ART-SWITCH BLOG

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The art market is enjoying the biggest boom in history but the artists are not seeing the benefits.

The Scull auction was one of the most important sales in the history of art and a pivotal moment for artists' rights. It was October 1973 and Ethel and Robert Scull were in the midst of a messy divorce when they staged an auction of contemporary art in New York. Robert Rauschenberg watched as Thaw, which Scull had paid $900 for fifteen years previously, fetched $85,000 and Double Feature, which Scull had paid $2,300 for the following year, went for $90,000. It marked a new age in which art speculation could reap immense profit but Rauschenberg was appalled. His reaction is now legendary: he confronted the seller yelling "I've been working my ass off for you to make all the profit!"

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Art-Switch plans to start a new scheme, where good-willed people or organisations can donate the Art-Switch's service to hospitals by sponsoring a hospital wall to have artwork for just £1 a day. Art-Switch's new scheme aims to not only enlighten hospital environments, but also encourage an active interest in the art within hospital environments by inviting the patients and staff to use our unique voting system to choose the art. This comes shortly after the government recently published a white paper on its position about whether art has a place in hospitals. They came to the conclusion that art creates a positive environment for healing, and a form of escapism both through aesthetics and thought. The notion of spending large sums of public money on art within an under funded health sector doesn't come without its protestors though, for years art has been put in hospitals through public funding with protest. Funding is the most pertinent objection to the involvement of art in hospitals:

'Although many called for further funding, and it is clear that additional money would always be welcomed, we believe that tackling issues about awareness, evidence and understanding are the most effective way to increase investment, and is in keeping with 'Creating a Patient-led NHS' (From Government Paper Report of the Review of Arts and Health Working Group)

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So here we are! It's 2008, we're well into the third millennium and capitalism has been getting dominant for a couple of hundred years. Its ideals dictate that free markets provide the best way to fairly value and distribute products and services. That includes artwork. Capitalism may or may not be a good system, but it's been failing to live up to its own ideals when applied to the arts.
The commercial Art World seems to be a closed door to the uninitiated. Obscure and sometimes arbitrary prices line the pockets of wealthy dealers and alienate both artists and would-be art buyers. Galleries typically take 50% of sale proceeds while uninitiated buyers are allowed to innocently believe the artist gets most of the funds they part with. Clearly there are insiders and outsiders.
Even the Art Council's own research programme by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre published in 'Taste Buds' reported that in the UK 5.9 million people aspire to buy original art but have yet to buy as opposed 4.9 million who have bought original art. This means more than half of us all are outsiders!!
It seems there are three root problems perpetuating this sorry situation. It's not complicated.

First, the art market gravely flouts capitalist free market ideals more than any other market. Founding forefathers of capitalism extolled its virtues as a means of establishing fair prices by matching supply and demand on condition that markets strive to ensure prevalence of the following characteristics (amongst others):

• There is free entry to the market for all would be buyers and sellers.
• Perfect information is available to all about quality or price of what each player brings to market.
• There is equal access to know-how and technologies for all market entrants.

Thus, the theory goes, all are equally empowered to make quality decisions on what to buy or sell, with whom and at what price.
The concept of a single market place, a stock exchange, enables all this to come together quickly and easily making for fast information dissemination and enabling efficient matching of supply with informed demand. Today digital technology has allowed most other markets to become ever more efficient at dispersing information and cutting out middlemen, while the art market lags woefully behind. Attempts to create art indices exist but only reflect existing trading activity of the 'insiders' so they can only reflect the dissolute endemic rot in the current art market. Some markets will always be fairer than others but clearly the art market is bottom of the class. Whereas inside dealing in share, commodity and other markets is policed and can lead to jail, the art market remains unregulated and monkey business is endemic (surprise, surprise!). It fails to measure up to these standards more than any other market and with disastrous consequences. Whereas the public trust stockmarket prices they distrust art market prices and artists suffer very poor terms of trade and nepotism.

Secondly, we are all wrongly led to chant capitalism's "supply and demand" mantra as if they are givens. We're encouraged to believe that if a 'thing' enhances a person's life, people will recognize its life-enhancing quality and automatically want (or 'demand') the thing. This is fine for a thing like water which requires no explanation of its life enhancing quality of quenching thirst. But some 'things' first require a level of education in order to understand how the thing can be life enhancing. The concept of 'demand' creates problems and serious biases against such things if the required education is not freely available to everyone. This is true for arts and media but particularly the arts. It's not hard to understand that if you can't read Arabic your demand for that typeface script will be low.
ڰښڦڮڿۓۻ
You may demand it for its beautiful shape but you will not pay more for any meaning contained within however important that meaning may potentially be to you. It's the same with art. In order to correctly price a thing of art, surely those 5.9 million people should be empowered to consider any life-enhancing (and often socially focused) meaning, as well as aesthetic quality.

The third problem is this lack of education and resultant risks faced by the uninitiated. Sadly, unlike the 3Rs, art literacy education is neither compulsory at school nor freely available to adults so 'demand' is sabotaged by widespread lack of understanding of imagery. Most of the 5.9 million have just not had sufficient opportunity to be well practiced at looking at and understanding contemporary artwork and their meanings, which is unfortunate as they are very often social. Inaccessibility of art courses compounds the problem; the art establishment expects people to do courses in their own time and at their own expense - over and above career commitments which provide the income to afford artworks. Yet often the uninitiated who try to foray into their world are met with intimidation and patronizing attitudes. Those that don't are judged for being disinterested and the whole saga ensures this status quo of advantaged insiders and disadvantaged outsiders, who face huge social and financial risks to enter market. Worst of all, artwork is reduced to being evaluated by the majority on superficial aesthetics alone, resulting in a lost opportunity to promote a sensitive, enlightened, strong and healthy society through deeper meanings within artwork.
All this was highlighted in last week's article, 'Value for Monet' in the Financial Times publication 'Wealth'. It reported worries that "...the art market is opaque, illiquid and unpredictable" and that "there are no marketmakers dealing on a daily basis and displaying publicly what price they will pay" which is in stark contrast to the transparency in share trading. It also reported that pension fund trustees who did experiment with art investments over 24 years concluded "there are no reliable methods of valuing".
Art-Switch considers it high time to rectify this sorry state of affairs and have set out to do it by:

• Offering a true library to foster widespread art literacy at the lowest possible cost.
• Providing free access to all artists and clients to avoid exclusion and elitism.
• Enabling employees in companies to choose artworks democratically.
• Creating daily price updates driven by informed demand from all of us, not just the privileged.
• Providing a platform open to all for trading art with transparency (Market-making).
• Providing an incubation facility for developing and launching careers of creative minds.
• Releasing thousands of incarcerated artworks' meanings from storage, cellars and attics.
• Transform artworks into income generating as well as capital gain assets for all owners.
• Create better terms of trade for artists including royalties.
• A powerful platform for strengthening society through art as catalysts for positive change.

So, is the art market free and fair? Does it live up to ideals of capitalism, equal information, access and free entry?
Or is it the ugly duckling, a prehistoric beast in dire need of evolution?
Should we regulate it, restructure it or rebuild it?
Is it time to start a single 'art exchange' stock-market place for art and can it be done?
Have you suffered at the hands of the existing fragmented art market?
Your thoughts, experiences and stories are welcome...

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Welcome to this shiny new blog on Art-Switch!

So many of you have had a lot of interesting things to say about Art-Switch over the years - so we've set up this blog.

I'll be taking that feedback as a starter for ten on this blog so that you can all say what you think.

Feel free. Speak clear, speak loud - let me know what's on your mind.

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)