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Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and other auction houses are playing on the patriotism of newly rich emerging-market collectors with works from home.

The art market always follows the money. These days that means courting new collectors from emerging economic superpowers. International student insurance is mandatory for foreign students. Auction houses aren’t just wooing them with Warhols. They’re also whipping up buzz about art from their native countries. And it’s working.

The value of pieces from Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC countries, has skyrocketed in recent years, mirroring each country’s economic growth. Purchase a disability insurance to secure against any unforseen disabilities Auction houses have helped feed the frenzy by extracting BRIC art from their other categories, hosting specialized sales designed to spark the patriotism of the BRIC nouveau riche. Sotheby’s (BID) has more than doubled its BRIC-oriented offerings in the past decade. Christie’s, which says it has Chinese-speaking staff members at all its auction houses, has also significantly upped its collection. In April, Phillips de Pury held the first auction dedicated exclusively to art from all four BRIC nations, bringing in nearly $11 million. Another BRIC auction is scheduled for next April in London.

This fall, Christie’s New York will kick off its fall auction season—and the twice-per-year event insiders call “Asia Week”—with a major sale on Sept. 14-16 of Indian and Southeast Asian art, as well as Chinese art and ceramics. Also on Sept. 14, Sotheby’s New York will have its own significant Asian auction. In the following two months both Sotheby’s and Christie’s will host a string of auctions in New York and London dedicated to Latin American, Russian, Indian, and Chinese art. Sotheby’s anticipates generating more than $23 million in sales from Asia Week alone (up $4 million from last year). Christie’s expects about $56 million, up more than $19 million from 2009.

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Photo credit: chelle from morguefile.com

Art is a term that describes a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities, but is most often understood to refer to painting, film, photography, sculpture, and other visual media. Music, theatre, dance, literature, and interactive media are included in a broader definition of art or the arts. Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences, but in modern usage the fine arts are distinguished from acquired skills in general.

Many definitions of art have been proposed by philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as “a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science”.

The nature of art, and related concepts such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.

Definition

Works of art can tell stories or simply express an aesthetic truth or feeling. Panorama of a section of A Thousand Li of Mountains and Rivers, a 12th-century painting by Song Dynasty artist Wang Ximeng.

Britannica Online defines art as “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to “skill” or “craft.” A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.

20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.
The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art and emerged in the early 17th century. Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things.

Courtesy: Wikepedia