Maybe there is a logic to this process that is simply beyond me, and I suspect, to much of the art world where even dealers are mystified, while the general public are inevitably in the dark to the point where they have stopped caring. In October 2022 the market for contemporary art created by artists under 40 was thriving. New works were high in demand at Frieze and there was a surge in prices at auctions. One example was Flora Yukhnovich who was in great demand in 2021. However, sales of her work plummeted by 88% in 2023 according to ArtTactic.  She was not alone. In 2023, sales of Njideka Akunyili Crosby dropped by 72%, Salman Toor by 68%, and Avery Singer by 63%. Overall, the market for contemporary artists fell by 43% in 2023 and that trend has continued into 2024 with sales down 53% in the first half of this year. At least one art writer put it down to the novelty having worn off as buyers turned back to the past and known territory.

Novelty in the 19^th century was a different matter. The Academy and its artists protected the status quo as they saw it and actively discouraged innovation and change. Artists such as Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau and Boulanger, who in their day were considered to be the epitome of artistic and cultural achievement, hardly warrant mention today unless in an historical context while the work of the early moderns, largely unappreciated at the time, continues to circulate the world and change hands for ever-more extortionate amounts of money. The work of the Impressionist and Post Impressionist artists is getting on to 150 years old now and still retains the mystique of being described as the product of artistic rebellion. The artists could hardly have imagined what the future would bring let alone the few adventurous buyers at the time.

However, attempts to not only predict the artistic future but control it inevitably fail. During WW2, Nazi art enthusiasts devised a canvas and preservation method that was supposed to physically and stylistically preserve the social realist style for as long as the proposed Third Reich, while the Fascists sought to impose a similar Realist house style in Italy that mirrored their ideas of power. The Third Reich lasted only five years – no doubt much to the chagrin of the participants. The irony though, is that the work they wanted so vehemently to preserve was so bad that it is of no value whatsoever today while the work of all of those ‘degenerate’ artists lives on in perpetuity. Mussolini’s ideas have also  lived on in the form of architecture that enshrines the power of governments while giving nothing away, while the Futurists who wrote so enthusiastically about reorienting Italian art and hoped to share in the rise to power of Il Duce as their train criss-crossed rural Italy loaded with art, were snubbed and had to find a different path.

There are also innumerable examples of art that has outlived not just the artist, but the civilisation from which it came, the century and even a millennium or two. Everyday another ancient site is excavated revealing cultural treasures, another Roman copy of a Greek statue is discovered as floodwaters recede and great excitement echoes around the world as an unheard-of Durer drawing surfaces to go with a relabelled Dali print discovered in a garage sale. DaVinci might be embarrassed to discover that his Mona Lisa is held in such reverence nearly a thousand years since he painted it as a technical exercise in Chiaroscuro. In another sphere, no living human was ever supposed to see the inside of an Egyptian tomb but millions of tourists line up annually to glimpse the emptied chambers before or after visiting the Cairo Museum – validation by tourism.

Some 20^th century art was so badly constructed in a technical sense that the built-in obsolescence continues to counter attempts at longevity by curators while public art on a grand scale has seemed almost impossible to destroy unless it happens to be a statue to a now-disgraced slave trader or was located in a desert area inaccessible to all but the most intrepid. The several examples of ‘invisible’ art and a banana that needs to be replaced on a weekly basis in this century say more about the gullibility of buyers than anything else and will no doubt become a distant memory with the demise of this generation.

The few examples of the Antiques Road Show that I have watched tell me that in order for any art object to survive and be valued there has to be a colourful back story – much like singers on Australian Idol who regularly trot out tales of motivational misfortune. The other commanding factor is the Vermeer syndrome. The art market regularly despairs that he painted so few works. Contemporary artists are no different. On the one hand it helps to be part of the ‘27 ‘club [ think Basquiat ] wherein dying before your time is a virtue and on the other, to be endlessly prolific so that anyone and everyone can have an example – until the novelty wears off.

Are these the natural filters we have come to accept Novelty, boredom and death? Perhaps we of the 21^st century can’t see the wood for the trees and will have to wait a century or a millennium to find out what has survived and what was worth preserving but who, or what circumstance, actually render that decision, if indeed it is even rational, remains a mystery.