The Freakonomics podcast has just published an episode on the economics of the Art Market. Among the interviewees, Amy Cappellazzo, former head of the Global Fine Arts Division at Sotheby's and now founder of Art Intelligence Global, Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Magnus Resch, PhD in Art Economicsand author, inter alia, of "How to be a successful artist" .
These are the key excerpts of Resch's interview. You're allowed to disagree. But don't miss the podcast.
On the Art Market:
....All the players combined — all the galleries around the world, and all the auction houses — their revenue combined is around $60 billion U.S. Let’s put this into perspective. FedEx makes more than $60 billion. And there is FedEx, U.P.S., and so many other companies. So we are really talking about an industry where a lot of people are involved, nobody’s really making money.
On Art Advisors:
.... So art advisor is almost everyone who studied art history and doesn’t know what to do. The role of an art advisor is to have a client and navigate the client through the jungle of galleries and artists and point at artists that the client should buy. There are probably even more than 100,000 art advisor because everyone can call themselves an advisor. I probably know 2,000 art advisors. And of those, maybe three are actually selling works.
On Art as an Investment:
Art is a bad investment. There are only a few artists that are really worth investing in. Nintety-nine point nine percent of the artists that you see at galleries and exhibitions, their value will never increase. The art market has too much supply, meaning there are way too many artists meeting very little demand.