Daniel’s Value and Ideas #24: We’re Paying with the Love Tonight
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.
Tag: Daniel Barnes
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #23: Empire Strikes Back
27 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The result is that contemporary art is a myth without a foundation, a copy without an original, a market commodity that is an abstraction at heart.
Three stunning paintings from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly donated to Tate
20 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The Tate has this week received its most valuable and exciting bequest in quite some years: Sir Nicholas Serota announced a donation of three stunning paintings from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #21: Everything You Steal Will Turn to Ash
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #20: From Street to Canvas
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #19: Beautiful Inside Everyone’s Head Forever
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #18: The Virtually Inclusive Art Market
23 May 2014 • daniel barnes
The art bubble continues to inflate, enjoying an absence of natural predators and external regulation.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #17: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Priceless
16 May 2014 • daniel barnes
It is often said, quite casually, that a work of art is priceless.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #16: Prize and Shine, It’s Turner Time
9 May 2014 • daniel barnes
This strategy, however, can backfire if it makes contemporary art seem too stern or obscure for a wider audience to grasp. And there is a very real fear that that has happened this year.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #15: Laughing All the Way to the Banksy
2 May 2014 • daniel barnes
A crisis of ownership and authenticity has erupted over the sale of seven Banksy murals which were removed from the streets of London by a cowboy art dealership called Stealing Banksy?
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #14: A Rolling Schnabel Gathers No Sparks
25 April 2014 • daniel barnes
Culture has a selective memory because it diminishes the thrill of the Now
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #13: What You See is What I Sell
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #12: Hammer Horrors
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #11: The Great Dictator, or, Rebel with a Cause
4 April 2014 • daniel barnes
Imagine a millionaire who lives on a diet of boiled eggs and iced coffee. He is an altruist and a patron, he is a tyrant and a menace. Imagine that he made the careers of today’s top artists,
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #10: Rising Stars: Part II – Peake Performance
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #9: Rising Stars: Part I – The Simulacrum of Success
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #8: For the Love of Art and Money
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #7: Show and Sell
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #6: All the Fun of the Fair
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.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #5: Artworld Selling Styles
21 February 2014 • daniel barnes
The commercial gallery is a stage on which an elaborate and mysterious performance takes place.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #4: Bringing Home the Bacon
14 February 2014 • daniel barnes
There is a point at which the prices of artworks cease to be shocking, like when a tragedy reaches such biblical proportions that emotional responses make way for pragmatism.
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #3: Total Eclipse of the Art
7 February 2014 • daniel barnes
Twenty years ago, a businessman named Martin Lang invested in Chagall’s Nude 1909-10
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #2: All Guns Blazing
31 January 2014 • daniel barnes
Celebrity culture inspires a morbid fascination with what somebody is going to do next, as if the whole human drama is monopolised by a notorious few. What, we ask with giddy exhilaration, is Justin Bieber going to do next? The artworld is no exception
Daniel’s Value and Ideas #1: Spot the Difference
21 January 2014 • daniel barnes
Damien Hirst has made close to 1400 Spot Paintings, the latest of which is Mickey Mouse (2012). The first 1365 are chronicled in a hotly anticipated, much-delayed catalogue raisonné, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011.
