Sarah Urist Green: What would you buy with $35 million dollars? A really big diamond? Your own airplane? Maybe a few private islands?  Perfectly affordable.

But If you were hoping to nab this relatively modestly-sized oil painting by Vincent Van Gogh, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. It recently sold at auction for $71 million dollars. It’s disappointing, I know.

The rich and powerful have always taken up a lot of space when it comes to art sales, even if the specifics have changed over time. But the history of this changing market is actually as much about progress and artistic  freedom as it is about wealth and status. Hi, I’m Sarah Urist Green, and  this is Crash Course Art History.

[0:46] [THEME MUSIC] 

[0:52] Sarah: We know that art has value beyond its price tag. In fact, we spent all of episode 6 exploring the non-financial side of things. But it’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room – for better or worse, money has always played a major role in the art world. Though the specific ways art has been bought and sold have evolved over time.

Like, if I were 15th-century Italian nobility, and I wanted a portrait to spruce up my parlor, I could write a letter to an artist friend  of mine – humblebrag – and commission them to create one. I’d get a cool new painting, and they’d get a bag of money – win-win. This was the system of patronage.

And it was pretty much the way that art in Europe was bought and sold for a long time. So, patrons had a ton of power over art: everything from the material, to the technique, to the subject matter. It’s kind of like when you go to Subway and “commission” a sandwich artist —   except instead of a six-inch veggie delite, you’d be ordering, like, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

Now flash forward about two hundred years to the first half of the 17th century. There had been enormous economic growth across Europe as the various nation-states expanded trade routes and reaped the benefits of colonizing others – benefits that extended to artists, too. For example, with the creation of the Dutch Republic in what’s now the Netherlands, artists began creating non-commissioned work and selling it to anyone who would pay for it.

Paintings were sold at bookstores, fairs, and even hawked by artists on the street. And that meant artists weren’t bound by the whims of their patrons – they could create what they wanted, when they wanted. As this free market grew, art guilds  gained more power.

These associations of artists established new standards for what made art valuable. They’d often help artists set the price of a work and connect with buyers to make the sale. On top of that, we start to see the emergence of full-time art dealers.

These new go-betweens would shop around at guilds and workshops buying a variety of artworks. That way, they could provide wealthy collectors with varied options, all in one place — and they’d sell  them at a higher price than they paid. By the dawn of the 18th century, this idea of a consumer-focused art market had spread across Europe – including the cultural hubs of London and Paris.

While art purchases used to be more about legacy and power, now they were more about what was trendy. Collectors would often sell off works when their tastes changed. So, art started changing hands more and more often.

Around the same time, collectors  also began buying and selling art from auction houses. Places like  Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London were profiting mightily off of art sales  through the 18th and 19th centuries. Both of these auction houses are still around  today – and seemingly doing quite well.

Throw in the popularity of online auctions in  the 21st century, and you’ve just completed a 600-year speed tour of the art market.  Which brings us to the global art market, which is so big, that it’s estimated  to be worth over 64 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. And to figure  out where those numbers come from, we rely in part on appraisers, the folks who do the work of investigating and analyzing art to come up with its value.

And that value can change significantly from the first time a piece is sold, to the last. Let’s head to the drawing board.

Behold: Salvator Mundi. It was allegedly created for King Louis the Twelfth of France around 1500, but the artist was unknown for hundreds of years. In 1763, it disappeared from history. Just–boop!

Gone! Until it reappeared in 1958 when it was auctioned off at Sotheby’s for a whole…72 dollars. Then, poof, gone again, until it popped back up in 2005 at an American  estate sale.

By this point, it was in bad shape. The panel was infested with worms, and it had been painted over in a botched restoration attempt. But a pair of art dealers bought it for  a little over ten thousand dollars and took it to a professional restorer.

As the layers of paint came off, they realized they had a prize on their hands. They were now convinced that the Salvator Mundi was made by  none other than Leonardo da Vinci. When the news broke, the art  industry went wild.

In 2013, Sotheby’s sold the piece again – this time for  around 75 million dollars. Later that year, the buyer turned around and sold it for over 127 million. And in 2017, the painting  turned up for auction again, where it sold for over 450 million.

The  painting has mostly been in storage since, except for a stint when it hung inside the yacht of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. To this day, not everyone is convinced the Salvator Mundi is entirely da Vinci’s work. Still, the suggestion that it might be, and the heated debate around it, was compelling enough to  keep driving up the price.

Which goes to show how important a  painting’s perceived origin story is to determining its price. Art specialists, dealers, and auction houses keep detailed records to  try to determine an artwork’s provenance — or the journey it’s taken from initial  creation through each subsequent sale. But this gets especially complicated in the case of stolen artworks.

When the art market swelled to new heights in Europe in the 17th century and beyond, European colonialism was well underway. And in addition to taking control of other nations, they stole a whole bunch of art as well. Take this figure, for example.

According to its provenance, it belonged to Jewish collector, Frederick Wolff-Knize, who had to abandon it at his home in Vienna when he fled the Nazis in 1938. After the war, he reunited with his collection, and he brought the figure to his new home in the U. S.

Then, in 1950, it went to auction where it was sold into another private collection, where it remained until 2019, when it showed up for auction yet again. But there’s another story, one that doesn't show up in the provenance. This figure was carved by the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand.

We don’t know the exact story of how Wolff-Knize acquired it, but it was likely part of a large number of indigenous objects that were taken from their home country, transported to Europe during the 19th century, and sold to collectors. Wolff-Knize’s Maori statue went through what’s been described as “art by metamorphosis.” In other words, it was never meant to be sold as art, but after it was taken out of context and resold, it eventually became art, at least in the way Europeans understood it – with a price tag. Which poses difficult questions.

Like, how  do we reckon with an art market flooded with works that were likely stolen from their original owners? Especially when those works have changed hands so many times that it’s difficult to identify where we might return them, and to whom? Meanwhile, the stolen works’  financial value may continue to grow or shrink, based on the changing tastes  and priorities of collectors.

And here’s another tough question:  who does the art market benefit? Many valuable pieces cycle from collector, to dealer, to auction and back again — accumulating  more value along the way, in what some critics call the gallery industrial complex. A small handful of players profit handsomely, while the majority of participants  in the world of art make very little.

This includes most artists, who typically only  see profit from the initial sale, what’s called the primary market, and not from any of the sales that follow, which we call the secondary market. This practice stretches all the way back to those early Dutch art dealers in the 17th century, who bought works and sold them for a premium. Contemporary artists have found numerous ways to  critique the gallery industrial complex.

Like, check out this series, called “Fakes” by the Cuban artist CB Hoyo. By loosely copying works that have sold for millions and scrawling pointed  messages across them, Hoyo pokes fun both at status-seeking collectors and the system that  provides luxury goods according to their whims. And Hoyo isn’t alone in his critiques.

Take the anonymous English artist Banksy. In 2018, his work, Girl With Balloon, famously  self-destructed immediately after selling at auction for 1.4  million dollars. It was an intentional move meant to criticize the excessive spending of the art market.

But many predicted the stunt would only make the painting more valuable – and they were right. The piece, renamed “Love is In the Bin,” sold for  25.4 million dollars when it went to auction again in 2021, despite or perhaps because  its bottom half is in pieces. Some critics have argued that this undercut Banksy’s act of rebellion, but others say it only reinforced his original message: the art market can be a wild and recklessly lavish place.

We’ve seen that the art market has never been static, and it’s sure to keep changing in the centuries to come. Is it likely to continue benefiting the richest of the rich? History says yes, but a girl can always dream.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of art out there that sells for less than that hypothetical budget of $35 million. In our next episode, we’ll dive into the ways that art and activism have often gone  hand in hand. I’ll see you there.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with  the help of all these priceless people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.