Grief

In January 1942, Soviet photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity site, where an estimated seven thousand Jews and others were executed at a trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took pictures that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never-before-seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image of a grieving woman to render this gruesome mass atrocity into a transcendentally human tragedy. David Shneer tells the story of how one photograph from the trench became much more widely known than the others, eventually being titled Grief. Baltermants turned this shocking atrocity photograph into a Cold War–era artistic meditation on the profundity and horror of war that today can be found in Holocaust archives as well as art museums and at art auctions. Although the journalist documented murdered Jews in other pictures he took at Kerch, in Grief there are likely no Jews among the dead or the living, save for the possible officer securing the site. Nonetheless, Shneer shows that this photograph must be seen as an iconic Holocaust photograph. Unlike emaciated camp survivors or barbed-wire fences, Shneer argues, the “Holocaust by bullets” in the Soviet Union makes Grief a quintessential Soviet image of Nazi genocide.

The determinants of art prices: an analysis of Joan Miró

Purpose Relatively little is known about the determinants of the prices of paintings. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the price determinants of the art of Joan Miró, one of the great masters of Modern Art. Design/methodology/approach The authors analysed 255 artworks by Miró sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s between 2003 and 2017, and performed a hedonic price regression to measure the impact of a series of variables on the prices of this artist’s works. Findings Miró’s works command higher prices, ceteris paribus, when they were painted on canvas, were sold at Sotheby’s and in New York City or London, were traded during the evening session and depending on the period in which they had been painted, the size of their surface area, the number of words used to describe the respective lot and whether they had appeared in an art book. The prices of Miró’s paintings increased substantially between 2003 and 2008 and then declined, coinciding with the global financial crisis of 2009. Research limitations/implications The results were obtained from prices established in art auctions, which represent only one portion of the market. Originality/value This is the first exhaustive study carried out on the determinants of the prices of Joan Miró’s works. The artist represents an ideal case due to the large number of his works that have been sold at auctions. As yet, only studies of Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol have been conducted. Joan Miró has well-defined artistic periods, which also allows us to determine the impact on the price of the works of the period in which it was created. This paper also offers a methodological contribution to parties involved in the art sector (artists, galleries, collectors, investors, museums, etc.).

Lagos Art World: The Emergence of an Artistic Hub on the Global Art Periphery

The global geography of art has changed greatly in recent years. Whereas global art hubs were formerly found only in the West, they now exist in locations all over the world, including Africa. Though some art worlds in Asia and Latin America have been studied in recent times, there is insufficient empirical data on art worlds in Africa. This is a study of the Lagos art world, which shows how an “art system,” with all of its attendant structures and agents, has emerged in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, in the last few years. Lagos reflects the dynamics of globalization and is building up the art infrastructure and the critical mass needed for a sustainable art world: an ambitious and fast-growing group of young local collectors, an art fair, an international photography festival, regular art auctions, new art galleries, historical and critical publications, a university art museum, symposiums, art foundations, residencies, and competitions. Lagos is becoming not only a “global city,” but also a “global art hub.”

Increase of art creatives: models, calculations, ukrainian segment of the market

. The paper describes a variant of the repeat sales methodology, used by art market analysts, as well as appraisers using comparative approach in assessing the value of works of art. Here we describe a new model aimed to, streamline the necessary calculations while maintaining the accuracy at the required level. We ranked economic success of the works of certain famous Ukrainian artists using data from the Artprice web-based resource (https://www.artprice.com). Included in the analysis were the sales outcomes reported by international art auctions for artworks from a certain part of the Soviet period and of contemporary Ukrainian artists. The ranks of the top ten masters of Ukrainian social realism in Ukrainian art market were compared to sale prices of works of 22 contemporary Ukrainian artists in international art auctions. The sample for the latter is made with more than 500 sales including very recent ones made in 2017. Comparison of these data with the results for TOP90 of the world's most expensive art sales in 2016 indicates lower demand for Ukrainian artists in the context of world top sales. However, the dynamics of profitability of Ukrainian works over time is overall positive. Methodology. Based on the model of cash deposit value growth in time, the author uses the method, well-known to appraisers, that allows to calculate the profit from movable property by analogy with the profit from a bank deposit. The basis for calculations is the data on the sale of the most expensive 100 paintings of 2016 year, as well published in web-based resource (https://www.artprice.com).