Over the past 20 years, Western culture and its market system has been increasingly engaged in a revisionist process. The process has overturned established hierarchies and, more importantly, reassessed the inclusions and exclusions made by taste makers and historians who have walked in their footsteps over the past two centuries. Even though the process has only just begun, a complete revaluation of the place of women in art history is underway, highlighting women artists from different generations, such as Berthe Morisot, Ljubov Popova or Alice Neel.
We have seen similar developments within music, with Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann and Lili Boulanger, as well as within architecture and design with the late recognition of Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand and Léonie Geisendorf, and many others. All of them forgotten during various periods for one single reason – they were women.
There is a range of exclusions for reasons other than gender. The most obvious and most current following last year’s Black Lives Matter protests is race, where practitioners in all cultural fields were systematically discriminated against and often excluded. In addition, sexual orientation or being born into a ethnic or even domestic minority in some part of the world, has also been a reason for being excluded from the “stories of the masters”. For example, few people in the art world, including Sweden, Norway or Finland, were aware of or had any expertise in contemporary Sami art before it was presented at documenta 14 in 2017. Since then, we have see a large number of exhibitions and a subsequent market trend with dramatic price increases.
The art system is changing and is driven by a general ideological change that is reinforced by the fact that there are an increasing number of women and people from minorities in executive roles such as curators, museum directors and collectors. The change is more enlightened and inclusive under pressure from a constantly growing and globalised art market. Some important examples of this ideological change is the acquisition campaign “The Second Museum of Our Wishes” at Moderna Museet 2006-2007, “elles@centrepompidou” at the Centre Pompidou in 2009, “Modern Women” at the MoMA in New York in 2010 and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, as well as Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen “Die Andere Seite Des Mondes” in 2012. Furthermore, there are more thematic exhibitions, such as “Women of Abstract Expressionism” at the Denver Art Museum in 2016 or “Elles font l’abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou in 2021. Similar museum-driven projects have also developed within other fields that are in need of a major overhaul. Both from a geographic perspective, such as Tate Modern and M+, and from a race perspective such as the major Kerry James Marshall retrospective “Mastry” organised by the MCA Chicago, the MOCA Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which took place from 2016–2017. Other examples include the superlative exhibition “Figuring History” in 2018 which brought up the subject of who is represented and who makes art history, and which presented Marshall’s works side by side with Mikalene Thomas and Robert Colescott, as well as the more than 30 American exhibitions, books and events focused on Afro-American art that were planned for 2021.
The increasing awareness of previously disadvantaged artists has positive consequences for their market value. Women artists are slowly moving up the art price ladder, even if the generalisation from the project “The Second Museum of Our Wishes” in 2007 that a woman artist who, in all other respects, was at the same level as her male colleagues previously only attained 10 percent of their market value, is still partly true. But over the past few years, this has changed, and the prices of works by prominent women artists have increased exponentially. The prices of works by prominent women artists have increased exponentially, with paintings by Joan Mitchell, for example, having increased by as much as 700 percent since the beginning of the century. The interest in black artists has been explosive, and even if the opportunities within this field are more limited, there is still tremendous potential.
There is an ongoing mega trend of revisionism that will probably have a considerable impact on price performance in the art market over the next 5–10 years. It is not only an important theme in our investment strategy, but also gives us an opportunity to promote equality and justice in the art industry.
The Investment Committee is well equipped to actively collect artists or groups of artists that may be of interest for museums to include in their exhibitions, or even form the core of exhibitions at a museum. This is a strategy that some of the leading commercial galleries have developed with great success over the years. For example, Hauser & Wirth included the completely forgotten 1960s artist Lee Lozano (which also led to an exhibition at Moderna Museet), or David Zwirner’s successful efforts to promote the works of Alice Neel at museums, which consequently increased the value of her works by around 400 percent in just a few years. The Arte Collectum Investment Committee will be working in a similar fashion and continue to elevate the status and the artwork of the artists, both by exhibiting their works and by publishing them in journals and books, which can lead to a considerable increase in the value of the fund.
There is an ongoing mega trend of revisionism that will probably have a considerable impact on price performance in the art market over the next 5–10 years. It is not only an important theme in our investment strategy, but also gives us an opportunity to promote equality and justice in the art industry.