Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art
Olav Velthuis; Princeton University Press, 1ed. paperback 2007
Paper | 2007 | $18.95 / £11.50
Talking Prices is a lucid attempt to analyze several of the major issues that beleaguer the public comprehension of art valuation. Olav Velthuis enlists some of the heavy hitters of modern economic theory including Joseph Stiglitz, the late Milton Friedman, and a coke-bottle bespectacled stable of Keynesian economists all of whom to add weight to the author's report. The evolution of the artist-dealer relationship, the dialectics of the public/private spaces of commercial galleries, and the peculiar rhetorical flambé set alight by the 'strike anywhere' match of "the art world's taste-making machinery," are part of the quest to capture the beast of pricing, a true chimera of the art world.
A jaunt through economic history from "the emancipation of the artist in the Renaissance, the rise of the notion of genius," to the avant-garde throes at the death pangs of classic art, brings us to our current state: the cult of Authenticity and Uniqueness where a signature (displacing the picture) is now worth a thousand words. Ever since the Ruskin v. Whistler trial erupted with thepot-of-paint-flung-in-the-public's-face-nah-nah-you-tie-pink-ribbons-in-your-hair brouhaha of the late nineteenth-century, pricing art has become a delicate matter. Increasingly the art object became second-fiddle to an idea, the more marketable the better.
You could almost dream up a hyperbolic rendition of an art pricing index that amounts to little more than placing the object on a scale and working out a simple calculus of medium, size, labour, not least its weight, etc. The truth is the history of valuing art has at various stages until the seventeenth century suffered the indignity of precisely that rationalism. Velthuis points out that dealers have replaced and in many ways are today's lasting patrons. He displays a genuine engagement with the topic, not unwilling to praise the otherwise leery role of the dealer as judge and arbiter, "Finding the right price for an artwork is... an art in itself."
But the following summarizes the challenges and the confusion surrounding an imperceptible phenomena such as pricing: "In a market that has to reconcile a fierce opposition between commercial and artistic value, and that has to commodify goods whose essence is considered to be non-commodifiable, dealers, artists, and collectors find ways to express and share non-economic values through the economic medium of prices." Velthuis describes the ensuing complications as 'value conflicts', but it's hard to avoid the obvious 'winner takes all' model where a large amount of consumers scramble for a small number of outlets for profit-making art. Thus giving the usual suspects the power to call the shots and rake in all the poker chips.
Larry Gagosian's diatribe on pricing Jenny Saville's lugubrious and corpulent nudes will eventually take up its place in the annals of economic warfare... or downright barbaric invasion: "That girl is 29 years old. If she is not going to make it, she is never going to have a career ever. That's like live and die, these are live and die prices, motherfucker. We are going to kill your ass, or you are going to make it, let's see. You want to be famous? We are going to make you famous or you are going to be unknown tomorrow." You have to give a salesman marks for tenacity and aggression, if not for effort and pride of place.
Robert Hughes once wryly remarked, "What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture." Even though Velthuis' analysis tracks the positive and detrimental impact of major commercial price setting venues for the art market, we are left with significant questions. Between auction houses and galleries, how much do dealers play a more dominant role in creating the value of art? And how much do dealers affect the decision making of museums that adopt artwork into their permanent orphanages cut off from creators and context? Frighteningly a lot, Velthuis seems to emphasize in assigning nearly all agency of valuation in answer to both questions to the successful dealer, the figure responsible for art's market debut.
Ultimately, pricing is as elusive as one's taste in art is idiosyncratic. Such topics are endlessly debatable, prompting the occasional provocative dialogue, but inconclusive to the core of investigators' quest for formulaic certitude. There are bankable--or depending on your outlook, good betting--trends, but the variables are the type dependent, if contemporary on fashion, if long term on the judgement of history. While piggybacking sales highs amplify and add inertia to well promoted art, we learn through the sullen moments of art history that although it's not quite as simple as boom and bust, the lows are low. Nevertheless those collectors, who uphold and support the art market and relish its energy, celebrate its entropy, never fail to applaud record-breaking prices on auction room floors, or bolster its feel-good non-profit status when things are rock bottom.
Applying an economic analysis to the art market...where handshakes are increasingly corrupted by egotistical spit, moral boundaries are vague at best, where emotions run high at all levels of transaction and natural selection is based on who you know... is a valiant but fundamentally vain pursuit at this point in time. Until there is more transparency and regulation of art in the commercial sector--which, shudder to think could increase our understanding of art--this and studies like it are limited yet unmistakably valuable. Velthuis spends whole sections of his study deflecting potential criticism and leaves us with a retreating sense that, "a price is not just an economic, but a social, cultural and moral entity." That's no salve for the wounds left open by the masochistically curious who want desperately to understand the frenzied business of art.
Steven Pulimood
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic.
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