This painting went from $180,000 to $10,000 in 2 years - is the Art Market Tanking? 

I've been following the art market , the recent articles, and the online chatter, and this is the most sober and reasonable analysis I've seen anyone put forth. Respect to you for not playing the game of hyperbole and outrage and instead just sharing the facts of how this process works. Very much appreciated!

The tragedy here is not just in the financial loss, but in what it says about the value of art itself. When art becomes merely a commodity for investors and flippers, it risks losing its soul. The artist, once a creator and storyteller, is reduced to nothing more than a supplier for a market that cares more about profit than beauty. Great Video! 💗

I think the art market is a money laundering front for the most part.

A retired family friend painted for years as a hobby. His wife wanted room in the garage so he tried selling some paintings at flea markets $25-$50 a pop. He got a spot at an open air street art festival and sold them for $2500 a pop.

As an art school graduate I found this information very informative. Often I ask myself what did I get out of art school. It would have been nice if at least something this clear had been discussed. Thank you.

Love Art. Hate and despise the Art Market.

The second piece, Sisters in Pink by Emmanuel Taku, is giving $14.99 at Target. 🎯

even with the drop I find them still overprized at 10,000.

As a ‘successful’ artist and coming from a background where I grew up in the gallery world too, the current price volatility has to do with one thing; Promotion! My family was out of the gallery business, when I began painting professionally, so I did not benefit from such promotion. But the outrageous prices in recent decades are the result of gallery owners promoting unknown artists as the next ‘thing’ and stupid collectors paying whatever the gallery says something is worth, as well as simple greed and desire for huge profits, on both sides of the sales receipt. And, note, my family did not have that kind of gallery. It was a ‘conservative/traditional’ gallery where the artist set the price and prices usually increased gradually over the years as artists became more and more well known based upon a consistent body of work over time.

Wondering how much trends factor into this. Both examples that open the video feature African-American subjects. I can see works with such subjects being more in demand when black issues/BLM/etc featured heavily in the American zeitgeist but once the mainstream culture moves on, art like that seems more niche and would therefore fetch lower prices as the trendy bidders/buyers are focused elsewhere.

I know nothing about art, but I really liked your channel.

In short: pricing in the art market is propped up by galleries who act like gatekeepers, constricting supply so as to inflate prices, and only selling to buyers who won’t resell quickly (so the galleries can keep the game going as long as possible). Once the gallery loses its ability to constrict supply the game is up, and all the prices, hype and prestige come tumbling down.

I’ve seen this happen so many times. It even happens to established artists. I used to work for McKee Gallery who represented artists like Philip Guston , Martin Puryear and Vija Celmins and we were always on the lookout for speculators. Good to see Vito Acconci featured here, he was a teacher of mine at SVA. Thanks for the video, it’s so hard sometimes to explain to people how artists make it and sustain a market, this was clear, concise , and digestible for the general public.

Glad to see someone covering the article and going over it in more depth. A tragic situation, but also a learning opportunity for many.

The art market is a con mans game. Its just pump and dump but done with artwork rather than stocks. The dealers/galleries conspire to hype an artist and then dump their stock. A lot of the stuff they do would result in criminal charges if they did it with stocks.

The art in question is........... questionable.

I learn more about art from your videos than any other channel. Thank you. (And, as I’m sure you know, the DMAC is actually a pretty good place for a city the size of Des Moines.)

Wonderful and very comprehensive video on an incredibly important topic. Chapeau! Wishing you and your channel the very best!

Thanks God i wouldn’t give 10 dollars for it

Hi, just FYI, the background music is distracting and makes it difficult to understand for people with hearing problems (like me). You have good content, there's no need to put bells and whistles on top of it. Best

first two paintings were over-priced from the start. just like houses and flats in most cities.

Thank you. It's trickier than I knew.

Art valuation is fairly arbitrary. Something is only valuable because an "expert" says it is. And, those experts have a stake in declaring items valuable. Also who ever "lost" money on those pieces almost wrote it off their taxes!

As someone who deals in 19th centiry paintings and gravures Im in a different "world" and my market is doing just fine. I have to wonder if "modern art" will stand the test of time based on its quality and message? It's all a matter of personal prefernce and maybe? Tastes are changing and people are being safer in their "investments".

Wow I went to art school (I studied design, thankfully!) and this was never discussed!

Because I am an artist, I cannot do what the dealer does. I do not know how to cultivate a demand or even how to set a price. A dealer earns his money by helping and advising the artist. An artist must gather skill in a common accepted medium or a unique and original medium in establishing a recognizable style or identity. This takes time and experimentation. You may work for years and abandon the medium for another. This is why being an artist takes courage. In preparation for a one artist show, it helps to employ some elementary merchandising techniques. A small body of work needs to have a sense of continuity. Medium used, size and maybe pallet common to all pieces. The public feels comfortable with vague repetition, not duplication. If it has an intellectual message people may want a piece of your work. There are no hard and fast rules but one time on West Broadway, there were these guys selling abstract expressionist Motherwell type, swauls on NYC subway maps and doing a brisk business.

Hi Christopher, a precautionary tale well told. ❤

I also think the market is crazy about fresh paint without considering the long-term value of the work! The art being created is popular now but might not have that timeless effect!!

Such an interesting video! The only thing I thought I knew was to not undersell gallery prices when selling on your own. I had no idea that the art market was this corrupt!

I never realized that if I just walked into a prestigious gallery with a bucket of money that they might not be willing to sell to me!

The only thing I took from this is that it's always in the artists best interest to get pimped out by a dealer or else they're playing the game wrong

I learned something from your podcast. Please put out more in the future. Thanks

What do you mean no one wants to pay top dollar for overpriced pretentious garbage!?

The beauty of Art is definitely in the eye of the beholder who has the ability to buy it.

It boggles the mind how much the "Art" world deteriorated. Horrendous patches of paint for very confused collectors. I am speechless!

I love art, and i can't think of a reason i should care about this.

Superb ... if you were never sure how this could happen... this excellent explanation tells you !

As a painter, this was such a fun video

It amazes me what passes for ART today. It's not art, it's just a fad.

Excellent discussion, thank you!

Huge difference between art as a thing and the markets that move art as a commodity. Begin by studying at the best art schools in the world, obtain at least a Masters degree in painting, sculpture or some other specific skill, work day and night, know your work’s place in the lineage of art history and find a patron with good connections. You are then on your possible way to having your work commodified. Chances of success after that 1 in a million probably. You have to be exceptional, wealthy and very well connected to keep going making good work that no one is buying.

Many artists are doing online galleries. Less overhead, more money for both parties!

As an autodidact starting artist working outside of the market, this is facinating. I am very happy when people buy my paintings made with love as they "buy a part of me". At least I am sure they are not seeing it as an investment, they buy it because they genuinely like it. Next october I will be studying fine arts for the first time in a quite fancy art school. I'm curious where this will bring me. I saw that some of the teachers own galeries themselves. The money sounds nice but I don't want to be part of an investment/market scheme.

As a 20+ year Art Collector, Researcher, and Critic. I think the Art world is so over-inflated and unscrupulous Etc... and not always at the top. Like the stock market, some would say bye and hold and go long even then there is no guarantee, there has been more than one Well-known renowned art collector interviewed on RU-vid who said or eluded to the fact that they have spent more money on more paintings that never produced profit than the few others that they have or had that did in the long term. For the Art that did not, as many Million / Billionaires will not tell you there are many ways to skin a CAT ! Deals they made with Galleries, Action Houses, Art Brokers, Tax Rightoffs, Donations to Museums and Public spaces, Back door trades Etc... I think that in the not-too-distant future, the Fine Art and Collectibles Luxury market bubble will not burst but will have a steep downturn but not crash for a period of time.

Back in the sixties/seventies my grandparents bought a lot of art from unknown artists, they got what they liked and all of them are on the walls. I don’t like the idea of inflating prices like this because it makes it harder for normal people to hang art on their walls.

Artists and gallery owners just need straw purchasers to get a sales history for an artist. Easier to sell when you can say his last two pieces sold for {x} dollars.

The art world is also like the auto market... you have demand for high end vehicles that are high end prices, they cool off for a few years, then they sometimes become classics and are desirable again with high end prices.

Paintings often sell at a discount to the buyer that the public does not see. Further the gallerist may hold onto the painting until the buyer has paid off the purchase. In some cases, both the gallerist and the buyer may speculate on a short term trend and "sell" at an inflated price, with the expectation that they will be able to settle the details in the future. There may be something similar going on even when wee are told that a painting "sold at auction".

Great thorough video, got a new subscriber 🎉

Galleries are market manipulation organizations that artists and investors benefit from. Ferrari cars are now sold this way- allocations, limited production… DeBeers diamonds as well. Bubbles can last quite a long time if well managed.

Very enlightening!

I sell at outdoor art festivals. There is bother more rewarding when someone connects emotionally to my work. I have seen people cry while looking at it. These are the people I want buying my work. They are buying it because they connect with it. There is no thought of a monetary investment or what it will sell for in the future. And this is how it should be.

We have that same Ed Ruscha “Actual Size” print !

Wow! I retired a few years ago and started painting and I just realized I have a bunch of masterpieces laying around my house! Anyone interested in buying a gen u whine masterpiece?

I wonder if predictive modelling would help determing the future auction prices of an artist's work. For example, you mention that there was only one person willing to pay $200,000 for that work. So what were the next closest bids? Was it a tight race? Were the next ten closest bids over $100,000? Plot them all on a graph, then do this with their other works, so that the x-axis represents time (when subsequent works were sold), and the y-axis is the amount they were sold for. Then apply this analysis to other artists' works. You'll start to see a pattern, and you can develop an algorythm for it. Other variables might include whether the artist was still alive at the time of sale, how long they had been creating and selling art, and even the average prices sold with pakrticular galleries. You'd need to enlist the help of a math and statistics professional, but it could be done. Then you'd have an objective model to help guide you towards certain works and artists, and those to stay away from. Remember the movie "Moneyball", and how stats were used there for sports? Or the guys who figured out a pattern on the Price is Right and won? Galleries, artists, auctioneers, collectors and investors may or may not be manipulative, but data is never manipulative unless you let it.

This isnt an indicator or signal of market trends, it is a feature. It should be a red flag for anyone venturing into this world. The primary and even most of the secondary market at the elite end of the contemporary art world is a potemkin village designed for money laundering. If you dont want to get burned as a collector or an artist...pay more attention to what OTHER artists, professors, and alternative spaces are collecting...not the greedy and/or gullible gatekeepers and tastemakers

The original price seems ridiculous. Maybe that’s why.

fantastic video!!

This is a section of the art market that exploits arts and leaves them high and dry. Galleries are leaches. Artist are always better off dealing directly with their collectors. This “market” is dead. Art “dealers” are Sheratons. I’ve never met one that was legitimate. This description of the market is a Hollywood fiction that has been propagated far too long. The most successful artist i personally know (and i know hundreds of the from doing art festivals for over 20 years) do it themselves 100%. I’m just sick of people that know nothing about the real art businesses telling us how it works.

Never heard of them so…..

There has never in the history of the artworld, been an artist who's work has gotten picked up by a gallery as a result of being seen in a coffee shop! Not in the real world does that ever happen! 😂

As I always have said, art market is another name of a legal scam involving lots of accomplices. Clarify how to set prices for art pieces.

Everyone is leveraged to the gills! That's what's happening.

Great fun thank you

Brilliant video.

Artnet’s 2024 Intelligence Report on the African art market : Between 2013 and 2023, total sales increased by a whopping 46 per cent with 2021 marking the best year for the African art market - $101.3 million worth of work by African-born artists were sold in that year.

I generally don't "get" art.

there were two people interested in that painting that went for $200k otherwise the auction wouldn't have gotten so high. I get the video and thanks for doing this....makes a lot of sense how one purchase can snowball into higher prices

Thank you for nailing this! Hopefully more people will see this video and receive clarity.

I wouldn't even spend a penny on that Sisters in Pink painting, so surprised it sold for $10,000. Shows just how phony the art market is.

Good insights, but there is another factor in the examples you cited that went unmentioned (and perhaps intentionally so): Lewis, Davis and Taku are all black. There was a vogue for black artists in the early 2020s that inflated their market values well beyond what they would otherwise have been. After that vogue wore-off the market corrected, and their work's values returned to approximately the same levels as their non-black peers. So the phenomenon I find more interesting is that their work's values became so highly inflated in the first place, not that they are now seen as being worth in the $10K range. (No, this is NOT in any way a criticism of their work, nor of people who highly value it. It's just an observation of how fads cause spikes in perceived values.) Also, Davis had just died (at age 32) before his painting sold for nearly a million. My sense is that this was some of the FOMO that hits collectors, when they think someone might turn out to be the next Basquiat.

This is your best video!

The gallery is the artist's sales team. Once I had galleries, I never sold out of my studio.

Well it’s got to be good to start

When you walk around any public collection or any blue chip commercial gallery, you can instantly see there is nothing to differentiate a million dollar painting from hundreds and possibly thousands of painting with no market value at all. It's like pop music, a hummable catchy tune that drives you mad can earn millions and does, ask Taylor Swift but a serious musician/composer whose music is interesting and deeply emotional could be living on bread and water. A whole lot of factors come into it and quality os only a small part of that.

To sip on cheap wine, and snack on stale crackers….😂 I’ve been a professional artist for 46 years. I’ve decided to become a comedian, and relay all the outrageous stories that have happened during this time, that are, quite frankly, tragic and hysterical.. perfect material for comedy. The best part is knowing that my artwork is in collections throughout the world, and that it gives the buyers great happiness. My artwork ranges in price from $20 on up, depending on the time that I have spent creating the piece.

The value of fad is never as enduring as the value of quality.

I wouldn't even pay ten dollars for those, cmon what art is that

Probably 0.2% or so of all artists will ever get into those realms

This proves what Gunnarry Seargant Heartman said , "you're so ugly, you could be modern art masterpiece"

Art is also used for political means, which is why many "modern art" celeb artists from Pollack onward were sponsored by the CIA to socially freak out other countries. As for the "only one wanted that painting" gambit, no - only a last bidder got the art being offered, but the other bidders wanted it too. Otherwise, all the crappy Photochop-looking messes shown in this video would be priced at their true worth - 10 bucks.

You didn't touch on promotion. Without promotion you will just fade away, in that sense the gallery owner helps with this aspect by guiding the work to the right people and promoting the works in other ways, many times though the many connections they have. I have seen gallery owners get prominent people to show up at an opening which can then attract people to the show and don't forget the invite only shows.

When you let a piece become commercial and sold as prints to the masses the original also degrades in value. No one wants something in everyone elses house.

$180,000 down to $10,000? And no reserve price? What's going on there?

In the part where it could destroy an artist’s career and the matter of time if the artist could bounce back, are you suggesting the artist should only sell works from the gallery and not to direct sell to one person collector?

Art has many functions, but in the art market, it functions as a financial tool. When you have large sums of money, you need a place to store that value. Keeping it in cash will only devalue over time due to inflation. In order to deal with this issue, the financial industry manufactures a variety of products with which investors can store their wealth. There are things like stocks, bonds, real estate, and luxury goods. In this context, a $1M painting is really just a $1M bill that's meant to appreciate rather than depreciate, and an artist is just an individual that the market has elected to mint the $1M bill.

Very good your explanation, thank you for the video

Very interesting look into the market, especially shows how such bad and mediocre art gets propped up. The cutting edge of art are not at these galleries and modern art institutions, they're in online artists circles with amazing artists these curators and collectors would've never heard off. Those artists blow these pretentious hacks out of the water because they rise from being excellent and recognized by other artists and people who like art and not appeasing the political whims in this redundant dinosaur system. I hope it collapses or gets torn down, society has no benefit from it.

if the Art is poster-ity fashionable, then it won’t hold value. It might become iconic collectable LATER, but it won’t hold value as a piece until then

As an artist I find this misses one point, quality. Ive worked for several blue chip artists and their work is good work. The two examples you showed are not. a Martin Puryear is going to hold up better than the work in your example. That being said art is a bad investment in terms of the return on money invested, it is the dividend of living with the work that makes art worth owning. One gentleman I worked for has work at Storm King and the Hirshhorn, but the price of his work at auction has gone down considerably since his death (I have been trying to pick one up, but have not found the right piece at the right price) his work is starting to recover but will not fully recover its cash value for many years. The trough of death is very real, I have been following the value of Susan Rothenberg (an old teacher of mine) and her work is selling at auction for a very depressed price.

Good video but wish you would have highlighted the nuance of pricing and value that black artists experience vs white artists bc that is a big factor into things

Money laundering.

Those first paintings you displayed are pure crap to begin with.

Adam Conover covered this in Adam Ruins Everything, which is more about the evil money aspects tainting the whole system.

Loving to learn art business. Strangely the algorithm spot on. Thank you for the breakdown, give insight what happened in art world. I have questions if you don’t mind. What that young artist should do when that happens? If we see as retail business, cut the gatekeepers seems good way to level up the business skills. As you said it not easy as it seems. What do you think?

How can there be only ONE bidder who wants to pay such a large amount for an estimated $10 000 piece of art? Surely he/she has to be bidding against someone for the price to reach a high target? Unless they are buying it to flush away some cash for some (likely illegal) reason?

bad - particularly the more recent - art that gets hyped for whatever reason will begoing down, fatally.

What if I bypass the art dealers and only sell one work per buyer? I feel like I could hedge the issue of art dumping if I only allow one work per client Thoughts?

Saatchi dumped a few successful artists, Chia and Scully amongst them, who felt betrayed. I laughed. That is the art world!

For those interested the book "Boom" by Michael Shnayerson is worth reading. This video would have been better without the loud background music. Very annoying.