The main differences between the current art markets are the scale in which they cover. The biggest of the four markets is a market that can be described as being on an international scale, whilst the smallest usually stay within a national scale, while some don’t even consider this art market as art at all.
So, what is it that is so different about these four art markets? What is it that makes the scale of these markets so vastly different? My thoughts on the matter is that the art markets are closely similar to that of regular markets. And the thing that control the regular market is one thing; supply and demand.
Art, in the same sense as any product on any market, needs to have some demand for the price to go up. If the supply is too big, it might mean that the demand will go down, leading to the price to go down. There are more reasons that world-known art today is highly sought after, but if we generalize the reasoning for this, is that there is a demand for it.
The bottom line is that if no one is interested in an art piece, that art piece – no matter how good it looks or how long it took for the artist to make – it will have no value if it is not something that people will pay for. Art is still controlled by how much people are willing to pay for it.
The price of art pieces is connected to whether people consider them art at all. The price tag of any art piece is deeply tied to the artist behind them. The bigger the popularity of the artist, the higher the probability that the art piece that they create will have a higher demand behind it. The weird part about this “fact”, is that most of the artists that belong in the Branded- and Avant-Garde art markets most likely started in Alternative- or Junk art markets. Many artists didn’t even get popular before after their deaths, Vincent van Gogh being one of them. Most people of his time did not appreciate the art that he made, and it was only after his death that his art was truly appreciated by the masses. So it can be said the he started out in the Junk art market, but after his death – he became a part of the Branded art market which we know of today.
My point is that even though most artists start out in the lower art markets, there is still the possibility of them becoming popular enough to rise up to the higher art markets. What I’m trying to say is that it’s hard to truly categorize art in a way that makes it stay in one type of art market forever. Even though it may start in a lower tier art market, there is no way of knowing that it won’t be able to rise to the higher tiers.
Making sense of art and design industries 