Part 1: A Little History of the Art Market
Have you ever wondered how an art market even came into existence? I’ll tell you. And I will start from the very beginning: from the emergence of the art object to the birth of auctions, patrons, artists, academies and professional art dealers. Sit tight boys and girls, your history lesson is about to start in two parts (so that I don’t saturate your mind with way too much fascinating information). Part 1.0 Let’s start off with a fun fact: the Venus of Berekhat Ram (700,000 – 290,000 BC) is considered to be the first art object ever in the history of art objects. It was actually discovered not long ago in the Golan Heights by an archeologist in 1981. It is essentially a small rock that looks like a pregnant woman and it is believed that it was created during the Stone Age most probably by Homo Erectus (WOW!). But there’s no evidence of any trend of cultural collecting in societies at this point in time so we can assume that artists were not competing with each other. As a result …