Mei Moses Index

Double Red Oolong Tea

(rating: 4.1/5) On an autumnal-inspired trend of rating red teas, this one was cultivated in Taiwan's Nantou County and smells like a fresh apple orchard. However, I don't think its scent is equivalent in sensories to its actual taste, as the latter was more reminiscent of roasted barley and walnut. I like it :-) it's a nice fall tea.

To whom does a significant work of art belong? To humanity at large? To the culture that created it? To its current legal owner?

After a weak attempt to brush up on my dusty French skills, I attempted to read Andrea Fraser's article, "L'1%, C'est Moi" last week. Unfortunately, I gave up after three paragraphs and ended up finding an English translation on Scribd. Despite feeling mortified at realizing that my terrible French accent somehow got even worse, I'm quite glad I did finish, because it was one of those reads where you sit back and realize that literature can be overwhelming in a beautuful way.

Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock notes that the two greatest sources of wealth internationally today "[are] contemporary art [...and] apartments in Manhattan." The functions of the global debt market have long been known to be in direct correspondence with the tides of the art world's canon, with one constantly shaping the other. The art world is both a staggering product of and a participant in the same systems of inequality that characterize hierarchal economic structures. 

Unfortunately, art has never been considered separate from the financial practices and speculative behaviors of the wealthiest individuals. Although art technically can and does exist under capitalism without being commodified, it becomes an asset when it is viewed as property to be purchased (or originally created with the authentic intent of the artist to be sold), which applies to every unit of supply in the contemporary market. With this, we see a defining art asset class for speculation that is traded alongside other financial instruments––municipal bonds, student loans, and medical bills. In an era of near-total financialization of resources, culture, and authenticity in itself, the instantaneous moment at which it becomes privatized--the moment at which it transmogrifies into a marketable, ownable form, mirrors and becomes another form of these practices. This means that the rise in art prices often corresponds to the broader accumulation of wealth among the top 1%. 

The Sotheby’s Mei Moses Index is a specialized index that tracks the performance of fine art as an asset class, helping to assess changes in the art market over time. It is widely regarded by elite art auction houses and institutions as a tool for comparing the financial returns of art investments to other types of more financially acceptable investments, such as stocks or real estate. The index produces annualized returns for the art market, allowing investors to compare the returns from art to those of other financial instruments like stocks, bonds, or real estate; it shows how art investments have performed over different time periods, molding the relative performance of art into its own distinctive asset class. It is based on a repeat sales methodology, tracking the price changes of the same artworks that have sold more than once at public auction and broken down into sub-indexes by art categories or periods, such as Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern, or Post-War and Contemporary.

Marx critiques how labor is commodified under capitalism, being transformed into "labor power" that equates to a wage. Art is another example of a fictitious commodity -- it should never be a seen as an object subjected to fluctuating market value over time. The ability to acquire expensive art is a marker of status, and the auction houses and indices like the Mei Moses Index help sustain this dynamic by treating art as a luxury investment. The art world, including artists, collectors, galleries, and museums, cannot claim to be separate from the economic structures that produce inequality. 

My question is, if specifically contemporary and conceptual art is seen by the elite as an investment asset, what exactly is driving its ridiculously high prices? The artist's name? The aesthetic appeal? The intuition for visual value? Tracey Emin’s My Bed sold for $4.3 million in 2014.

The global contemporary conceptual art market is literally a massive speculative bubble that is just waiting to burst. Prices for contemporary art skyrocket constantly, never because it is driven by intrinsic artistic value, but purely only by speculative investment, where collectors, investors, and auction houses fuel each other's expectations of ever-rising prices in a self-sustaining financial feedback loop. Elites who can afford to buy such ridiculous prices continue to pour in, not because the art itself is necessarily more valuable, or they find intrinsic aesthetic value of its form, but because they believe it is a symbol of wealth and a potential opportunity to sell for an even greater amount down the line. For any art historian or connoisseur that might disagree with me, to argue that Emin's bed IS actually genius, that this unmade bed IS a visionary token of intellectual artistic superiority, that it IS worth the financial cost of 400 times my university tuition, is a surrender to the system. It is an agreement to fuel and affirm a vicious financial hierarchy that has been structured to reduce the sentient expression of human nature into a mere commodity.

It’s only a matter of time before this bubble, like others before it, meets its celebratory self-destruction. The seductiveness of investment returns has obscured its fragility, but when the market shifts, the crash will be as dramatic as the rise that preceded it. 

Literary text, reality, and art are channels for society to self-sustain and remain relevant, nobody is ever actually purely original. The literature and art you create can never come from a singular, intellectual mind. You are merely the vessel for an intersection of institutional powers and society’s universal theories that can and will continue to exist without you. When you create, it is not you creating, when I write, it is not I writing, it is the culture using us as vessels to explicate itself while invigorating itself. 

To see it possible to bind art's value to markets is to misunderstand its essence. Art is the primary channel of culture's voice, for shared truths and unspoken histories, not an "asset" to be bought and sold. It belongs not to the market, but to the human experience and to turn it into an object of profit is to diminish its power to endure.

The desire to possess is never an innocent one. It is a public feeling.