jeremy tessmer | curator & designer

In a wandering article in Bloomberg, one of America’s three most important and influential collectors of Post War and Contemporary Art, Eli Broad, declares that the art market is semi-officially “back to normal” after a significant price adjustment. Broad’s assessment followed his recent attendance at the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland. His insights nearly always prove fascinating, but there are some issues with his analysis that tug at me.

Ironically, Broad’s collection is deeper than it is… well… broad. He collects a very selected number of artists, but he holds deep ‘inventories’ by each of these artists. In some ways, he is the major market for works by these artists. One imagines that galleries with new offerings by these artists are calling Mr. Broad’s curator first. The auction houses more than likely do the same.

Broad is hardly the only market for these people, but he is one of the biggest fish in the pond. It thus stands to reason that his unwillingsness to participate in the market with quite the same enthusiasm (read: cash) as he did previously had a significant impact on prices. Thus, Broad’s spending may have helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, he is also dead right. The art market does seem to be rebounding, if a bit more slowly than I and my colleagues would prefer.