art market, or in numbering speculative buyers among its clients. What is disappointing to note is how the risk-and-reward speculation that has long flourished among the trophy hunting ‘flippers’ operating in the elevated heights of the evening sales has taken root in the plains below. To the traditional auction drivers of death, debt and divorce, one might now add another: desire to make money.

Susan Moore is associate editor of Apollo.

Monet, Picasso, Freud, Bacon, Kusama – these are all names usually associated with blockbuster exhibitions, with timed entry tickets, at prestigious museums. But in the past decade all of these artists have had major exhibitions with outstanding curatorial input and lauded critical receptions not just in museums but also in commercial galleries. From single-artist retrospectives to thematic cross-genre shows, galleries now compete head-to-head with museums and public collections.

Often, big-name critics and curators are brought in for the occasion. Just this past year we have seen major shows curated by the likes of Hilton Als at David Zwirner (‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’), Legacy Russell at Hauser & Wirth (‘The New Bend’), and Andrew Bonacina at Michael Werner (‘Interior’). Throughout the 2010s, the late art historian John Richards curated a series of Picasso exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery, reported to have drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors. Starting with ‘Picasso: Mosqueteros’, focused on the artist’s late works, Gagosian secured loans from such institutions as MoMA and Fondation Beyeler as well as members of the Picasso family. Even more impressive were rooms filled with paintings owned privately, by major collectors like Steven Cohen and Jan Shrem. Such heavyweight exhibitions demonstrate the strength of connections that elite galleries foster between collectors, curators, and clients. But to what end? The benefits of such complex, expensive endeavors are manifold. Reputation, thought leadership, sales and market development are all spurred by these so-called ‘museum-quality’ exhibitions.

Particularly following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, many art institutions were left unprepared and poorly positioned to face this cultural reckoning. But in an industry heavy with ‘male, pale and stale’ leaders and artists, younger generations have been pressuring the art world to diversify. This push for diversification has led to some of the most interesting gallery shows in the very recent past. These private businesses, unlike many museums, have both the resources and the flexibility required to respond in a nimble fashion. Exhibitions like ‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, based on a collage-like book published by the African American author in 1974, have allowed galleries such as David Zwirner to shift focus to artists and curators of colour, lending a progressive perspective to platforms that have been built on white European generational wealth. For that exhibition, Hilton Als gathered over 20 artists ranging from the canonical (Jacob Lawrence) to established market darlings (Julie Mehretu) and millennial up-and-comings (Walter Price). The exhibition was a public-relations success, with coverage in such wide-ranging publications as Vogue and Hypebeast. It’s worth noting that, in contrast to these high-profile curatorial initiatives, regular programming at galleries has in many cases remained business as usual. In November 2022, for instance, just one of Zwirner’s nine global exhibitions featured an artist of colour (Tau Lewis, a star of this year’s Venice Biennale).

Shifting from press and positioning, curatorial exhibitions also allow commercial galleries to trial new artists. For example, of the 20 artists featured in ‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, only two are represented by Zwirner. Exhibitions organised by external curators can lend galleries the gravitas needed to bring in major artists, or provide the leeway to work with emerging names, testing the market with their collectors. They may also establish a fertile relationship with the artist and their studio – leading perhaps to more permanent collaboration. The painter Julie Curtiss, for example, got her start at White Cube in ‘Dreamers Awake’, a group exhibition exploring the ongoing influence of Surrealist women artists, held at White Cube back in 2017 – not long before Curtiss joined the gallery’s rosters officially in 2020.

The most significant and perhaps most obvious benefit of these shows is financial. Organising blockbuster exhibitions comes with heavy costs: coordinating loans with multiple museums and private collectors, hiring curators, bringing in artists and producing lavishly illustrated catalogues. To offset these costs, galleries have one tool unavailable to museums: sales. There might not be prices in the exhibition pamphlet or any captions distinguishing between loans and works for sale, but that doesn’t mean that money isn’t changing hands. In fact, in the back room or perhaps only by discretion of the gallery director, some of the works on loan may actually be on consignment. For the economics to make sense, it’s no wonder that the biggest museum-quality shows at galleries often focus on artists who carry hefty price tags.

Consider the ‘Picasso: Mosqueteros’ exhibition at Gagosian: while few of the paintings (10%) were actually for sale, they ranged in price from $2m to $10m. More interestingly, the show had a considerable long-term effect on the late Picasso market. Roberta Smith’s review of the show for The New York Times heralded its tide-turning importance: ‘One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch […] the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return. That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here.’ The top ten prices at auction for post-1967 Picassos have all taken place since 2011 and at prices over £13.7m, far above Gagosian’s prices in 2009. And these are just the publicly available prices, while the private sales market for Picasso continues to be among the strongest, dominated by Larry Gagosian. Richardson’s exhibition reignited interest in a period that was previously considered minor within Picasso’s creative output and helped reposition the late-period Picasso market.

From market-making sales to reputational gilding, then, museum-worthy exhibitions confer social, cultural and monetary benefits on commercial galleries. To quote Andy Warhol, ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’ For gallery visitors too, such exhibitions can offer educational and visual enrichment with few of the roadblocks encountered at traditional museums. The exhibitions are free and generally require no pre-booking, registration, or tickets. Such an experience can be a relief from quickly sold-out, expensive blockbusters at major museums. Does it matter that a museum-quality show is held at a commercial enterprise? It could be argued that audiences are spoon-fed a constant meal of blue-chip names with less room for ‘difficult’ or non-commercial art. While museums are bound by their missions to educate and serve the public, the galleries may only serve their own bottom lines. Audiences searching for truly outside perspectives and conceptually challenging environments may want to look elsewhere.

Madeleine Kramer is a consultant and client strategist who has worked at Sotheby’s, White Cube, and Gagosian.

In December 2022, a new data-driven report was published looking at the representation of Black American and female-identifying artists in US museums and the art market. It was the third edition of the report, and the most extensive to date, finding that between 2008 and 2020 just 11% of acquisitions at US museums were works by female-identifying artists, and only 2.2% were by Black American artists.

The report’s authors – Charlotte Burns, independent editor and founder of Studio Burns, and Julia Halperin, former executive editor of Artnet News – are the first interviewees in our new series speaking to innovative thinkers in the art world.

Can you tell us how and why you started these reports?

Julia Halperin: Our first report was published in September 2018. The idea for it came after Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition ‘Mastry’ had arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Basquiat’s skull painting sold for $110m at Sotheby’s, and there were all these headlines at the time saying what a great time it was to be a Black American artist. Charlotte and I were sitting together in a bar thinking, ‘Is that actually true?’ If it was, then the art world was running counter to the rest of America, in the middle of Trump’s presidency, and if it wasn’t, then we should stop saying that. So we thought we would use data to investigate that question.

We reached out to a variety of museums and asked them for information on exhibitions and acquisitions. They, like us, thought it would be easy information to pull, but we were all quite naïve at the time.

You have mentioned previously that museums were sometimes highly defensive when presented with your findings.

Charlotte Burns: It’s not just the museums, it's the entire art world. There are people in positions of authority and power who very much believe in progress, and they usually believe that they are part of it, but when we say ‘no, look at the numbers’, it just clashes so much with their sense of reality and identity, and the language that the art world uses to talk about itself and sell itself. The usual reaction is, ‘Wait, there must be something you've missed’.

Another problem in the art world is that it's not an industry that’s really able to see data as a language it understands, or how to embrace it.

In your latest report, some of your worst-performing museums included the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Do you think that these museums are ‘held back by history’, being forced to collect, and accept donations, from before the 20th century?

JH: In some ways I do. Encyclopaedic institutions have a different mandate than modern and contemporary institutions, so we see modern and contemporary institutions moving much closer to parity.

But also, no. I think one of the most profound things that we found was that you don’t actually have to be a big museum or have a big budget in order to make changes in your collecting. You just need to care about it, focus on it and make a real effort. The National Gallery of Art had dismal numbers, but in the past few years has really made an effort and seen a real shift.

It’s difficult for museums if they don’t prioritise this issue and have saddled themselves with legacy gifts that have been pledged years before. I was thinking recently about the Fisher Collection gift at SFMOMA and the Edlis/Neeson Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. These are collection decisions that are going to affect people coming into that museum for generations – and these decisions were made in the past 10 years. So I’ve become less and less sympathetic.

(Editor’s note: The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA has 7.6% of artworks by women artists and 1.9% by Black American artists. The Edlis/Neeson Collection at the the Art Institute of Chicago has 17% of artworks by women artists and no Black American artists. Neither collection includes Black American women artists.)

CB: Everyone keeps saying there weren’t any women or Black artists, but they may just not have made it to our systems. So you may have to work really, really hard to get it. Art existed. Women were making art, Black Americans were making art. It’s just it wasn’t visible or valuable to this system. But that’s the system’s problem, not the artists.

Your report also looked at the art market and found that galleries are doing a better job at selling works by women than the auctions are. Why do you think this is?

CB: I think the galleries are just closer to the art than auctions. The A to Z of artists at auction is not very big. They want you to understand that the sales are where you go for a very limited pool of greatness. That’s the business model. Lisa Dennison, chairman at Sotheby’s, told me once that she thinks of a family tree when auction houses are guiding buyers. If the buyer wants a Warhol but can’t get one, they might send them to Christopher Wool, if they can’t get a Wool they’ll send them to Wade Guyton, etc. So when women do appear in the sales, it’s not that the auction market has evolved or that tastes have progressed. It’s just that they couldn't find a Pollock anymore so they needed to bring in a Joan Mitchell to be able to satisfy that demand.

The gallery lexicon is just much, much faster. The level of art-historical knowledge needed to work directly with artists is totally different.

Individual patrons and collectors have tremendous influence within the US museum system. To what extent do you think these collection figures are guided by what these collectors want and don’t want in their own collections?

JH: We were speaking to Michael Darling of [the art donation digital platform] Museum Exchange and he was saying that he sees a mismatch over and over with the donors wanting to offer works by white men and the museums wanting something that’s going to diversify their collections.

But I don’t get the sense that these same donors were refusing to let got of their incredible Elizabeth Catlett. Those works move in different ecosystems, so it’s a lot harder for institutions to find them. The people who collected Black American artists, Latinx artists and Indigenous artists did so outside of the museum ecosystem. The museums don’t know them and they don't know the museums. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier for museums to find the people who have the art that they already have in their collection.

Both of your reports have focused on the US, which makes sense as the US is seemingly where the debate and movement around representation in culture is the most active. Can you tell us about this decision? What do you think about running a report like this for other countries, e.g. China, UK, India, Italy?

CB: I think there are complexities around representation that vary from country to country. Looking at women would be easily done because the women in our study are international. But with race it is more difficult to be universally specific. So for the UK would we look at Black American artists or would it make sense to do Black British artists? But the US market is so dominant, could we ignore American artists? America is America, it’s the centre of the art world and art market.

JH: But even something like looking at Brazilian national collections, and looking at Black and Indigenous artists in Brazil, I think would be super interesting.

What would you say are the most significant or surprising findings in your latest report? Was there anything you didn’t expect, knowing the art world as well as you both do?

JH: This is sort of a niche one, but for me, a really illuminating piece of data was that for Black women artist acquisitions, purchases outpaced gifts. For our total data set, gifts were around 60% of what museums acquire, so with the Black women artists we can really see museums using their own money to push against the tide.

And then the thing that, initially, I thought was really encouraging but now I find depressing, is that you can really see an individual’s impact on institutions. You can see the year that Jessica Morgan came to the Dia Art Foundation and you can see when the National Gallery made the decision to acquire the work by the Corcoran Collection. You can see the effects of individual people making decisions and it’s exciting that one person can make a difference. But on the other hand, it also shows that there are only a few people operating at the highest level in this world and the systems are still not changing.

(Editor’s Note: The National Gallery of Art added 6,430 works from the former Corcoran Gallery of Art to its collection in 2015. The collection was particularly rich with works by women and African Americans.)

CB: My answer is more about the process of the study itself. It started off as a journalistic essay and now it’s become this massive part of our lives. It gives me hope that there are so many people we’ve spoken to who want to create change, discuss change. There’s Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven initiative to drive change in museums as workplaces, which has been so enriching; the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums; SMU DataArts. It feels like a lid is opening on something and I just don't want the lid to get screwed back on.

But at the same time it feels like we’re still at the stage where we're trying to convince people that the numbers aren't that great and we're not at the stage where we can move things in a more dramatic way. If the art world as a whole doesn’t get on board with these kinds of conversations, there probably will just be a schism between certain kinds of museums and certain kinds of publics. Because the public is growing, so you can’t keep showing the same stuff forever.

The power of ‘big data’ and algorithms is part of our everyday lives. The global e-commerce industry harnesses it to increase customer engagement and sales, while financial services have adopted ‘big data’ to seek out greater returns, sometimes creating autonomous trading algorithms. Social media algorithms tailor your feeds using minute metrics such as how long you hover over a TikTok video. A 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that thanks to a split-second pause here or there, TikTok’s algorithm can learn your basest interests and innermost emotions in as little as 45 minutes. In essence, data can reveal our instinctual, subconscious, even primal, selves.

But the art world doesn’t really care about data. It is viewed as having little constructive use in the day-to-day activity of creating, displaying, or trading art. ‘I have come full circle on the value of quantitative analysis,’ said the influential economist Clare McAndrew in a 2018 talk at Art Basel. ‘When I started out, I thought that everything in the art world could be put into a quantitative model. Now I think it has a place, but it only guides you on big picture stuff.’

The closest the art industry gets to social media algorithms is image recognition software, as championed by companies such as Artsy, whose Art Genome Project and Thread Genius was acquired by Sotheby’s in 2018. The idea is that with enough data, and associated ‘tags’, an algorithm could recommend artists and works of art based on visual similarity. Finding that what you want isn’t available or is too expensive? No problem. Here’s a work that looks just like it.

This might sound ridiculous to anyone brought up in the traditional art world. Just because something looks like a Mark Rothko doesn’t mean you can sell it for $50 million. There is very little interchangeability in art. Furthermore, the biases of algorithms have been well documented – positive feedback loops push upward trends higher and downward trends lower, perpetuating existing prejudices and blind spots. Does the art world really want to direct collectors down this path? ‘We’ve taken a lot of steps to tweak the algorithm,’ said Artsy’s Chief Revenue Officer Dustyn Kim in 2021, referring to the need to mitigate against the data recommendations always being built out of the majority of sales, which continue to be made by white male artists. Artsy has had to manually introduce more racial and gender diversity into its recommendation engines.

But data can be alluring for those who want to disrupt the art world. One of the long-standing criticisms of the art market is that it is rife with informational asymmetry, particularly when it comes to prices. Having to ask a gallery director for a price is antithetical to the modern commerce experience, in which people expect all information on the spot, for free. And of course if data is not publicly available, it cannot be verified, which opens it up to manipulation (see for instance the recent data scandal at Warner Bros., who have been accused of inflating active subscriber counts for HBO Max).

Naturally, then, there are those who want an art world where all prices for art are available all the time. Where artist’s exhibitions are constantly and publicly graded. And where the person with the deepest pockets gets first pick. This, the argument goes, would be a ‘fairer’ art market, more democratic – like Amazon, or retail investment.

Millions have been invested in recent years into predicting and publishing prices. ARTBnk, founded by the financier turned art dealer Asher Edelman, claims to deliver ‘accurate, unbiased, and trustworthy valuations’ through the power of AI, machine learning and 100 million data points. (The company also offers art investment through fractional ownership of art.) LiveArt, founded by former executives from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, wants to create a C2C art marketplace that bypasses the auction houses and galleries. The company provides free and unlimited access to past public auction data and insights.

Artnet is perhaps one of the best-known companies in the art world, the leader in supplying historic auction sales data and insight. But for the past decade, the founding Neuendorf family has been fending off an attempted takeover from businessman Rüdiger ‘Rudi’ Weng. Weng controls just over 25% of Artnet’s shares, just a few percentage points away from making him the largest shareholder.

Weng, originally a financial analyst, is relatively unknown in the art world. He is not seen at glamorous gallery dinners or VIP openings, and his most public-facing company, Weng Contemporary, sells ‘affordable’ editions online by established ‘brand-name’ artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Alex Katz. But behind the scenes, he has also been investing heavily in his data capabilities.

Last year he invested $2.5m, together with the collector Vincent Worms, in ArtFacts and its subsidiary Limna, who have been attempting to quantify how an artist’s exhibition CV correlates to their prices. If Weng successfully takes over Artnet, he will own arguably the most comprehensive auction database, as well as being able to track user searches. He will have a New York editorial team with its finger on the pulse of the newest trends and 4 million monthly visitors.

The motive for Weng’s interest in data can be easily deduced from his other ventures. He has also bought a 20% stake, alongside the dealer Johann König, of the art tokenisation company 360X Art. This company tokenises physical works on art on the blockchain for investors to trade shares of art back and forth. In 2023, Weng aims to create his own art fund.

In Weng’s vision, then, the idea of a traditional collector, one who supports artists and buys to hold, is fading. For him, the future of the art market will be that of the financial markets and the investors who thrive therein. His investments point towards the building of a rapid trading marketplace where works of art can be bought and sold day to day, hour to hour, with ease – in which he can then take a few per cent on the trades.

The traditional art world does not want a ‘financial’ ecosystem, but rather a ‘cultural’ one, where the value of art is driven gradually by community. Galleries and dealers representing artists and their estates often argue that full data transparency would remove the protective cloak that allows an artist to grow without the constant spotlight on price and hitting certain career markers. But for those investing heavily in art market data, KPIs are all that matter.

Few people are asking which data insights might be constructive to artistic endeavour and could help create a healthier art world, even though we have seen evidence that this is possible in the past. Take, for instance, initiatives like Art+Museum Transparency and Indebted Cultural Workers, which in 2019 and 2020 created an open, public spreadsheet with more than 3,200 salaries within all different types of arts organisations, allowing museum workers to fight for fairer pay.

Data is only ever a tool. Perhaps the questions worth asking are: who is using it and what are they using it to do? As the art adviser Josh Baer once jokingly put it, ‘Imagine what might happen to the art world if Larry Gagosian hired Cambridge Analytica?’

At the time of writing, in September 2022, the art world has been doing some ‘Seoul searching’ (sorry, we couldn’t resist). The launch of Frieze Seoul follows the opening of Korean outposts by a slew of European and American galleries over the past few years, including Pace, Perrotin, Ropac and Various Small Fires.

There are a few obvious reasons for this, much written about. Seoul provides galleries with the opportunity to access Asian collectors without the current risks of setting up in Hong Kong. Rent is also cheaper than in Hong Kong. There’s no import duty and there is no capital gains taxation on works under $45,000 nor on works by living artists. Furthermore, Korea already has one of the richest histories of art in the region, and a long tradition of collecting.

Most importantly, however, the past three years have seen a phenomenal surge in Korean collectors actively buying art, particularly young collectors buying works by ultra-contemporary artists. Art sales in the Korean art market were 922.3 billion won ($688m) in 2021, compared to 381.2 billion ($285m) in 2019 (according to a report by Korea Arts Management Service).

As the international art world, collectors and galleries turn their attention towards the peninsula, it is crucial to understand the underlying incentives driving Korean collectors, as well as what it is that local collectors actually like to buy.

In order to gauge the activity and prevailing tastes of Korean collectors, Critical Edge began by studying the lots offered for sale at Korea’s two main auction houses, K Auction and Seoul Auction.

Prior to 2021, the two houses consistently offered around 1,500 works of art per year. In 2021, that doubled to just over 3,000 works. The growth was particularly concentrated in works of art made since 2000 – these have gone from 350 a year in 2017 to 1,356 in 2021 to almost 5,000 projected by the end of 2022.

Looking at the top 100 artists who most frequently appear at auction, clear groupings appear, giving an indication of where demand lies within the Korean market.

Korean artists account for around 85% of works offered. This group is still dominated by traditional modern Korean masters, mostly associated with the Dansaekhwa (‘monochrome painting’) movement. Top among them are internationally known figures such as Lee Ufan, Kim Tschang-Yeul, and Park Seo-bo. Just those three artists make up 15% of works offered at auction. But there is also a younger generation of Korean artists, such as Kim Sunwoo, whose dodo-filled landscapes and NFTs have been gaining traction among young Korean collectors.

In terms of non-Korean artists, there is a clear demand for international brand or ‘blue-chip’ names. These are artists who have, for better or worse, often broken through to become ‘must-haves’ for new collectors. Think Yayoi Kusama, Alex Katz, David Hockney. But more surprisingly there are also contemporary artists not from South Korea, who remain proportionally unrecognised in their own countries. Take for instance Edgar Plans, whose cartoon and graffiti-inspired work sells mostly in auctions in Hong Kong (32%) and South Korea (17%) – with only 3% of auction sales in his native Spain.

The younger Korean and non-Korean artists in these sales represent a shift in generation but also a shift in aesthetics. Far from the monochrome aesthetic of the modern masters, the taste among young Korean buyers appears to slant towards the colourful and cartoonish. Take for instance the Spanish Javier Calleja, one of the most-sold Western artists at auction in Korea, whose drawings, paintings and installations are inspired by toys from his childhood. See also the Japanese Ayako Rokkaku, whose brightly coloured works are inspired by Japanese ‘kawaii’ or ‘cute’ culture. Her fellow countrywoman Maki Hosokawa’s paintings are similarly populated by cartoonish characters with oversized eyes – fun and joyful pastiches of well-known scenes from art history.

The growth in ultra-contemporary art, Korean and non-Korean, has been driven by a massive generational shift in the collector base, bringing with it different incentives for buying art compared to previous generations.

Over the past two years, an important trend among Koreans has emerged: FIRE (‘financial independence, retire early’). This has resulted in an aggressive passion for exponentially increasing personal wealth as fast a possible. In October 2021, The Korea Herald reported that ‘80% of young Koreans were currently investing in stocks, funds, cryptocurrencies and other assets’, often taking on significant amounts of household debt.

Many new art buyers are driven by the perception that art is a good investment. ‘The craze for investment has extended to the art market,’ commented Do Hyun-soon, CEO of K Auction, in the Korea JoongAng Daily in March.

This incentive has not gone unnoticed by the international dealers deciding what to offer the local market. ‘We’re not coming in with blue-chip artists. We are introducing them to [artists] they might have seen on Instagram,’ said Esther Kim Varet, founder of Various Small Fires, in Ocula Magazine in October 2021. ‘Koreans are very smart about understanding trends, and they tend to want to be early.’

However, since 2021, the Korea Stock Exchange KOSPI Index has fallen 23.4%. Cryptocurrencies have either drastically fallen in value or, in the case of South Korean-founded Terra Luna, collapsed altogether.

This leaves a great deal of uncertainty around Korea’s newfound place in the art market. To some extent, the international art world is still testing seeing which artists will ‘stick’. This month at Frieze Seoul, Ropac will test appetite for Anselm Kiefer, Pace will do the same for Adrian Ghenie, and Various Small Fires will try Diedrick Brackens. These are three artists a world away from colourful, cartoonish aesthetics that have dominated the ultra-contemporary art sales in the past two years.

But it is also worth remembering that the recent boom in the Korean market has, in no small part, been due to younger collectors wanting to make a quick buck, something the art world doesn’t tend to like that much. And when this young collectors find out that art is a terrible investment, the house of cards might come crashing down fast.