How the artworld is killing its own market via the internet
Digital Strategy + Execution
As a young artist, I asked the gallerist who represented me how the art market worked. When I queried the answer, I was dismissed with a phrase that became familiar, "You don't understand the artworld."
I repeated these conversations to my father and asked his opinion. He said, "Haze, this is not how business works. This is something else."
Some years ago I asked the owner of a private art collection that has been held in one family for generations and includes some of the world's greatest paintings for his opinion on a globally known contemporary artist. He gave a two-word reply.
"Con artist."
In February 2023 my non-fiction memoir essay, The future of art fraud, was published in Australian literary journal Griffith Review Issue 79, Counterfeit culture, edited by Carody Culver, and is now free to read at After Studio Hours. On page 112 I wrote, "Long ago I was pressured to accept a five-year contract to inflate the value of my work. It specified the amount of art I would have to create and the increasing prices at which the artworks would be sold and bought back through auction houses by a group (their names protected by privacy laws). At the end, a book about these artworks would be written by one of them. Both the book and public record of auction results would be used to justify the pumped-up value. Then artworks owned by the group would be dumped – sold to legitimate collectors.
In the artworld, this is known as price ramping.
I refused. On my father’s advice, I kept the handwritten contract anyway."
This anecdote is not new information. While my earlier online writings about price ramping in 2007 are now archived privately, an internet search using the keywords "art market manipulation" reveals an ever-increasing number of videos, books, blog entries and social media posts by artists, podcast episodes and investigative articles by journalists.
By the time I wrote The future of art fraud, I assumed everyone in the artworld already understood that the flow of information facilitated by the internet would impose transparency on the notoriously opaque art market. When the 2020 pandemic enforced mass migration online, I expected the artworld – including art auction houses and publicly funded art institutions – to weed out behaviours which, when properly understood by the mainstream, would cause irreparable damage.
That did not happen.
After my essay was published, I had a conversation via direct messaging on social media with a peer I've known for years, in person as well as online, who has decades of experience within the contemporary artworld. I was told that, "The price ramping thing happens here in New York all the time. It's kind of how the market functions... it is the nature of the beast until the next artist comes along. Everyone is aware of it too... I suppose it's what everyone here in the artworld has signed up for. Everyone knows what the game is, and all the artists I’ve ever met all want to be incredibly successful (and rich)."
Although not everyone in the artworld engages in market manipulation, enough do that it's normalised. While it may be what the majority of the artworld signed up for, it is not what the audience signed up for. The audience – which includes the legitimate market for art – reasonably expected meritocracy, expertise without undeclared vested interests, and professionalism.
As the internet forces transparency on the business of art, the artworld is in the process of killing its own market by failing to address its own flaws. Instead, the artworld is using the internet to promote itself and repeat already-disproven myths in art-specific magazines that are essentially ads-for-editorial and "insider" podcasts where empty, rote statements about how important the current system is and how well it works are also repeated – without explaining how it actually works.
Perhaps this approach is taken because market manipulation is so normalised within the artworld that, from the inside, no-one sees the problem. Maybe the majority of the artworld does not know how to create authentic value without it. Even if they did, perhaps there is no incentive to change for people in positions of power who benefit from the current system.
The internet has given the audience the ability to simultaneously view the artworld as it presents itself to the public and watch what happens behind the scenes. The notable discrepancy between presentation and reality corrodes basic trust essential for business transactions.