the 'fine art 'market for photography

Tis happening! Photography is being successfully reduced to a  Fine Art.  Its power to affect change is being sanitised by the white walls of galleries and museums.  The mathematics of the  corporate driven market  are remaking photography into just another commodity.  A commodity that is being pushed by  militaristic surveys using  "ArtTactics"  and" Art Intelligence". But then, reducing photography to a "Fine" Art are a military need  in contemporary society.

This week, ArtTactic published a survey that showed that confidence in the modern and contemporary photography market is up by 9.2% since May, with the biggest increase in confidence at top end of the market, for photos priced over $100,000. Some 92% of experts surveyed thought that prices for modern photography are likely to rise in the next six months, while 34% thought that prices in contemporary photography would go up and 66% thought they would remain at current levels.

Andreas Gursky, Rhein II, 1999, C-print mounted to plexiglass in artist's frame. This became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction last year. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Historically, prices for fine art photography have tended to be much lower than those fetched by artists working in other medium, but that seems to be changing for some parts of this market, albeit pretty slowly. “Prices are definitely creeping up, but it’s not a steep curve, more of a gradual slope,” says Ben Burdett, owner of  ATLAS gallery, a London fine art photography gallery that has helped to build the photography collections of people such as Elton John and institutions such as the National Museum of Qatar and is currently exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach.

He says there’s a relatively short list of really hot names in the photography market that consistently do well at auction, such as earlier twentieth century photographers like Richard Avedon and Irvin Penn, Helmut Newton, and living artists such as CindySherman and Andreas Gursky. A 1999 Andreas Gursky work, Rhein II, holds the record for the most expensive photograph to be sold at auction after it fetched $4.3 million at Christie’s in November last year. “At auction, you see the same names, and indeed the same images by those photographers, sell again and again. People feel more comfortable joining a party where everyone is already having a good time.”





But can the gap between fine art photography and the rest of the fine art market ever be fully closed? Arthur Goldberg, a major US collector of contemporary photography for the last 40 years, said that it was up to history to decide if there should be equality between the two when he spoke at the Artelligence conference in New York a few months back. However, he thought that buying photography was a real opportunity to own great art at a lower price. “Great art is great art,” he said, “whatever the medium.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryntully/2012/12/09/the-steady-rise-of-fine-art-photography/