#vera list

[lilithsplace]

’Portrait of Vera List’, c. 1965 - Larry Rivers (1923–2002)

paint, charcoal, wood, tape, plexiglas, and aluminum window frame  |  source:   Vera G. List (1908–2002), a life trustee of the Jewish Museum, was an active collector and champion of contemporary art.  source:

[ozgeersoy]

On Investment

The below text was published in Speculation, Now, edited by Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni (Durham and New York: Duke University Press and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, 2014), pp. 154–155.

“Investment in art” immediately connotes financial profit but can be also associated with non-financial gain. Government subsidies, corporate sponsorship, and philanthropic acts are investments that seek a return in the form of cultural integration, image making, or the professionalized field of social responsibility. Philanthropy aside, however, investment is resonant of the action or process of putting away money with the prospect of future gain, and thus, in the context of art, means buying artworks for financial profit or expected realization of value in the future. Investment is embedded in buying, selling, and reselling of artworks in an exponentially growing art market that is largely facilitated by surplus capital and lack of regulations. As investors focus on what is profitable, they create a monopolized market, and thereby transform art into an object of speculation and an asset class, instigating a taste for risk taking.

Investment in art as a method of speculation is possible as long as the value of artworks are generated, perpetuated, or distorted in its closed system. Autonomy in art, a sine qua non, allows every artwork to create its own justification. Art’s autonomous state enables it to take any form and allows aesthetic evaluation to mimic open-ended financial assessment where value is not innate. Approval by the market, the museum, art-historical scholarship, and, increasingly, the branding culture then produce an added or additional value—all based on symbolic capital. Art’s speculative nature endorses financial strategies that are at the core of risk-happy investment. Artists nevertheless continue to seek ways to bend or distort the financial system and its instruments. Relational art and participatory practices, for instance, undermine marketable, sellable, and collectible objects, and expose themselves to a different system of value judgment. Art’s flexibility to take different forms thereby sustains speculative investments and serves as a tool to infiltrate and subvert them at the same time. —Özge Ersoy 

[studioworkout]

slappin' fools  with sculptures

AWRS