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 …

After the longest nap in the history of the naps – that had to be taken by force thanks to none other than Christianity – the ‘art market’ woke up with the early Renaissance in the 14th century. Two novelties had taken place: on one hand people had developed a new taste, almost a fetish, for finely bound books that developed into a whole other complex market. On the other, Medieval guilds were still regulating the quality of art which partially castrated individualism amongst artists. But among all this, in Florence, a hero was born. Hello Giotto – the absolute most important painter of the early Renaissance who introduced perspective and the third dimension to painting.  Yes, that is why painting is what it is today. Basically, and he changed the rules of the game for everyone. At the same time, a new type of art patron emerged. The most well known were the… come on, you know who… Their name starts with an ‘M’ and ends with ‘edici”. It was a Florentine family of merchant …