There's something quite unsettling when we read this report in Forbes about how the art market doesn't seem to have been touched by the global financial crisis with vendors setting a $2.8 million asking price for a Picasso "Portrait of Jacqueline", acquired this past November for just over $1.5 million. A report, commissioned by the European Fine Art Foundation, estimates the value of the global art and antiques market in 2010 at 43 billion euros ($60 billion), up 52 percent from 2009 when values slumped as a result of the financial crisis.
At a time when Europe is going down the gurgler and people are getting their benefits cut, at a time when American unemployment is up around 9%, there is something quite perverse about this.
It's a point taken up by New York art critic Eleanor Heartney when she writes: "Isn't there something basically unhealthy about a society where social programs that serve the poor and middle class are cut to the bone while a Picasso can go for over $100 million? Oh yes, I know, this is "private money," but how did these art collectors manage to amass such huge fortunes in the first place? Is a CEO, especially one who runs the company into the ground and then floats off with a golden parachute, really worth more than 300 times his lowest paid employee? Why are the bankers who nearly toppled our financial system free to retire to their mansions while we demonize teachers who want to have a tiny bit of retirement security? Why have virtually none of the productivity gains of the last 30 years gone to workers? Whose money is it, really? And where does this leave us? I can't help feeling that the art world's responses to funding crises reveal a glaring myopia. The problem isn't how we argue for a share of the increasingly tiny budget pie devoted to funding for social services and culture. The problem is the whole concept of the pie. I keep wondering, as state and local governments careen ever closer to bankruptcy and the federal government flirts with a trillion dollar deficit, why isn't anyone connecting the dots to the extension of the Bush tax cuts? Why is the question of increasing taxes on the very wealthy so completely off the table?"
The art auction world is an alternative reality.
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