Just finished watching the BBC's show 'The Contemporary Art Bubble' in which Ben Lewis, a contemporary arts journalist allows us into the backdoor dealings of the business of the contemporary art trade. Since the YBA and Saatchi boom contemporary art went from strength to strength ignited and paralleled by the rise in power of the media to filtrate financial control. If you can catch this series on BBCiplayer it exposes from internal sources the cornering of the market that takes place from collectors and dealers (no laws for this in art as other areas) who control rises in price of their personal favourites for cumulative personal gain, how Sothebys 'lend' buyers money cunningly to raise overall value in their market and so increasing revenue, how they also use guarantees as incentives to buyers insuring a fixed bar of value for certain works if they are to bid on them. Also for the big collectors who lend to the larger galleries or exhibitions huge tax breaks take place. Private galleries for example White Cube or Gagosian use representative artists as pawns within the auction game of nudge nudge wink wink as obviously you would predict but to some extents their more black market dealings are exposed, for example Lewis reignites the controversy that took place over Damian Hirst's, 'For the Love of God' in which it was said to have been sold yet it was later discovered Hirst and possibly others still contained a share interest within the piece.
As the show wraps up we see the demise of the bubble, defllating under the crunch, sales of auctions down some 70-80%, guarantees reduced, leaving trading and profit floating. However Lewis reminds us that Hirst's own personal sale of his collection of works split solely from any gallery/dealer control raised £111 million not so long ago as the crunch started so the future is unpredictable, how much time does it take for contemporary art to really loose chunks of it's value, will collectors control their assets or loose out to financial crunch?
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