The reader with an interest in the business and economics of contemporary art should begin with three periodicals: Art & Auction Magazine, ARTnews and The Art Newspaper. Art & Auction magazine is published monthly by Art & Auction LLC in New York. It covers the type of contemporary art sold in major evening auctions. ARTnews magazine is published eleven times a year by ARTnews LLC in New York. It covers art-market news and gallery openings. The Art Newspaper is a tabloid, published in London eleven times a year, a combination of news and industry gossip. All three are widely available at magazine shops, or by subscription.
In my personal view, the most interesting writer on art and business is Souren Melikian, a columnist for Art & Auction Magazine and Paris-based art editor of the International Herald Tribune, where he has written a column for forty years. Melikian is also an expert in Persian art and culture. He curated the well-reviewed Louvre museum exhibition Le Chant du monde: L’art de l’Iran safavide (The Song of the World: The Art of Safavid Iran, 1501–1736. It was curated under his full name, Assadulah Souren Melikian-Chirvani), and opened in October 2007. Melikian is known in the auction and art dealer world as ‘The Phantom’, because no one seems to have his email or phone number. He contacts them, they don’t contact him. I often saw him striding in and out of evening auctions but I was unable to arrange a meeting, one of my great disappointments in the process of writing.
Always informed and readable is the writing of Kelly Devine Thomas of ARTnews, Carol Vogel of the New York Times, Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York’s Village Voice, Anthony Haden-Guest of the Financial Times, and Judd Tully of Art & Auction. My two favourite recent books about art dealing are Richard Feigen’s Tales from the Art Crypt and Adam Lindemann’s Collecting Contemporary.
Richard Caves’ book Creative Industries offers unique insights on the economics of art. Dick Caves is an internationally recognized and highly creative professor of economics at Harvard. He said he had the idea for the book twenty years earlier, but he waited until after his retirement to write it, when his reputation for professional seriousness could more comfortably be placed at risk. His reputation emerged intact.
One of the most innovative economists writing on twentieth-century painting is David W. Galenson at the University of Chicago, whose studies are mentioned several times in the book. Most of Professor Galenson’s work is hard to access – much is available only in working papers published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington. Some of his work is included in a 2006 book, Artistic Capital.
The following suggested reading is related to individual chapters of the book.
Branding and insecurity
Minna Hanninen, Branding: An Examination of Auction House Branding Strategies and Management, London: Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2005.
Robert Lacey, Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, London: Time Warner, 2002.
Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005.
J. H. Duveen, Secrets of an Art Dealer, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938.
Rene Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer (translated from the French by John Rosenberg), New York: Strauss and Giroux, 1966.
Art of the dealer
Jenny Bruckmann, How to Promote Art: Lessons from the Twentieth Century’s Most Successful Dealers, London: Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2002.
Adam Lindemann, Collecting Contemporary, New York: Taschen, 2006.
Art and artists
Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Richard Feigen, Tales from the Art Crypt, New York: Knopf, 2000.
David W. Galenson, Artistic Capital, London: Routledge, 2006.
Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Damien Hirst and the shark
Jonathan Barnbrook, Damien Hirst: Pictures From the Charles Saatchi Collection, New York: Harry Abrams/Booth Clibborn, 2001.
Damien Hirst and Robert Violette (eds), I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London: Booth Clibborn Editions, 1997.
Jerry Saltz, ‘The Emperor’s New Paintings’, Artnet Magazine, 6 April 2005.
Warhol, Koons and Emin
Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, London: Muller, 1989.
Jeff Howe, ‘The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami’, Wired, November 2003.
Robert Rosenblum, The Jeff Koons Handbook, London: Thames and Hudson/Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1992.
Michael Shnayerson, ‘Judging Andy’, Vanity Fair, November 2003.
Kelly Devine Thomas, ‘The Selling of Jeff Koons’, ARTnews, May 2005.
Charles Saatchi: Branded collector
Rita Hatton and John A. Walker, Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, Hong Kong: Ellipsis, 2000.
Andrea Urban, Manipulation and the Contemporary Art Market: An Examination of Charles Saatchi, London: Sotheby’s Institute, 2003.
Choosing an auction hammer
Florence Alexandre, Exploring Different Ways Branding Is Used in the Art World, London: Sotheby’s Institute, 2000.
Judith Benhamou-Huet, The Worth of Art: Pricing the Priceless, New York: Assouline Publishing, 2001.
Helen Kirwan-Taylor, ‘Horror of the Hammer’, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 8–9 July 2000).
Robert Lacey, Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, London: Little, Brown, 1998.
Christopher Mason, The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004.
Auction psychology
Hahn Ahlee and Ulricke Malmendier, ‘Biases in the Market: The Case of Overbidding In Auctions’, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University Working Paper no. 9, 2006.
William Grampp, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics, New York: Basic Books, 1989.
C. Hugh Hildesley, The Compete Guide to Buying and Selling at Auction, New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Helen Perkins, Hammering the Estimate: An Examination of Consumer Behaviour at Auction, London: Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2000.
Francis Bacon’s perfect portrait
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997.
David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Auction houses versus dealers
Roger Bevan, ‘The Changed Contemporary Art Market: Have Auction Houses Tried To Become Dealers Either By Buying Them Or By Behaving Like Them?’, The Art Newspaper (2002), available at theartnewspaper.com
Art fairs: The final frontier
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, Taste Buds: How to Cultivate the Art Market, London: Arts Council UK, 2004.
Lauren Smith, Fair Trade: Art Fairs as a Competitive Strategy for Dealers, London: Sotheby’s Institute, 2005.
Peter Watson, From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market, New York: Random House, 1992.
Art and money
Rand Corporation, Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About The Benefits of the Arts, New York: Wallace Foundation, 2005.
Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick, Money, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back Again, New York, 1975.
Pricing contemporary art
Judith Benhamou-Huet, The Worth of Art: Pricing the Priceless (translated by Charles Penwarden), New York: Assouline, 2001.
Louisa Buck, Market Matters, London: Arts Council England, 2004.
Otto Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Fakes
Dennis Dutton, The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Bruno S. Fry, Art Fakes – What Fakes? An Economic View, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, Working Paper Series, University of Zurich, July 1999.
Art critics
David Galenson, Painting Outside the Lines, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
David Galenson, Who Are The Greatest Living Artists? The View From The Auction Market, Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2005.
Museums
Bruce Altschuler (ed.), Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
James Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc. and Museumworld, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Contemporary art as an investment
Orley Ashenfelter, Kathryn Graddy and Margaret Stevens, A Study of Sales Rates and Prices in Impressionist and Contemporary Art Auctions, Oxford University Working Paper, May 2003.
William Baumol, ‘Unnatural Value: Art Investment as a Floating Crap Game’, American Economic Review, vol. 76, no. 2, 1986.
Walter Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
William Goetzmann, ‘Accounting for Taste: An Analysis of Art Returns Over Three Centuries,’ American Economic Review, vol. 83, no. 5, 1993.
William Landes, ‘Winning the Art Lottery: The Economic Returns to the Ganz Collection, Recherches Economiques de Louvain, vol. 66, 2000.
Michael Moses and Jianping Mei, ‘Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces’, American Economic Review, vol. 92, no. 5, 1992.