The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing turns out to be the title of a bunch of movies and other stuff. This documentary echoes (or precedes) Blurred Lines and The Price of Everything. It is all about the effects of the explosion in fine art prices brought about by the massive increase of extremely wealthy people looking to invest in art in the manner in which they invest in other commodities. Art has always had a value to collectors, but now the set of all collectors contains more and more people who have no real interest in art but instead engage in speculation, stalking young artists still in art school to see whether they can become The Next Big Thing, which they do, for a time, with sometimes dire consequences later on down the line. In some ways, this was the story of Basquiat, but it is happening more frequently and although Basquiat´s paintings continue to command absurdly high auction prices, most artists in similar situations will be forgotten when this bubble bursts at some yet to be determined point in the future...

One somewhat amusing aspect of this particular take is the emphasis given to gallerists and collectors who clearly view themselves as morally superior to the pure speculators--those who view art only as a business. Let us be perfectly frank: gallerists are, too, engaged in business, what has now become Big Business. Contemporary gallerists profit parasitically from artists in the very manner in which forgers do. Are they morally superior to them? Do they deserve to keep as much--or far more--from an art sale than the creator of the piece? Are not gallerists themselves complicit in precisely what has happened to the art market in recent decades?