Forbes.com claims that the Chinese Contemporary Art market was a warning sign for the conduct of the entire Chinese investment economy.
In the contemporary art market, as Forbes detailed a year ago, China’s pay-for-play culture was a perfect match for the self-dealing ethos of the art world. Top Chinese artists were mass-producing paintings in almost assembly-line fashion, selling them directly out of their studios in unknown quantities for up to hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Auction houses were working with lesser-known artists, galleries and dealers to bid up their works and set a good public price for private sales.
Artists routinely paid critics for praise and museums for exhibitions to build up their brands. Want to get prime show space at a top national museum? Artistic merit is nice, but money talks. Want the cover of an art magazine, or a lengthy article inside? That is all for sale–and still is, but presumably at a deep discount now.
The game is up, but for those who got in early enough and got out, the money’s been made. “That whole Chinese collector cartel, it was kind of like a big Ponzi scheme,” says Philip Tinari, an art critic and curator in Beijing. People kept recruiting new buyers to pour more money into the market, driving up prices. “It was quite clear what it was.”
Chinese Art: Tricks of the Trade (Forbes.com)
I am amazed at the faulty writing in the Forbes article. The author obviously has little or no perspective on Chinese culture, history, or artwork in general.
It strikes me as a bit absurd to think that there will not be enough collectors to support a thriving art market in China — a country that is both massive in size as well as population — where the middle and upper classes will, in coming years, dwarf the number found in developed economies. Not only that, but these potential middle- and upper-class collectors will be likely to purchase domestic artists increasingly for both patriotic as well as investment reasons. We are already seeing this happen — as is the case with Macanese and Hong Kong collectors buying Chinese antiquities around the world, in recent auctions like the one held last weekend in Hong Kong, mainland buyers are scooping up works by contemporary Chinese artists. Again, the writer fails to see how cultural characteristics will affect the Chinese art market.
Also, to dismiss contemporary Chinese artwork as a “fad” or a “scam” is in itself ignorant. For Chinese art lovers and collectors, this artwork is a part of their contemporary history and, as such, are just as legitimate as any country’s artwork.
All in all, articles like the one in Forbes are, in my opinion, designed to appeal to people’s emotions as well as the innate bias that many of the publication’s readers may harbor. The fact that the article has no critical merit about the artwork or artists themselves, and just focuses on a “business in China is sketchy — therefore everything in China is sketchy” mindset, I feel, discredits the entire argument and is incredibly ethnocentric. Chinese artists have proven their quality and their merit — they’re in collections around the world. They’re in museums and galleries. They’re published in art compilations. The sell for millions of dollars. So to think that these artists won’t achieve parallel prices as important western artists is, again, ethnocentric and shows a lack of foresight.
Well the commment above is the line that chinese contemporary art dealers have been feeding gullible collectors for the last five years. Dream on, dude, that little game is over!
The point that Forbes missed is that the ‘Western’ contemporary art market, in NY, London, Moscow and Dubai was run on exactly the same lines and is heading South at the same speed.
I think CLBC makes a valid point in terms of the cultural value of art, the financial aspect of it i tend to view as something that should be consider separately from that issue. I, personally, don’t prefer viewing art as an investment. If its a piece that someone likes it should be a piece that is worth whatever someone competing for it is willing to pay and not necessarily because they’ll be able to flip it for a profit. Probably a very naive view point but it makes sense to me when it comes down to purchasing something thats usually just a bunch of relatively inexpensive materials put together. Why buy art at all if theres something to catch-onto when it comes to purchasing a paint on a piece of fabric?
Chinese art sucks. It's all imitations of Western art that's already been done. People are only buying it because it's made by a Chinese person.
Though I would have to agree that there is a lot of unregulated nonsense on the mainland, and will continue to be, this is China for christsake, the place has never been orderly in all of its history, as for artists making work in production lines, get with the times, have you not heard of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons? Why the hell can’t an artist use assistants to help make the art, like saying a film director doesn’t make a movie because he has a crew.
There is lots of nonsense in the mainland art scene, but really there is lots of nonsense everywhere in the world in Contemporary art circles. it is part of the joy of being involved in it. Stop being such haters. Yes, Yue Minjun’s work sucks but lots of rich people by worse art than that the world over.