"I've Seen the Future, and It Belongs to the Dead"

Two separate observers of the art market share the view that the art market's return to life will be led not by emerging contemporary art, but by big brand name dead artists. The fact that they disagree as to which dead artists will save the market is interesting though.

Artnet critic and man about town Charlie Finch predicts it will be "classic contemporary":

What this means for the art market is simple: a steep drop in prices for the work of younger blue chip artists awash in inventory both present and future, and an expanding universe of price appreciation for the limited set of artworks created by those gone by. [...] If the supply is limited and the art tied to a historical movement, dealers’ pockets should soon fill with devalued bucks which they in turn will reinvest in inventory. Let the boom begin!

Editor at large of The Art Newspaper Georgina Adams predicts the ghosts who will save us will have been dead a bit too long to qualify as "contemporary":

But now contemporary art is the most damaged sector of the market, and fields where connoisseurship is still important have come back centre stage. “Old Europe”, with its expertise and long collecting traditions, is suddenly looking stronger and stronger.

Personally, I think it's unwise to bet against the living. There has been an evolution in how quickly human history can change since the dawning of the mass interconnectivity brought on by the Internet and cable news. From the way the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, the budget surplus the Clinton administration led us through became the unimaginable debt-legacy of the Bush administration and the Republican's "permanent majority" evaporated into thin air, to how supposedly "everything changed" one day in September nearly eight years ago, I've learned to stop underestimating how quickly world events can develop these days. The one thing all those unimaginably fast events had in common was that they were initiated and/or accelerated by people who believed in a different (and arguably for them "better") future.

The truth of the matter is I don't know exactly what will spark a resurgence in the living contemporary art market (though I'm not convinced a boom there requires either excessive conspicuous consumption or any of the other postmortem explanations we're seeing for the one that ended last September...in fact I'm not convinced a "boom," per se, is required as much as an education-led expansion into a broader market of informed collectors among those currently not prioritizing art among their steady purchases).

Indeed, I think this particular market didn't crash, but rather merely froze. Most dealers I talk to (mostly my colleagues in the emerging art market) report a slight thaw since January. Whether that's enough to prevent what Mr. Finch described as "the expectation ...that galleries would quietly close for the summer and fold, and just not reopen in September" or not remains to be seen, of course. But if I had to bet on artists (and dealers) of eras gone by or those who believe in the future of art, I'd keep doing what I'm doing and put my money on the living. There aren't going to be too many unimaginably quickly evolving developments among our dearly departed.