Cambridge Risk Event in association with Sotheby's Institute of Art
Exploring Risk and Uncertainty: Metaphors from the Art Market
Date: Friday 23 September 2011
Time: 09:15-19:00
Location: Sotheby's Institute of Art, 30 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3EE, +44 (0)20 7462 3232
Meeting Overview
This research-based conference will investigate the nature of risk and uncertainty using metaphors from the art market with an aim to draw novel inferences and develop insights relevant to both the art world and other fields. In particular, the conference will investigate dominant models in the art world and the lessons which can be learned from them.
In recent years, art has become big business in way not seen since the Dutch golden age. Once the preserve of a small elite, the explosive growth of the art world has brought it to international attention and created opportunities for incumbents and new entrants. The market for art has increased in both size and scope with the expansion of emerging economies and the global widening of income distributions. The parallel growth of the financial markets has driven the evolution of art as an asset class and an investment option. As well as challenges, the growth of the art market has offered exciting opportunities for the creation of both economic wealth and symbolic and cultural capital. These changes have also introduced new forms of uncertainty, volatility and risk to the art world and its participants.
Download the flyer for this seminar (pdf, 1.26MB)
Download the programme for this seminar (pdf, 38KB)
Meeting Convenors
Dr Anna M. Dempster, Senior Lecturer, Sotheby's Institute of Art
Michelle Tuveson, Executive Director, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies
Meeting Abstracts
- Anders Petterson: Using Sentiment Analysis in Assessing Risks in the Art Market
This presentation looks at the role of the 'tastemaker' in the contemporary art market, and shows how the ArtTactic Art Market Confidence Index can provide a better understanding and measure of risks in this market. A methodology of index construction employing expert sampling to assess market trends is argued to be particularly appropriate given the structure of the art world. - Anna Dempster: Risk Perception in the Visual Arts
This paper considers perceptions of risk in the visual arts. An analysis of surveys and interviews shows that attitudes to risk by art world participants is fundamentally different from those sciences, economics or finance. The relationship between business and creative risk is explored in detail investigating the tension between art and commerce. - Michael Jacobides: The Morphing Industry Architectures in the Art World
One of the most significant dynamics of change over the last few years has been the transformation of the structure, the architecture of entire sectors From financial services to computers and cars from healthcare to education, new players redefine the very boundaries of a sector, shaping who does what and who takes what. The art world appears to be an example. In this collaborative session, we will draw on examples from other sectors to probe how the art world's "industry architecture" has changed or may change, and how this will affect the risk and uncertainty in our context. - Tom Flynn: Negotiating Authenticity: Contrasting Value Systems and Associated Risk in the Global Art Market
This paper explores the concept of authenticity in a rapidly globalising art market and assesses the risks associated with various forms of private and corporate art collecting within that expanding market. Using a recent case study involving the unauthorised wholesale copying in China of an original work of sculpture created by a US artist, the paper assesses the extent to which differing cultural attitudes towards originality and authorship reveal potential new vulnerabilities in the market. As the art market continues to atomise, with the traditionally dominant western centres of production and exchange giving way to emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East, so new forms of risk and uncertainty are beginning to appear. - Phanish Puranam: Organisation Theory and the Art World: A Bridge Worth Building?
A central concern of organisation theory is how organisations work to understand the processes through which division of labour and integration of effort arise in order to meet organisational goals. While the world of art clearly has already offered several insights into the functioning of markets, its relevance to the study of organisations has been less explored. I will reflect on some of the possible ways in which studying the art world may help shed light on issues in organisation theory. - Stephen Satchell: Bubbles in the Art Market
We investigate the presence of bubbles market. This in turn requires defining what the value of art might be. By using Blanchard's model of bubbles, we show that it is possible to say something about the presence of bubbles even when a measure of fair value is not present. - Payal Arora & Filip Vermeylen: Battling Uncertainty: Old and New Experts in the Market for Visual Arts
This paper explores the position and purpose of experts in the art world over time. It has been long understood that art theorists, critics, historians, dealers, auctioneers, curators and so forth play a seminal role as intermediaries in a market that features significant information asymmetries and uncertainty. They facilitate exchanges and are instrumental in determining the artistic, social and financial value of a work of art. However, in this digital age, declarations surface on the death of the knowledge and quality. The intrinsic value of a work of art is not (or no longer) a given, and various new intermediaries, both social and technical, now appear to contribute to and compete in shaping the valuation process. In the context of the art world, questions therefore arise relative to the role of the amateur in the evaluation and validation of art in current times. Do social media level the playing field and can we assume that equity and vastly increased scale in participation results in better judgments? Does online participation on art valuation impact its actual market pricing? In this paper, we contend that the traditional art experts have not necessarily been replaced by these new players, but rather that new voices have been added to the chorus. This said, many issues - particularly those involving trust and art quality - remain unresolved in the contemporary art market. - Margaret Iversen: Chance
What is the meaning of chance in art since around 1900? Why should artists deliberately set up a gap between intention and outcome in their practice? And why should the viewer find the result so engaging? Chance has been used to characterise a very broad spectrum of practices including the readymade, collage, expressionist painting, performance, participation and more. While I will touch on some of these, I intend to restrict my focus mainly to those chance procedures that involve setting up some quite formal procedure or mechanical apparatus for capturing chance occurrences. Once the apparatus or instruction is determined the artist then adopts a posture of waiting to see what will happen. - Christophe Spaenjers: Price and Volume in the Art Market
Previous research has shown that, in many asset markets, a drop in the aggregate price level is associated with a drop in trading activity. For example, Clayton et al. (2010) discuss the positive pricevolume correlation in housing markets, which can be mainly explained by exogenous shocks that affect both home prices and trading volume. This paper shows how a positive correlation between relative performance and volume on a disaggregate level may affect the estimation of returns (on the aggregate level) if the asset category is only infrequently traded. More specifically, we document timeseries variation in the composition of observed art sales at auction - more popular types of art are overrepresented at each point in time - and we present evidence that this leads to biased art return estimates. - Laurent Noel: How to Define the Quality of Artistic Goods?
This study shows that the art market is an information market. Information focuses primarily on the quality of the goods. Quality is a complex concept which covers different aspects. If one of the key aspects is lacking, the market may disappear, demonstrating the applicability of Akerlof's "Lemons" theory (1970) to the art market. - Arjo Klamer: Without Uncertainty No Art Market
Uncertainty rather than risk is a crucial element of the art market. Using the distinction that Frank Knight made between risk and uncertainty and drawing on the work of Mary Douglas, this paper explores the role uncertainty plays in the art market. It accounts for the conversations that constitute art in general and the market for art in particular. The conversation is about the generation of meanings, a process that is inherently uncertain. This feature has far reaching consequences for the way the art market performs, including the pricing of art. - Clare McAndrew: The Collateral Value of Fine Art
In this paper, we examine the effect of implicit seller reserves on the estimation of value-at-risk based on historical asset sales data. We direct our examination toward how and whether fine art might prove an appropriate form of loan collateral for banks and other financial institutions. Using a data set of French Impressionist paintings, we control for the effect of works that are bought in-house to construct a distribution of potential sale values that corrects for sample selection bias. It turns out that the downside risk surrounding deviations of auction prices from expert presale estimates depends critically on how buy-ins are incorporated. If downside risk is assessed solely on historical experience with successful auction sales, the data appear to support loan-to-value ratios between 50% and a 100% larger than loan-to-value ratios that countenance the existence of seller reserves. The auction process, however, is quantifiable and can reveal the necessary risk information required for loan consideration. - Joseph Lampel: Art Fairs as Resource Valuation and Trading Events.
Art fairs are "field configuring events" (Lampel and Meyer, 2008) and are contexts where all resources relevant to the art field's strategies are valued in relationship to each other. They are also contexts where actors use resources entrepreneurially to create and obtain other resources that further these strategies. This paper deals with the macro and micro dynamics of art fairs. At the macro level I explore the interaction between the art field and art fairs, with particular emphasis on how actors employ field resources in fairs. At the micro level, I examine the tactics that actors employ to improve their position and capture value from during art fairs. After establishing the basic resource valuation framework, I move to an examination of art fairs as investment opportunities, analyse the spatial and temporal structures of valuation in art fairs, explore art fairs as regions of 'predictable unpredictability', and close with art fairs as entrepreneurial arenas for actors in the art field. - Rachel A J Campbell Pownall: Does the Sun 'Shine' on Art Prices?
This paper examines the role of private values in art auction prices in London during the period 1990-2007. The private value is closely related to taste and mood, whereas the common value of a painting is linked to the future resale value. By proxying for exogenous variation in both components, we show that the lower part of the price distribution is populated with paintings with a relative high private value, whereas in the upper part, transaction prices are driven primarily by the common value characteristics. Our finding has important implications for collectors and investors in the art market.
Conference Speakers
Payal Arora, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Payal Arora (PhD Columbia University-TC; MEd. Harvard University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research work focuses on social computing, knowledge constructions and cybercultures. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, The Information Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies and the like. Her 2010 article on digitalisation of information won the Social Informatics Best Paper Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She is the author of Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate) and the upcoming book, Virtual and Real Leisure Spaces: A Comparative and Cross-Cultural Analysis (Routledge).
Richard Bronk, London School of Economics
Richard Bronk is a writer and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics with expertise in the history of ideas, philosophy of economics, comparative corporate governance and European political economy. He spent 17 years in the City of London - positions including head of European equities at Baring Asset Management, European equity strategist at Merrill Lynch, and Adviser on European capital markets and political economy at the Bank of England. Richard is author of Progress and the Invisible Hand - the Philosophy and Economics of Human Advance; and The Romantic Economist - Imagination in Economics. He has an MA in Classics and Philosophy from Merton College, Oxford.
Tom Christopherson, Sotheby's
Tom Christopherson is a Senior Director of Sotheby's and has been European General Counsel since 2001, heading the Legal and Tax & Heritage Departments for Sotheby's Europe and Asia. He read Modern History at Oxford before qualifying as a Solicitor in 1989. Tom worked at the private client specialist law firm Withers from 1987-1989 and then at the international corporate law firm Freshfields from 1989 to 1996, working in London and Brussels and including a year with the Corporate Strategy Department at the Rank Organisation plc. Tom joined Sotheby's in January 1997 and is a member of the Committees of the British Art Market Federation and the Society of Fine Art Auctioneers, and sits on the Court of the Company of Arts Scholars, Dealers and Collectors and on the Advisory Board of the Sotheby's Institute, London.
D'Maris Coffman, Winton Centre for Financial History
D'Maris Coffman is the Director of the Winton Centre for Financial History & the Mary Bateson Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Most of her current research is on the relationship between public finance and private capital markets in early modern and early late modern Europe. She manages the European State Finance Database. She received her MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania and her BSc in Economics from the Wharton School. She has offered courses to advanced undergraduates and graduate students at Penn and Cambridge in early modern public finance, economic thought, and the development of financial capitalism.
Anna Dempster, Sotheby's institute of Art, London
Anna Dempster is Senior Lecturer in Art Business, Sotheby's institute of Art, London. She has a BA and M.Phil in History from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD at the Judge Business School, Cambridge. For the past six years she has held a lectureship at Birkbeck College, University of London becoming Programme Director of the MSc/MA in Creative Industries. Her research and teaching experience is in leading institutions, including London Business School, Rotterdam School of Management and the University of the Arts, London, where she was Research Director of the Creative Industries Observatory. Her research focuses on the role of risk and uncertainty in the creative industries and visual arts with publications in strategic management, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Jeremy Eckstein, Sotheby's institute of Art, London
Jeremy Eckstein started his working life as an actuary and fund manager, before joining Sotheby's as Head of Research where he created indices and other performance statistics to monitor the art market for investors such as the British Railways Pension Fund. He has worked as an independent consultant since 1990, undertaking a broad range of commissioned research, conducting surveys for the art trade and producing a variety of statistics and economic analyses. He has a special interest in 'securitising' art, structuring fine art investment funds and specialist financial services for the art market.
Tom Flynn, The Sculpture Agency
Tom Flynn is a London-based art historian, critic and journalist. He lectures on the history of the art market at Kingston University, at the IESA/Wallace Collection Masters course in Art and Business, and is a visiting lecturer at Christie's Education. His publications include The Body in Sculpture (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (Routledge 1998, co-edited with Dr Tim Barringer), and Sean Henry Scala, 2009). In 2007, he founded The Sculpture Agency to promote contemporary sculpture.
Jos Hackforth-Jones, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London
Jos Hackforth-Jones is Director of Sotheby's Institute of Art - London. She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Prior to her role at Sotheby's Institute, she was President and Provost at Richmond. She is a distinguished academic administrator, noted art historian, author, curator and lecturer. She has published widely on art historical subjects, including most recently Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, (coedited with Mary Roberts, Blackwell Publishing, 2005). She has held a number of international research fellowships organised colloquia and conferences and lectured extensively. In 2007 she was lead curator of the exhibition, Between Worlds, Voyagers To Britain 1700-1850 at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Margaret Iversen, University of Essex
Margaret Iversen is Professor in the School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, England. She is author of Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (2007), Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993) and Mary Kelly (coauthored with Douglas Crimp and Homi Bhabha, 1997). Recent publications include Chance (2010) and Writing Art History (co-authored with Stephen Melville, 2010). Between 2007-2011, she was Director (with Diarmuid Costello) of a major interdisciplinary AHRC-funded research project, "Aesthetics after Photography." She is currently writing a book on photography, trace and trauma.
Michael G. Jacobides, London Business School
Michael G. Jacobides holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at London Business School, where he is Associate Professor of Strategic and International Management. A Ghoshal Fellow at the Advanced Institute for Management Research, he studied in Athens, Cambridge, Stanford and Wharton and has been on the faculties of Wharton and Harvard Business School. He works with organisations such as the WEF, Zurich, BBVA, Santander, BT, EDS, Bertelsmann, IBM, PwC, Saatchi, Lufthansa, EADS and UNCTAD, helping to re-think how firms navigate in shifting landscapes. He has published in journals such as SMJ, Organisation Science, Research Policy, AMJ, AMR, JMS, and ICC where he is an Associate Editor, as well as HBR, the Financial Times and Forbes.com.
Arjo Klamer, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Arjo Klamer (1953) is professor of cultural economics at the Erasmus University. Before that he taught at several American universities (Duke University, Wellesley College, University of Iowa and George Washington University). He is on the board of several cultural organisations in the Netherlands and experienced true entrepreneurship in an attempt to found a new university (Academia Vitae in Deventer). Currently he is co founding an organisation that will assist cultural organisation to switch to an entrepreneurial mode. With (former) PH students he has set up the summerschool Value of Culture with venues throughout the world. In his writing he develops a cultural economic perspective that deals with the essential tensions between economy and art or culture.
Joseph Lampel, Cass Business School
Joseph Lampel is Professor of Strategy at Cass Business School, City University London. Joseph Lampel is director of the Film, Media, and Entertainment Research Centre at Cass Business School. He is also the editor with Jamal Shamsie and Theresa Lant of The Business of Culture: Emerging Perspectives in Media and Entertainment, Lawrence-Erlbaum, (2005), and has published in Strategic Management Journal, Organisation Science, Journal of Management Studies, Sloan Management Review, among others. Joseph Lampel does research on the film, art, fashion, music, and fragrance industries. He can be contacted at lampel@city.ac.uk.
Clare McAndrew, Arts Economics
Clare McAndrew is a cultural economist, investment analyst and author. Clare founded Arts Economics in 2005. Clare completed her PhD in economics at Trinity College Dublin in 2001, where she also lectured and taught economics for four years. She then directed a number of research projects for the Arts Council England on the effects of regulation, taxation and other issues in the visual arts market. In 2002, Clare joined US firm Kusin & Company, a boutique investment banking firm specialising in art investment, as chief economist. Clare set up Arts Economics to focus her efforts on art market research and analysis, and works with a network of private consultants and academic scholars in providing research and consulting services to the global art trade and financial sector. Clare has published widely on the economics of the art market, including her most recent book entitled Fine Art and High Finance, published by Bloomberg Press.
Laurent Noel, Audencia Nantes School of Management
Laurent Noel is Assistant Professor and heads the Major in "Cultural institutions and multimedia industries management" at Audencia Nantes School of Management. He received his Doctorate in Economic Sciences, from the University of Paris. His research area includes a variety of topics in art and cultural management.
Anders Petterson, ArtTactic
Anders Petterson is Founder and Managing Director - ArtTactic, London. He is a leading authority on the art market, with particular focus on the modern and contemporary emerging art markets. He previously worked at JP Morgan in the Investment Banking division, responsible for debt capital market and structured products for banks and corporates. He worked as an independent Research & Evaluation consultant for Arts & Business in London between 2002-2007, and has been involved in a number of large research and evaluation projects in the cultural sector. Anders is lecturing on the topic of 'Art as an asset class' for Cass Business School, Sotheby's Institute in London and IESA in Paris. He is a frequent art market commentator on Bloomberg TV, Reuters and CNN.
Rachel Campbell-Pownall, University of Maastricht
Rachel Campbell-Pownall completed a First-class Honours Bachelor's degree on Economics and Econometrics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, in the UK in 1996. She completed a Masters in Finance and Econometrics in 1998, and then went on to complete her PhD on Risk Management in International Financial Markets at Erasmus University, Rotterdam in 2001. She currently works at the Tilburg Sustainability Centre at Tilburg University as an associate professor of finance and at the University of Maastricht as an assistant professor of finance. She teaches Financial Research Methods at Maastricht University, and Capital Markets and Investment Management for Tias Business School.
Phanish Puranam, London Business School
Phanish Puranam is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School. He is also Chair of the School's PhD Programme. Phanish studies the design and management of collaborative structures within and between corporations. He obtained his PhD at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and has been on the faculty of London Business School since 2001.
Danny Ralph, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies
Danny Ralph is a Founder and Director of the Centre for Risk Studies, Professor of Operations Research at Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow of Churchill College. Danny received his PhD in 1990 from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He was a faculty member of the Mathematics & Statistics Department at the University of Melbourne before coming to Cambridge University for a joint appointment in the Engineering Department and Cambridge Judge Business School. Danny's research interests include optimisation methods, equilibrium models for electricity markets, and risk in business decision making. He is Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B).
Mary Rozell, Sotheby's Institute of Art, New York
Mary Rozell is Director of Art Business, Programme Director and full-time faculty at Sotheby's Institute of Art, New York. She has an MA in Modern Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, JD from Pepperdine University School of Law; and BA, Hamilton College. She is a member of the California and District of Columbia bars. An art historian and art lawyer, Mary Rozell specialises in private art collection management and is a legal advisor to collectors, artists, and foundations. Ms. Rozell was the Germany correspondent for The Arts Newspaper, a curator of contemporary art, and a consultant to galleries and Villa Grisebach Auctions. She served as the Director of the European Studio Programme for the ACC Galerie/City of Weimar, Managing Director of the Swiss Institute - Contemporary Art, and as director of a major private art collection and related foundation.
Stephen Satchell, University of Cambridge
Stephen Satchell was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, is currently a teaching fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor in Finance at Sydney University, Australia. He is the Editor of Journal of Asset Management, Journal of Risk Model Validation, Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds. He has written nearly 200 refereed articles and is the author/editor of 11 books. He has PhDs from London and Cambridge universities and is an honorary actuary. He is strongly associated with quantitative asset management but finds other approaches interesting as well.
Christophe Spaenjers, HEC Paris
Christophe Spaenjers is an Assistant Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. He received his PhD from Tilburg University. During his PhD, he also visited London Business School, Columbia Business School, and the International Center for Finance at Yale University. His research interests include investments, investor behavior, international finance, empirical corporate finance, and financial history. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, American Economic Review (P&P), and Oxford Economic Papers.
Michelle Tuveson, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies
Michelle Tuveson is a Founder and Executive Director of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies. She has worked in the technology sector for the majority of her career, with her most recent position in the Emerging Markets Group at Lockheed Martin. Prior to that, she held positions with management strategy firm Booz Allen & Hamilton, and U.S. R&D organisation MITRE Corporation. Her research interests include machine learning applications for modelling sentiment indicators and their impacts on markets. She was awarded by the Career Communications Group, Inc. as a Technology Star for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). She has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University. She is a member of Christ's College Cambridge.
Filip Vermeylen, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Filip Vermeylen (Ph.D. Columbia University 2002) is an Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam where he teaches and coordinates various courses in the Master's program 'Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship'. He lectures and publishes on different aspects of the economics of art and culture with an emphasis on the history and functioning of art markets, the notion of quality in the visual arts and the role of intermediaries as arbiters of taste. Since 2009, he is the program director of an NWO-research project entitled Artistic exchanges and cultural transmission in the Low Countries, 1572-1672. His book Painting for the Market: Commercialisation of Art in Antwerp's Golden Age won the Robert Bainton Prize for Art History in 2004.
