All language subtitles for [English] Blurred Lines_ Inside the Art World [DownSub.com]

[dramatic orchestral music]

[slow bass music]

[Announcer] No bailout for Lehman Brothers

meant moving day for most of the firm's 12,000

employees here in New York.

[Man] I'd prefer not to talk about it.

[Interviewer] How long have you worked for Lehman, sir?

You know, I never thought it would come to this.

It's just a tragedy.

[Reporter] The worst financial collapse

since the Great Depression,

and perhaps the end of an era in American business.

[upbeat rock music]

[gavel bangs]

[Auctioneer] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,

a warm welcome to Sotheby's, and this historic sale,

Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside my Head Forever.

[Announcer] When Sotheby's auctioneer Oliver Barker

opened the bidding for an extraordinary 223 new pieces

by the artist Damien Hirst,

it seemed the art market was oblivious

to what was happening to the stock market.

Contemporary art is such a headline everyday

for one reason, money.

Oh, 180 million dollars for a Modigliani,

I mean, it doesn't actually even feel like news anymore.

I think it just highlights more of the haves and have not's,

and the numbers are just huge.

The only thing that is really important

to an artist is making art.

A lot of contemporary art will be in the dustbin

in 10 years time, I think, there's too much of it.

[Paul] The art world, it's really a religion,

it's a belief system, you have to believe in this stuff

for it to become 500,000 pounds.

Is the art market perfect,

and does the cream always rise to the top?

I'd say no.

Everything is an instantaneous reaction,

you need to buy that, buy that, don't buy this,

get into that person's market.

It feels like art is in its golden age.

People love it and appreciate it more than ever.

Five million, 750.

This show was a real vote of confidence

from buyers worldwide, I mean, we had an amazing result

with 181 million dollars sold tonight.

Who gives a fuck, at the end of the day, you know,

about how much something sold for?

Really, is it gonna change your life?

I can assure you of something, art has changed my life,

not an auction result.

["Dangerous" by Big Data ft. Joywave]

[gavel bangs]

[slow piano music]

The question of who's determining

what constitutes contemporary art is actually a

hard question to answer,

because there are many different people who are doing that.

I don't think anyone worries any longer

whether something is a photograph or a painting

or a video or some digital manifestation,

what we think about is, is it meaningful?

Does it convey some kind of impact?

And so all those lines that clearly define

whether something was a print or a drawing

or a painting have long since been blurred.

[upbeat piano music]

♪ I need dollar, dollar

♪ Dollar, that's what I need

♪ Hey, hey

♪ Well, I need dollar, dollar

♪ Dollar, that what I need

♪ Hey, hey

♪ I said, I need dollar, dollar ♪

♪ Dollar, that's what I need

♪ And if I share with you my story ♪

♪ Would you share your dollar with me ♪

♪ Bad times are coming

♪ And I reap what I done sowed ♪

♪ Hey, hey

♪ Well, let me tell you something ♪

♪ All that glitters ain't gold ♪

♪ Hey, hey

♪ It's been a long old trouble ♪

♪ Long old troublesome road

♪ And I'm looking for somebody ♪

♪ Come and help me carry this load ♪

♪ I need dollar, dollar...

[Vicky] Art is really all about money,

though that everyone in the business will try

and tell you otherwise.

[Dr. Iain] It's almost impossible to escape the system.

That's the thing, we live in a commodity driven environment,

people acquire commodities, and that is no different

in the art world.

[Christian] Insanely rich people with a lot

of speculative income, you know, this is one of the places where

that attracts that kind of money.

[Allison] You have so many collectors collecting

because they love art, others, you know,

are into the social competitive aspect of it.

There's bragging rights, I mean, it's trophy hunting

amongst people with a lot of money.

There are more people buying art who don't know

so much about art, and so they don't trust their eye,

and their eye is not very learned,

and so they tend to go with brand names that are familiar

that make themselves feel comfortable.

Much of the art world has been seduced

by this direction, and I think it's very dangerous.

[Taryn] It's the commodification of something

that used to stand outside,

and is now...

fully on the inside.

It's a perfect mirror of our society,

this sort of American Apparel ad version

of the art world is what we're dealing with.

[upbeat jazzy music]

You know, the contemporary art market,

we are talking about significant amounts of money,

and there's no way that anyone could be flippant about that.

[Allison] When you have a lot of rich people

who are trying to prove to everyone how rich they are,

this market gets on fire.

[Iwan] It's become truly global,

it's a parallel world almost now to the real economy.

[Amy] The market is like the weather,

you just have to manage it and like, know how to deal with it,

you can't ask it to go away or not be there.

It's always astonishing to many people

that something that has no intrinsic value

could have these incredibly high, you know, monetary values,

this seems, you know, ridiculous, you know, of course.

[Glen] I remember years ago, probably 30 years ago,

when the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a million dollars

for an old master painting,

it was the front page of The New York Times,

million dollars seemed like a huge amount of money,

today a million dollars for a work

of art doesn't seem extraordinary.

So we're in a moment where there's been a big bump up again

in the amount of money that's being spent on art,

and the prices that works of art are realizing,

but this is not a new phenomenon,

it's just another dimension of an older phenomenon.

It's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

What does it say to you?

It restates the negativeness of the universe,

the hideous, lonely emptiness of existence,

nothingness, the predicament of man

for us to live in a barren, godless eternity,

like a tiny flame, flickering in an immense void

with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation,

forming a useless, bleak straight jacket

in a black, absurd cosmos.

What are you doing Saturday night?

Committing suicide.

What about Friday night?

[Lisa] Right now there's a lot of noise in the art world,

but art is something that's been traded

for a very long time, and patrons of the arts,

commissioning art existed since the time of the Medicis.

[dramatic orchestral music]

[Allison] So a patron model would be like,

what you would have in the renaissance,

where this family would support you

and you would sort of create all your art,

but this requires artists to sort of know a patron,

and to always be in their good graces and please them.

[Michael] If you look at the long history of art

in culture and civilizations and metropolises,

they were always invested in commissioning art,

bringing artists to the center of cities

to make great works that would hopefully last

into the future.

It certainly used to be, in Manet's time,

that the collector was, in a certain sense,

beholden to the taste of Manet,

to the genius of this particular artist.

And he was almost sort of a supplicant before an artist.

Most of us have this, still have this 19th century image

of art, which is that art is about beauty.

Somewhere in the 20th century, it became contemporary,

it became abstract,

it was not necessarily beautiful,

and you had to work out your own meaning.

[slow jazzy music]

I love these, I mean--

These are kind of cool.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind having one of these in my house.

Nooses of neon.

I mean, what even is neon, it looks like liquid.

What it is, it's an inert gas that.

Some of my friends in the diamond business loved art,

but they were loving a different art to me,

it was an artist called Warhol,

it was an artist called Keith Haring,

and they're all buying these for nothing, you know,

and I said, "I wouldn't have that trash on my walls."

I remember, it was an exhibition of electric chairs,

he showed me around, and I said, "Well, how much is that?"

He said, "Well, that's one and a half million,

"and that's two million," I said,

"You're kidding, I don't believe this."

I could buy a Renoir,

or I could buy an impressionist painting.

He said, "Well, you know,

you should really get involved in this."

[upbeat jazzy music]

By the early '80s, really, things exploded here,

where a new generation of American artists came

to the fore, people like Julian Schnabel

and David Salle, and then little by little,

the world became broader and more global,

and the boundaries, really, just were broken down

so that there is no more simple center of the art world,

and pretty much the market follows.

[Paul] Contemporary art, for the first time, really,

in history, has been enormously popular

amongst a very wide demographic, a global audience

that is leisurely, that has access to like, easy travel,

and has an appetite and wants to have a bit

of this sort of lifestyle, actually.

If you bought this painting behind you,

this Bacon, even 15 years ago,

it was around three million dollars.

We're now offering it with an estimate

of 75 million dollars, that shows the huge potential

that's built into this art, and it will continue to rise.

[Alan] The art market of the moment is never a perfect gauge

of who is going to be recognized

for making a long-term contribution

20 and 30 years from now.

[rhythmic drumming]

[gavel bangs]

[Sarah] The key thing that any artist wants is validation.

Validation comes in many different ways,

and the first stamp of approval is often the art school.

So coming from the right art school.

That could be UCLA, it could be Yale, it could be CalArts,

it could be the Royal College in London.

A provincial art school where nobody actually even

attends the degree show is unlikely

to have the same impact as one with an art world nearby.

An artist, yeah, if they're successful,

it's like becoming a movie star, you're rising through the ranks.

You know, you start out of school,

a lot of them do master's degrees in fine arts.

[Sarah] And then being picked up by a dealer,

a credible one, and often, a younger, smaller dealer,

one known for having a good eye for emerging talent.

Being put in a group show, let's say,

by a curator who's seen to be going places.

Being put in a biannual, not just like the big biannuals,

but something like Made in LA,

which is the Hammer Museum's biannual.

Then you'll have a solo show, then you'll move up

through the different tiers of galleries.

[Don] And at some point you got taken on by day auctions,

and then evening auctions, and you sold well,

and so you became a regular at evening auctions.

[Auctioneer] Sold, 600,000.

[applause drowns out speaker]

[Sarah] You usually want all of these things to get put in play,

and all of these qualitative endorsements

to take place before a spectacular,

crude, financial one.

$8,000 with Laura.

Thank you guys.

[crowd cheers]

Thank you, back, double O94,

that was sorted, there it is, to you, sir.

$170,000.

Thank you, sir.

[crowd cheers]

[Christian] Art is supposed to be critical,

and it's supposed to be critical socially and culturally.

When the North Star is money, then the headline is,

you know, how many zeros are attached

to a particular work of art.

That criticality sends a fall away pretty quickly.

[overlapping chatter]

[Announcer] Damien Hirst is no stranger

to celebrity or to controversy.

The bad boy of British art is in line

for the biggest payday for any living artist ever.

[Don] You saw Damien Hirst in 2008

in a much reported event, bypassing his dealers

and taking 200 of his works directly to auction, and saying,

"I don't need the branded auction house anymore."

That was described as the sum of all fears for auction houses.

[Sarah] At that time, he probably

became the most famous living artist in the world.

["Fame" by David Bowie]

[Don] Hirst was the most significant artist, post-Warhol.

He had the sense of the back-story to art,

that art was not what it was,

but it was what you thought it was, it was what you saw.

Hirst is a really remarkable character,

and I think a remarkable artist.

And if you look back to 1991,

it's amazing what he produced in that year.

The formaldehyde shark, a butterfly room,

all sorts of sheep and other mammals,

his cabinets with pharmaceutical boxes in them.

He also had fun playing with the media,

he was a certain kind of enfant terrible.

His work plays perfectly into the game

of trying to do things that will push the envelope.

[Laurence] I think he was transparently involved

in the market for structural reasons,

he was critiquing the market,

and that was the reason for his work.

Hirst produced the 12 million dollar stuffed shark.

This shark was about life and death, when you look at it,

the shark looks alive when it's dead,

dead when it's alive, it reminds you

of the end space between life and death,

it reminds you of your mortality, 12 million dollars.

["Fame" by David Bowie]

[moves into slow ambient music]

I really like Damien when he first started exhibiting.

He was an artist who was making work that looked

like work that had never been presented before.

Over time, the subject matter kind

of got replaced with money.

I don't think about what things cost, I just don't.

As the work has commanded higher prices,

I have been able to make choices that feel more autonomous.

At this point, I can keep those things extremely separate

from what I do.

The only thing that is really important

to an artist is making art,

and it's sort of a privileged,

lucky thing that actually, I mean, I'm always surprised

when I actually could pay for dinner.

♪ Everybody knows that the days are loaded ♪

♪ Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed ♪

♪ Everybody knows the war is over ♪

♪ Everybody knows that good guys lost ♪

♪ Everybody knows the fight was fixed ♪

♪ The poor stay poor

♪ The rich get rich

I was alone a lot when I was a kid,

and it always seemed that I was able to draw,

so I was an artist since I was a child,

I mean, I never really was gonna be anything else.

Everything I've got to say is in my paintings,

the rest of this is just, you know, chit chat.

My father said to me, "How come you painted her eyes out?"

And I said, "So you'd look at her chin."

I mean, the guy's a genius, but by being a genius,

he's been a genius at too many things,

from being a businessman, a property developer

to a filmmaker to a painter. If he will have just stayed

as a painter, he could have been one

of the best painters in the world.

I probably paint like a jazz musician,

I know where to begin but I don't really have necessarily

an idea of how the thing's gonna turn out.

He went off focus making movies,

and all this sort of thing, great,

but as an artist, as a painter, if he's just stayed with that,

everybody would know who he is and what he does.

Obviously I've had some success in my life,

and there have been other moments where people

kind of forgot about whatever I was doing.

You have a good sized ego.

It's been said, definitely.

There's nothing wrong with having a big ego.

No, but you know, would you ask Marlon Brando

if he had a big ego?

Probably.

I mean, you know, you have a big ego?

No, not me.

I'm sure you do.

I remember Clement Greenberg saying to me

at an airport in 1982, "Early success never lasts."

I said, "Well, how could I listen to you, I'm a kid."

[laid back music]

[Sarah] He's not the greatest editor of his work.

A lot of male artists just like to get bigger and bigger

and bigger, and it doesn't necessarily get better.

It's interesting, it's very hard

to find a woman artist who does that.

[intense electronic music]

[Marina] To be a performance artist these days,

you have to be a warrior,

you have to kind of fight for your territory

and you're to conquer your territory.

I have such a strange position in art,

because, you know, I have been a few times

in the number one, number two of the top list

of other art reviews in England,

but at the same time, I uh, you know,

my work doesn't sell that much, and would never probably sell,

because people can't really place me on the art market

because they don't know what I'm actually doing

with, is the performance, which is some kind

of immaterial form of art,

how you can actually put the value on this?

[intense electronic music]

[Christian] Her career has managed to

blossom through spectacle.

Portals of naked people at MOMA

and folks passing through them, you know,

is a significant way to scare up interest.

[Marina] I think that good pieces of art

have to have so many layers of meaning,

and the different societies can take always one layer

as they need it at the time.

So that good pieces of art can have long life,

and can always kind of come back and come back.

And the ones who just in the moment, you know,

popular or fashionable, they have very short life,

and this is, what is there to say?

[Christian] And she's become very good at grabbing headlines

and basically making herself into a celebrity.

You know, the artist as celebrity,

that has happened with Marina Abramovic.

[Marina] It is really important in moment of an artist

to know when to stop and how to die.

It's as important as living.

[intense electronic music]

It's very sad story that if you sell something

for, I don't know, 155 million,

you never could see this painting anymore

in its true value, because everything you're going

to always look is this money which somebody paid.

Like, soap was something that people

with more sensitive skin would use,

so I started thinking about this idea of sensitivity.

And then it became an art material,

a material for me to molest and participate with,

draw with, melt it down in these large vats.

And then as you poured it onto a surface,

it would begin to harden, and you'd have this opportunity

to scrawl in it, change it, redirect it,

and I thought of it as almost creating a new topography,

like a landscape.

I try to be patient as an artist,

I try to make what I feel like I need to make.

And once I get into, you know, this room, everything

that is outside of this space

no longer has significance to me.

It's not about what people want,

what people are gonna say about it.

I honestly don't feel a lot of pressure.

[rhythmic drumming]

[Taryn] My work is produced, created, conceptualized,

everything, in a vacuum, it's truly me and my studio,

and that's it. There are no outside voices

until the work is made,

and it's always been that way for me.

[upbeat electronic music]

[Jeff] There's always a lot of confusion with my work,

where people think I am making a critique, and I'm not,

I'm making an acceptance of ourselves and our own history.

[upbeat electronic music]

[Don] Koons is the most expensive living artist

at auction the world has ever known.

He produces beautiful things, he would today qualify

as the best art marketer of any artist in the world.

[Sarah] There are moments of real genius in his work.

I love the equilibrium series, which is the work,

where we have the basketballs floating in tanks.

His basketballs, pieces that are some

of my favorite art ever,

I think that some of the coolest objects ever made.

He has made an art of acuity,

and it's not just any acuity.

It's the kind of acuity that is perfectly filled,

filled to the brim

with notions of financial value.

His work is the kind of thing

where the first reaction I have is, okay, next?

There's nothing deep there.

Certain of his series have tended to become trophies

of a particular class of people,

and that...

status tends to override their other meanings.

[Don] Jeff Koons has a series which is based

on Popeye and Olive Oyl, you may remember,

Popeye was a cartoon character in the '50s.

Koons produced a series of sculptures,

because he said that the transformative power

of spinach on Popeye is the same

as a transformative power of contemporary art on the buyer.

One of these comes up for auction

and it's purchased on a single bid by Steven Wynn

for 28 million dollars.

Two weeks later, it pops up,

it's got a price tag on it,

for sale, 60 million dollars.

It went from 28 million dollars to 60 million dollars

in 14 days, not a single art world reporter editorialized

on this and said, "This is insane."

The world has reached a point where that's accepted,

it's insane, but it's interesting.

[upbeat electronic music]

For me, it's all about the future,

it's about becoming, and I want to become the artist

that I can become.

It's hard to not think about Koons' work

in relationship to the people who own it,

and it's almost like provenance has overtaken the work.

You know, whether his work will be revered 50 years from now,

I have no idea,

but he's a great art marketer.

[camera shutters click]

The kind of work that Damien Hirst makes,

that Jeff Koons makes, is celebratory of,

you know, the big sloshing money pit

that the art market has become.

Each of them are what I would call a production artist.

Rather than work alone in a studio making things

and limiting their production by what they can master

with their own hands, they have teams of people

that make things for them.

Sometimes, if you're not in control of it

or you lose control of it, or you lose a sense of scale,

you can put too much out there.

What matters is the work, if the work is interesting,

how it got to be made isn't necessarily questionable.

In renaissance times, they had helpers, apprentices,

all that matters is what the work's like,

how it gets to be done is, well, it's not what you see,

you see the result of how it was done.

They mean nothing except money.

[laid back oldies music]

[gavel bangs]

You know, it's really, really hard when you're a dealer,

because you do have the responsibility

to take on an artist and help build their career.

[Narrator] They're really wanting to support artists,

they're wanting to actually help artists to get along.

The gallery owners, 90% of them,

all about making a profit.

[Almine] A gallery makes a living for the artist first,

and makes a living for the gallery staff second,

and activates the whole energy of creation.

They have to take care of museums.

Top collectors that support their gallery.

Top collectors that support their artists.

I think they've got a really tough job to do,

because they can't please everybody,

yet they're asked to do that.

[Vicky] The people who are selling the art,

they all have this gloss, this incredible veneer

of intelligence and academia and respectability.

They often speak five languages,

they may have, you know, very exotic sounding last names,

and it's all part of the gloss that goes with the paintings,

but it is just that, a gloss covering up something

that is much less attractive.

The dealer still is the one who is holding the key

at the primary level to the artist.

Primary market refers to a painting being bought

for the first time, and that is probably the most opaque

of all of them, because dealers really want

to make sure they're under complete control of the price,

and that's really, in part,

to make sure prices never go down.

So what they do is they just make sure no one ever knows

what anything is bought for.

[Jeff] They're not transparent about prices,

because if they're not, well then,

if you walk until a store after I walk into a store,

they can quote you twice as much as they quote me.

The reason they tell me they don't put the prices front

and center is that the artists want the art

to be looked at as an exhibition,

and secondarily as a sales opportunity.

Art is strange insofar as who owns it impacts

on its meaning and reputation.

Primary dealers are very careful about

where they place the work, because they know

that that owner will either enhance

or detract from the credibility of the artist.

The whole success of this enterprise relies

on the aura and the glamour and the mystique,

and the apparent inaccessibility of this world.

[Sarah] They're in the business of selling art,

so you would think they'd have someone standing

in front of the desk welcoming you to the gallery

and asking if you'd like to speak to a salesperson,

or learn more about the art, but there is an aura

that galleries want to project, and a mystique.

I hope that here we're not guilty,

I mean, it's a common criticism of galleries.

I hope that we're not guilty of that.

[Sarah] If you're new to the game and you've got a pile

of posters on your wall, and you've just come

into a quick bit of money, and you're like,

"I'm gonna buy a real painting for the living room."

You may not find yourself first in line

for a much coveted artist's work.

The clever dealers will deliberately make it tricky

for you, you're gonna overpay if you're just thrilled

to be at the table.

Listen, I've been a dealer,

I understand why these things are done, you want,

you know, your artist's work to wind up at MOMA,

and if a trustee walks in, you know,

you'd rather the trustee at MOMA have the artwork,

'cause it stands a better chance of basically being

in the museum, than somebody from Boise.

But that doesn't make it any more right.

[Taryn] When you buy a luxury home or you buy a yacht.

You know who owned the home or the yacht before it,

you know what they paid.

The middle man, the brokers, whatever the call themselves,

dealers, art advisers, often are very secretive

about where they got the art from, and what the cost was.

[Allison] No one ever really knows what art is worth,

especially if you have an emerging new artist,

so if price goes down at all,

everyone is worried the whole market

for this artist will just collapse,

and they'll never work again, and they will go

to great lengths to manipulate the market.

[Christian] A dealer may decide that, you know,

his youngest contemporary artist needs a, you know,

a price bump, and they will basically take a work

to auction, and bid it up, and you know,

between the collectors and the dealer, or several dealers,

they will build a price up to whatever amount,

and buy it amongst themselves.

It narrows the market, remember,

many an artist has been burned by prices

that go up too rapidly, and one day they wake up

in the morning and their market has disappeared.

[David] You know, you're seeing artists being cannibalized

by the art market. Certain galleries

that are so corporatized, the idea that some

of these larger galleries are picking

up extremely young artists and sort

of inflating their markets at such a rapid pace.

It's scary, it's a scary, scary thing.

[upbeat guitar music]

Who is Larry Gagosian?

He doesn't want you to know, [laughs] I can tell you that.

One of the uber dealers, the uber dealer,

and I think there isn't really a comparison

to be made with anybody else.

He sells about a billion one of art a year,

that's three million dollars every business day.

Most important dealer the world has ever known.

I think of Larry a little bit like I do

of the auction houses, they're in another world.

Gagosian believes that artists are heroes,

women artists, men artists, but the,

making a great artist in heroic practice,

and that's what interests him.

If your intention is to stay connected to your artists,

then it must be incredibly difficult

if you have three, five, 10 galleries across the globe.

[Vicky] He knows who the right collectors are,

who the right artists are, and how to bring it all together.

You know, the art world doesn't really operate without him.

[upbeat guitar music]

I have known Larry since we were both agents

at the William Morris Agency together when we were kids.

He left the agency to go sell posters

in Westwood for UCLA students.

Larry has taken a model that we used at CA,

which is to represent a larger talent pool

to give that talent pool leverage,

and in order to do that,

he needs a lot of facilities to show the art.

[upbeat rock music]

His galleries have more floor space

in total than the Tate Modern in London.

[Sarah] He started out in LA, he went to New York,

he went to London, Athens, and Paris,

and Hong Kong,

and I think he had outposts for awhile in Moscow.

He's so unique in the sense that he has over 70 artists

on his books, most of them are actually solely represented

by him, he has a group of collectors who buy exclusively

from him, he has relationships

with every single major museum in the world,

he is an ecosystem in his own right.

[Christian] He is a major player, he is also something

of a significant enigma.

[upbeat rock music]

[Lisa] I know there's this mystique around Larry,

everybody wants to do the definitive film on Larry,

right, the definitive book on Larry.

He hasn't cooperated in any way, shape, or form,

and this is a story that we're not gonna be able

to tell, I don't think, for another 50 years.

If you're the middle man, which is what Larry Gagosian is,

what upside is there in sitting around,

discussing how you operate?

Very little, I would imagine, because his clients don't want

to read exactly what percentage he took,

and they would probably have a heart attack.

[slow piano music]

[Glen] Curators are involved in what they want to do,

which is to look at what interests them,

and think about whether or not there's a way

of making that interesting to a public.

Dealers look at it and think differently,

can they commercialize it, can they find a way to sell it?

And I don't want to reduce dealers simply

to being merchants, because a lot of dealers really believe

in their artists, and they believe in the mission

of trying to ensure that there's a public for those artists.

[Lawrence] I think Larry is extremely important

to the art world,

he's done amazing things and he's done incredible shows,

but it's not who I emulate, I'm just not interested in that.

That part of the business.

Albert Oehlen was an artist that we started

to show when we had a gallery in Los Angeles,

he was a wonderful, wonderful person,

wonderful artist to work with, and he said

that he was going to leave the gallery,

and went to Gagosian.

This certain artists like something

that Larry offers that we don't,

Larry has a private jet, he can pick Albert up

in his home in Switzerland and bring him to London

with his wife, it was tough, it was devastating,

because there was no issue that he could allude to.

It was no bad business, but I think he was looking

for something else that we couldn't provide him.

Which is something that I don't feel regret,

I don't mind that I don't have a private jet, if that's

what he needs, then he needs to go to another place.

If I spent my time deciding which people were able

to buy my work, I think I would probably commit suicide.

Choosing a gallery for me was all about relationships,

how you deal with people.

David Kordansky is a gallery I started working with

when I was a younger artist and he was a younger dealer,

and we kind of grew up together.

He nor I knew what we were doing,

we just kind of were doing it.

And, you know, I loved David like a brother, and

he loves what I do,

and I love that he helps facilitate what I do.

I know this isn't the story that a lot of artists have

to tap about galleries, there's a long history

of galleries taking advantage of artists,

doing things that weren't in the artist's best interests,

and honestly, I haven't talked to my gallery as much

about the prices of work in years, we talk about art.

I'm not a car salesman, you know, I'm a gallerist,

and there're individuals within the gallery

that are more than happy to make deals and close deals, so.

[Adam] An artist has to be bigger

than any gallery they might show at, or might have shown at,

you know, art is bigger than that, you know.

Galleries fade, you know, they go out of business,

dealers die, but you know, we still look at the Mona Lisa.

Do you think when the artist painted this,

he ever thought it would go for such a ridiculous price?

I mean, what is it, it's just some paint,

brushes, some cheap canvas, what's the big deal?

[sighs]

It's shit, what do you want for it?

Three million.

Done.

Done.

Art's an intellectual, fascinating subject.

Money should have nothing to do with it,

but today, unless you've got a lot of money,

you can't buy art.

[gavel bangs]

[Michael] I was 17 and a half years old,

graduated high school,

had never been, believe it or not, to New York City.

When I was going through MOMA and seeing the master works

that were there, the depth and the breadth

of what they were showing from the turn

of the century forward, it just pretty much put me

into a state of cultural shock.

[Laurence] You know, to be a collector today

is the most difficult thing imaginable,

it's become such a huge, I'll say "industry," if I may,

in my earlier days it was intellectual, it was solid,

there wasn't too much art about,

it was an honor to buy something,

an honor to see something before the contemporary madness.

Today it's very difficult to be a collector,

and the reason why it's difficult,

it's so easy to make a mistake.

[Valeria] Every collector has a path of its own,

my long term is to create a collection

that is something worth more than the sum of its parts.

I like to look in direction that people are not looking at.

This is what I do, I don't want to join the herd of,

you know, and say, "Me too, I want it, too."

I do constantly acquire, but I have to discipline myself

on the amount that I acquire, because it could be endless.

People talk about collecting as if it's a virus,

you catch it and it's addictive,

or you can't get rid of it, there's no known cure.

There's not a month that goes by

that I don't seem to acquire something.

[Larry] I do love collecting art, in some strange way.

I wish I collected pictures of art instead

of the actual art itself.

[Andrea] I would say most collectors, there's a part

about contributing to society and culture,

and there's a big part about this idea

that I may be really successful in this life,

but my life is mortal, and what is this thing

that's going to immortalize me,

and that's a really important, you know,

significant component of collecting, too.

I've been in art and am in art because I love it,

but the flippers couldn't care less about an artist,

about an art, it's all about making a profit.

Well, contemporary art is one of those markets

which does attract collectors, but also speculators.

There's a term called flipping,

which is not a very attractive term,

but people do turn over works on a more regular basis

than they do in other markets.

No one should want a buyer who is buying art purely

as an investment,

no one should want a buyer who is thinking

about how quickly he can flip the art.

It is not in the artist's interest.

No, I'm not at all interested in the speculators.

But I like real collectors, I like to place work

into collections that are stable.

In my life, I don't sell, but, you know,

they say, what, they say, "Death, debt, and divorce."

So, you know, maybe, you know, I hope none

of these happen to me.

[upbeat electronic music]

I do make it clear to all the galleries

that I work with that I hope they're selling the work to,

you know, quote good people, that means that,

you know, six months later it's not gonna be going

to the auction block where, in my argument,

I would say it doesn't belong.

It deserves to be in the home of someone who's going

to take care of it. You never really own it,

it always belongs, in my mind, to the artist.

You're a caretaker, you're a steward, if you will.

It's a great responsibility,

so I say that to my dealers,

you know, don't sell to people who don't understand that.

[Christian] There is a distinction to be made

between collectors and buyers, and unfortunately,

the age in which we are,

we're seeing these developments is the age of the buyer.

It's the age of cats with lots and lots of money,

that they don't know what to do with.

[Amy] Every couple of years

ushers in a new group of collectors,

American hedge fund billionaires.

A new crop of Hollywood people,

I remember when all the minerals people came in,

then there was the Middle Easterners

and the Qatari royal family.

There's always a new crop coming in.

[Christian] How often, the kind of taste that they develop,

with that kind of money, well, in fact, it doesn't develop.

Well, I tell you, sometimes I go into a collector's home

and I think, shit, they really need a consultant.

The art consultant is like a shrink,

they know what kind of art their clients like,

or they train their clients as to what art they should like.

[Christian] They're folks who basically act

as the eyes and ears,

more often the ears than the eyes, of buyers and collectors.

They hear that so and so bought, and Stevie Cohen has.

That's part of the great herd mentality of the art world.

It's become a global asset class,

it has aggregated the wealthiest patrons

and art aficionados from around the globe,

new people coming in the art market, in particular,

would demand a different level of service,

or transparency, or knowledge, or expertise,

given the amount of capital that's flown in.

Art moves very quickly now, and you really need

to be on the ball, and to be following it all the time.

It can be handy to have someone who's helping you.

[Sarah] If I were looking for a consultant,

I would make sure it was someone who is not a dealer,

did not have inventory, and did not buy

or invest in art themselves.

I don't want them taking the A painting

and then selling off B plus paintings to all their clientele

in order to make sure that artist market moves,

that happens.

[Laurence] I've been in art and am in art because I love it.

But unfortunately, you may like it today

and may not like it tomorrow, because your taste changes.

[Auctioneer] Sir, 969, thank you.

[Amy] They don't make many masterpieces.

When you trip upon one,

you'll likely do more extraordinary things to get it.

[upbeat rock music]

[gavel bangs]

The same art in different locations

can mean very different things.

[Allison] Getting your painting in the Guggenheim really sort

of is gonna up your value and up your brand.

That's an amazing stamp of approval.

[upbeat rock music]

One of the really important roles that public institutions

still have is to ensure that they're not just speaking

to the very, very tiny number of people

that are so wealthy that they're able to buy art.

But they're also reaching those hard to reach audiences.

And I think it's why artists still consider institutions

to be the most prestigious context for their work,

because it makes it influential and important.

[Paul] If I'm not mistaken, he painted this,

this marvelous portrait of his French mistress,

Madeleine Pressuit, in the '20s.

Paul, I'm gonna have to differ with you on this one.

Really?

Gil, Gil, just pay attention, you might learn something.

Okay, well, if I'm not mistaken,

this was a failed attempt

to capture a young French girl named Adrianna from Bordeaux,

if my art history serves me, who came to Paris

to study costume design for the theater,

and I'm pretty sure she had an affair with Modigliani,

then Braque, which is how Pablo met her, Picasso.

Of course, what you don't get

from this portrait is the subtlety in her beauty,

she was just a knockout.

What have you been smoking?

[Alan] Today,

as the price of art continues to rise dramatically,

the museum is competing with collectors around the world

with extraordinarily deep pockets.

[Vicky] It's a much more complicated job for them

than it would have been, say, 30 years ago,

when all they had to really worry

about was gosh, wouldn't it be nice

to get that particular painting into the museum,

can I go and now take the owner out to lunch?

You know, it's a business.

[Don] No museum that I know of,

no major museum,

makes money on its visitors.

MOMA's figure is that,

if you take their total cost structure and divide it

by the number of visitors, the average visitor costs them

about $50.00, and they pay 15 to 20 to get in.

So they've got to make up the difference somewhere,

and the somewhere are donors.

[slow jazzy music]

[Sarah] The best museums are not dictated

by any particular board member,

and it takes a very strong museum director

for that to happen.

[Michael] Well, a lot of people ask about,

is there a tension between a donor

that has a particular point of view,

and is it aligned or misaligned

with the organization of the museum?

First of all, you have to understand

that without donors, there aren't museums,

so we deal with all of it in its complexity.

Money always comes with a demand.

Leon Black goes and buys, you know,

what is essentially not a great piece of art, you know,

Munch's The Scream, it's emblematic,

but it's not a particularly great piece of art.

At the time it was, you know, the most expensive work

of art, I think it was 2012, and you know,

almost immediately, it's on view at MOMA.

Now, that's fairly unheard of,

and that's basically somebody setting an agenda.

The board of MOMA is not there

because of their art expertise,

but they're there on a give, get,

or get out fundraising basis, and that's true of most

of the major museums in the western world.

If we don't support the arts, then,

you know, there's no reason to continue on.

[Christian] The role of the museum has changed,

in that they're dignifying the appeal.

On the one hand, you appeal to the big,

you know, hedge funds types, they're basically sort

of beyond the board, then, on the other hand,

you go after, you know, mass cult,

that way you assure the world and you assure yourself

that you are not only the richest,

but the most popular kid on the block.

[Glen] Every day you have to make your case

to someone or some group of people,

or to the government, or to a corporation,

about why you exist, why it's important that you exist,

why it's important you do what you do.

I think the thing that's complicated is

that there's like a hybridity

between the commercial art world and also the other bit

of the art world, the public sector or the institutional,

this contributes towards a sort of,

an increasing commercialization

and privatization, if you like,

of what were previously purely public institutions.

People buy works of art,

they give them away occasionally,

they pass them on to their heirs, who keep them for awhile,

but eventually,

most art of significance makes its way

to some kind of public institution.

If you look back over the 20th century

and you think about all of the great museums

in this country, the Frick, the Huntington,

the Clark Art Institute, the Morgan.

They're all museums that were created

by individuals who left their collection,

essentially, to the public.

A new generation of extraordinary wealthy people

are looking to do just the same thing.

Now, some people might say they're not motivated

by the same kind of altruism that Frick was motivated by,

but I don't know what kind of altruism Frick was motivated by,

I know that at the end of the day,

he created an institution and left his collection

to that institution, and we're all the better for it.

[abstract piano music]

[gavel bangs]

[upbeat dance music]

An evening auction at Sotheby's and Christie's

is the pinnacle of the art world.

500 people go, four even bid, the others are there to be seen,

they're part of a theatrical performance,

and the auction house has them as evidence

of what an important spectacle this is.

[intense electronic music]

The top of the auction row is Christie's and Sotheby's,

it's a duopoly.

They compete largely with each other.

You have Phillips in there, but saying I bought a work

at Sotheby's is different than saying,

"Come over to my house,

I'd like to show you something I bought at Phillips."

They compete for iconic works, the works that are on the cover,

the works that are discussed in The New York Times,

'cause that's what brings people in,

and that's what brings other consignments in.

[Announcer] This Warhol portrait

of Liz Taylor is another highlight

of the season going under the hammer this week.

The auction house is optimistic about business this season.

So far it's been very good, the market is strong,

it's become a completely global market,

because you have buyers from all over the world

that are participating in these auctions.

Our catalogs are gonna be big and scholarly and juicy,

and we're going to bring the highest values we can

to the presentation of art and the selling of art.

[Jean] We're the only auction house where you can bid live

on the phone, that's how we're trying

to stay ahead of our competitors.

The competition between the major auction houses,

which was always intense, is even more intense

than it's ever been.

[Vicky] Christie's has certainly dominated in recent years,

its auctions have garnered,

by far, the biggest sums of money.

Sotheby's has, you know, really suffered.

[camera shutter clicks]

[Narrator] Amy Cappellazzo

had an art agency called Art Agency Partners.

The principle reason that Sotheby's paid

50 million dollars was

because they urgently needed intelligence in-house.

Amy Cappellazzo, who was an absolute high flyer,

known as a consummate deal maker

with a lot of very powerful clients.

[Vicky] They definitely needed her Rolodex,

they needed somebody with that kind of star power.

[Sarah] And Allen Schwartzman,

who was one of the best reputed

art consultants in America.

Well, it is a kind of small, gossipy, cliquey world,

I suppose, so maybe people just wanted to talk about that.

I don't know, the art market isn't a market

or a world that's had a lot of acquisitions.

So in other industries it wouldn't be near as seismic.

Most of the amazement about the deal

was not the people they acquired,

who are at the top of the art world, but the numbers,

and it remains to be seen how that will play out.

[Amy] The auction houses were these old, wholesale businesses

for years and years,

and then they became more retail operations

where they were selling directly to collectors

and having direct kind of influence on collectors,

and helping with bill collections,

and really being the arbiters of the marketplace.

[Alan] Often the auction market drives the prices sky high,

because people who don't have access to it

from the primary dealer, it's their way of buying.

[Dr. Iain] What the auction house does best

and will always do is make price transparent.

So, you know, we don't know

what secondary market sales take place

in the dealer market, we don't know the values,

but the auction house will always make those prices clear

to everybody. So that's an eternal function, without that,

the market is so opaque that nobody knows what's going on.

I mean, when something sells at auction,

that's one of the few transparent moments

of price

in the art market.

The auction world likes to present itself

as cleanly transparent, as the place where you know

what real prices are, but that's not actually the case.

[Vicky] These days, if you go into an auction

to bid on a piece of contemporary art,

and you don't understand, once the bidding is underway,

what's going on at auction,

you're the sucker who's being played,

because everything around you is completely rigged.

[Don] There are things like chandelier bidding at auctions.

[Sarah] Well, chandelier bidding

is when there is no bidding going on in the room at all,

but the auctioneer takes bids from the chandelier,

that's because he's bidding up to the reserve price,

and so if the reserve is one million dollars,

he may start the bidding at $700,000

and try to create momentum, and if you're

on the phone or you're watching on video,

you may not realize that there is no real bidding going

on in the room at all.

Should that be revealed, should the reserve be disclosed?

If it was, you'd simply start the auction

at the reserve price, is anybody harmed by this?

[Vicky] Very occasionally,

situations come along that do expose

all this kind of nefarious activity

that, by the way, would be considered completely illegal

in any other industry.

You may have a collector who bids up the price

of a Damien Hirst, not because they want to buy it.

They don't want the value of what's in their inventory

to go down, and that happens publicly,

the Mugrabi family in New York is very open

about the fact they bid up Warhols,

because they have several hundred Warhols,

and if you have a small Warhol flower painting,

it will sell for a million and a half dollars,

because people who own Warhols will not let it sell

for less than that, they'll bid it up.

Are there people who come in and manipulate the market?

Are there dealers who want to protect their artists?

Possibly, but the minute you raise your paddle,

there's no surety that someone else will raise ours,

even if I crossed my heart and hoped to die,

I don't have to, so you may end up owning it.

Yes, I think you hear about these cabals

and people who aren't, you know,

deeply investing in an artist's market

and holding onto it and hoping to profit someday,

but there's no proof of that, it's a very hard thing to prove,

and it's really not illegal.

[Don] If something's listed at auction

and estimated at four to five million dollars,

and it sells for 14,

how can you go into an auction expecting to pay four

to five million dollars for something,

and write a check for 14?

The answer is either you kind of knew that would happen,

but it's also that you want the object,

and it doesn't matter very much to you,

and that's the high end of the art world.

Fair warning, your bid, not yours,

I'm very sorry, but I'm glad for you.

[gavel bangs] 33.

[David] It's the least interesting concept,

to talk about the auction houses,

why aren't we talking about the art?

[upbeat funky music]

[gavel bangs]

[upbeat funky music]

[Alan] Basel Art Fair was not only the first fair,

it remains the single most important art fair in the world,

and I believe, to this day,

it's the most difficult to get into.

[Vicky] The world's tycoons literally crammed, sort of like,

with almost their noses pressed against the glass,

waiting for the opening of the fair,

it was a race to see who could get

up the elevator to the first floor.

Which is where the top galleries

were selling the top artists,

and I've never seen mass panic amongst super rich

in one place like it, it was an extraordinary spectacle.

[upbeat funky music]

[Sarah] I really feel like I can take the temperature

of the art world when I'm there,

and get a sense of what's going on in art.

[upbeat funky music]

[Marc] We've always been very attentive

to what's happening in the art world.

We've always tried to embrace the things

that were really the most important in the art world,

the things that were developing.

[Michael] When I started going to Basel in Switzerland,

it was a very small group of people,

everybody knew each other, it was really,

truly passionate art collectors,

most of the material was not pre-sold,

so you had an opportunity, if you went

in the early hours of the opening,

that is pretty tough these days.

More than half the work is pre-sold by the major dealers.

[upbeat funky music]

[Christian] The thing about art fairs that we forget now,

since they've become sort of like these catch-all places

for celebrities, and all kinds of other folks,

is that they're essentially trade fairs.

You know, galleries used to go to basically get rid

of the backroom, the stuff that they had in the back

that they weren't able to sell.

Now they're actually asking artists

to produce specifically for fairs.

[Matthew] It's a big change that's happened

over the last 30, 40 years,

is that the wealthy used to be inherited wealth,

and now they're self-made, and so they're working people,

usually, they don't necessarily have the time

to spend two or three days a week going round galleries.

It's another reason why art fairs are useful for them,

because it's a very efficient use of time.

It's one stop shopping, I mean,

it's why are shopping malls popular?

It's the same thing, it's a real convenience.

I've always been a big believer of,

you know, there should be many fairs,

they should do great, because at the end,

it enlarges the buy, that's all it does.

[upbeat salsa music]

[Narrator] Miami is a completely different beast.

I haven't been to Miami Basel,

only because it sounds such a nightmare.

[Sarah] A lot of parties,

and there's a lot of marketing going on.

Marketing of all sorts of things,

like new vodkas

and new jewelry brands.

This piece is aggressive, it's dangerous,

it's stupid, and that's why I like it.

This is entitled Blue Box, it's about the civil war,

obviously. This piece was made on a ship,

and then shipped to a car, and then driven to a plane.

This is a challenging piece,

and would be good for your collection.

It's so stupid, it's hard to understand,

and that can be so interesting.

You're talking about my jeans, aren't you?

[Sarah] It offers a lot of food for thought in its spectacle,

but it is a lot harder to focus on the art.

Then there's all the socializing,

everybody wants to give you a kiss on the cheek

and shake your hand,

when are you gonna look at the art?

[Allison] Now more people than ever are going.

People who don't know anything about art,

or maybe not even sort of interested in it,

but just sort of along for the party.

[Don] Basel Miami will draw 65,000 people,

of whom 2,000 might be purchasers,

and that may be, that may be overly optimistic.

I mean, others are spectators.

[Laurence] If you go to an art fair,

the conversation is absolutely laughable because it's coming

from people who haven't got a clue about art.

[Christian] Miami's become this

orgy of positional spending.

It's become Comic-Con for people with gobs and gobs of money.

[upbeat pop music]

[Robert] Everything has been ratcheted up to be showbiz.

You've got to get the crowds out,

you've got to get the heads of the people,

and whatever they can do to bring them in, they will.

[Alan] It's part of the whole phenomenon of event shopping.

You might get good art in an art fair,

I probably couldn't tell if it was good art anymore

because the context impacts it so negatively.

[upbeat dance music]

[Christian] You've got an echo chamber

that does not exactly produce the kind

of surprises that one, as an art viewer,

never mind as an art critic, wants to see

in a place like Art Basel Miami Beach,

which supposedly is the premier art event,

or rather, art fair in the world.

There's a certain kind of intellectual snobbery

that comes with dismissing all art fairs

as some horrible event that just sees the unfolding

of a venal art world at its maximum expression.

[Paul] I think that there is a lot of pressure on artists

and their galleries to continue to be producing work

for these endless number of art fairs that keep appearing,

because there's a lot of money to be made,

and there are lots of cities around the world

that are very happy to have this .1%

of the world's wealthiest people arriving

in town and spending money.

[Taryn] Everybody always talks about this pressure

that's on artist to produce.

If you choose to be the artist

that's gonna service art fairs

and service this constant flow of goods,

then that's what your art becomes.

[gavel bangs]

[slow piano music]

[Don] So find the man who can get reversed from the art world,

greatest supply can produce greater demand,

if you get a deal like Gagosian,

who's got 12 or 13 galleries around the world,

takes on an artist and shows him at multiple galleries

and multiple art fairs, they get more promotion,

more write up in art magazines,

and they are perceived as hot,

and so there's a greater demand for their art,

because they produce more.

Unlike anything else pretty much in economics.

[Lisa] Because of the scale of galleries today,

the fact that a gallery now has a branch in Beijing,

London, and New York, and LA.

There's a demand,

a constant need to feed this machine,

and there's a demand for art that makes artists produce,

produce, produce, without any time to say,

"I'm sitting this season out,"

or, "I'm sitting this fair out."

You have to feed the machine, and if you don't,

do you become irrelevant, do artists worry about that?

I don't know if I could live with this one, it's,

I like it, but the green is, it's sort of institutional.

Get a fucking decorator,

these paintings aren't even done yet.

We'll take the green one.

For one thing, you learn how to say no.

If I was talking to a young artist who was

on his way to New York,

and I could see that his work was very good,

he or she was very serious.

I would say to them,

it's important that you learn how to say no,

not every opportunity is a good one.

You've got to say yes until you can say no,

and once you get the chance to say no,

you should say it as often as you can.

[Michael] This frenzy over younger artists,

which is predicated on making money,

you can't build a career that way,

it's too speculative, there's no foundation,

it's difficult on the artist,

I think if you add to that the pressure on artists

to produce today, it's overwhelming.

Galleries can say no to fairs, artists can say no to galleries.

Collectors, you can say no to collectors

who want in on the work.

I think we all have our own responsibility

in those natures, and no one's got a gun to anyone's head.

[upbeat dance music]

[gavel bangs]

[upbeat dance music]

[Amy] It's a very high functioning system

and marketplace, do some people win and some people lose?

Yeah, I think in every single market it's that way.

I mean, look, it's a very particular business model.

The bigger it gets, the more textured

and layered and nuanced it gets.

[Vicky] Art has this different aura about it,

and it leads to a huge amount of corruption.

The problem is that the corruption

in this world is basically among very rich people,

does anybody else,

outside of this little trench of people, care?

One argument is that the only people

being manipulated are Arab sheiks, Russian oligarchs,

and so let's take them for a ride.

I don't like that argument,

I think that it affects artist'' lives and artists' markets.

Really, only a very small group

of artists can really make a living at it.

As an economist, you're always like,

are these the most talented, the most able artists?

And when you have some minutia distortions, perhaps not.

And so I think the question we should worry

about is, you know, maybe collectors aren't getting hurt

by paying too much for bad art,

or there's bigger tragedies in the world,

but maybe we would have a market

with better working artists.

And art would maybe be a little bit more accessible,

because you would have a larger pool

of artists who could afford to be full time.

I think the concern I have,

like, if there's any case for regulation

or sort of more pricing transparency,

it is that, you know, more artists are probably better,

or more than we have, and you know, could we create a market

that would support more working artists,

rather than just a very sort of elite group of artists

who just happen to be very good at playing the game,

and sort of pleasing a small group of,

sort of very famous collectors?

Stocks and bonds are regulated,

why can't an art market at this level be regulated?

[Don] I worked a couple of years ago

with a congressional committee in the United States

that was looking at regulation.

And like most committees that have looked

at this at the state of US level, they gave up

and said, "Let it be."

I keep asking, well,

why does nobody come in and regulate this art market?

It seems so wrong, but the problem is

that because, basically, there are no poor people

in this game. The government, I think,

sort of shrugs and says, "Well, who are the victims?"

We're not in the business, you know,

it's a rich people's business, so they turn a blind eye.

[Announcer] Good evening, there were dire predictions

about what might happen to the financial markets

in this country today, in fact,

this morning at the opening bell,

the Dow took a steep dive in what seemed,

for a time, like near panic selling.

[Christian] If the federal government has decided not

to prosecute bankers for what happened after 2008.

The going notion is that what happened

when the roof caved in is victimless.

Gosh, you've gotta imagine that

what happens in the art world is nothing,

is nothing to these folks. And that's unfortunate,

because I do believe, I strongly believe

that the art world needs regulation,

and I'm in a very unpopular position, having said that.

I do think people should list their prices at galleries.

That basic act of transparency is something

that could percolate upwards in a really strong way.

[Alan] It's really, to me in terms of regulation,

a question of ethics, there is a story

in The New York Times yesterday about a Picasso sculpture

that's in a show at MOMA at the moment,

which seems to have been sold to two different people.

Those are the kind of things that, you know,

that look bad for the art world.

It's a business which is very likely regulated,

and the reason is, is because the goods we're dealing in,

the commodities we're dealing in are heterogeneous,

every one is different.

And it's very difficult to legislate

for a market in which every single item has its own story.

Has its own sales history, and on the day,

has a personal relationship

between the seller and the buyer.

It is the case that people are buying off GNP

nowadays and not seeing the work

in real life, in the flesh,

not seeing its textures and feeling its scale.

We've definitely moved away from the heart

and soul of what this is all about.

[Vicky] I remember talking to Frank Stella at a dinner

about a year ago, and he said to me,

"Can you think of a day

The New York Times has ever ran a story

on the front page about art

without talking about the price of the art?"

And the answer is, it doesn't happen.

[Amy] I came to the art world before,

before there was ever a whiff of money anywhere,

like, you didn't turn to this if you didn't love it,

and you weren't a believer.

[Glen] I don't think the obsession with money is healthy

in any context, and it's certainly not a healthy aspect

of the art world, it's a fact, it's a reality.

On one level, the price tag causes everyone

to stop for a moment and say, "Oh, my God."

[Christian] More money does not mean better quality art,

it means more art that is particularly in tune

to how to make money.

I think we all get hurt, you know, culture gets hurt.

[Paul] We're now in a world that is producing a huge amount

of work, most of it, a lot of it that's been driven

by the market, things have to have a reason for being,

there's a lot, there's a huge amount of work

that doesn't have a necessity for being.

Six million five.

So you get a false reading of art history,

and a false reading of what is important.

There is the moment we live in

where a value is determined by how much things sell for,

and how much celebrity someone gets.

Very few people manage to create a value

that endures over a long period of time.

Ultimately, value's created by people

who aren't even alive now.

That doesn't mean that's the only value, though,

I think the value of the moment is another type of value,

it just doesn't last.

We might be in a bubble with contemporary,

we're seeing some investors make some mistakes

with their buying in contemporary,

but with proven pieces that have a real place

in art history, like the Talbin collection,

I don't think it's a bubble,

I think the prices will only go up.

[laid back reggae music]

[gavel bangs]

[Don] Price bubble happens when the price

of a commodity goes up faster than GNP, faster than incomes,

faster than inflation, and that can't happen forever.

And so the question is,

does it deflate slowly, or does it burst?

[laid back reggae music]

[Christian] The one thing about the art world

that has sustained itself since the 1950s,

is that prices have always gone up.

And art has beat out a couple of recessions.

Does that mean that these prices are sustainable,

the kind of records that we're seeing,

150 million, 170 million?

No, just that slowdown will make,

you know, the expectation that art is something

that you can mint money with, which is a lie, anyway.

I think that bubble will get popped.

[Vicky] There is going to be, at some point, a downturn,

and when that happens, it then becomes clear,

what is the good stuff that's going to last,

that has real value, then it all shakes out,

and that, inevitably, will happen.

It all works out in the end,

you can only control a market, like art,

for a short period of time.

So I have no worry that in 50 to 100 years,

if an artist isn't needed into those next generations,

if an artwork has been propped up unfairly by the market,

it'll only be a for a period of time,

it can't last forever.

But history is ruthless

in dispensing with things it doesn't need.

At 59, 60 million, 66 million, 67 million,

68 million, 74 million, 75 million, 77 million,

at 83 million dollars. Fair warning,

You're all done?

And selling at 95 million dollars.

[gavel bangs]

[intense music]

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

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♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Hope you like what you see

♪ Everybody said

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ I'm taking every chance

♪ That I can think of

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♪ To be enough

♪ I'm walking my road

♪ No matter how tough

♪ I won't look till tomorrow

♪ Wake up, wake up

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Hope you like what you see

♪ Every say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ I'm using my hands

♪ And all of my life

♪ To make a work of art

♪ That never dies

♪ I'm looking for that

♪ Somebody somewhere

♪ To take my dreams

♪ And get me out there, out there ♪

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Hope you like what you see

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ I'm ready

♪ So ready

♪ Let me show you how high

♪ I fly

♪ I know it

♪ Really know it

♪ If you're ready

♪ Then this is my time

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Hope you like what you see

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Hope you like what you see

♪ Everybody said it

♪ Yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece

♪ Trying to make history

♪ Everybody say it

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Look at me

♪ Painting my masterpiece