The Art Market Crash and the Global Economy

Vincent Anthony Falkiewicz

Erica Gilbert-Levin  

If Olav Velthius knows his stuff (and I think he does), an art market crash will have a silver lining: the effect of returning "democratic values" to the art world.

Velthius argues that the latest boom in the art market beginning in the 1990s was, in a manner that mirrored previous art market rises, most beneficial to the elites of the art world, particularly dealers and the most prominent artists whom these dealers represented. Each art market boom has materialized primarily as a result of an inundation of excess economic capital into the market. The flooding of the market with more money "than it can readily absorb," according to Velthius, is really a reflection of an influx of new buyers who have extra cash and seek to "buy access to a social world" – that is, to enhance the measure of their social status by purchasing goods that represent cultural prestige. But the rise in demand leads to an "erosion to egalitarian values," and those who already possess an "elite" status go up the social-status totem pole, while all others slide farther down from the positions they covet. Sought-after works of art become "less affordable," and the "wealth needed to buy these works [increases] dramatically." The culmination is a contemporary art world that "is receding toward a kind of commercial sublime, barely accessible to all but a few." To Velthius, the "phenomenon" of the waiting list epitomizes and perpetuates the polarizing trend propelled by a boom in the art market. Because the possession of money no longer holds much sway (since there is already so much money flooding the market), other measures of prominence, measures bound up in status and reputation and embodied in Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, assume greater value; "money no longer suffices to gain access to goods." Those involved in the art market, then, turn to devices like the waiting list to distinguish who is "worthy" of possessing coveted works of art – and those with mere money, who are lacking in status and renown, are disregarded. The waiting list "enables art dealers to accumulate symbolic capital," Velthius explains. "By claiming they are not interested in selling to the highest bidder, dealers are [...] denegrating the economy. In showing that they are working for art and not for money," and will therefore only sell to the worthy who are higher up on (or have bypassed altogether) the waiting list, "they establish and reaffirm their reputation in the art world. This, in turn, enables them to consecrate [...], or bestow legitimacy and value on, the artists they represent." And the more "legitimacy and value" the dealers' artists accumulate, the more successfully the dealers can profit from selling these artists' work. A crash in the art market, then, which would spell the end for devices like the waiting list, and for the broader dynamics that undergird, necessitate, and facilitate the use of such devices, and the result would be a much-needed process of democratizing the art market and the art world at large.

Kimberly Ann Phoenix