Word: arts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks...
...people wanted them very much, whereas before they had been invested with a kind of fetishistic and obsessive "rarity." Bullion is not absolute; its value is a matter of assignation, of social agreement. Tulip bulbs are no longer bullion, and it is not hard to imagine a time when art will not be either. It has happened before, and can easily happen again. Those who pronounce on art's power as a hedge against inflation-as a commodity that rides the inflationary spiral, always ahead of money-tend not to mention that when runaway inflation lays waste an economy...
...second flaw in the euphoric confidence of today's art traders is a matter of historical myopia. How wonderful, we are told, that all things rise in price, as though in some universal resurrection and canonization of the dead. Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture...
Fashion, in other words, is taken not to exist. But the unpleasant fact is that no reputation is immune to fashion. The art market is built on it. The French cattle painter Rosa Bonheur, a favorite of Victorian merchant princes, got ? 4,059 (then almost $20,000) for her Highland Raid in 1887; in 1952 it was resold for under ?200, or $560. Sir Edward Burne-Jones' Love and the Pilgrim, sold in 1898 for .?5,775 ($28,000), dropped to ?21 ($85) within less than 50 years. If artists who in their day were considered outstanding, whose work...
...flood of undiscriminating investment capital that flows toward art these days may yet produce a crisis analogous to the one that nearly sank the Bordeaux wine industry in the early 1970s. A surge of investment in Bordeaux vintages, to some extent by people who could not tell Medoc from camels' urine, shoved prices so high that traditional consumers of claret switched to Italian and other wines, thus tearing the bottom out of the market...