Facebook Fading?

From The Conversation:

This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites. Young people are turning away in droves and adopting other social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service.  

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media, we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.  

Instead, four new contenders for the crown have emerged: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp.

Copyright Trauma

My friend Lilian makes mosaics. A couple of years ago someone sent her a link to prints of her work for sale on a website based in China. I heard from her again this week. First, here is an image of one of her mosaics:

Queen Esther Holding Evidence of Haman's Guilt; 8" x 32", Venetian glass, smalti, gold tesserae, gems, gold leaf on wood panel; 2002.

Here is what Lilian sent me:

In Turkey a hi-fashion design house has manufactured blouses with a combination of her mosaics printed on them.

I cannot figure out how to prevent this and neither can I see any benefit in legal action, I am sad to say. The protection of your international copyrights can be an impossible or impossibly expensive task. Thi is a risk we all take and there is little to be done except to remember that imitation is a sincere form of flattery.

Wiki Resource: DIY Budget Gallery

What is DYI Budget Gallery?

This wiki is a Do It Yourself manual on how to organize your own Budget Gallery where you can get an introduction to what a Budget Gallery is. If you're thinking about organizing a show, you'll be interested in seeing our show planning timeline that guides you through all the steps.  

Not everything presented is applicable in Canada or other constituencies. There is an American bias to the text but it remains a worthwhile resource for artists planning on mounting an exhibition.

Link.

Further to the Last Post

Right after writing the post before this one about the bubble in the art market, news comes out that Francis Bacon's Thee Studies of Lucien Freud sells for $146 million in six minutes. Link.

Big Picture Art Market News

From Is this the end of the art-market bubble? by Felix Saloman on the Reuters website.

"This is one reason why I’ve long said that even if there is a bubble in the contemporary-art world (and I think there is), it’s not a speculative bubble. The people spending millions of dollars on trophy art aren’t buying to flip; the people selling aren’t selling to make a fast buck. Rather, they’re selling because of one of the “three Ds”: death, divorce, debt. The exceptions to this rule are dealers, of course, along with a small number of collectors who are so active they start becoming quasi-dealers in their own right. If you’re well connected in the art world and willing to make an opportunistic purchase, then you’ll probably be willing to make an opportunistic sale as well, when the price is right. 

"But right now, I’m beginning to see indications that things are changing: if you look at this month’s big contemporary art auctions, you’ll see quite a lot of art being flipped, including art being flipped by one of the biggest collectors of them all, Stevie Cohen. According to Carol Vogel and Peter Lattman in the NYT, Cohen is selling a Gerhard Richter which he bought from the Pace Gallery last year, along with “about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions”.  

Link.  

Meanwhile, Carol Vogel at the New York Times in an article titled Digging Into Deep Pockets at Auction says:

"It’s strange to think that just a decade ago, Christie’s entire evening sale of postwar and contemporary art totaled $62 million. On Nov. 12, during the second of the two big auction weeks that start in New York on Monday night, Christie’s is offering one painting — a Francis Bacon triptych — that is expected to bring $85 million. Its archrival, Sotheby’s, has a 1963 Warhol that it anticipates will sell for $60 million to $80 million.

And:

"After Christie’s record $495 million postwar and contemporary art auction just six months ago, when buyers from all over the world — New York and Doha, Beijing and São Paulo — competed on everything from a Pollock drip painting to a classic canvas by Lichtenstein, seasoned collectors like the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, the newsprint magnate Peter Brant and the musician Eric Clapton apparently thought it was time to cash in before the good times end.

This season’s contemporary art catalogs are as thick as doorstops, brimming with more paintings, drawings and sculptures with estimates of over $20 million than ever before.

Link.

 Then there's Kathryn Tulley at Forbes whose article is titled, Contemporary Art: End of a Bubble or Already Burst?, cites statistics that suggest Salomon is behind the times in making predictions of a collapse in the market. She says the decline has been underway for a while.