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abril 22, 2014
The Seven Surprising Ways the Internet Has Screwed the Art World by Alexandra Peers, artnet.news
The Seven Surprising Ways the Internet Has Screwed the Art World
Artigo de Alexandra Peers originalmente publicado no ArtNet News em 17 de abril de 2014.
We all know the Internet has accelerated the art world, flattening prices, boosting the growth of fairs, fueling the practice of snapping up art sight unseen. But the Internet has changed how things work far more than that: Artists, collectors, and museums are behaving differently in cyberspace and because of it. Here’s how:
1. The truly rare object is now wickedly expensive.
The easy availability of price information on the Internet has standardized prices for many works; one gallery can’t charge all that much more than another for somewhat similar works.
But for truly rare art or objects, especially limited-edition multiples like rare books, the sky is now the limit. You used to suspect that, say, a British first edition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula with its original sun-yellow, blood-red cloth cover would be pricey, but you didn’t know there were only a handful available for sale worldwide and where to get one. Now you do. (And, based on one 2013 sale, it would cost you about $12,000.) Consider the Mexican painter Jose Salazar: His works are rare, so much so that one might come up at auction only every couple of years. When the last one did, at Neal’s in New Orleans, collectors found it and it went for triple its estimate, or $564,000.
2. It’s fueled the art boom by inspiring false confidence.
“Google search an artist’s name and you are an instant expert,” notes Portuguese art collector Antonio DeCordoso, who shops annually at the Armory Show and Art Dubai fairs. It doesn’t quite work that way, of course, he adds, but the Internet provides a burst of comfort and confidence that has meant people buy more quickly, if not much less foolishly.
3. The Internet has created new power players and ways to be ones.
There’s a pecking order in the museum world that has existed for decades, but it’s being upended. The century-old Frick Museum, plus the Getty and the Dallas Museum of Art, have fewer Twitter followers together than the Andy Warhol Museum, a social media behemoth at 629,000 followers. (Museum director Eric Shiner says the Warhol has made social media a priority.) Similarly, the number of visitors to Paddy Johnson’s Art F City blog outpaces the circulation of some art magazines. It’s comparing apples to oranges, of course, and isn’t necessarily negative for the art world—unless you are one of the laggards.
4. It’s fueled the production of multiples and “near” multiples.
Some art-world watchers—the Baer Faxt’s Josh Baer among them—argue that it’s actually changed the art that artists are making; that they are creating bodies of work with little dissimilarity precisely so they can be traded easily, and sight unseen.
5. Everyone is now an art-market quarterback.
The Internet started a cottage industry of analysis of, and investment in, the art market, just as the manageability of sports statistics fueled the explosive growth of fantasy leagues. An industry of experts with no institutional memory? Lucky us.
6. It’s crystallized groupthink.
The art world was always a gossipy place, but you used to have a day or two before a consensus on, say, the Whitney Biennial was reached. No longer. Even the casual online skimmer can immediately feel they’ve read so much that they’ve already seen the show—or at least floor three.
7. Who are all these people—and were all of them invited?
Remember paper invites? At first it was great when Blackberries took off and all you had to show at a check-in was your e-vite. Now, websites for events serve as to-do lists for party crashers, who always seem to know somebody at a museum, and can either talk their way in or bottleneck the desk while they name everybody in their class at Cooper Union. The good news is so many people are trying to get into art parties that it’s making the art world more fun and magnetic. The bad news is the crashers are in line ahead of you.