Tag: mercado del arte
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The security of the name
Anyone working in contemporary art acknowledges, though they rarely state it aloud, that the living artist presents a challenge to the institution, whereas the established artist represents a convenience. Not because anyone holds them in contempt, but due to something colder and more difficult to combat: the logic with which a...
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Illuminating the empty room
In little more than twenty years, Málaga has transformed into a city of museums, and this, stated without irony, is an achievement. Where there was once only sun and beach for the visitor, there is now a density of institutions that few Spanish cities of its size can match: the Picasso, the Pompidou, the...
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Three thousand dollars for my book
On 20 July 2026, a federal judge in California granted final approval to the largest settlement to date between authors and an artificial intelligence company: 1.5 billion dollars, approximately three thousand for each book utilised. What was resolved therein is not what is typically reported. It was not determined whether a machine...
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Capital gain without the artist
Consider a young, unknown painter who sells a painting for three hundred euros. Twenty years pass, the painter has established a reputation, and that same work is auctioned for one hundred thousand. Between these two figures lies a vast disparity, a capital gain of nearly one hundred thousand euros that emerged while the work transitioned from...
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Who is accountable for the verdict
The oldest institution of contemporary art will distribute its awards this year by visitor vote. This is neither a citizen participation initiative nor a curatorial experiment: it is what remained when the jury departed and the vacancy required resolution within days. The Venice Biennale has been since…
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The common pool
In September 2019, the cellist Zoë Keating published her figures. Two hundred and six thousand and eleven streams on Spotify that month. Seven hundred and fifty-three dollars. A year earlier, she had accumulated two million streams from two hundred and forty-one thousand listeners across sixty-five countries, and that yielded twelve thousand two hundred and thirty…
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Whose black is it
In 2014, the darkest material ever manufactured was introduced to the world. Known as Vantablack, it was developed by a British firm, Surrey NanoSystems, and is composed of carbon nanotubes so minute and densely packed that light enters between them and virtually never escapes: it absorbs 99.965% of the light it receives. A surface coated with...
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Art that raises the rent
The scene repeats in many cities and is almost invariably recounted in the same manner, as a positive development. A neglected neighbourhood, characterised by vacant premises and low rents, begins to attract artists' studios, small galleries, a festival, and a café with character. The neighbourhood 'revives'. Cultural supplements celebrate the transformation. And a few years later, the...
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What we cannot know about the price
On the invisible boundary between building reputation, manipulating the market, and defrauding. Every so often, a scandal of forgery or fraud traverses the art press and reactivates a comfortable suspicion: that the entire market is a fabrication, that prices are smoke, that behind every figure there is a hand pulling the strings.…
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The Credible Hand
What happens to the value of the handmade when the first thing we ask before an image is where it came from. For centuries, the value of a work was discussed by looking at it. One could disagree on the result, but the question operated on something present: this is what there is, let us judge it. The era of…