Has Contemporary Art Sold Out To The Market?
12 July 2016 • Tabish Khan
A lively and good humoured debate, with a shock result
12 July 2016 • Tabish Khan
A lively and good humoured debate, with a shock result
7 August 2015 • daniel barnes
Artnet has published its list of the top ten most expensive living British artists at auction for 2015. The list betrays a gentle change in the current of British art,
24 July 2015 • daniel barnes
Georg Baselitz has demanded the removal of all his loaned works from German museums in protest against regulations regarding the export of artworks.
24 April 2015 • daniel barnes
Tabish Khan wrote an insightful piece this week on how the prices of artworks are calculated. He identified two contributing factors: one, the artist’s price point at a given time, which is presumably a function of the strength of the artist’s brand; and two, the size of the artwork.
13 March 2015 • daniel barnes
In 2014, the global art market grossed €51billion, which is a 7% increase on 2013 and the highest total ever recorded. These are the findings of Dr Clare McAndrew, who every year compiles the TEFAF Art Market report before jetting off to the one of the artworld’s most prestigious art fairs in Maastricht.
13 February 2015 • daniel barnes
Auction week heralded the usual suspects: Richter, Hirst, Warhol, Fontanna, Boetti, Klein, Murillo, Twombly, Baselitz, Dubuffet, Basquaiat. Different works, but the same artists endlessly circulating the market.
6 February 2015 • daniel barnes
Damien Hirst sold a lot of very expensive art between 2007 and 2008. So much that he became the world’s most expensive living artist, which gave him the acumen to do whatever he liked. Next week, the seminal Pill Cabinet Lullaby, Winter is going under the hammer at Christie’s, but it has a curious history as an unfulfilled promise that had momentous effects.
9 January 2015 • daniel barnes
A spectre is haunting the artworld. In the foyer of Christie’s New York, at over twelve feet tall and made of painted steel, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Monkey (Orange) (2006-2013) presides over daily business.
1 January 2015 • daniel barnes
In order to combat this, contemporary art has developed jargon that purports to explain every nuance of the artworld, but it often only deepens the mystery.
12 December 2014 • daniel barnes
James Franco is everywhere, doing everything, all the time. He is an actor, writer, musician, English Literature student, teacher, director and world war agitator. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he is an artist, but one who exposes the heartbreaking sycophancy and emptiness of the artworld.
12 September 2014 • daniel barnes
As autumn descends on London, the artworld is gearing up for the great tragic-comic circus of consumption and gossip that is Frieze Art Fair.
25 July 2014 • daniel barnes
Damien Hirst has commanded the destruction of an early Spot Painting……
4 July 2014 • daniel barnes
The saleroom was electric. Not like it’s got a family full of eccentrics, but like important things were about to happen.
13 June 2014 • daniel barnes
This immanent and inevitable catastrophe is a lesson in how the unchecked might of the market renders impotent the museums whose mandate is to preserve our rich cultural history.
6 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The phenomenon of Basquiat’s prices and the more general taste for street art of which it is symptomatic is a product of the art market’s ability to disseminate otherwise obscure art and to launch it into the establishment.
2 June 2014 • daniel barnes
On the evening of 15th September 2008 three completely unrelated events occurred, which determined this precise moment in time. This is the story of how art survived recession in spectacular fashion and how a philosopher, an artist and a bank unwittingly crossed paths.
23 May 2014 • daniel barnes
The art bubble continues to inflate, enjoying an absence of natural predators and external regulation.
18 April 2014 • daniel barnes
The recent announcement of the UK’s top ten most expensive living artists offers a sobering opportunity to think about the extent to which contemporary art has been infected by its entanglement with money.
11 April 2014 • daniel barnes
The price of art is a much discussed and much maligned phenomenon. But whilst there may sometimes be good grounds for suspicion, a lot of what we hear about the price of art is a wilful fantasy of the media, fuelled by a perennially disingenuous market.
28 March 2014 • daniel barnes
The newest star to twinkle in the infernal blackness that traverses the space between economics and culture is Eddie Peake.
21 March 2014 • daniel barnes
There is a new generation of artists who are realising staggeringly high prices. This group of rising stars is an all boys club of young, middle-class men. It is a perfect demonstration of the perennial confusion between price and quality, where buyers’ voracious habits steer the consensus towards judgments of artistic worth. But the market, in its inexorable whim, is not always right.
14 March 2014 • daniel barnes
The relationship between art and money is complex because it is necessary to the very existence of art in capitalist society, at the same time as being a threat to the integrity of art.
7 March 2014 • daniel barnes
It is worth remembering that whether it is selling exhibition tickets or paintings or even making lucrative sponsorship deals, man cannot live by art alone and that capital rules art just as it does everything else.
28 February 2014 • daniel barnes
They are cultural farmers markets, celebrity hotspots, arenas of business, a capricious day out or a site of curious innovation.