neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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auction

At the Wysing Arts Centre just outside Cambridge, I took part in an all-day workshop for artists and students from the Curatorial Course at the Royal College of Art.

It was organized by Kit Hammonds and included Sarah Thornton, and Francis Outred from Christies.

"The Economics of the Art System will take an in depth look at the art market, exploring the financial and cultural economies that drive the industry. From commercial galleries, collectors and art fairs, to the influence of auction houses this retreat will question the value of art as commodity and the commercial influences on artists' practices, as well as considering survival tactics for artists, curators and gallerists."

circulation

I wrote a short text, commissioned by katya Sander for Circulation, a special issue of Printed Projects.

I assembled some of the research I did around art auctions........

Markets are a brilliant bundle of technologies, assembled to circulate things. All kinds of things. The most visible form of market, is the competitive market. A neo-classical economic model of a competitive market, pictures rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest - without regard for others - as the motive force for markets. The laws of supply and demand at play amongst these rational individuals, extrudes the values - often represented by a financial price – exchanged, in any transaction. These fundamental elements; rational agents, supply and demand and price mechanisms function in all markets everywhere; like natural laws.

Except of course competitive markets don’t actually work like this. Or at least, only in ideological models.

Seven Days

I just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. Thornton guides us through seven different days –constructed over a five year research period. Each day is a description of one of the institutional structures that comprise the market for contemporary art: a Christies auction, the famous art school ‘crit’ of Michael Asher, the Basel Art fair, the build-up to the Turner Prize, the offices of Artforum magazine, the corporate studio of Takashi Murakami and the Venice Biennale. A glaring omission is that one of the days was not spent at a contemporary art museum, or even a particular high-end gallery.

Despite the odd inclusion of Asher’s ‘crit’, and Thornton's insistance that "the art world is much broader than the art market," her mapping of an art world, revolves around the highly visible competitive market.

Financialization

“We must try to avoid a vicious circle on which tighter liquidity conditions, lower asset values, impaired capital resources, reduced credit supply and slower aggregate demand feedback on each other.”

I read this quote, a beautifully succinct piece of prose in a paper produced by Paul Tucker, Executive Director and Money Policy Committee Member of the Bank of England, for the Institutional Money Market Funds Association Annual Dinner, in April 2008.

I was researching Auction Houses at the time and trying to keep an eye on financial markets. Of course we have not avoided the vicious circle, in fact we seem to be spiraling into a terrible black vortex.

“One hand, one million dollars, no tears.”

Is the McGuffin or plot device that motivates Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, which I'm reading at the moment. Its an insiders account of the deregulation of the American Mortgage markets in the 1980's and the beginning of the havoc that CDO's and contempt, are visiting upon us now. Liar's Poker was presented in the 1990's as humorous, now it reads as a tragedy; Marx reversed.