Better than Gold: Art in Storage Spaces

• In Event: Turning (More) Things into Assets: Techno-economic TRANSformations

Abstract

Since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, the art market has exploded. A low-growth global economy, low interest rates, and surging asset prices turned artworks into safe havens for transnationally mobile private wealth. Key to this investment trend are new types of art storage spaces, including 'freeports' where artworks are stored 'offshore' and traded tax-free in climate-controlled bunkers. Here, however, art becomes more than a mere store of financial value. Rather, novel practices of insuring, collateralizing, and securitizing art in storage effectively financialize art through storage.

This financialization problematizes both public and private relations between art and finance, as new financial products and services offered through art in storage affect established norms and forms of art ownership and display. New economies of enrichment create new dimensions of financial speculation, introducing new uncertainties and risks as well as new opportunities for tax avoidance and evasion. These, in turn, manifest new global forms of wealth concentration and inequality, which may necessitate the adaptation of (self-)regulatory and redistributive frameworks.

Researching how art is currently financialized in and through storage, my project analyzes the far-reaching implications of new types of art storage spaces. Doing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at and around these art storage spaces, I study the contested technologies, politics, and ethics of art storage and art financialization practices.

I add to theories of globalization by conceptualizing as global finance assemblages the technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses, and value regimes transnationally networked around art storage spaces. Based on recent histories of collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art, I demonstrate how global finance assemblages now accumulate financial profits from past and present artistic futures. I aim at a better understanding of global art-market dynamics, including imagined futures of boom and bust.

Author

• Christoph Rausch, Maastricht University