Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.
This is what happens when art is treated as an investment. Or a trend/fad.
The irony for me is that, even with the market value drop for these artists, they're still raking in a hell of a lot more money than I can even dream of getting for my art. I'm exceedingly lucky if I can sell a painting for 350 bucks, but lucky enough to sell something for roughly 100, but usually LESS.
But from 2021 to 2023, the prices for these artists — “ultracontemporary” is the industry term for them — plummeted by almost a third, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Experts say the downward trend is continuing; in the first half of 2024, sales of work by young artists fell 39 percent over last year.
Collectors had overestimated the market’s strength; fearing the work might soon become impossible to sell, they wanted to make at least some of their money back — regardless of what public flops might mean for an artist’s future.
Artists rarely benefit from high auction prices, since most works at auction are sold by collectors who have bought their works earlier and are now hoping to sell them for a profit. The artists also rarely speak — as they do here — about how art market speculation affects them personally and professionally. In retrospect, Ismail, 34, said he regretted selling up to five works at a time to art advisers and collectors — who swiftly resold them.
“Everyone wants a piece of the cake,” he said, recalling how buyers made offers over email or on Instagram. It was hard to tell genuine collectors from speculators, he said.
Then, around 2021, record high prices caused a stampede of sellers, which flooded the fragile market. Gallerists raised artists’ prices but in some cases they overshot the target, discouraging potential buyers.
Laurent Mercier, an art dealer representing Emmanuel Taku, said in a text message that what happened to the artist was “very sad and crazy.”
In 2021, Mercier said, Taku’s paintings had nearly 500 wait-listed buyers and promises of museum donations that would improve the artist’s reputation. But in the next two years, as other dealers entered the picture, works by Taku suddenly flooded the market, with supply outstripping demand.
Prices began to collapse with some collectors offloading the artist’s work at auctions. Now Mercier is trying to clamp down on sales to build back demand.
Allison Zuckerman was 27 and working in her cramped apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when the mega-collectors Donald and Mera Rubell discovered her, buying more than 20 pieces. (She stashed dirty clothes under the bed before their visit.) Since 2021, her work has sold at auction 59 times, a remarkably high volume for a young artist. “It feels very out of body,” Zuckerman said of watching auctions.
“Everything that went into that painting — the discoveries, resolving that one corner, that brushstroke that really brought the whole thing together — isn’t what’s being talked about.”
Speculation is characteristic of the art market’s long history of buying frenzies that later crash in disillusionment. In the 1980s, a strong Japanese economy and a buoyant American stock market drove art sales to new heights. When 1990 came around, Japan entered its “lost decade” of financial woes and the American stock market crashed; half the contemporary artworks offered in major auctions that fall failed to sell.
Again, in 2014, a group of young artists whom critics called the “Zombie Formalists” because of their retro abstract styles became market darlings. Three years later, many of their paintings sold for a fraction of their peak prices — if they sold at all.
"Georgina Adam, the author of two books on the contemporary art market, said that changes in taste previously dictated the rise and fall of artists over long periods of time. Today, she said, the cycles are shorter and “the reason is speculation.” More than a third of the buyers at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in 2021 were new clients, and Adam said they may have been more interested in turning a profit than becoming lifelong patrons."
But speculating on artists is different from speculating on stocks and cryptocurrencies. Artists say it feels intensely personal.
“You are buying a piece of my life — a little history of me and my people,” said Lewis, who gives the subject of every portrait a portion of the proceeds from each sale. Such charity is rare in the United States — where living artists, not to mention their subjects, have no legal claim to the proceeds of a sale by a collector or institution.
@MariaAragon64 One thing I have learned regarding the people who buy and sell art like that.
Easy way for a tax write off, buy a piece of art, have it valued for more than its buying price, donate it.
I do not like the art community at that level. It does little for the artists directly.
@sentientdessert @MariaAragon64 Most art only gets valuable after the artist is good and dead.
@poemblaze @MariaAragon64 So...
Step 1: buy art
step 2: kill artist
step 3: profit
(this is not meant seriously)
@sentientdessert @poemblaze
There was a comedy in the 60s about an artist having to pretend he was dead so his art would sell. I think it had Dick van Dyke and Dean Martin in it.
@MariaAragon64 @sentientdessert That's clever!
@MariaAragon64 @poemblaze The Art of Love is the film.
@sentientdessert
It's pretty cynical out there. For that crowd, it's about investment value, not whether the buyer actually loves the art.
That is the major consolation for me: whoever buys my art, buys it because they love it and they want to have in their daily space - and not in a vault accruing interest.
@MariaAragon64 When I watch Antiques Roadshow it seems much art/collectibles cratered in value after 2008. I'm not aware enough of the market to know if there's been any general recovery
"The art market has been experiencing a downturn for the last few years, but the slump has been particularly acute for young artists. During the early pandemic, a speculative boom driven by a misplaced belief in quick returns set in, with collectors spending $712 million at auction in 2021 on works by artists born after 1974 — a giant leap from the $259 million buyers spent just a year earlier. "