But the art world remains far from diverse, especially at the upper echelons. MFAs don’t come cheap - in 2014, tuitions at the 10 most influential MFA programs cost an average of $38,000 per year, meaning an art student would have to spend around $100,000 to complete their degree - so some gallerists attempt to diversify their representation by looking beyond the art school crowd. “These shoes are the first arena, the first entry point for a lot of young artists,” he said. Henri Neuendorf, an associate editor at Artnet News, told me gallerists often visit art schools’ MFA graduate shows to find fresh young talent to represent. To break into the market, an artist first needs to find a gallery to represent them, which is harder than it sounds. Why is art so expensive?Ī few living artists - Koons, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama, to name a few - are rich and famous, but most are not and never will be. Meanwhile, most living artists’ work will never sell in the six- or seven-figure range, and the galleries that represent them are increasingly being left behind. These sales are driven by a small group of wealthy collectors who pay astronomical prices for works made by an even smaller group of artists, who are in turn represented by a small number of high-profile galleries. The sales that make headlines, like that of Koons’s latest record-breaking sculpture, are both increasingly commonplace and, at the same time, an art world anomaly. The global art market - which includes gallery, art fair, and auction sales - saw $67.4 billion in sales in 2018, a 6 percent increase from the previous year, according to Art Basel and UBS’s annual report on the global art market. In 2017, “Salvator Mundi,” a long-lost painting thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci that later became the subject of a fringe conspiracy theory, sold at Christie’s for $450 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold. Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold a pair of paintings by the late Chinese French painter Zao Wou-Ki for $65.1 million and $11.5 million in September. The Koons sale may have set a new record, but bids in the tens - or hundreds - of millions aren’t uncommon in the art world. The sculpture, a large, silver reflective rabbit, was purchased by gallerist Robert Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, founder of the Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan, and father of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, on behalf of an anonymous client. Last week, a 1986 sculpture by Jeff Koons sold for $91.1 million at Christie’s, setting a new record for the most expensive work sold by a living artist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |