The Art World’s Elephant in the Room — The New York Times (2018)
Scott Reyburn — September 21, 2018
LONDON — It’s one of the most celebrated graphs ever produced by economists.
The chart, first published in 2013 by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner using data from the World Bank, shows global income gains from 1988 to 2008. The graph climbs sharply on the left, indicating how outcomes improved in the developing world from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession. Further to the right, it shows how equivalent outcomes declined dramatically for the working and middle classes in the developed world, but soared for the planet’s wealthiest 1 percent. This arrestingly unequal pattern of global income distribution has become known, famously (at least to economists), as the elephant graph.
What does this have to do with the art market? Well, pretty much everything. A decade after the fall of Lehman Brothers and Damien Hirst’s era-defining “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction at Sotheby’s, the art market remains one of the most glaringly visible symptoms of global income inequality.
A drawing from the “Tech World Tarot Series” by Mieke Marple, an artist represented by the San Francisco gallery, Ever Gold [Projects]. Credit: Mieke Marple/Ever Gold [Projects]
[The following is an excerpt: full article available here]
And yet dealers and auction houses keep plugging away, coming up with new initiatives and strategies to keep the grass roots of the market alive, if not verdantly green.“I show a lot of emerging artists, and under $20,000 is definitely the harder market,” said Andrew McClintock, director of Ever Gold [Projects] in San Francisco. “It’s always been a struggle.”
But unlike Berlin, the San Francisco Bay Area is awash with tech wealth, some of which is trickling to California’s contemporary art dealers.
Enigmatic drawings of tech-inspired tarot cards by Mieke Marple (who also formerly co-owned Los Angeles’s trendy Night Gallery) are currently among Mr. McClintock’s best sellers in the $3,000 to $10,000 range, he said, adding that younger collectors were encouraged by flexible payment plans and invoices payable in cryptocurrency. “Gallerists need to start thinking of themselves as entrepreneurs, not sit around waiting for a client to walk in the door,” Mr. McClintock said.
