Study on the art market

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

The subject of the art market is a serious and serious subject, vast and complex. The art market encompasses all artistic movements.

My father had done the Salon des Indépendants with one of his friends, a Catalan surrealist, Prudencio Salvador Asencio, in the 80s.

At the time, modern art and surrealism were the areas that generated the most money. Van Gogh and Monet lived in a certain poverty all their lives, although Clémenceau helped Claude Monet a lot to come out of the shadows. He was the subject of a wonderful retrospective at the Petit-Palais in the 80s. Monet was partly an artist supported by the regime and its patrons.

The art market is based on profitable niches. For example, in the past I worked as a picture seller with a friend, who started out as a simple salesman and climbed the ladder, to team leader, then boss. He sold very good paintings. As a boss, his best income was one day 73,000 euros. He helped young people get by. He had two apartments, changed cars often, drank bottles of champagne in boxes. Everyone was asking him. He then experienced a peak in terms of income and lifestyle.

However, in 92 and 97, two terrible car accidents put a stop to his career. He lost his 3-year-old son, in the end he was disabled and lost his wife. Fortunately he had bought a big car, which cushioned the shock.

Today he is disabled, he has difficulty speaking and walking, he also has an illness with an unpronounceable name. We've jumped from one thing to another.

On Twitter or X, we can admire the works of very great contemporary, classical, modern, hyperrealist and other artists.

It is difficult to give a value to a painting, the genres are so vast. Some master paintings are priceless.----- What made my friend's sales force was the exceptional singularity of the products he sold. But everything collapsed around him. We go from one extreme to the other in the sales profession.

It must be said, modern art is conditioned by buyers, critics, journalists, American millionaires and others. This is what propelled Picasso for example, German journalists, American millionaires. He was the first to have exploded the art market. Other modern painters followed. Picasso knew how to break the codes and conventions. Picasso managed to reduce brown and ochre tones to their simple expression, with my father it was quite the opposite.

The art market as its name indicates is a free market, subject to supply and demand, which creates and establishes profits, even competition between museums.

Sotheby's, or even the Drouot gallery, are as many organizations where many young painters more or less experienced launch themselves on this market, exhibit abroad, satisfy orders. I have known some, and their fortunes are varied, their notoriety too.

I do not want to make a trial of the art market. It is a market where anyone, any museum director can intervene. In this field, the United States is the strongest, especially for sacred CODEX and modern art.

American painters have understood this well, where for example my father was a poor manager if we compare this aspect with his pictorial genius. They have offices, secretaries, a large clientele, not to mention advertising and prospects.

We can say that the art market tends to overflow into other fields, at the same time it is becoming more democratic and pits buyers, the public against creators. It is a crossroads and a meeting point between trends and fashions.

I think that a painting is like a musical instrument, it either gains or loses value depending on the level of design and particularity it reaches.

What makes Cubism successful is the people, as with the Nabis, the Dada movement or Surrealism which came from poetry.

It is the masses that condition the art market and its expert value. The same goes for many sectors linked to luxury, watchmaking, jewelry, furniture and so on.

A good niche, something off the beaten track or original, can help a lot to rise in such a market where everything is open.

The more an artist is able to channel the crowds, the more his aura, his charisma makes him a leader, the champion of a given movement. I am thinking for example of comics, for example mangas or new technologies in the field of graphics, which solicit a good part of the audio-visual. Contemporary cartoons for example, from digital, whose advantages and disadvantages exist.

For many artists, the art market is a fool's errand, for others an outlet, a bet, a guarantee of being recognized and going down in history.

It is also a clash of civilizations, an archaism of wild capitalism. The art market is also a shock absorber for pluralism and democracy. It also has parallel or underground worlds, ramifications.

Few painters manage to live from their works or their art, and in this profession one must know how to face the unexpected, know how to bounce back. The art market is also the place of a relative class struggle that has more or less disappeared today, so much so that thought remains locked up.

Once you have broken through, it goes by itself, but you still have to succeed in doing it, and then to last. Nowadays, the state has partly lost face, it is mainly the private sector or individuals who indicate the direction of the path to follow.

Man Ray, Banksy, Ernest Pignon Ernest, Jean-pierre Basquiat, Keith Haring, Francis Bacon and others, as we can see, these are artists who managed to break through overnight after the public's plebiscite.

Today, it is more difficult to break through, to surprise the public, because the public follows you or not. It is receptive or not. It is also a matter of affect and originality.

The time of great patrons is over, I am thinking of the Americans, the Russians, of patronage during the Renaissance.

Today the market keeps its tentacles, but also its discretionary corollary. I don't want to be a moralist, I just see a relative weakening of European strongholds, but not necessarily inevitable.

The immense art market lays bare artists in their most intimate personalities, it is also partly dehumanizing, it shows its cards.

Many try to take the right boat, but luck is not always there, competition is very tough, ubiquity is no longer enough for artists to break through.

The public demands platonic sensations, it wants to see its dreams fulfilled.

The art market has become very permeable, which pushes anyone to get started or try to access it, the trick is to make a first breakthrough. Once the customers are there, once they are loyal, it goes by itself. The capital is there, but you have to know how to position yourself on something sure.

Christian Diez Axnick.