Artnet put out the first of their planned series of intelligence briefs, and it is a MONSTER. They had me with the cover and a teaser to let me know who had survived the “zombie apocalypse”. To be clear, I’m probably closer to the inner workings of Professional Rodeo than the art market, although I read the major stories, love to watch the major auctions, and can’t get enough of any tale about art theft (when is someone going to steal “The Scream” again?). That said, I didn’t have even a whif of an idea as to what the cover story was about.
Here’s the explainer…
What was Zombie Formalism? If you’re not an avid follower of art-world trends, you may have no idea. Don’t worry: From an aesthetic stand point, you didn’t miss much. In an economic sense, though, zombie formalism was perhaps the biggest story of the past decade, transforming the art market and changing what it means to be a young artist. It’s a story about art’s fraught relationship to finance, and also, I want to argue, about the way debt has become subtly inextricable from discussions of contemporary aesthetics.
I guess at the heart of it was the speculative purchase of low-priced, new artist work that you flipped pretty quickly at auction and a lot of it looked the same. Yes, that sounds a lot like how VCs invest in trends.
My three minutes of research also let me know that Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, and Jacob Kassay were the darlings. I am unfamiliar with their canons.
Much of the prose of the Artnet Intelligencer has the erudite condescension I’ve come to expect in most art discourse, but on top of it is a WILDLY satisfying layer of data. The Zombie Formalist discourse isn’t just a hit piece on trendy styles and art rubes, it also has some rocking sell-through and price point trend data to add some real meat to which of the artists ended up being trend-setters and trend riders.
Here are my favorite top four data points from the THICK book:
- $10.2B was the first six months total on art – I think I might have under-guessed by about70%.
- The average price sold at auction is ~$93K. My guess is that the front-page outliers don’t really swing that number (although I wish they had given us the median instead of average). I can’t really separate out museums-buying-from-museums, but whatever chunk is just personal collectors, I’m wondering what net worth I would have to have to collect at that level. More than my current net worth.
- Only five women were on the top 100 list of best sellers in the first six months of ’18. I start to run out of female artists I can name pretty soon after O’Keefe andMitchell…but I think I thought that new artists of the past 20 years would have tipped the scales a little more.
- I wouldn’t have guessed that Bâsquiat had four of the top ten sales and more than 50% of price in contemporary. It might be time to rewatch his bio.
My favorite chart:
The chart that made me say “what is going on inSwitzerland?”
Just to add my own analysis, total sales normalized for population vs. the US, Switzerland rocks it in at 3.5X. UK is 2.5X (maybe more museums/pop?), France is 0.5X, Germany is 0.15X. Why is Switzerland 3.5X? China is also at .15X, but the dramatic economic disparity there doesn’t make population the right index normalizer.
Remember when I wanted that distribution curve…here it is .It tells me that growth is coming from mega-collectors/museums, not the dentist dropping $90K on a print.
And finally, it’s still a two horse race, but Phillips is definitely the Little Engine that Could…they’ve had a great two year run.
That was a very satisfying dive into high level drivers of the art market.