Art & Market

Recently, I got drunk on an after party and talking with a Well Known Artist focused with a horrible insistence on market mechanisms which can be used to become such a known artist. I can only hope he didn't get offended. But what is striking me in that is the question why I did it. Why after a certain amount of wine I got back to the art market. Not to the idea of art, a process of creation, or reception, any of those important things I could ask him but to the market. Does it mean that I still can't place an issue of art being on the market on my matrix? I still didn't position it in relation to the other aspects of art - its value moves up and down. How important it is? How important is to be known? Important for all participants of an art world, and important for an artist. Not in simply term of material value, but in term of intellectual and cultural importance. How the position on a market influences an intellectual and cultural value of a vary piece of art? How the position held by an artist changes a meaning and value of his work?
Heh, it seems to me that finally by accident I found a thesis of my Diploma Essay :)

Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh

It's very strange what happens to the piece of art once it becomes to be percepted as a masterpiece. For all those people asking how much are Sunflowers it is not the art at all. They are excited by an artefact of richness and fame, which is actually very sad, because none of them can get into relation with a real painting. And none of them is interested in it. So what about the passion and terrible sadness which emanate from the Sunflowers?

"1987 - A painting by Vincent Van Gogh has been sold for $49m (£27m) - a world record for a work of art. The final price was more than twice what the painting, called Irises, had been expected to reach. (...)
The previous record for a painting was set in March by another Van Gogh masterpiece, Sunflowers. It was bought in London for just under $40m by a Japanese insurance company."

"In the spring of 1888 he [Reid] presented his father, James Reid, with two paintings by Van Gogh. The first was Still Life, Basket of Apples; the second was a portrait of Reid himself (...)His father later sold them to a French dealer for £10 each.
The (...) Moulin-de Blute-fin (...) was sold by Reid to another Glasgow collector, William McInnes, in July 1921 for £550. By the early 1920s, prices for Van Gogh's work were on the rise; and the first of a flurry of fakes were appearing. In 1923 Sir James Murray, an Aberdeen collector, acquired Still Life with Daisies and Poppies, which turned out to be a forgery.(...)
[Portrait of Alexander Reid] was eventually bought by Glasgow Museums in 1974 for £166,250.(...)
Olive Trees was painted outside the asylum in St-Rémy in 1889. It was first acquired in 1923 for £275. Today, the piece has strong Scottish ties, having been bought by the National Gallery for £1,600 in 1934.

Some recent figures:

1921 Gainsborough Blue Boy £148,000 (equivalent to £4.5 million today)
1970 Velasquez Juan de Pareja £2.3million (equivalent to £21million today)
1987 Van Gogh Sunflowers £22.5 million (equivalent to £39 million today)
1990 Van Gogh Dr Gachet £44 million (equivalent to £61million today)
(...)
Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents sold in 2002 for £49.5 million = £11,000 per square inch
Van Gogh’s Dr Gachet sold in 1990 for £44 million = £66,000 per square inch
Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks sold in 2004 for £35 million = £341,130 per square inch
Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe sold in 2004 for £58 million = £45,312 per square inch

2006 The New York Times said the city's Neue Galerie paid $135m (£73m) for the oil painting [The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by G. Klimt]in a private sale.

The $140m quoted as the price obtained by Sotheby's for Pollock's Number 5, 1948 would make it the highest figure known to have ever been paid for a painting.

I have something to play

Yes! I have something to do! They allowed me to play with their website and are open to my ideas of promotion and e-marketing. I have to say - I feel a bit better. A bit more valuable. Somebody treats me as I would have a brain. That is a real surprise! Am I really able to do something more than show people direction to the toilet and entrance or shout in my broken English - Don't touch the object, pleeeeease!? Sorry. It sounded a bit too bitter. The Somebody took a dig at me yesterday saying that I ALWAYS complain about my work after few months of conducting it. I have to rethink his words. Definitely. I will do it today at work. heh, I learn to postpone thinking/considering important things until I get to work. It is a real example of time management! Trully speaking, invigilating is not so bad as I complain. Sometimes you can even get into discussion about art with a curious visitor. I swear, I happens! Anyway, I have to be back to my new work to finish it until I'll have gone to my old one :)

Birkbeck

I have been to Birkbeck just few minutes ago - I continuously got back emails sent to Arts Management so popped in to their IT dep. to see what is wrong. Findings?
I MUST be back to studying.