«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

Culture Monster has seen a picture of the global art market, and it looks very much like a portobello mushroom. The glimpse came not in a photograph, painting or drawing, but from the 83-page annual “TEFAF Art Market Report” issued recently by the European Fine Art Foundation.

It found that the art business rests on a very slender stem of prized artists whose work has sprouted a vast canopy of cash, paid overwhelmingly by a coterie of 600,000 or so global millionaires who qualify as “mid- to high-level art collectors.”

The report found that 8% of the art auctioned worldwide in 2013 accounted for 82% of the money spent. In the United States, the ratio was even more skewed: 7.5% of the works auctioned raked in 91.2% of the bucks.

-Los Angeles Times
 March 18 2014