Challenging Necromantic Trends
One surveys the auction catalogs and blue-chip rosters, anticipating a spark of vitality, only to confront the same spectral procession: estates exhumed, narratives conjured from thin air, and prices levitating on the fumes of posthumous myth-making. The factory sublime, as we diagnosed in these pages last issue, is but one symptom of a deeper malaise, a market that prefers the safely deceased over the riskily alive, where value accrues not from an artist's breathing genius but from the alchemical interventions of dealers, curators, and historians who retrofit relevance onto forgotten oeuvres.
The Limitations of Posthumous Narratives
Why, one must ask, do collectors persist in this necromantic charade, bidding fortunes on works whose creators can no longer defend, evolve, or disrupt their own legacies? The tired narrative is seductive in its certainty: a deceased artist, conveniently silent, becomes a blank canvas for revisionist storytelling. Galleries unearth dusty archives, museums stage “rediscoveries,” and auction houses orchestrate bidding wars fueled by scarcity and sentimentality. Suddenly, a mid-century abstractionist, overlooked in life, is hailed as a prescient visionary, prices soaring not because the work has grown in stature, but because the narrative has been polished to a marketable sheen.
Artist Direct Earnings: A New Metric
Collectors, if they aspire to more than mere financial arbitrage, must shatter this paradigm and pivot to the living pulse, the artists who are not relics but active agents, judged rigorously on their skill, innovation, and direct engagement with the world. Here, value derives not from posthumous hype but from Artist Direct Earnings: the tangible revenues an artist generates in their lifetime through studio sales, commissions, and self-directed ventures. This metric strips away the illusions of estate manipulation and reveals the raw truth of an artist's trajectory, their ability to sustain a practice, build a collector base, and evolve without the crutch of death's dramatic multiplier.
The Case for the Living Artist
An emerging painter commanding $20,000 to $80,000 per canvas through direct dealings signals not just market viability but genuine resonance: collectors investing here are betting on vitality, on works that pulse with the artist's current interrogations of climate, identity, technology, and form. Consider the absurdity of the alternative: why funnel capital into a system that rewards inertia, where a “magical new narrative” is spun from obituary clippings and archival dust? Living artists offer accountability; they respond to critique, iterate on failures, and forge breakthroughs in real time. Their earnings, earned while alive, reflect unmediated merit: no dealer inflating myths, no museum retrofitting significance.
A Call to Action for Collectors
In this new paradigm, collectors become patrons in the truest sense, fostering ecosystems where skill triumphs over spectacle, and promise is measured by the artist's hand, not the auctioneer's gavel. History, ever the impartial arbiter, will judge harshly those who clung to the embalmed while the living revolution unfolded in plain sight. The factories may churn onward, the estates may multiply, but the astute collector will recognize that the future of art lies not in yesterday's storage units but in today's studios, vibrant, contentious, and gloriously alive.