Is there such a thing as an 'Art Market ?'

In a recent interview by Anna Somers Cocks at The Art Newspaper, the collector Adam Lindemann, was asked whether he believed there was such a thing as an ‘Art Market’. Lindemann’s response got me thinking. His answer goes something like this:

“I believe that the art market is filled with economic realities, supply and demand and wavering trends. But I do not believe in the Art market as an asset class the way it is written about in the press, or studied at NYU, because each work of art is an individual object. Now, maybe that’s going a bit far, that’s the Micro versus the Macro or Plato versus Aristotle. Aristotle is about everything being infinitely different, Plato is about the absolutes, like beauty. I don’t believe in the Platonic view of the art market as one entity, but I believe in the Aristotelian view, which is to say that each, individual artist is their own art market. There is the 'Warhol market', the 'Klein market', the 'Judd market'…. The 'Art market' is a sum of parts… There is a strange mixture of psychological factors that sets it apart.”

I think his main point is that art should never be referred to as a set of commodities because each piece has a unique value that depends on a range of psychological factors rather than commercial or numeric success rates. The psychological and economical factors that are so unique to Art being bought, sold and made is what interests me.

In the British 'Art market', one could argue that some of our best known contemporary artists have come to make art to make money. They hope it will sell, even if it is for an ethical cause, like Banksy’s recent collaboration with Damien Hirst, to be sold to raise money for Bono's ‘Join RED’ charity(see picture). Yet most of them never started off with the intention to be ‘true tradesmen’. Certainly, this is true of many bohemian contemporary artists in Russia (1960s+), who were part of the ‘unofficial art movement’.

The ‘unofficial artists’ (non-conformist), typically expressed themselves about the status of Russian life, politics and sociology. It was the first auction of there work in Russia by Sotheby’s that took their work on a fast track to becoming a highly sought after commodity. Many of these artists, like Ivan Chuikov and Pyotr Belenok, were affected profoundly by the sales of their work to the West (for thousands of pounds.) Mainly because it felt like the meaning of there work was being taken away from its provenance. Many wanted to go back to the way they were before the sale, before their art reached the fringes of capitalism and its meaning somehow changed….It was hard to do that, due to the reality of the occurrence itself, and instead some went about making art about what had happened, or what was happening. Perhaps in this sense, the so – called ‘Art market’ is just a vicious circle of production and reaction. It is the reaction of the public to art work that determines the fate of each individual artist’s market, and thus the Art market as a whole. Yet it is the artist’s reaction to the Art market, or to the economy as a whole, that can make a work of art in the first place. It is this mix of intentional and unintentional success that perhaps sets it apart from other commercial markets.

This is an argument that has been written about in thousands of books, over thousands of pages – so I'm going to stop here because blog posts are best when they are short. However, it is the inherent contradiction of art for arts sake and art for money's sake that I have been pondering over and thus felt the need to write about for the past couple of days... It's pretty cool that artists like Hirst and Banksy have come to be able to make ‘commodity art’ where the money goes to charity – thank goodness for existence of the “Art market”!

(Ref 1: The Art Newspaper. Ref 2: Adam Lindemann 'Collecting Contemporary.' Ref 3 : Getty images.)