The $12 million stuffed shark

What Hacker News says

1. hank_fJul 2024
   It’s not about pretentiousness. It’s a market for collectibles, and for a piece to be collectible, it has to be authentic.

   Here, they mixed a bunch of identical fake plates with a real one. They’re trying to prove that people don’t care about beauty, only about collectability. But that’s no secret. The art world doesn’t give a damn about beauty or meaning, they care about how collectible it is, plain and simple.

   Anyone who thinks high-worth art, 20k plus, is purchased for beauty or meaning is not active in the art world.

   There’s a book, "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark," that lays out the art world in fine detail. I highly recommend it.

   Art dealers, collectors, and auctioneers couldn’t care less about meaning or beauty. It’s all about provenance, scarcity, and an artist’s desirability.

   There’s a fourth participant, the casual buyer with lots of money. This is who everything is marketed towards. That’s where the myth of intrinsic beauty and meaning comes in. They’re the sucker. Auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s hire top marketing firms to concoct stories for the artwork and imbue it with meaning, but that’s all aimed at the casual buyer.

   Everyone else is in it for the money. Art dealers, collectors, and auctioneers trade among themselves, pumping up the value due to provenance. Then they unload it on the sucker. And here’s an interesting fact, over 90% of the time, once an artwork is unloaded, it never reaches that high price again.

   If you want to make money in the art world, you have to be an active participant and be part of the inner group, you can't be the casual.

   This doesn't mean there's no beauty in art. There certainly is. Go to a local gallery and buy yourself something good to look at. But don't confuse wall decorations with the "art market". They're two very different beasts.

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2. killjoywashereApr 2022
   Don Thompson gets after this from another angle in "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". The particular thread I'm thinking of is the purchases of Charles Saatchi. It looks externally like there's a positive feedback loop where he collects you, which makes you famous, which makes your work valuable, which he can then sell. But ... if you look at the average value of work in Saatchi's collection, it asymptotically approaches $0. The man buys a lot of art. Warehouses full of stuff that hasn't been seen. Similarly, there are a lot of poor writers in New York. Is there a positive feedback loop? Try measuring it.

   https://www.amazon.com/dp/0230620590

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3. acjohnson55Dec 2020
   I can relate. I actually used to work at Artsy (the company who published this article), and before I worked there, I felt much the same way. What I learned after being immersed in the art world is that occasionally, art will "speak" to me immediately. But more often, it grows on me as I understand the context of the art and who made it. This is definitely the case for me with Basquiat, whose work can look like childish scribbles at first glance.

   In my farewell email to my Artsy coworkers, I wrote that as I really began to engage with the art world in my time there, I realized I had gained a whole new layer of perception. I was seeing new references and callbacks everywhere in the world around me.

   So what I would say is that if you feel like it's going over your head and want to invest the time, it can be extremely rewarding to go down the rabbit hole. You can do this by reading articles, watching documentaries, visiting exhibitions, and finding spaces inhabited by enthusiasts.

   Some things to check out:

   - The book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

   - The film Exit Through The Gift Shop

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4. killjoywashereMar 2019
   This is where open, collaborative agreements would be nice to see. There are square miles of government wall space where the public could enjoy publically owned art, but instead of paying 300K annual for a small traveling "open curation" group, the museums jealously horde all the art in basements that cost $50M to build and required $1M annual upkeep.

   I have a real concerns about the leadership of the art world. From my perspective, they think they're in the business of catering to billioniares and manicuring real estate, when their real job is supposed to be exposing the society to art.

   If you're interested in the art world, I highly recommend Don Thompson's The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

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5. wallflowerJul 2018
   Reposting an old comment. The art world obeys supply and demand - where demand has no relation to the real world. Damien Hirst is a marketing genius. He needs a factory to build his art, much like Porsche.

   If you are more curious about the contemporary art world market and why $29M is not that expensive[1], I recommend "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". In general, brand (in this case Christie's and Sotheby's) ranks supreme above all else. Once you are branded, you can pretty much sell anything as expensive art. Also, an interesting factoid - when we hear of Far East/Middle East buyers bidding tens of millions (or more) for a painting, we naturally tend to think - who buys that without seeing it - but as the book points out - the painting has most likely gone to see the buyer already (e.g. Dubai/Hong Kong pre-auction private tour).

   Excerpts from the book:

   "Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world -- everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such as Jasper Johns' 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it (currently Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem to want to acquire is what economists call positional good; things that prove to the rest of the world that they really are rich."

   Jasper Johns' White Flag

   http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-this-...

   http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329

   Estimates on the artist economy: "40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC)

   For London and NYC each: 75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income)

   300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income)

   5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

   https://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-Contemporar...

   [1] "If a great apartment costs $30 million, than a Rothko [big deal famous contemporary artist] that hangs in the featured spot in the living room can also be worth $30 million - as much as the value of the apartment. But no one could envision a $72.8 million apartment to use for comparison..."

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6. GargoyleFeb 2018
   If you're interested in this, I highly recommend the book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics Of Contemporary Art. As the promo blurb says, it's a Freakonomics-style look the art world, covering artists, deals, collectors, and auction houses. A ton of insight into how all the psychology of it fits together.

   https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...

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