The peacock stroll

A recent column published by Artnet discussed a problem of pricing that affects the mid-career artist. Anyone who has known people in the industry for enough time to see the ebbs and flows of careers, will be familiar with the issue of price stagnation and diminished demand. Where a young, hip artist once commanded high prices, the buyers eventually vanish. People stop dishing out increasingly higher prices, or leave them altogether high and dry. To quote the article “As demand plateaus or declines, prices begin to reflect a past that no longer exists. Sales dry up. Buyers move on to newer, younger, more exciting pastures. Galleries stop showing your new work.”

The article goes on to state that gallerists are considering a novel approach to increasing demand: lowering the price of artwork. In many other markets this would seem intuitive, price and demand usually have an inverse relationship. Yet lowering prices in the art world is seen as a “taboo.” There is a reason for this and art isn’t the only industry that this is the case.

 Andy Warhol, Dollar Bill. 1962

The term “Veblen value” describes a good that, as the price goes up, the demand goes up. The consumer usually will interpret the high price relative to similar products as denoting a higher quality. There is another factor to the price/demand correlation and that is that the high priced item signals its owner’s wealth. This correlation works both ways. Brands like Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton never go on sale because they have Veblen value. These brands would rather destroy their un-bought stock than lower the price, because presumably, this would make the brand less desirable. 

Veblen value is named for Thorstein Veblen, a nineteenth and early twentieth century economist who is probably best known for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. This book gave us the term “conspicuous consumption.” The book relays a genealogy and examination of what Veblen calls the “leisure class.” His part in sociological, ethnographic, anthropological study begins with the chieftains of barbaric societies making a display of excess to reassure their people of their power. Then as now, Veblen says “The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.” In modern societies, the upper (leisure) class makes a display of the fact of their wealth with symbols of their leisure and profligacy. What has to be apparent in these displays is evidence of the lack of the necessity for “useful work.” It is also important to demonstrate a pecuniary wastefulness; that is, money is of so little importance to me that I can virtually throw it away on ridiculous things.

Veblen writes that despite beauty being the antecedent of art’s value, the reason artworks are truly valued as trophies is their rarity and price. It is the display of pecuniary superiority and the apotropaic warding off the obloquy of bad taste and low breeding, that attracts the purchaser. There develops a confusion whether the attraction to an article is based on its beauty or its price. He describes the low value of beautiful weeds; a rare hard to cultivate flower of similar beauty demands a high price. Please remember, for Veblen, at the root (pardon the pun) of these flowers' desirability is beauty. Today, beauty in art has become scorned, forgotten and perverted. At any rate, beauty is unimportant to the collector of art. For the collector today, owning an artwork signifies another character of the leisure class, cultivation. 

Art collecting is perhaps, more than anything, a display of cultivation. Like all of Veblen’s examples of the conspicuous wastefulness of the leisure class, cultivation displays the lack of necessity to pursue education and spend one’s time on worthwhile pursuits. Cultivation and taste in art is a signifier of one's economic superiority, because such useless knowledge seems the domain of such a small elite. People employed in useful pursuits would have no time for things that offer so little advantage.

The fact that what passes for taste and knowledge of art is chimerical, based on nothing, is the reason for the collector’s impetuous character. The collector has nothing to base their decisions on, so art collecting becomes a Kabuki theater. Those hoping to signify their cultivation by buying art they neither like nor understand. 

This display of pretend knowledge is the reason for so much ugly and esoteric art. The work people buy must not only differentiate them from people of lower castes who favor such brutish and silly things as beauty, they must also signal their superiority to people of the same class. What happens is an arms race where the most insipid, ugly art becomes incredibly expensive; all those involved are too afraid to admit they don’t get it or like it, convinced that the cultivation required to appreciate such outlandish art is an indication of a truly rarified soul.

When the mid-career artist who was a previous salvo in this arms race finds his work lacking the demand by such trophy hunters, lowering the price might be considered. Although the Artnet piece broaches the subject, it veers away from this very common problem. The piece discusses artists that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to. The piece describes effective pricing for these non-germane examples, but ignores the bulk of the artists that find themselves in the predicament. And this is a life-shaking problem for those who experience it. 

The glaring truth that seems so hard for people involved in the field to countenance is that much of art is only desired because it is desired. It's sophisticated because sophisticated people buy it.  But this sort of tautological value only works as long as it works. When art has been hollowed out of everything besides being an emblem of wealth, nothing remains when the price drops. Lowering the price of the slumping artist usually has the effect of Wile E. Coyote looking down in the Warner Brothers cartoons, the fact that the prices are held aloft by nothing will become apparent and they will plunge.