10
The Asset Form

Characteristics of the asset form

When they are viewed as assets, things are purchased (exchanged for a sum of money), but only for the purpose of being resold (that is, transformed once again into money). The resale is often presented as speculative when it is made soon after the purchase. But, even if it takes place after a longer period of time, the item is still treated as an asset, inasmuch as it is regarded primarily with reference to its metaprice and inasmuch as its preservation is intended to protect or maintain inheritable wealth. This is particularly clear in situations in which estate planning advisors put the long-term“interests of the family” ahead of their clients’ whims, taking on the role of “protecting the rich against themselves.”1

The asset form places things at the outer limits of the commodity cosmos, since commodities are produced from encounters between commercial and non-commercial goods. The process takes a particularly spectacular turn when the assets subjected to massive trading are certificates of ownership that exist only in written form, but it can also involve things considered in their materiality.

“The direct form of the circulation of commodities is C–M–C, the transformation of a commodity into money and the reconversion of money into commodities,” Marx wrote.2 Now, in the asset form, the relation to money is inverted, closely resembling the transformation that, for Marx, was typical of capitalism: M–C–M, or, ideally, from a capitalist viewpoint, M–C–M´. We can say that there is M–C–M when we are speaking of a placement – that is, when there is a requirement of resale in the short or long term, but when the requirement of profit does not have priority. In this case, the anticipated metaprice is equal to the sale price. By contrast, the requirement of profit becomes the primary factor in the form M–C–M´: one expects that the resale (in the short or long term) will bring in more money than the initial cost of the commodity; in this case, we speak of an investment. But whether the transaction is a placement or an investment, in the asset form a thing is a commodity transformed into money, treated as quasi-money, or treated as a substitute form of money, and it serves to build up wealth that may be intimately connected to its owner; indeed, the owner may even take physical possession of it. Thus, although it has often been emphasized that placements in art are of relatively little interest to banks,3 we must keep in mind that a commodity may be used in place of money, as when wealthy heirs choose to pay their estate tax to the central government by donating artworks to public collections.

As an asset, a commodity has value only in the relation between a price and a metaprice, insofar as the latter is a possible future price: its value is its anticipated metaprice. To valorize a commodity is to assign it a metaprice that, at minimum, will be maintained. The more the anticipated metaprice goes up, the more the price will go up. No one says, about an object considered as an asset, that its purchase price was too high or not high enough on the basis of its value. Such claims can be made only by someone relying on knowledge of its metaprice on other occasions – for example, a metaprice attributed to the object in the past or the metaprice of a similar and comparable object. Its purchase price can be said to be above or below its metaprice.

We must stress here that an object, as an asset, does not produce revenues. Its income-generating capacity can be analyzed only at the time of resale, taking into account the capital gains or losses realized (that is, realized in the difference between the sale price and the metaprice). There is a significant difference, here, between investment assets and placement assets; the profitability of the latter is measured at regular intervals, most often annually. Since William J. Baumol’s celebrated 1986 study arguing, on the basis of an analysis of 640 transactions involving paintings between 1652 and 1961, that works of art were not very profitable, and notably less so than financial placements,4 many other researchers have studied the profitability of collectors’ items as assets (aside from French Impressionist paintings, which have attracted exceptional attention). These studies, ranging from contemporary Italian art5 to bottles of wine6 to Australian aboriginal art,7 have generally focused on auction sales, especially those conducted by the major houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s,8 where prices are made public and readily accessible, unlike those negotiated in secret or discreetly with gallery owners or brokers.

The development of the asset form is nevertheless closely tied to the rise in sales at auction and to the transformation of these sales in relation to sales in the standard form, inasmuch as the latter relies on the distinction between new and used commodities. Thus, in France, a law that came into effect on 25 June 1841 provided that, in sales of furnishings, only used goods could be sold to the public at auction; this was intended to protect retail merchants by giving them the exclusive right to sell new merchandise. Beyond the fact that, especially from the second half of the twentieth century on, auctions have made it possible to establish ever more spectacular record-breaking prices for works of art,9 they have undergone a considerable extension with the creation of Internet auction sites. Yet this extension has maintained the distinction between new and used goods, since, for furnishings to be sold at auction on the Internet, they “must be used – that is, they must have entered into the possession of a person for his or her own use, either as gifts or as purchases, at some stage of production or distribution” and, if they are new, they “must come directly from the production of the seller if the latter is neither an artisan nor a merchant.”10 Still, it is not just because an object is sold that it belongs to the asset form.

The commodity form in which funds are stockpiled has to be a more robust way of maintaining buying power than if the funds were left in an exclusively monetary form. The metamorphosis of money thus has to bear on objects that have a greater chance of keeping their buying power when they are resold at the end of a given time period than money does when it is left dormant.

In the asset form there are two types of totality, depending on whether one adopts the logic of placement or that of investment. In the logic of placement, the totality is constituted by the entire set of goods – that is, by all the entities that, if they were purchased, could store up money. In the logic of investment, the totality is constituted by the entire set of goods that, if purchased, could be resold for more money than the amount needed to acquire them. Metaphorically, goods of the second type constitute a portfolio; thus lacks are created within an ideal portfolio. Goods of both types have to be readily resellable; consequently, they have to be able to restore, in monetary form, the funds that were necessary to acquire them.

The asset form can be envisaged from the starting point of three questions. First, is the durability of the object that serves to store money well established (is it better established than that of money itself)? This first question has two facets: one concerns the durability of the thing in which money is invested and the cost of maintenance; the other has to do with whether the thing can be resold at the time and place of the owner’s choosing. In other words, what is its liquidity? A subordinate question is whether the thing is transportable, either in the form of a title of ownership or in a material form. Finally, will the object, if it is resold, bring in more (or less) money than had to be provided in order to acquire it (profit or loss): that is, will the future metaprice of the object be higher than its price?

Subjected to the filter of these three questions, things that can serve as complements in a basket of goods or in a portfolio and can fill lacks are thus fairly limited in number. They have to be guaranteed by an institution; they have to be liquid (available for exchange at any time and at any place); they have to be known, but not so visible that their displacement would be hindered; they have to be mobile and displaceable via the sale of the title of ownership or, preferably, via the sale of the thing itself; they have to be durable, meaning that their maintenance costs will not be too high; and their price must be able to rise over time.

Many things, even most things, cannot be handled by the asset form, or, to be more precise, the asset form enters into tension with the other forms we have envisaged. A thing immersed in the standard form or in the trend form cannot shift directly into the asset form. In the case of the standard form, the price of a commodity is highest when the thing is new, and it decreases steadily thereafter, whenever the thing is sold as a used item. The trend form could be articulated with the asset form in that it is cyclical and thus leaves room for hope of a higher price. But it introduces such uncertainty, owing to this same cyclical character, that the future metaprice of an item is just as likely to be lower if the trend shifts. This is why the asset form is articulated in a privileged way with the collection form, in which the prices of objects may rise over time and depend in any case on institutions that guarantee them; however, these processes follow the logic proper to collecting, which creates a certain tension with the asset form. Such articulation between the asset and trend forms is often denied, and, as Raymonde Moulin has remarked, “economic calculation does not figure in collectors’ descriptions of what they are about.” When questioned about whether their purchases are also assets, collectors oscillate between “outrage” and “cynicism.”12 Their denials are echoed by critics who stress the weak liquidity of collectors’ items, the opacity of information, the high transaction costs, and the limited opportunities for arbitration in the case of conflicts – all these factors explain why funds for investment in art have not been developed.13

To be assets, things have to last, which excludes a number of fragile works composed of materials of uncertain life expectancy or even deliberately chosen by an artist for their ephemeral character. In addition, as assets, things have to be preserved under particular conditions: high-quality wine has special storage requirements, for example. And the durability of things as assets has to last beyond the context of the sale, inasmuch as the things purchased are expected to circulate further. In the case of auctions, the auction house is a determining factor in the price of a thing:14 the sale of objects in a prestigious house such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s increases their prices and may even make it possible for things to be sold that might otherwise remain unsold, or sold at much lower prices, in a different transactional context, such as an online auction. The impact of auction houses on prices is especially salient when the collection form, the importance of which is well understood by the directors of these houses, is mobilized to allow the things on offer to appreciate with respect to one another if they are sold together, as though the ideal totality were presented in a staging that advances a narrative valorizing that totality. This phenomenon is illustrated, for example, when the furnishings, decorative elements, and tableware of a famous ocean liner (the France), a luxury hotel (the Crillon, the Plaza Athénée), or a prestigious restaurant (the Tour d’Argent) are dispersed at auction, attracting buyers who associate each of the things sold with the history of these locations, as if each item bore some trace of the celebrities who frequented the sites. Thus Artcurial’s sale at auction of 3,500 items from the Crillon brought in roughly 6 million euros in 2013, whereas the estimates had anticipated only 2 million. But the curtains of a famous luxury hotel, whatever stars they may have protected from the light, remain curtains, and they can bring a high price only if they are presented as filling a gap in a totality that includes the plates, chairs, tables, and so on, of the same hotel; stripped of the memorial power of the totality in which they had been inserted, they will not interest the same auction house and can be sold only at the price of other used curtains in a different transactional context.

On the liquidity of things as assets

Let us now consider the objects belonging to the asset form in terms of their analytic presentation. When things are envisaged as assets, their differences are pertinent neither in relation to their uses nor in terms of their position in serial sets; thus a large number of their properties, whether these are substantive or narrative, are neutralized. The differences that remain pertinent are those related to the degree to which the objects can easily be converted into money – those differences, one might say, on which their liquidity depends. The term “liquidity” refers here to the possibility that the person who holds the objects will be able to draw the anticipated revenue from them no matter where or when the transaction takes place. The liquidity of an object may itself be a function of various factors that the holder of the thing in question must be in a position to appreciate.

Let us look at five such factors. A first dimension is the transportability of the object – if not the object itself in its materiality, then its title or deed. A second is the degree to which transactions concerning assets can be discreet – most notably in order to avoid taxes – as opposed to being hard to shield from national or international controls. Things in the collection form may also be considered “national treasures” and thus be legally prevented from leaving the country, or even subject to a right of pre-emption on the part of a central government if it seeks to insert them into public collections, thus withdrawing them “forever” from the possibility of resale. A third factor concerns the existence of valid instruments over a geographic area of some size that makes it possible to determine the characteristics of things and associate them with a reference price; when such tools exist and are reliable, a thing so determined can be negotiated at a similar price in other places.15 From this perspective, the implantation of the same auction houses and galleries in major cities throughout the world increases price stability.

A fourth factor: things have to be able to find a buyer easily and be sold rapidly. As it happens, sales of collectors’ items, when they are assets – that is, when their prices are high – generally remain seasonal, and time is required to organize auctions and find specialized merchants who can guarantee the nature of the items; in addition, the transaction costs are apt to be high. Thus for Australian aboriginal art, following the seasons of the southern hemisphere, prices are higher at auctions held from May to July and lower from December to February.16 The liquidity of collectors’ items as assets has increased only in a relative way through Internet transactions, in that more of the items exchanged in that context are produced according to the standard form (postage stamps, for example) and are sold at lower prices, whereas high-priced collectors’ items produced in limited editions or even in a single exemplar (a Hans Bellmer drawing, for example) are not offered on the Internet. This difference can be attributed, on the one hand, to the question of guaranteeing the authenticity of the things offered for sale and, on the other hand, to the fact that, while standardization offers the buyer guarantees of the properties of a mass-produced object that has become a collectors’ item (a piece of furniture or a watch, for example) and of which the buyer may have seen exemplars, a potential buyer of a work that is unique may have a greater desire to assess it by being in the presence of the thing itself. Finally, the group of potential buyers of collectors’ items as assets is growing because the patrimonial class is expanding and becoming wealthier. If inequality were to diminish, the liquidity of this type of object would decrease correspondingly.

Let us take postage stamps as examples of collectors’ items that are readily convertible into assets with great liquidity. As we have seen, stamps have been privileged objects of collection, but they have also been easy to use as assets. Stamps are small in size, easy to transport and to hide, and they can also be presented in catalogs that offer both a description of each object and its price. The latter takes into account the price received for goods deemed similar during various earlier transactions, and this fictive price plays a regulatory role during new transactions. It is established and set by “experts,” holders of an institutional authority delegated to them by the numerous philatelic associations spread throughout the world and grouped in federations. The same type of stamp, for example a Penny Black (the first stamp in history), whose price is generally high, is thus likely to be negotiated at comparable prices in different markets, with variations that depend on the circumstances of the transaction and the condition of the stamp.17 This, for example, is why, during the period between the two world wars, the political authorities of the Soviet Union tried to limit philately, for fear that stamps would be used, especially in external commercial relations, as quasi-currencies capable of rivaling the ruble.18

We can contrast the case of stamps with that of certain second-hand goods just as sought after by collectors; here, prices can vary considerably depending on the situation in which they are evaluated. A dealer, questioning the role of “experts” in his area, thus wrote the following in his memoirs:

To know, one first has to see. But that is not enough to propose a price: even if I hold a Daum vase, an ivory statuette, or a violin, its price, in my eyes, depends on several criteria. Is this the price for which I would buy it in a second-hand shop? Or in an auction house? Or is this the price for which I would sell it? And, in this case, where? On the sidewalk at the Vanves fleamarket, at the Biron market at Saint-Ouen, at the Village Suisse, at the Louvre des Antiquaires, or in the Carré Rive Gauche?19

These remarks apply more generally to all objects when they are treated as assets. In the absence of formal inscriptions, these resources cannot readily generate goods likely to see their prices stabilize no matter what the transactional context may be. Their exchange owes a great deal in each case to the personal relations that surround a given transaction and to the information that each participant has, not only about the things being negotiated but also about the other participants, as has been demonstrated in studies of the “bazaar economy.”20

We could make similar remarks about paintings on canvas, as well as old books and manuscripts. These objects have the advantage that they can be transported fairly easily and discreetly, thus allowing their possessors to escape taxation;21 this is more difficult in the case of a real-estate asset, for example an apartment in the heart of Manhattan or Paris, which cannot be moved and which is usually subject to taxation.

The negotiation of things as assets may bear only on the title of ownership, however – that is, on a written document whose exchange is registered by government agencies. For such a transaction to remain discreet, complex financial arrangements may be required, such as recourse to offshore companies, while the goods themselves may remain stationary, stored in warehouses located in free ports.

The possibilities for negotiating a painting at similar prices in different circumstances are very uneven, depending on the level of “recognition” that has been achieved by the artist. While the price of a canvas by an artist who is little known, or appreciated only by a limited number of admirers, will be uncertain, the price of a work attributed to a famous artist and included in reputable catalogs will be relatively stabilized. One of the roles played by the major auction houses, where prices (but not the buyer’s identity) are made public, is precisely that they set the prices of paintings and confer on them the status of liquid assets, thus allowing works of art to serve as virtual equivalents of money.

The commercial potential of assets

When things are treated as assets, their capitalization is defined in relation to the axis of commercial potential. Capitalization – that is, the realized value of the future flow of profits that can be expected from an asset – aims to estimate the current price of an item – that is, the sum that an actor would be prepared to pay at once to ensure ownership of the item in the hope of a future profit, rather than investing that sum in a different operation involving its relation to other goods. The process of capitalization leads actors to compare the purchase price of a thing to its metaprice – that is, the estimate of what it may bring in, or cost, in the future. Capitalization presupposes constructing a specific relation between the present and the future. The asset is appraised in terms of the future revenues that it may generate, which presupposes setting the point in time at which these revenues will be received. But such an appraisal allows the actor to set the top price for the item, as current capital, only if it is balanced by a rate of realization that takes into account both the cost in time – generally indexed on the prevailing interest rate – and the cost in risk, as an estimate of the likelihood that the revenues will actually be available at the end of a given time period. The latter cost is itself dependent on an appraisal of the relation of the benefits that can be expected from a risky operation and the anticipated cost of the efforts that would be required to reduce the risk. The axis of commercial potential, in the asset form, is thus oriented neither toward a horizon on which things are destined to become trash – as in the standard form – nor toward their preservation in order to make them immortal – as in the collection form – but, rather, toward a present whose content, defined in terms of capital, is determined with reference to more or less distant future moments.22

On the axis of commercial potential, then, at one end we find assets promising future profits whose realization will take into account prices subject to moderate risk, provided that the negotiation takes place in the short run, for example because the circulation of the assets will benefit from mimetic effects encouraging speculation – as can be the case for financial assets23 but also for works of art. In this situation, the preference for immediate gains – that is, for the present – wins out over confidence in the future. At the other end, we find assets offering the hope of future profits in the long run – that is, revenues at a level that will make up for the increased costs in time and especially in risk.

In the first case, the rhythm at which assets change hands will be rapid; actors will seek to submit each asset to the test of exchange in the hope of an immediate profit as long as there is an upward trend – that is, as long as one can expect that numerous actors will be ready to acquire them with the same motives – and also ready to get rid of them as fast as possible when the trend reverses and other actors can also be expected to try to liquidate them quickly, as we know all too well from financial crises in which the effects of mimetic speculation are blatant.24 But one could undoubtedly find many more processes of the same type that have developed in situations of mimetic enthusiasm for various things sought after by collectors, as when, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese investors paid increasingly high prices for French Impressionist paintings, which they held in particular esteem.25

In the second case, the rhythm at which assets change hands will be slower, although the tendency to hold onto them may be attributed to diverse motives. The object of a given transaction may be either an investment – when the decision to hold onto it is based on the hope of a profit that will increase over time – or a placement intended to hold a significant sum of money in reserve in order to shield it from wealthdestroying circumstances. This second option may be based on a comparison of the unequal risks attached to different kinds of assets. This is the case, for example, when sums earned through commerce in very volatile assets are set aside in reserve – warehoused, as it were – by being placed in assets from which only moderate revenues can be expected, but whose capacity to resist the test of time seems particularly great provided that their level of liquidity seems adequate. This possibility – which follows the prevailing tendency, in banks, to suspend the distinction between savings and holdings26 – is no doubt widely exploited by collectors of expensive artworks. Relying on the solidity of the works that they collect, works whose value is supported, as we have seen, by the institutional authorities in charge of rendering things “immortal,” these collectors can both cherish the works for their precious qualities and treat them as particularly robust goods likely, on this basis, to play the role of a virtual reserve currency when considered in terms of the asset form.

From this perspective, things appreciate insofar as buyers estimate that there will always be future buyers who will appreciate them just as much. This is why the name of the creator of an artwork is the most important factor in its price, not only for European and North American art but also, for example, for Australian aboriginal art,27 for artists’ names are warranties for the future, once the narratives of the creators’ existence have been taken up by those who write history and then by institutions that possess other works by these same artists. Although several scholars have maintained that artworks are less profitable than financial placements, these works appear no less durable in the logic of constituting a legacy intended to be held by the same family and, in the long run, by the same patrimonial class. After all, the history of capitalism is also a history of huge, highly capitalized companies that were omnipresent on a worldwide scale at some point in time and later disappeared, their existence forgotten or reduced to a mere memory after just a few years.

In contrast, collectors’ items can be held for several centuries; this explains why the asset form has been able to develop so robustly. But the consistency of prices, in the case of the most expensive works, cannot be attributed, contrary to what certain economists suggest, to a “quality” presumed to be incorporated in the work itself and presumed to have imposed itself over the years. If this were so, it would make prices the best indicator of the worth of artworks and would justify the role attributed to awards and prizes in aesthetic judgment and in the use of works as assets. Rather, the consistency of prices is based on the fact that, if the prices of certain works are maintained, it is first of all because they are assets, and because those who own, buy, and sell or transmit them have an interest in maintaining them at such high levels.

In this light, we can understand better why the selection of the most famous artists in history, those whose fame has persisted over time,28 corresponds fully to the valuation of the asset form, while in the meantime the status of works by these artists has been modified, passing from the status of treasure to that of quasi-currency. When we draw up the list of paintings sold at auction for record prices between 1701 and 2014,29 it becomes clear that the most expensive works in the eighteenth century, sold in those years in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or London, are those of artists whose works brought in very high prices two centuries later (for instance Gérard Dou or Anthony Van Dyck). The most remarkable case is that of Rembrandt, whose works have regularly been purchased at record prices for three centuries (in 1798 in London by the English banker Sir Francis Baring, in 1811 in London by Prince George IV, in 1913 in Paris by the American businessman Benjamin Altman, and in 1961 in New York by the Metropolitan Museum). New fortunes help maintain or establish collectors’ items at high prices as assets, whether the works in question are ancient or more recent ones that are being included in turn in a narrow circle: works purchased by Americans in the early twentieth century (Henry C. Frick bought a Frans Hals at a record price in 1910, Benjamin Altman a Rembrandt and a Mantegna in 1912–13); by Japanese in the 1980s and 1990s (Yasuo Goto bought a Van Gogh for a record price in 1987, Tomonori Tsurumaki a Picasso in 1989, Ryoei Saito a Van Gogh in 1990); and also by Brazilians in the 2010s (Lily Safra bought a Giacometti for a record price in 2010).

For a long time many analysts have considered that works of art and venerable objects treated as assets were used as means for saving, intended to preserve capital rather than to increase it,30 while investments in contemporary art were riskier and had a more speculative character, forming a bubble ready to burst the moment an economic crisis came along. Still, we may wonder whether the transformations of the art market linked to what is called globalization, a phenomenon marked by unification and rapid transmission of information, have not modified this distribution, with the most expensive contemporary artworks now being treated as reserves of capital. This transformation might make it possible to understand the growing resistance of the art market to economic crises. Whereas the 1929 stock market crash had a considerable effect for almost a decade on the contemporary Parisian art market, obliging most art galleries to close,31 the consequences of the 2008 crisis were short-lived, especially where artists whose works command the highest prices were concerned. As early as 2010, the index of contemporary art prices began to rise again, setting new auction records starting in 2014 (driven above all by sales of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Zeng Fanzhi, Martin Kippenberger, and Peter Doig).32

Figure 10.1 Structural schema of the asset form

The fact that several exceptional pieces reaching very high prices are regularly negotiated among a small number of major collectors helps support the capitalization of these assets by lowering the level of uncertainty as to their real – that is, current – value, as objectivized in a price.33 The high cost, which may sometimes appear exorbitant, that certain actors agree to pay, and that it would be tempting to interpret within the sacrificial logic of the potlatch,34 actually plays a more prosaic economic role, in the sense that it helps support the value of the entire set of assets of the same type, considered as capital. It thus makes it possible to minimize the possibility of a collective destruction of collective wealth, an eventuality that always threatens accumulations of things, even the most noble and immortal. It is as though, on the occasion of these sales at auction, each of the participants were acting in two different ways simultaneously: on the one hand, as individuals endowed with their own interests in competition with other individuals who desire the same object and, on the other hand, as participants in a small but worldwide collective whose members know one another for the most part and often maintain personal relationships. This group is formed by the set of extremely wealthy major collectors who also have an interest in seeing that the value of the collectors’ items they own is maintained and attested by the prices at which they exchange things among themselves; this encourages them to develop specific forms of cooperation, one manifestation of which is competition to drive up auction prices.35

Notes

  1. 1. See Camille Herlin-Giret, “Les mondes de la richesse: travailler et faire travailler le capital,” doctoral thesis, Université Paris-Dauphine, July 2016.
  2. 2. Karl Marx, Capital, 4th edn, ed. Frederic Engels, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, [1890] 1990), vol. 1, part 2, chapter 4, p. 247.
  3. 3. See Nathalie Moureau, Analyse économique de la valeur des biens d’art: la peinture contemporaine (Paris: Economica, 2000), pp. 197–200.
  4. 4. See William J. Baumol, “Unnatural Value: or Art Investment as Floating Crap Game,” American Economic Review, 76/2 (1986): 10–14.
  5. 5. See Nicolette Marinelli and Giulio Palomba, “A Model for Pricing Italian Contemporary Art Paintings at Auction,” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 51 (2011): 212–24.
  6. 6. See Elroy Dimson, Peter L. Rousseau, and Christophe Spaenjers, “The Price of Wine,” Journal of Financial Economics, 118 (2015): 431–49.
  7. 7. See Dominic Taylor and Les Coleman, “Price Determinants of Aboriginal Art, and its Role as an Alternative Asset Class,” Journal of Banking & Finance, 35 (2011): 1519–29.
  8. 8. See Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy, “Auctions and the Price of Art,” Journal of Economic Literature, 41/3 (2003): 763–86.
  9. 9. See Christophe Spaenjers, William N. Goetzmann, and Elena Mamonova, “The Economics of Aesthetics and Record Prices for Art since 1701,” Explorations in Economic History, 57 (2015): 79–94.
  10. 10. Lionel Bochurberg and Sylvie Lefort, “Les ventes aux enchères sur l’internet,” Legicom, nos. 21–2 (2000): 136.
  11. 11. See the list of marketing manuals in chapter 8, p. 199.
  12. 12. Raymonde Moulin, The French Art Market: A Sociological View, abridged trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), p. 84.
  13. 13. These criticisms have been advanced by Noah Horowitz, in Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 143–87.
  14. 14. As Taylor and Coleman suggest in “Price Determinants of Aboriginal Art.”
  15. 15. For exchanges to be carried out easily and often, the determination of goods has to be based on stable markers and has to be readily accessible, so as to limit anxiety on the part of actors as to the existence of asymmetries in the information available; see Bruce Carruthers and Arthur Stinchcombe, “The Social Structure of Liquidity: Flexibility, Markets, and States,” Theory and Society, 29 (1999): 353–82.
  16. 16. See Taylor and Coleman, “Price Determinants of Aboriginal Art.”
  17. 17. See Anthony Kuhn and Yves Moulin, “Le rôle des conventions de qualité dans la construction d’un marché: l’évolution du marché philatélique français (1860–1995),” Entreprises et histoire, no. 53 (2008): 54–67.
  18. 18. Jonathan Grant, “The Socialist Construction of Philately in the Early Soviet Era,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995): 476–93.
  19. 19. Hubert Duez, Secrets d’un brocanteur (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 65. For an especially illuminating analysis of the formation of prices in flea markets, see Hervé Sciardet, Les marchands de l’aube: ethnographie et théorie du commerce aux Puces de Saint-Ouen (Paris: Economica, 2003).
  20. 20. See Clifford Geertz, “Suk: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” in Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 123–313. Hernando de Soto shows, similarly, that the myriad micro-enterprises in the suburbs of Lima are distinguishable from capital, in the proper sense of the term, only to the extent that, since their property is not based on institutional and legal arrangements, the revenues that can be drawn from it are entirely dependent on local connections and personal relationships, familial in particular. See Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
  21. 21. To get a sense of the advice given by financial specialists to buyers of art aiming to minimize the tax implications of this type of investment, see for example Ralph Lerner, “Art and Taxation in the United States,” in Clare McAndrew, Fine Art and High Finance: Expert Advice on the Economics of Ownership (New York: Bloomberg Press, 2010), pp. 211–48. For the French case, see Herlin-Giret, “Les mondes de la richesse.”
  22. 22. On the importance that this mode of evaluation has taken on, and on its extension from the evaluation of businesses to that of public investments or even to the calculation of the costs that may be involved in preserving the well-being of future generations, see Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York: Routledge, 2009), especially pp. 147–66. And for a sociological analysis of the processes of capitalization, see Fabien Muniesa, “A Flank Movement in the Understanding of Valuation,” in Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, eds, Measure and Value (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 24–38, and Horacio Ortiz, “Value and Power: Some Questions for a Global Political Anthropology of Global Finance,” in Raul Acosta, Sadaf Rizvi, and Ana Santos, eds, Making Sense of the Global: Anthropological Perspectives on Interconnections and Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 63–81.
  23. 23. See André Orléan, The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [2011] 2014), and, for an empirical application, De l’euphorie à la panique: penser la crise financière (Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 2009).
  24. 24. See Charles Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics and Crashes (New York: Macmillan, 2011).
  25. 25. See Takato Hiraki, Akitoshi Ito, Darius A. Spieth, and Naoya Takezawa, “How Did Japanese Investments Influence International Art Prices?,” The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 44/6 (2000): 1489–514.
  26. 26. See Jeanne Lazarus, L’épreuve de l’argent: banques, banquiers, clients (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2012), pp. 222–5.
  27. 27. See Taylor and Coleman, “Price Determinants of Aboriginal Art.”
  28. 28. If about half (twenty-six) of the fifty Flemish artists viewed as “canonical” at the end of the twentieth century have been famous for 350 years, we must not forget that those in the other half are no longer celebrated as major artists. See Victor Ginsburgh, François Mairesse, and Sheila Weyers, “De la narration à la consécration: l’exemple de la peinture flamande de Van Eyck à Rubens,” Histoire & mesure, 23/2 (2008): 145–76.
  29. 29. See Spaenjers et al., “The Economics of Aesthetics.”
  30. 30. See Moulin, The French Art Market, pp. 143–6.
  31. 31. See Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944–1970 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012), p. 22.
  32. 32. See the ArtPrice annual report, The Art Market in 2014, https://imgpublic.artprice.com/pdf/rama2014_en.pdf.
  33. 33. On auctions as arrangements for reducing the uncertainty about value, especially in the case of collector’s items, see Charles Smith, Auctions: The Social Construction of Value (New York: Free Press, 1989).
  34. 34. For example, by invoking the notion of expenditure, in Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, [1949] 1991).
  35. 35. In Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), a work based on a large number of field studies and written for a broad public by the sociologist Sarah Thornton, one can find a description, very rich on the ethnographic level and very perspicacious, of the major auctions of contemporary art in New York (pp. 1–39). The author stresses the difference between innovative collectors eager to extend and modify the contours of their collections, which pass through the primary market by and large, and collectors who are oriented more toward the accumulation of assets, who turn to the secondary market and to auctions so as to know “with certainty that they’ve paid the market price” (p. 12). Thornton also describes with pertinence the signs that attest to the existence of personal relations among the members of the latter group, for whom major sales also constitute social rituals and occasions to reinforce their bonds.