Why is art so expensive?

The short answer is that most art isn’t.

A few living artists — Koons, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama, to name a few — are rich and famous, but most are not and never will be. To break into the market, an artist first needs to find a gallery to represent them, which is harder than it sounds. Henri Neuendorf, an associate editor at Artnet News, told me gallerists often visit art schools’ MFA graduate shows to find fresh young talent to represent. “These shoes are the first arena, the first entry point for a lot of young artists,” he said.
Last week, a 1986 sculpture by Jeff Koons sold for $91.1 million at Christie’s, setting a new record for the most expensive work sold by a living artist. The sculpture, a large, silver reflective rabbit, was purchased by gallerist Robert Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, founder of the Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan, and father of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, on behalf of an anonymous client.

The Koons sale may have set a new record, but bids in the tens — or hundreds — of millions aren’t uncommon in the art world. Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold a pair of paintings by the late Chinese French painter Zao Wou-Ki for $65.1 million and $11.5 million in September. In 2017, “Salvator Mundi,” a long-lost painting thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci that later became the subject of a fringe conspiracy theory, sold at Christie’s for $450 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold. The global art market — which includes gallery, art fair, and auction sales — saw $67.4 billion in sales in 2018, a 6 percent increase from the previous year, according to Art Basel and UBS’s annual report on the global art market.

The sales that make headlines, like that of Koons’s latest record-breaking sculpture, are both increasingly commonplace and, at the same time, an art world anomaly. These sales are driven by a small group of wealthy collectors who pay astronomical prices for works made by an even smaller group of artists, who are in turn represented by a small number of high-profile galleries. Meanwhile, most living artists’ work will never sell in the six- or seven-figure range, and the galleries that represent them are increasingly being left behind.

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