Toward the end of 2008, almost investmentall investments, art included, was were crashing because of the financial crisis. But the decline in the art market was somewhat different; there were other factors in play. As Velthius writes, the art market was already so "overheated," that even without the "crisis in the financial market, a downturn would seem inevitable" (Velthius, 1). He also notes that between August 2007 and January 2008, research indicated that confidence in the contemporary art market had already dropped 40%. So the first assessment I make of the art market's crash is that it could have been inevitable because of the drastic increases in value before the crash, whether or not the financial crisis happened in the first place.
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