What is taste?

Taste is an acquired disposition to ‘differentiate’ and ‘appreciate’ … to establish recognition. 

- Bourdieu (1984): A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p 436

 

The moment you think you understand a great work of art,

it’s dead for you. 

 

- Oscar Wilde

 

“To lead the world…we need the most talented and hardest-working people”. 

- Mark Zuckerberg (New York Times, 12 April 2013)

“The art critic keeps trying to interpret thing he can’t understand and which can’t be interpreted.  A painting does not need anybody to explain what it is about. If it is good, it speak for itself, and a critic who tries to add to that statement is presumptuous.“ 

- Harold Rosenberg (American art critic and philosopher)

Niall Ferguson on London’s future as the world’s financial capital

“If we don’t get our act together within the next 10 years. Hong Kong will overtake London.”

 

Niall Ferguson, History Professor at Harvard and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, on “Will London survive as the world’s financial capital?”

(panel discussion organised by Latham & Watkins, 27 June 2012 – London)

Gordon Cheung: Art is not a speculative investment

Epic landscape paintings with pink stock listing collages in the background are typical for the BBC (British born Chinese) artist Gordon Cheung and show  deep thinking about the relationship between money and its environment. Especially his Tulipmania series (2012) is a reflection of the understanding between art and finance. When I asked him whether art could be regarded as a speculative investment today, he said that it had nothing to do with art and that speculative investment were only about making money. 
The current state of the contemporary art market, in particular of selling art for several millions, shows something different: Art investors want to resell faster than the law allows, auction houses are influencing buyers to raise the hammer price, and illegal price-fixing

Art a synonym for money?

“As a boy, I used to long for things that cannot be melted into air by money or wards, things that are inviolable, insoluble, and now I have found them, in the world of art.”

-  Frans Kellendonk, Mystiek Lichaam