
The Art World’s Mini-Madoff and Me - prismatic
https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/inigo-philbrick-art-dealer.html
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hristov
The best thing about this article are the comments, which are obviously
written by the "mini-madoff" himself. So yeah, read the article first and then
read the four comments, three of which are ostensibly from different accounts
but all obviously written by the subject of the article. It is pretty funny,
actually because in those sock puppet comments he comes off as exactly the
same person described by the article.

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paganel
This article seems more like a former lover complaint than a serious article
on how f-ed up the contemporary art market is (and I'm pretty sure it's f-ed
up).

> I expressed my incredulousness at the very thought — who over 8 years old
> plays checkers

From time to time I tend to forget how Anglo/US-centric most of the people who
write in English are, it's almost like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
And the answer is "yes, there are millions of people playing checkers even
though they are over 8 years old"

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Uhhrrr
The fact that everything was fine and dandy while all the valuations were
going up reminds me of this sama post: [https://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-
government](https://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government)

...for more than one reason.

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55555
My painter friend told me that the art market was sketchy as hell, but I must
admit even this article surprised me. I have a hard time feeling too bad for
anyone in this story.

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ad31mar
This just goes to show, once again, what a ridiculous clusterfuck of greed and
outright criminiality this "industry" is.

And I was worried about my little manifesto [1] being too straightforward.
Time to spice it up, I guess.

[1] [https://binnedart.com/about/](https://binnedart.com/about/)

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grugagag
Scammers scamming scammers, what could be more delightful to watch? But sadly
this is nowhere near Madoff’s heist, it had a promising beginning but the
protagonist soon got sidetracked by drugs and a lavish lifestyle. Why is this
even news? This is the price of doing this type of business

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oska
> There is an adage with which my father frequently admonished me as a child:
> You can lie as much as you like, but don’t believe your own lies.

Strange advice to give a child.

~~~
perl4ever
Sometimes "you can X as much as you like" is a rhetorical device and not
literally endorsing X. It frequently is used to juxtapose a bad thing with
something worse that you might not have thought of.

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101404
*...and I

~~~
lioeters
"..and me" is correct in this case, since "me" is used as the object of the
phrase.

"..and I" would be suitable as a subject, for example: "The art world’s mini-
Madoff and I worked together for many years."

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rolltiide
> Consequently, prices sometimes can be manipulated by the very well
> connected, who would be consistently selling and reselling the same works at
> increasing prices

Go ask your local fine art gallery about the prices, try to do literally any
price discovery and get the avant-garde run-around and count the minutes until
it gets defensive

"ah you know I'm just in finance and most of the markets I work with have
other mechanisms for price discovery so I was just curious about how it works
here, for this artist"

 _well you know you need to buy something you really appreciate for yourself
and want to keep for decades and you need all that time for the price to
appreciate_

generic stuff, but none of this answers what the market depth is now and how
is standing market depth determined and what were the prior prices, or why
that piece over there keeps increasing in price by 15% but is still in your
gallery - is this consignment from someone you just sold it to? how come they
weren't influenced by the same thing you just told me

Anyway, you can't ask it exactly like this in a casual conversation because
thats just asking for defensiveness, but don't expect a transparent market.
you can try asking about the art world in any cordial way you can think of and
get stonewalled. You know the answers deep down.

