The expensive art market continues to struggle

If the stock market today is in the dumps, the high-end art market doesn’t seem any more attractive. And it’s been like this for a while, stretching back to 2024 when we last took a look at this.

But there’s a difference between fine art and the art market. Money isn’t everything.

For more on this, art critic Blake Gopnik spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Where are we these months later? High-end art market, is it still a mess?

Blake Gopnik: Yeah, it seems as though it’s an even bigger mess than usual. In 2024, auction sales for works over $10 million — and those are some pretty valuable works — were apparently down 44%. There were 44% fewer sales of those high-end objects — according to the Wall Street Journal, at least — than there had been the previous year. So that trophy inventory isn’t moving, even at the art fairs, where you expect to move that kind of stuff. And it’s worth pointing out that in the decade or so before, those same works had gone up 700%. So after this insane climb, there was this insane tumble.

Brancaccio: OK, hit me with your radical claim, Blake.

Gopnik: Well, I think that when those kind of big-ticket paintings are put up for sale, they’re actually not works of art at all. So that, of course — that’s what the bidders, the buyers are looking to buy. I think they’ve become purely financial objects. They’re a different kind of object all together. And I have to admit, I’m riffing here on some work by a Berkeley philosopher named Alva Noë. That, in fact, objects are only art when we use them as art — when we admire their aesthetics, or we think about what they mean, or we argue about whether they’re good or bad, that’s when they’re works of art. If you use it as a financial instrument, if you use it as an investment, it’s not functioning as art. You can say the Mona Lisa barely functions as art anymore, because 99% of the time it’s just background for a selfie. And that’s true also of when works of art are just financial instruments.

Brancaccio: All right, so to pick up on that theme, you and I can workshop a New Yorker cartoon together, right? It’s sort of like the fancy-pants person invites his guest into his nice salon to show him framed on the wall objects that he says, “May I show you my collection of stores of value?” Right? That’s what you say.

Gopnik: Exactly. And of course, that relates to my hero, Andy Warhol, who actually presented silk screen paintings of dollar signs as works of art. And that’s, of course, the comment that he was making.

Brancaccio: Yeah, the more you think about, let’s say, a painting or a sculpture as a store of value, then other investment vehicles compete for your dollars. In other words, “Oh, I’m not interested in that art store of value. I might be interested in putting my money into bonds, because interest rates stayed higher.”

Gopnik: Exactly. And, you know, investing in art is the weirdest darn thing, because it has no obvious value. I mean, we’ve said this before on the show: It’s just a bunch of oil paint on a piece of canvas. So it’s completely arbitrary what it’s worth. But, in theory at least, it’s supposed to be worth something, because it matters to the culture as art. And if things are getting in the way of that, then its investment value should drop as well. So there are all sorts of factors that are helping, thank God, the art market tumble.