In his article Velthius discusses the art market crash of 1990, and how the art market has rebounded since then. Many people believe that art market sales will decline with the decline of the stock market, and financial status of the people in the country at the time. This is true some of the time, however, the art market also fluctuates on its own sale, based on the goal of consumers, and how the dealers go about selling.
One of the reasons for the crash in 1990 was due to the increasing prices of all the pieces going to auction. Velthius tells an amusing antecdote about how in November of 1990 at a Sotheby's sale in New York, a painting of a Spanish Landscape by Julian Schnabel was expected to sell for $400,000, however when it was put up for auction there were only a few very low bids, and inevitably it failed to sell. A New York Times reporter stated: "After some silence, cynical laughter and a round of applause followed".
Velthius then explains that the art market crash was born out of a delayed effect of the Stock Market downturn in 1987, as well as the dealers and galleries manner of viewing art. They had, previously to the crash, thought of the artists as merely a price tag, and thus did not care about the pieces themselves but were just purchasing the names attached to them. The auction houses would thus price all pieces by one artist at the same point, regardless of the individual value of the art. During this time, only a small group of individuals could afford to purchase these high priced pieces, and thus were only interested in the ones that had the quality they were looking for, not just the named attached to them, thus the decline in the art market.
Curators Richard Armstrong, Richard Marshall and Lisa Philips said in their essay that "we have moved into a situation where wealth is the only agreed-upon arbiter of value" and that "capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying and reducing it to the status of a commodity". By this they mean that there is no discussion or agreement on what specific qualities about each individual piece are noteworthy, but rather the only thing discussed is the value of the piece, thus moving art into a capitalistic market, that does not care for anything but the ultimate money made from each piece.
Another critic Edgar Degas wrote: "It's as if pictures were being painted by stock-exchange players by... people avid for profits". It is clear that people were unhappy with the discrepancy between the quality and price of each picture, thus causing the downturn of the market through their refusal to purchase low quality pieces for high quality prices.
Currently however, things have changed, and dealers and gallery owners believe they are making a more conscious effort to put prices on pieces according to their quality, and not just the name attached to them. By doing so, there is more variety in prices, and the art market is opening up to people who could not previously afford anything, thus making sure that there is never only a select, small group of people who will only buy high quality pieces. Also, the art market has become more global, thus making it stretched out more, and not concentrated, and thus able to sustain itself better during periods where some people are unwilling to spend on high art.