Art business

If the hypermodern age of capitalism, which is the world for nearly three decades, is the planetarization and financialisation, deregulation and outgrowth of its operations, is also the one that is marked by another kind of inflation aesthetics inflation. Not only are the megacities, objects, information, financial transactions that are involved in a hyperbolic climbing, but the very aesthetic field. Here are the worlds of art involved in turn in hyper networks, contemporary capitalism that incorporates in large scale the logical of style and dream, seduction and fun in the different sectors of the consumer universe. If there is a bubble, there is another kind of bubble whose extreme inflated do not know, however, not crisis or crash, with the notable exception of the limited field of contemporary art market, the speculative bubble, as we have seen, could explode in different moments, we live the time of the aesthetic boom sustained by hyper capitalism.

With the hypermodern times call up a new aesthetic period, a society over-aestheticized, an empire where the sun of the art never set. The imperatives of style, beauty, the show business gained such importance in consumer markets, turned so the design of objects and services forms of communication, distribution and consumption that it is difficult not to recognize the advent of a true way of aesthetic productions arriving now to maturity. We call this new state of liberal trade economy: capitalism artistic or creative capitalism, transaesthetic.

At the time of financialization of the economy and its social, ecological and human damage, the very idea of an artistic capitalism may seem radically shocking. However, this is the new world face that by blurring the boundaries and the old dichotomies, transforms the relationship of the economy with art as Warhol transformed the relationship of artistic creation with the market, defending an art business. After the modern era of radical disjunctions, we have the hypermodern age of conjunctions, deregulation and hybridizations, where the artistic capitalism is a particularly emblematic figure.

The importance of market logic in the art world is not new, but of course, at the time of globalization, is a new level that is reached, as evidenced particularly the growth of investments of art collectors and the vertiginous increases of the artworks prices. The art appears increasingly as a commodity among others, as a type of investment which is expected high returns. The romantic age of the art gave way to a world where the cost of the works is more important and mediated than the aesthetic value: now is the trade price and the international market which consecrate the artist and the artwork. We are currently in the time of the "art business" which sees the triumph of speculative operations, marketing and communication. If capitalism incorporated the aesthetic dimension, it is increasingly channeled or orchestrated by financial and trade mechanisms. Hence the feeling often shared that the more artistic capitalism reigns, there will be less art and more market will be.