Obviously if an artist is very well known then sure, throw out some big numbers.
But I find it hard to believe that there is an established and tangible system to give monetary value to completely subjective material.
Surely money laundering must play a role at some rate but still. What makes someone qualified to say what art is worth?
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The same way money works. People mutually agree to a system and to making exchanges. Nothing firmer than that, I’m afraid.
Subjective things can be measured.
“What is tasty?” is subjective. “What does Bob think is tasty?” can be measured, by asking Bob (or watching what food Bob easts). Further, you can do a large scale survey or study, and find out what a whole population finds to be tasty on average (and identify subcategories, etc).
An appraiser is supposed to be well-acquainted with the actual distribution of subjective tastes in the population (and more specifically, among art buyers).
An appraiser’s job is to accurately estimate how much a piece of art might sell for. All value is just what someone is willing to pay. It’s just harder to judge for art, because it requires knowledge of the current vibe of the community of people who pay lots of money for art. But Toyota has appraisers who value their new cars, too. They’re called “economists”.
If we assume honesty and integrity, a vast majority of it would be familiarity with past auctions and how much people are willing to pay for art of that kind or from that artist.
So it is not that anything is established, if is just using precedent to make educated guesses about what a work would be valued at if it went to auction.
That said, the whole art world is rife with dishonesty when you get to the absurd levels of wealth, so there is a lot of corrupt data entering the system.
The same way you appraise real estate or other property like cars. There’s a market for these items. Items that are similar fetch known prices at auctions. Items that are by the same artist fetch prices at auction. You can impute approximate value based on condition and those other sales.
It’s more or less the same as how anything is appraised.
They have familiarity with the market and the product and use that knowledge to estimate the value of the product.
The art market is small, art is not fungible and it’s infested with money laundering, so even with deep knowledge of the space appraised values can be wildly off the mark.
An appraiser may not be accurate but they’ll have a better handle than just about anyone else on how the market reacts to specific artists and types of art.
An appraisal of anything is subjective. For art, it’s based on the artist’s popularity, the condition of the piece, and various other factors that influence its desirability. Its like an appraisal for a home. Your house’s price is based on the condition of your home, the features, and the market where you live. The appraisal value isnt a guarantee of anything- just an estimate backed by a market analysis. If the appraisal you got says your home is worth 500,000, maybe thats where you start pricing it. If you don’t get any offers, your house isn’t worth 500,000, no matter what the report says.
Edit: You can see this disconnect in the pope’s old house. It was on the market for like 250k, but then dude became pope, and now the asking price has skyrocketed because the circumstances have changed since the last appraisal.
It’s only worth what someone will pay for it, and it’s mostly people with more money than sense that will pay a large amount for someone’s picture of a red square.
They have to say how much someone else will pay for it. They don’t have to understand what it means
Think of hiring an art appraiser akin to running a brothel, blind. You would do well to hire someone who demonstrates a good sense for identifying high value and low value personnel based upon their knowledge of what the clientele are likely to pay, even though it too is “subjective”
It’s important to remember that “subjective” is not the same as “entirely random”. It is typical for there to be general consensus on a subjective opinion even if there is disagreement over the exact value.
Who is the best football player? What’s the coolest car? What’s the best comfort food? All will have different answers depending on who you ask, but most people would tend to agree on roughly where answers would fall.
And that’s where an art appraiser comes in. Their job is to be knowledgeable about the general consensus to be able to put the work into the right region of the chart.
They can both be true. Art is subjective, and theres people whose job it is to decide how much a piece is worth. Art being subjective means that every person who looks at it has their own valid opinion on what the art means and how it impacts them. When an art appraiser says a given piece is worth more than another, they aren’t saying that nobody can prefer the less valuable one. While their appraisal assigns a dollar value, it isn’t an objective measure of quality or anything about the art. Its pretty much just a guess about how much people will pay for it at auction. When they say a piece thats just a blue stripe on a white background or smth is worth $1 million, they aren’t saying its more skillful or impactful or beautiful than any other piece, all theyre saying is “these rich guys will pay bank for anything with this guys name in the corner”
A lot of expensive art is sold at high value to inflate it artificially. Rich people often use art as a way to invest money due to how tax isn’t collected off art purchases and sales. A bit of a rigged system really. An appraiser for art is essentially like an appraiser for real estate. They look at the past price history of the work and compare it to current valuations.
Some great answers here.
Will you pay millions for that duct-tape-over-banana, or will you recreate for $3 at home?
The expression “art is subjective” is about whether an individual person personally likes the piece of art.
An appraiser’s job is to determine what price a piece of art will sell for, which is a completely different question from whether he or anybody else likes it as an art piece. There are people who would pay a high price for a famous art work simply because they know it’s worth that much, whether or not they like the piece.
Imagine if you were a banker and somebody came to you for a loan to start a restaurant. Yes, taste in food is subjective, but whether you like his food is irrelevant to your job. You just need to know if he can sell enough food to pay back the loan.
So it’s the same for an appraiser. They consider artistic merit, but probably more importantly they consider things like how much similar artworks have sold for, how famous the artist is, and whether that type of art is popular. It’s still a very inexact determination, because you really never know what the second richest person might offer for a particular painting, but they can often get a good idea.
Appsaising monetary value of art can be similar to assessing the value of a piece of land. While people can like or dislike a piece of land, there can be objective factors that suggest the current value of it (apart from size), such as location, accessibility, sale value of previous or similar land, etc. And that being said, a piece of land may still be sold at a price largely deviated from the assessed value. Art appraising works somehow similar to it.
Subjective doesn’t mean arbitrary. All value is subjective. The value of gum is subjective, but you can still tell that a pack of gum is gonna sell around $1-2 unless there’s something special about it.
The appraiser’s job is to estimate how much most potential buyers will pay for something; to say “based on current trends, you’ll probably make about $XXX dollars selling that”
Let’s say you cook a meal and give it to 100 people. 80 people really like it and say it’s super tasty. This meal is now appraised as quite tasty, even though 20 people disliked it and taste is subjective and their opinion is perfectly valid.
An art appraiser is more like an appraiser of the trends that emerge out of the subjectivity. They are interpreting trends and also financial liquidity and customer availability and interest. They don’t appraise art as art, but rather the capitalistic and subjective environment it exists within.
They are not grading the actual quality of the art, they are only speculating how much it could sell for. That’s purely perception based
Okay i actually have no idea
Having a “professional appraiser” is a way to keep the IRS off their backs about money laundering. It’s just a circlejerk. Art communities give schools credibility. Those schools then offer Art History and Art Criticism agendas. You publish your Ph.D., and become a “NOTED EXPERT” of some dude’s rectangles and some other dude’s weird portraits that look like they were done by a 6yo. Then, some drug cartel or “international business man” “hires” you to “appraise” their work, (read: bribes you to give some insane value) and after that, some other rich dude buys your “art” for some obscene amount, and SOMEHOW, totally RANDOMLY, also gets a huge shipment of cocaine.
Then, because you lent your voice to that “appraisal”, you turn around and commend your school, and this is how we mint money launderers and appraisers.
They do also have to do some actual “appraisals” for museums and insurance companies, though, to maintain the facade of legitimacy and credibility for why some scribbles are worth millions of dollars, and why others should just go on the fridge with a magnet.
We subjectively agree that the appraiser is accurate.
Beauty of the art is subjective, quality is not.
A picture can have amazing colour combinations, use great paint, show a very professional stroking technique and so on. Painting can be made sliggishly or with great effort and that effort alone gives the painting a certain quality. Independent of that quality, I can still find that image ugly. Like the Mona Lisa. Amazingly well done picture. I personally have rarely eevr seen something so boring and uninteresting. Logically I would never buy that painting (because I don’t want it). Other people might love the painting and be willing to buy it. For those people, a value for the painting has to be determined so a price can ne decided upon.