the internet creates consensus around icons

I was recently interviewed by Haydn Shaughnessy, columnist for the Irish Times on the art market and its phenomenal appreciation in the past year, particularly in the contemporary market. My take from the article:

That pessimistic note is not shared by art dealer and financier Mark Beam. Still involved in the world of finance, Beam was previously a stock-market trader in New York, the breed of investor that some argue has contributed to the putative art bubble.

"There will be a correction because that's the way markets behave, but underneath all that, the internet is making it easier for people to build a consensus around iconic images and to desire them," he argues. It is a point underlined by developments in the art market.

...Values in the market for contemporary artists have risen 111 per cent in the past 12 months. If a combination of those forces referred to by King - more people now like art - and by Beam - the internet creates consensus around icons - then rather than straining at a gossamer-thin bubble, the art market could be in for more of the same, driven by a more visually eager world.

Time to roll out the contemporary art fund business plan I wrote 2 years ago....Here's the full article:

Prices for well-known pieces are going through the roof at art auctions, but is this just a bubble or simply an indication of growing demand for contemporary work, asks Haydn Shaughnessy.

When the hammer fell on William Percy French's The Mountains of Mourne in the May auction of Irish artists at Bonham's this year, the sale price of €25,000 was six times the anticipated value. Paul Henry's Dooega, Achill Island, slated at €40,000, sold for €260,000.

Around the world the auction house Christie's spent the summer of 2007 setting new record prices for living and modern artists, recording global sales of £1.63 billion (€2.4 billion) for the first six months of the year, a rise of 32 per cent on last year's figure. Equally significant was that a total of 358 works sold for more than $1 million (€730,000), compared with 189 auctioned above that price during the same period last year.

It is already popular wisdom to suggest that these rises are the sure signs of an art bubble. Perhaps also indicative of a kind of fever is that record prices are being achieved by obscure objects, such as the French designer Prouvé's kit-form house, a prefab designed for colonists in Brazzaville, which, except for three prototypes, was never actually built. One sold at auction in July for almost $5 million (€3.65 million). At the start of 2007, before Christie's remarkable rise in revenues, the International Herald Tribune was already asking if this market was a bubble ready to pop. (Image by Michael Grey, not part of the original article)

On the issue of an art bubble, there are dissenting views and they come not only from the auction houses prospering from rising values. According to Irish fine-art expert Mark Adams: "Look at 19th-century Irish paintings which were popular five years ago. Today you can't sell a 19th-century Irish painting. Taste has moved to the front end of the last century." As well as a bubble, investors need to be aware of fickle tastes.

There are three main reasons for price rises globally, according to experts at auctioneers Christie's. "There is a broader spread of wealth and it goes very deep," says Lisa King, international managing director at the firm.

"All emerging markets - China, Russia, India, the CIS and Middle East - are buying into anything contemporary. First they buy their national ilk, Chinese buyers buy Chinese artists, but then they move to other markets. But also people are more interested in art."

Could the real driving force in rising art values be not simply the spread of hyperwealth but an extension of the art-loving audience? In an article in the Art Newspaper earlier this month, New York gallery director and critic Jane Kallir argued that the art market has risen because of a structural imbalance within the art world.

"For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators)," she writes. "Now, it seems, collectors have taken charge. Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assumes disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity's personal preferences will cloud everyone's short-term judgment. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge."

Art, argues Kallir, has become the common denominator in the social lives of the rich, making the odd masterpiece. That pessimistic note is not shared by art dealer and financier Mark Beam. Still involved in the world of finance, Beam was previously a stock-market trader in New York, the breed of investor that some argue has contributed to the putative art bubble. (image by Michael Grey, not part of the original article)

"There will be a correction because that's the way markets behave, but underneath all that the internet is making it easier for people to build a consensus around iconic images and to desire them," he argues. It is a point underlined by developments in the art market.

Green Car Crash by US pop-artist Andy Warhol, whose career was not predicted to rise posthumously into the stratosphere, sold for $71 million (€51 million) this summer. Warhol has ridden the crest of the recent price rises and he is precisely the type of artist whose work features around the internet. "The headlines are very much focused on the modern and contemporary markets," argues Christie's Lisa King, "but the rest of the market has had a more steady and much more measured growth."

Values in the market for contemporary artists have risen 111 per cent in the past 12 months. If a combination of those forces referred to by King - more people now like art - and by Beam - the internet creates consensus around icons - then rather than straining at a gossamer-thin bubble, the art market could be in for more of the same, driven by a more visually eager world.

Indeed, the desire of many of the world's leading galleries to present their wares to a wider public is also part of this story, putting art on the agenda of an ever larger audience.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art's outreach programme is one example of taking art to the people. In mid-July, London's Tate Gallery launched the BT Tate Player, an online service providing access to a wide range of its collections as well as to interviews with artists recorded over a 30-year period.

The Tate's website now attracts 18 million visitors a year and gallery director Nicholas Serota wants to see it grow, arguing that public galleries have been slow to exploit the full potential of the internet to connect with wider audiences.

"We should be a leader in this field - there's this wealth of material which could be out there," says Serota. "Initiatives like [ BT Tate player] could change the way we think about programming our exhibitions and allow our audience to shape our programming more."

As a result of these advances, the Tate is beginning to think about how to establish communities of interest around certain artists and events. The Tate's new media director, Will Gompertz, cites the use of the photo-upload site Flickr and the social-networking site MySpace as two additional ways the gallery is reaching out to a wider public. Art, arguably, is coming under the democratising influence of the internet.

ANOTHER NOTABLE development, though, is the decision of key players in the art market to pursue the cutting edge of contemporary art. One feature of the June sales this year was the disposal of key works from the 1970s by the collectors Elaine and Melvin Merians so that they could refocus their collection on more contemporary artists. It signifies two features of the advancing art market. The first is the entry of more highly valued works in response to burgeoning prices. Now is the time to sell and some of the rapid rises in prices might also be explained by the fact that collectors, such as the Merians, have been tempted into releasing more valued works.

The second, however, is that the market is prizing contemporary works above all else. The very currency of works in a world of more rapid communications appears to be a factor.

Still, critics such as Jane Kallir are not convinced that, overall, the dynamic is itself of value. In her July excoriation of the market she complained: "This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances."

If that argument holds water, then rather than anticipating an imminent financial collapse, the answer lies in a new kind of dialogue, one where the art-historical community comes to terms with the requirements of a new audience but perhaps also encourages that new audience to grow in aesthetic complexity. What we may be witnessing is not just a growing market, but one that is changed and won't readily fit back into its historical shape.

That certainly seems to be the case in Ireland. "For a while now everyone's waited for a collapse," says Mark Adams. "But I don't see that. There's enough power in the market and the market has grown long enough, for 10 or 15 years, for us to have to accept that these valuations are now justified."

If that holds true in Ireland, then you might ask why would it not in the rest of the world?

swarming intelligence

I am seeing sooooo much buzz happening around the new emerging capital market for good through my involvement in xigi.net and goodcap.net. It gives me great confidence that "the future is here but not evenly distributed yet" as William Gibson says. For now it can be found in swarms forming around certain nests of activity:

1. Socially responsible investing, the most minimal effort required by an investor who wants to screen their investments from tobacco, oil, etc...is trillions of dollars now, and the actions many more corporations are taking to improve their eco-social impact in response to client/consumer demand are increasing.

2. The rise of clean technology and microfinance as "serious" investment sectors where capital is being deployed that directly impacts ecology and society. In just 5-7 years clean tech now represents nearly 10% of all venture investments for example.

3. The increased attention that is being directed toward these kinds of models is just beginning. (see a blog i wrote and graph representing the movement of these sectors along a curve from "social trigger" to "maturity" - . This "blended value" sector is more mature than we think. Well at least there is great precedent being created.

Merrill Lynch is starting to put "blended value" investment products on their platform; More and more social MBA programs at business schools are being launched; Job sites like justmeans.com that are targeting this sector are appearing; Rating and certification entites like bcorporation.net are arising; social stock exchanges like altruistiq.com and bovespasocial.com.br are being created. In short, many pieces of market infrastructure are being put in place that blend social and financial value in what some call the emerging capital market for good. You can find a lot more at www.xigi.net which seeks to make this landscape more clear.

At the same time there is a new infrastructure unfolding empowered by our increasing ability to form groups around particular interests and activities and to take some some sort of action.

According to Frank Lacombe from the University of Calagary: "The collective intelligence of the swarm emerges in a decentralized way from the actions of individual insects responding to local stimuli from the environment and, most importantly, from other members of the swarm. There is no “boss” in charge. No individual insect grasps the big picture. Yet in the aggregate, the local actions of each insect based on the local stimuli available to it can accomplish a collective goal that serves the interests of the whole community."

There are swarms forming around various nests of "good" socio-economic activity that serve a collective goal that is now becoming more clear. The future is becoming more well distributed.

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Image above from National Geographic. Swarm video by Alan Sondheim...

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a social singularity?

"Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience." Joseph Cambell (Art by Michael Grey)

So where are our poets, the ones who will reveal the new mythology arising from the collective? Is there something to uncover? Cambell was sure it had something to do with the whole planet. Is there something arising now on earth that touches on the mystical side of essential experience?

It is clear is that something is happening in the social sector around the world from the grassroots. People are rising up, working, playing and in some ways fighting together in new ways. Following capitalism's defeat of socialism as an ideology that frames the way global society organize itself, we are left with "a new moral hunger," as Katherine Fulton describes it. "The social sector is reorganizing itself...literally acting its way into a new way of thinking....A social singularity."

Terrence McKenna, the controversial poet, philosopher and ethnobotanist wrote about this kind of human singularity as a future state. "It is possible to know the future," he said, "or levels of novelty that future states will fulfill by the happenstance of unpredictable events- to know where the road goes but not necessarily what the scenery looks like... toward the culmination of a human process... of tool making, which comes to completion in the perfect artifact... man- the final tool- a reorganized man that blasts itself into a new experience of itself."

My conversation today with a group of fellow socionauts circled around this new mythology, but admittedly could not encapsulate it. Its about redefining wealth. It's about social restructuring. Its a voyage many of us seem to be on yet our destination is uncertain. We did not discover this destination today, but we certainly articulated what it feels like. We seem to know where the road goes more or less, but we cannot define precisely what it will look like.

We looked for a savior, a hero and found no individual but many. We looked for a theater where the new mythology was being told, a new language, new pictures or symbols and found the anecdotal but nothing that encapsulated this new mythology. What we did find was "a hero with a thousand faces," emerging collectives of diverse actors seeking good through cooperation. Cooperation has traditionally been defined by tribes or nations. Much more often now an uncommon set of players is coming together to cooperate in pursuit of a more balanced social system.

At the same time we are in the midst of a technological breakthrough in the depth and breadth of our global communications. In the same way the first pictures of earth from space changed the way we saw ourselves -a shared horizon - the rise of a global communication network or membrane is providing incredibly detailed sensory awareness of earth and its people as a living system. Our lenses are so much more powerful. This new "membrane" augments our physical senses in interpreting how to act in the world. Nevertheless while we have invented the capacity to monitor the planet with higher resolution, there are no interfaces that make it easy to do so. Right now we are fumbling with the idea of consciously responding to the feedback we are receiving. What if, for example, all government data were freely accessible in real time enabling anyone to write software applications to better manage budget allocation, anticipate demographic or migration shifts or locating resources for disaster response.

This concept of a community constantly reinterpreting how it should act in the world in synch with a constantly evolving shared horizon is an important one.

This is consistent with research on termites by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s that suggests, by analogy and reflection, a connection in the way cooperative networks of people operate: that the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest (i.e. the planet) was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part.”

Like a termites nest, the collective action that emerges within the network is strongly influenced and inspired by the activities of what other members are doing and the overall shape of the network.

In the face of what many view as earth's darkest hours of violence, repression and climate change somehow the human species seems poised to act collectively to alter its course. There is no one directing this shift, it is the intelligence of the swarm reacting to a new image of its nest - the planet. This is truly mysterious. A higher level of intelligence is seemingly acting autonomously.

We can't quite put our finger on this. We can't quite articulate it in an integrative way. There is no nice neat encapsulation or symbology that we can run through the viral marketing machine. Its a force that moves on its own inspired by "insight"- a deeper form of wisdom that arises out of collective intelligence. It cannot be controlled or harnessed because it is so deeply interconnected with everything else. No one individual movement can define its core dynamics. Its a mystery.

Having just reread "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth," Bucky Fuller's prescient tome on integrative thinking, I leave you with this ...



paz
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