The Price of Everything

Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat or Gerhard Richter are sold for incredible sums at auctions. Today, art is a huge spectacle that is all about attention, a fair share of glamour and, above all, big money. The art market follows rules that are almost incomprehensible to outsiders. But can the value of art really be measured in dollars? What happens to it when it becomes a mere asset, an investment? What does this commerce-driven concept mean for the artists? "There's a lot of people that know the price of everything and the value of nothing," quips pop art collector Stefan Edlis (1925-2019) from Chicago, quoting Oscar Wilde. Having escaped from Nazi-ruled Vienna with his mother and two siblings, Edlis was a US soldier in the late stages of WWII and later made a fortune as the founder of Apollo Plastics. A fair share of the proceeds Edlis made as a business man, he invested into his art collection. "Art and money have always gone hand in hand," says one art dealer. According to him, it is "very important for good art to be expensive. You only protect things that are valuable. If something has no financial value, people don’t care. The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value." Curator Paul Schimmel points out that in our time, there are a hundred times more collectors than in the 1970s, as well as thousands more artists creating new works. The art market of today is fully globalised. Yet in spite of the astronomical sums spent at auctions and other art trading places in the present day, the vast majority of artists do not make enough money to live on.