Brisbane Art Workshops Updates

The Contemporary Art Bubble burst when the GFC took hold, and the lies and deceptions, price fixing and market manipulation were found out.  But have things really changed …

In my humble opinion, the Galleries are still showing crap, and there is still market manipulation.  Collectors are still being duped into buying art that they are told is or will be worth lots of money and Gallery Directors are selling the hype with sentences that prefix the artist’s induction into the Gallery Stable with their artist “… was awarded the Academic Excellence Award”.

What does Academic excellence have to do with this person selling a piece of art.  The art object is the practical side of an Art Degree, yet Gallery Directors are selling the practical on the hype and rhetoric that surrounds it.

Isn’t art supposed to be about beauty, aesthetics, enjoyment and pleasure?  Richness lives in your surroundings as well as your bank account.  With “things” as cheap as they are these days, there is no excuse for “bad taste”.

As an old student of QCA, who managed to achieve a place within its studios by folio, it is insulting that Galleries would dare espouse the achievements of someone who can talk the bullshit, but can’t actually do it.  Infact, I’d go so far as saying that many of these artists today wouldn’t have made the cut back in the day when folios were king, when rhetoric was left to the critics and art historians.

In order for the world to get some normality in the art market, it needs to be overhauled.  There needs to be some regulation in this industry, but it is doubtful if any could ever be reinforced, due to the very subjective nature of art itself.

It is because of the Contemporary Art Bubble, that the Henry Review for the Australian Taxation Office is setting the stage for the biggest overhaul of the tax system in 40 years.  Thanks to the greed, market manipulation and speculation of recent years, the Government looks set to axe the ability for the Self-Managed Superannuation Fund to be able to buy art as part of their investment folio.  As art is an unregulated industry, the government has seen fit to term this investment class as unworthy and speculative at best.  For once I agree with the government, the only thing that was propping up the art market was its underpinning of rhetoric, dust and feathers.  The majority of Contemporary Art is boring, ugly, and technically deficient; therefore technically worthless with no intrinsic value.

This has dire implications for the art market as investors will be seeking to “dump” their investment art and try to recoup their money before the tax implications take effect, and a double dip in the graph is likely.   However, all is not lost, and I predict this will cause one of the biggest shake-up’s in the Art World in Australia’s history, and I say, bring it on.

Previously the market was held up by greed and speculation, in part fed by the fact that owning a piece of art within a Self-Managed Fund meant you weren’t allowed to have it in your home.  You weren’t allowed to look at it, and had to store it in a safe place, as you would your gold or jewellery.

Now, private collectors will most likely store their collections in their homes, where they can enjoy them.

And here is the sticking point.  Enjoyment.

In a recent article for an Amsterdam University, a Professor of Economics did a paper on art as an investment.  He wrote that art has “a psychic value”, that is, art has intrinsic value just like real estate.  He wrote that while real estate as an asset class increases in capital value, it also had intrinsic value because people live in houses and the piece of real estate becomes a home, and is not just a piece of paper like shares or bonds.

Art also has intrinsic value because of the supply and demand equation.  Where there is limited supply and high demand, prices will be strong.

The two key names that led excesses within the contemporary Art Bubble were Damian Hirst who hired employees to make his art (high supply), cashed in on his reputation when he held his own Auction, and Andy Warhol whose prints were in high supply, surely spelt disaster for anyone who invested in them.  While Andy Warhol is famous in the art history books, are his prints really worth that much?  High supply is unsustainable as a capital growth strategy.

Sound judgement prevails in Bear Markets.  In times of financial depression, the markets usually revert to what is known to have value.  Gold in the financial markets and in the Art Market, investors defer to the Old Masters, and those who already have a name in Art History, such as Monet.

I predict that only art that has intrinsic value will live to survive, and that the next chapter in the art history books will be dedicated to explaining away the excesses since Duchamps “Urinal”.  Art that has technical prowess combined with good aesthetics will proceed to outpace it’s contemporary competitor of those artists who use enablers; that is those who hire employees, trace, project, or use technology to digitally enhance or enables them to make “art”.

The Post-Contemporary Market or the Post-Photographic age as David Hockney described it will hopefully yield some common sense in the art market, now that the collector has to look at what they buy.