Poisoned Tongues and Chicken Feet: My Sojourn to China’s Rising Kingdom of Contemporary Art
Our dealer-scribe ferrets out the news to be had in the Far East.
As an art lifer, I’ve begun to measure the remainder of my days by how many Art Basel fairs I’ve left to attend. The fifth iteration of Art Basel Hong Kong (or 10th if you include pre-Basel ownership)—together with Beijing’s first Art Gallery Weekend—brought me to China this time around. For the art world, China and the region represents a new constituency with a voracious, unparalleled curiosity and hunger to learn. The military may run the biggest auction house, Poly, but who’s to judge considering what’s happening in the rest of the world? China was recently defined as constituting 20 percent of the art market in the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report by Clare McAndrew (poached from the Maastricht fair) versus 21 percent for the UK and 40 percent for the United States. So, off I went with no clear plans and fewer invitations.
The Song dynasty, from 960 to 1279, was the first government to nationally employ the use of paper money, and begat a blossoming in the support and celebration of the arts. Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) was better known for his poetry and painting prowess than his governing capability, and during his lifetime he accumulated a collection catalogued at 6,000 works. He was the proto-Mera Rubell of the Song. One imagines that if Trump picked up a brush he’d be a more sympathetic character, too; it didn’t do any harm to George W. Bush, now the subject of a best-selling book and an exhibition of his paintings.
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Online Art Market?
How Big Is the Online Art Market? Depends Who You Ask The latest report from Hiscox estimates that the online art market hit $3.75 billion in 2016. Eileen Kinsella , April 26, 2017 Is the change-averse art market finally beginning to embrace the internet? The ArtTactic/Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2017, released this week, describes the online sphere as “a market yet to awaken”. For the fifth year, the analytics company ArtTactic teamed up with the insurance company Hiscox to survey the field. The report is based on responses from 758 art buyers, 132 galleries, and staff from various online art platforms. Despite a relative slowdown in the global art market, the online art market grew by 15 percent, to $3.75 billion, last year, according to Robert Read, head of art and private clients for Hiscox. The online art market’s share of the total art market also grew last year, from 7.4 percent in 2015 to 8.4 percent. While that may seem small, it is roughly equivalent to
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