Who Buys Art?

The Fine Art market is a very elusive and fickle creature for a number of different reasons.

1. The price of an original piece of art is outside most people's budget. By it's nature, a piece of art is a one of a kind, hand made item. This ensures that it is generally priced to cover the amount of time, skill and talent and materials that goes into each piece. Add to that the desirability of the artist's work and the price can be very high. For most quality art this limits the number of art buyers.

2. Art is perceived as a luxury and therefore not high on people's shopping lists, this limits the market further.

3. The variety of styles of art is vast and the number of buyers for each style, medium, size, price range, etc. is very limited. The amount of choices of art and number of pieces available far exceeds the demand. This breaks the art market into mini-markets for each style, limiting the market even further.

4. The people who appreciate art the most are often artists themselves are not necessarily buyers.

5. What usually sells art is not the quality of the art itself but instead it's the celebrity, fame, fashion, fads, and other fickle reasons that surrounds the art or artist.

6. Many people find art intimidating and the traditional snobbery connected with art is still a major obstacle for a person to overcome if they want to get into collecting art.

7. The vast majority of pictures on walls are reproductions that are printed in China or other low cost countries. People often think that when they are buying these prints they are buying art, but they are not.

8. Mass produced 'art' has expanded into "original" paintings that are really the same pictures painted over and over again, often in a conveyor belt style with many artists working on each piece. Buyers of these paintings are at least trying to buy originals but can this be called art?

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head. I could come up with many, many more but I just wanted to throw some out there and see if anyone agrees or disagrees.

Let me know if you have any comments. Leave one at this blog or email me at carol@carolmcardle.com

Meanwhile please enjoy my paintings of Florida nature, photographs of natural Florida, trompe l'oeil and murals, and abstract paintings.