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International Art Critic Says High Prices For Select Pieces Causes Issues For Market

The international art market has seen a recent spike in extremely high prices for select pieces, including a Picasso that sold at auction for nearly $180 million earlier this month.

Anna Somers Cocks is the founder of the Art Newspaper, a UK-based publication that tracks the art world, and she was in Louisville to Tuesday evenign about the international art market at the Kentucky Center for the Arts as part of the Speed Museum's lecture series. In a conversation with WFPL's Jonathan Bastian, Cocks said those astronomically high prices cause problems in the rest of the market.

"I think it distorts everything below this very top level of prices because it's not that there's a trickle-down effect—you sell a Picasso for $179 million dollars, it doesn't mean that your nice landscape on the wall has gone up a little bit in value, unfortunately," Cocks said.

In a recent study, the Art Newspaper found that one-third of contemporary artists whose work was shown in American museums last year were represented by a small group of only five dealers.

"That's a great concentration of patronage power," said Cocks.
Instead of looking primarily at prices of artwork, Cocks would like to steer the conversation back towards the quality of the art itself. One of the most interesting art scenes in the world right now, according to Cocks, is in a surprising place: Saudi Arabia.

"It's a tiny, tiny art scene, but there is a small group of artists there who are producing conceptual works—they've learned about conceptual art because of being online—and in it, they're saying things about their regime and they're doing it very subtly, metaphorically. I take my hat off to them because they're brave and they're extremely streetwise," Cocks said.

Anna Somers Cocks will speak at the Bomhard Theatre at the Kentucky Center for the Arts tonight at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the Kentucky Center Box Office and are free for Speed Museum members.