Jerome Marot
Well-known member
I visited an art fair about a month ago. The fair itself is not worth reporting, but it allowed me to watch a conference about the art market (by chance, actually). It was an interesting peek about the way of thinking of gallerists and you may be interested in a summary.
First things first: this is about visual arts: mainly painting (including tags), sculpture and photography. It is essential to keep this in mind, but also to compare the marketing of visual arts with the one of performing arts (e.g. music). I may sometimes refer to music to point the differences.
The person holding the conference works for 52 masterworks, which is a cross between social site, crowdfunding and online gallery. That obviously tainted their presentation, but they also refer to a study by the insurance group AXA, which you will find here: http://www.axa-art-usa.com/news-events/detail/detail/axa-art-collectors-survey-probes-the-who-what-why-and-where-of-collecting.html
Please download the pdf from that page and read it through. Read in particular pages 12-13 and the three different types of collectors: art aficionados, traditionalists and investors. This text builds on that study.
The conference started by discussing social networks like facebook and explained that a turn in trends on Internet use in the past years. Internet users used to go to the Internet to seek information. The latest trend is to use social networks to gain social status. People will post on social networks so as to show their (online) friends how cool they are and they do this by posting about emotions. For example, they will post about a concert or a vernissage and explain (or show through photographs or videos) what great time they had there.
This is exactly what art does. It gives the user an object to post about and an object about which they would experience feelings. A few notes from me on that point:
-this is true from paintings/photography, but also from music
-it is more socially acceptable and more “upper class” to post about a vernissage or concert than about the last expensive fridge one bought
-this “I experienced something great and you didn’t, aren’t you jealous” game existed before the Internet, the enlightening part is not that it is the internet, it is that it is about emotions.
From that point, the conference discussed art collectors. I was actually surprised that they only discussed collectors as if there were no other market, but apparently there is not. If you are not a collector, that is if you just need one or two pictures for your home but do not intend to make it a hobby to buy visual works and participate in art fairs, vernissages and similar meetings, you are of no interest to gallerists. This is a very important point and I will come back to that in another thread.
A note from me: this is an essential difference between visual arts (painting, photography) and performing arts (music, theatre) as one cannot collect music concerts for example. We will see later that there is an essential similarity nevertheless.
The discussion of art collectors brushed on the 3 types from the AXA study: art aficionados, traditionalists and investors but mainly discussed the aficionados. I understood after finding the original study (the AXA study): they are, by far, the largest group of customers. Investors are a distant second (and a search on the subject shows that there are special markets for them, e.g. with storage rooms in airport so that they can quickly swap works of art on the market) and traditionalists were not really discussed outside of an historical concept (I had a feeling that they were not really understood). In the AXA study, the 3 types are discussed pages 14 to 21.
So what are the aficionados and why do they collect art?
This is where the conference departs a bit from the AXA study (only a bit). It may be that the differences reflects the fact that the lecturer came from Germany and ran an online art social site. In that conference, the aficionado, which forms the main group of art collectors, is male, about 40-50 years old and a successful entrepreneur. Most important for him is the contact with the artist.
A note from me: this is the similarity with music. I just happen to know a bit of the jazz scene, and I would say that the people orbiting around the actual musicians actually do the same. They did not manage to be musicians themselves so what they are actually seeking by contact with actual musicians is some kind of surrogate social status. None of this was said in the conference, obviously, but it would also make sense in the context of visual arts. The people who collect paintings or photographs are not artists. Instead, they chose to work hard and long hours to build a successful company and make money, usually by exploiting their underlings. Collecting allows them to meddle with the “artist” crowd and be surrogate artists.
When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. There was a great absent in that conference: the works themselves. Not one single time did the lecturer talk about trends in graphic arts or what would make a successful painting. He only talked about the artists. This is what his customers (the collectors) are interested about. And this was also quite apparent in the fair: the “artists” were all visually recognisable in the crowd be it by their dress, hair style or behaviour. This also explains why most of the artists are male: the customers are male and need somebody they can identify to.
I have also wondered for years why nobody presenting himself as an artist runs a part time “normal” job when so many are really poor (at least I have never met one). With this system you cannot do that: the aficionados are entrepreneurs. One cannot believe to imagine how much they despise the people running day to day jobs: these are the people they exploit every day to become rich (think Dilbert’s pointy haired boss). They won’t identify to someone who runs a day to day job.
At the end of the conference, my understanding of the art market was quite different than at the beginning. I understood that the gallerists mainly sell social status. The actual qualities of the works are secondary, at best their only useful feature is that they can generate emotions, but even that is not essential. First comes the personality of the artist and the artist should be the kind of person that the collector dreamt of being in his youth but chose not to be to become rich instead. Add some social meetings where the most generous collectors can shine amongst their peers and discuss who is financing the most promising creator and you got a market.
A sad market, I would say.
First things first: this is about visual arts: mainly painting (including tags), sculpture and photography. It is essential to keep this in mind, but also to compare the marketing of visual arts with the one of performing arts (e.g. music). I may sometimes refer to music to point the differences.
The person holding the conference works for 52 masterworks, which is a cross between social site, crowdfunding and online gallery. That obviously tainted their presentation, but they also refer to a study by the insurance group AXA, which you will find here: http://www.axa-art-usa.com/news-events/detail/detail/axa-art-collectors-survey-probes-the-who-what-why-and-where-of-collecting.html
Please download the pdf from that page and read it through. Read in particular pages 12-13 and the three different types of collectors: art aficionados, traditionalists and investors. This text builds on that study.
The conference started by discussing social networks like facebook and explained that a turn in trends on Internet use in the past years. Internet users used to go to the Internet to seek information. The latest trend is to use social networks to gain social status. People will post on social networks so as to show their (online) friends how cool they are and they do this by posting about emotions. For example, they will post about a concert or a vernissage and explain (or show through photographs or videos) what great time they had there.
This is exactly what art does. It gives the user an object to post about and an object about which they would experience feelings. A few notes from me on that point:
-this is true from paintings/photography, but also from music
-it is more socially acceptable and more “upper class” to post about a vernissage or concert than about the last expensive fridge one bought
-this “I experienced something great and you didn’t, aren’t you jealous” game existed before the Internet, the enlightening part is not that it is the internet, it is that it is about emotions.
From that point, the conference discussed art collectors. I was actually surprised that they only discussed collectors as if there were no other market, but apparently there is not. If you are not a collector, that is if you just need one or two pictures for your home but do not intend to make it a hobby to buy visual works and participate in art fairs, vernissages and similar meetings, you are of no interest to gallerists. This is a very important point and I will come back to that in another thread.
A note from me: this is an essential difference between visual arts (painting, photography) and performing arts (music, theatre) as one cannot collect music concerts for example. We will see later that there is an essential similarity nevertheless.
The discussion of art collectors brushed on the 3 types from the AXA study: art aficionados, traditionalists and investors but mainly discussed the aficionados. I understood after finding the original study (the AXA study): they are, by far, the largest group of customers. Investors are a distant second (and a search on the subject shows that there are special markets for them, e.g. with storage rooms in airport so that they can quickly swap works of art on the market) and traditionalists were not really discussed outside of an historical concept (I had a feeling that they were not really understood). In the AXA study, the 3 types are discussed pages 14 to 21.
So what are the aficionados and why do they collect art?
This is where the conference departs a bit from the AXA study (only a bit). It may be that the differences reflects the fact that the lecturer came from Germany and ran an online art social site. In that conference, the aficionado, which forms the main group of art collectors, is male, about 40-50 years old and a successful entrepreneur. Most important for him is the contact with the artist.
A note from me: this is the similarity with music. I just happen to know a bit of the jazz scene, and I would say that the people orbiting around the actual musicians actually do the same. They did not manage to be musicians themselves so what they are actually seeking by contact with actual musicians is some kind of surrogate social status. None of this was said in the conference, obviously, but it would also make sense in the context of visual arts. The people who collect paintings or photographs are not artists. Instead, they chose to work hard and long hours to build a successful company and make money, usually by exploiting their underlings. Collecting allows them to meddle with the “artist” crowd and be surrogate artists.
When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. There was a great absent in that conference: the works themselves. Not one single time did the lecturer talk about trends in graphic arts or what would make a successful painting. He only talked about the artists. This is what his customers (the collectors) are interested about. And this was also quite apparent in the fair: the “artists” were all visually recognisable in the crowd be it by their dress, hair style or behaviour. This also explains why most of the artists are male: the customers are male and need somebody they can identify to.
I have also wondered for years why nobody presenting himself as an artist runs a part time “normal” job when so many are really poor (at least I have never met one). With this system you cannot do that: the aficionados are entrepreneurs. One cannot believe to imagine how much they despise the people running day to day jobs: these are the people they exploit every day to become rich (think Dilbert’s pointy haired boss). They won’t identify to someone who runs a day to day job.
At the end of the conference, my understanding of the art market was quite different than at the beginning. I understood that the gallerists mainly sell social status. The actual qualities of the works are secondary, at best their only useful feature is that they can generate emotions, but even that is not essential. First comes the personality of the artist and the artist should be the kind of person that the collector dreamt of being in his youth but chose not to be to become rich instead. Add some social meetings where the most generous collectors can shine amongst their peers and discuss who is financing the most promising creator and you got a market.
A sad market, I would say.