The Dark Magic of the Art Market

The F Word with Laura Flanders

The market is magic, say capitalism's admirers but some that magic is pretty dark. Just look at what it's done to art and the art market. What once inspired generosity now feeds off its exact opposite - inequality and there's no reason art buyers or sellers should ever want to turn it back. I thought about this reading Molly Crabapple's bold, passionate book, Drawing Blood. “Pens can't take on swords she says, let alone Predator drones.” But the best art can inspire generosity. To make her point she tells a story about Picasso. In 1937 when Picasso's Guernica was shown, it was heroic not just for its heart-rending depiction of civilians slain in the government bombardments of the Spanish Civil War - but in the effects of the Guernica exhibition. To get in, in 1937, the price viewers had to pay was a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish front. The gallery gathered 15 thousand pairs. Fast forward to today and the prime effect of the high-end art market is to encourage hoarding. Take one Picasso. In 1997, and the price paid for a Picasso at auction was almost $32 million. In 2015, the price paid for the same piece was $179 million, also at auction. The price soared because there were that many more bidders. As the New York Times Upshot columnist explained, the number of people who could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso had increased more than fourfold in less than two decades. Those same decades have seen all but the very top fall further and further behind. The top 1 percent's pulled away from the 99. The top 0.01 and 0.001 percent from the one percent. If wealth's concentrated at the top there's less of it to spread about. The bombs hitting regular civilians these days in places like Greece and Spain are financial not ferrous metal - but austerity is today's civil war. The market discourages generosity. All that wealth is purely relational. Once it's a commodity - art's value is measured in the price someone's willing to pay for it. That means the $179 million buyer - if he ever wants to sell at a profit - is banking on the top fraction pulling ever further ahead of the rest. So there you have it - from giving boots to giving the poor the boot. In not quite a century. Welcome to the dark magic of the art market.