Who hasn’t heard about the roaring 20s; jazz culture, rivers of champagne, overindulgence and economic prosperity? People in the mid and higher levels of society just had so much cash available to them, that many couldn’t have spent it even if they wanted to (also, billion euro yachts hadn’t been invented yet, so that helped a lot too).
Little did they know that in 1929 all that glamour and carelessness would come crumbling down, crippled by the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century. Banks went out of business, because people were withdrawing all their savings, a fifth of all Americans were left without a job and most of them had families and children to support.
We might not think about such problems today, we may not be aware of how much the world’s economy is actually booming right now. From the cat tongue brush to “NASA grade” glasses, we can buy it all and the most important part, most of us can afford to do so!
When thinking of abundance, we may imagine people chugging Moët in custom gold-plated Ferraris, but we mustn’t forget that abundance doesn’t only show its face in extreme riches, but in 1000€ iPhones, Etsy arts and crafts sales and just the millions of artworks made and sold worldwide.
And while art has almost become commoditised, we should never forget that we have been living the dream for more than 10 years (even more if you weren’t invested in real estate in 2008) and that the times have never been better, communication never more direct, customers never so full of cash, as they are now.
We have been witnessing one of the greatest growth spurts of the art market; people talking about the possibility of a billion euro artwork sale coming soon, the global art market rising to more than 60 billion in 2018 and the amount of art residencies, stipends and other income sources for emerging talent skyrocketing. But this might change soon.
Because after every period of prosperity comes the rain; problems in domestic production, strong market changes in China and Russia, Brexit, uproars in France and bigot carrot people in charge of the White House. While for now we beat on, sailing with the currents, we always manage to forget that we are borne back ceaselessly into the past.