Business Commons^™

Business Interrupted : Covid-19 And Its Impact On Auction Houses, Carolina Sagardoy

MA Theses

This study aims to thoroughly analyse how auction houses are coping with the conditions imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic in the short-term and what the virus’ long-term impact on the business will be. The study will look at upcoming marketing campaigns and the quick migration to online sales, and will analyse the data within those sales. The study is unique in its aim to also analyse buyer and seller psychological behaviours and how they will be impacted as a result of forced or voluntary distancing when live sales return. Overall, the thesis aims to address the question: Can the auction …

Re-Thinking Risk Management Of Auction House Guarantees And Third-Party Irrevocable Bids, Nathan Krasnick

MA Theses

This paper addresses the question of how deviations between expected and actual art auction results impact the auction guarantees made within an artist’s market and among multiple artists, and whether those impacts can be identified and quantified. To do so, I use a theoretical pricing model based on datasets of historical auction records going back to the earliest available date for a specific artist but no further than 2010. I find that, in comparing the model’s expected and actual results to empirical price deviations at auction, we can identify and quantify the impact of those deviations on guarantees.

Story Of Twin Cities, Who Will Be The Next Storm Center Of Art Fairs?, Rui Bian

MA Theses

Since 2000, with the rapid development of China's economy, the evolution of contemporary art fairs in China has been accelerated. This paper takes two representative cities, Beijing and Shanghai, as examples. In the past one decade, Shanghai and Beijing have respectively led the trend of contemporary art market due to various internal and external factors. This paper uses PEST model to analyze, trying to find out who will be the next center of contemporary art in the next ten years.

The first part of this paper mainly starts from the differentiations in policies and regional distributions of Chinese contemporary art …

The Demand For Women Who Painted: Recent Art Market Trends For Female Artists Of The Premodern Era, Cristina Demiany

MA Theses

A number of events highlighting female artists who lived and worked before the year 1900 are currently appearing in the art world. In consideration of this expanding cultural activity, this paper explores recent art market behavior around premodern female painters by examining sales of their work at auction between the years 1998 and 2019. The larger questions around such an analysis include assessing if the work of premodern female artists presents a new investment opportunity for collectors, and if it could also provide a means of invigorating the Old Master market. Three case studies representing female artists from different locations, …

Chuck Close: The Cost Of Behaving Badly, And #Metoo, Rebecca Cohen-Homapour

MA Theses

In July of 2016, artist, Chuck Close was interviewed with a front cover spread in New York Times Magazine to discuss his legendary career. In December of 2017, Close was accused of sexually mistreating women on numerous occasions. This dissertation considers the powerful artist Chuck Close and repercussions following recent accusations against him made by multiple women. It will help us begin to understand how the recent allegations affect art museums and public exhibitions. There is also a discussion analyzing if an artists’ work can be separated from the reputation of its author. A hedonic regression, data analysis and interviews …

High Or Low? The Value Of Transitional Paintings By Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, And Mark Rothko, Monica Peacock

MA Theses

Transitional works of art are an anomaly in the field of fine art appraisals. While they represent mature works stylistically and/or contextually, they lack certain technical or compositional elements unique to that artist, complicating the process for identifying comparables. Since minimal research currently exists on the value of these works, this study sought to standardize the process for identifying transitional works across multiple artists’ markets and assess their financial value on a broad scale through an analysis of three artists: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The results reveal that transitional paintings by these artists are high in …