Artprice: Reaction to the Article in Countrepoint: A Historic Attack on the Art Market!
PARIS, July 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --
Artprice's press release of 30 June 2017 titled "Artprice takes a major stake in the OTC Art Market which generates a volume of transactions roughly 7 to 9 times higher than the traditional art market" has triggered a powerful virtuous dynamic over the last 9 days resulting in an extraordinary number of contributor exchanges and lots of debates and interviews in the written and audiovisual media.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160228/338238LOGO )
For the record, the press release is available at: Actusnews
Hardly ever, and so for the past 20 years, has an Artprice's Art Market analysis triggered so many contributions from various corners of the art world, OTC artists, historians, sociologists and journalists.
One article that has triggered numerous comments is the one posted on Contrepoints.org by Aude de Kerros (1 million readers per month according to the publisher) without Artprice prior knowledge of this article which was discovered by the company, as everyone else, on 7 July 2017.
The article quickly became the focus of animated discussions around the themes History of the Art Market and Artprice's vision of an OTC Art Market.
Artprice has therefore decided to encourage its readers to read this online article at
https://www.contrepoints.org/2017/07/07/294178-nouveau-marche-de-lart
or by simply continuing to read this press release...
A Historic Attack on the Art Market!
Thierry Ehrmann, CEO of Artprice and ArtMarket.com, believes he can take advantage of the deficiencies of Contemporary art's closed systems by launching an "OTC Art Market"... with plenty of drum rolls, suspense and marketing.
By Aude de Kerros.
At last... The man behind Artprice, ArtMarket and the Abode of Chaos, Thierry Ehrmann, has kept his promise. He had promised a historic attack on the art market on 30 June 2017... and that is what we got. Meanwhile, after two years in the doldrums, the same market has been enjoying a few moments of glory … the Venice Biennale, the Documenta show and the Basel Art Fair... as well as a couple of new auction records.
Ehrmann's first missile is essentially a semantic one. He now calls the "Contemporary art market", the "traditional art market" which he defines and limits to the market driven entirely by the major international galleries, auction houses and museums, all "network value makers".
Thierry Ehrmann suggests that the minimum "bankable" sale price of an artwork in this environment is around $50,000. Ironically, he describes the Contemporary art market[1] not only as "traditional" but also as "reactionary", suggesting that the system ensures its own survival in what appears to be a clever application of Guiseppe de Lampedusa's famous phrase "everything must change so that everything can remain the same"...
The emergence of "Hidden Art" ...
His second semantic notion is that of 'another market', invisible, non-existent, forced into the shade by the media and institutions. He calls this 'other market' the "OTC art market", as in 'over-the-counter'.
Having accumulated years of "BigData" and conducted in-depth market research, Ehrmann estimates that this 'other market' represents a volume of transactions seven to nine times higher than the 'traditional market'. He uses the iceberg metaphor to describe the situation: annually, the traditional art market - the hyper-visible and hyper-expensive part - represents about one million transactions on the secondary market with roughly another three million generated by galleries and private sales… whereas the submerged segment represents approximately thirty million transactions worldwide.
One of the world's major contemporary "Disruptors", Thierry Ehrmann has today announced that he has acquired the means to render visible and marketable, via his "OTC Art Market", all artworks systematically rejected by today's art institutions "for not qualifying as Contemporary art". And he believes this announcement will have the same impact as the blast of a bomb!
How Thierry Ehrmann became the Uber of the art world
Ehrmann's strategy is relentless. He knows what he is doing. He is perfectly acquainted with both the "traditional art market, including the Contemporary segment" and with market disruption, which he has been practicing since 2015 by making market information about artists freely available to anyone with a smartphone.
He knows that any market disruption which by-passes an intermediary generates profit. By encouraging cheaper online sales he makes galleries both unprofitable and useless, except of course those that 'network' the market prices of Contemporary art.
Ehrmann has been preparing the next stage of the assault - that of the 'general disruption' - for many years: he created an online sales-room "Artmarket.com", whose domain name he definitively acquired in 2017, and whose two words are understood all over the world.
With the purchase of Xylogic and then Blockchain he has ensured the transparency and security of the transactions chain, allowing anyone to retrace the different steps in the construction of an artist's market value.
In addition to these moves, Thierry Ehrmann has spent the last two years conducting a major study on all continents involving inventories and analyses of all the "big data" necessary for the organization of an efficient OTC market: social networks, parallel circuits, artists' sites, galleries, private museums, amateur buyers, art critics, independent art historians. He concludes that the key players in this market are indeed present and active on the Internet… they just need to be organized.
Ehrmann estimates the current Internet population to consist of approximately 1.2 million living artists and 40 million potential art buyers, with interests in 325 artistic movements, using 212 different artistic techniques and mediums. These new players in the market have one important advantage: they are willing to expose themselves to market forces and, with minimal sales and marketing-related costs, their prices are much cheaper.
Now, it's time to hit the jackpot! For Thierry Ehrmann, CEO of Artprice and ArtMarket.com, these conclusions prefigure a massive opportunity for Artprice, as he believes he can take advantage of the deficiencies of Contemporary art's closed systems by launching an "OTC art market" that will capture both the supply and demand for no-bankable art: i.e. all transactions from 50 to 50,000 euros, without any aesthetic, stylistic, or genre-based discrimination... In other words, a new market that will have a "blast" impact on existing structures!
His weapon: transparency technology
His methods will not only short-circuit medium-sized galleries, administrative institutions and museums, but will also undermine the Contemporary art market's opaque section, i.e. the top of the Madoff pyramid where everything depends on confidence and relations at the same time.
Indeed, thanks to the blockchain system, which has proved its efficacy with bitcoin, Ehrmann can render the art market totally transparent via the application of this new technology.
The whole chain of value-building transactions would become visible and the art market would become a real market... with real supply and demand (the top end of the Contemporary art market is essentially a supply-driven market).
The "traditional market" is worried... and Thierry Ehrmann believes he is in pole position due to a) the backwardness and failures of the "art establishment" in the Internet field (knowledge, mastery, etc,), b) its rejection of creative diversity and c) its exclusive consideration for customers with very considerable means. He believes in the virtues of competition... in a market of 'genuine' art-lovers rather than a market of cold-blooded collectors of financial products.
An uberization of the bureaucrats...
Thierry Ehrmann is relying on a cultural revolution that is already underway and which he has carefully studied. This revolution rejects the exclusively conceptual, financial, institutional, and bureaucratic fundamentals that dominate Contemporary art in France.
Nowadays the financial, intellectual and artistic quackery in the Contemporary art world is widely known and accepted. In France, the "system" has been denounced for over three decades.
And meanwhile...the French taxpayer finances bureaucrats in Paris's rue de Valois who instructed the archivists working in its Catalogue Library (supposedly filing catalogues with monographs of artists of a certain period) to systematically trash those whose official "contemporaneity" they have not approved.
In his privately-financed quest for big data, Thierry Ehrmann has patiently done exactly the opposite. He is now in a position to short-circuit all the experts, media, university theorists, as well as the French Culture Ministry's two hundred "Creation Inspectors", whose role is to intellectually legitimize Contemporary art.
Ehrmann is gambling on the virtues of the screen.... A world in which everyone is free to appreciate and buy whatever they want, with reasonable means, without being either intimidated, looked down upon or ridiculed. A screen that also allows cultivated art fans to conduct their own research, compare prices, find gems... gems whose 'intrinsic value' may later be recognized on an authentic market in the future...
Will Thierry Ehrmann be the one, indirectly, to give the artists the opportunity to make their old dream of liberty finally come true?
- It should be noted that the French notion of "Contemporary art" is itself the subject of debate. For example Christine Sourgins uses the acronym AC (art contemporain) to indicate a certain branch of conceptual "Contemporary Art" as opposed to a broader interpretation of "Contemporary art" that she believes indicates "all art produced in the current era". However, in France, the expression "Contemporary art" does not mean "all art produced in the current era", but uniquely its "conceptual segment". (c.f. Les Mirages de l'Art contemporain Paris 2005 Ed. de la Table Ronde). Translator's note: In this article, the notion "Contemporary art" is used in this more restrictive French way, referring to what some see as a Duchampian conceptual school.
About Artprice:
Artprice is listed on the Eurolist by Euronext Paris, SRD long only and Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF.
Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 657,000 artists. Artprice Images(R) gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 126 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians.
Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 4,500 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 7,200 international press publications. For its 4,500,000 members, Artprice gives access to the world's leading Standardised Marketplace for buying and selling art. Artprice is preparing its blockchain for the Art Market. It is BPI-labelled (scientific national French label).
Artprice's Global Art Market Annual Report for 2016:
http://imgpublic.artprice.com/pdf/rama2016_en.pdf
The text presented hereafter is a translation of Arte Creative's online presentation:
ARTE: A gigantic Christmas tree in the guise of a butt plug, a machine that defecates five-star meals, an icon immersed in urine and staged corpses - subversive, trash, provocative or insulting? Thierry Ehrmann, the man behind The Abode of Chaos dixit "The New York Times", an artist and the founder of Artprice, is the mouthpiece for scandal and discloses the workings of the most striking controversies in contemporary art. And scandal sells. 9 episodes are online:
http://www.arte.tv/guide/en/weekly-highlight
Discover the Alchemy and the universe of Artprice http://web.artprice.com/video , which headquarters are the famous Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abode of Chaos http://goo.gl/zJssd
News Artmarket:
http://twitter.com/artpricedotcom
https://www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom
https://plus.google.com/+Artpricedotcom/posts
http://artmarketinsight.wordpress.com/
The Contemporary Arts Museum The Abode of Chaos on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/la.demeure.du.chaos.theabodeofchaos999
The Abode of Chaos/Demeure du Chaos Contemporary Art Museum by thierry Ehrmann,author, sculptor, artist, photograph https://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/sets/72157676803169034
Contact : Thierry Ehrmann : e-mail : [email protected]
SOURCE Artprice.com
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