Erfan Abdollah Zadeh: Visual arts has clearly become a safe capital market that is getting more and more lucky every day and we even see creativity and innovation in methods of this investment which is a sign of its development.
The expansion of the art market is also in interest of people, because part of funds that were used to buy and sell property, dollars and coins are directed towards long-term investment and distanced from daily speculations.
If large economic companies, such as banks, had noticed such investments and had not accumulated large sums of money, for example, in real estate, maybe housing market would not have suffered such an acute and unbelievable day.
At the same time, elite financiers moving towards art, prosperity of this market, creating jobs for artists, increasing artistic productions and strategic point: “Global branding of prices of works of great Iranian art” will not be far from reach.
This new and stylish business, which in its current form and definitions has a history of several decades in developed countries, has been in Iran for a little over a decade and therefore it is natural to face ups and downs and still has many unknown angles ahead. Two steps forward and one step back, excitement, etc., are all understandable in newly matured market, and with passage of time and increase of public experience, existing problems, which are sometimes called harsh criticisms, will decrease.
But most urgent need today is to pay attention to infrastructure of art market, maybe until this infrastructure is provided, event that everyone wishes for Iranian art; not come true One of the most important headlines of this topic is continuation of international presence of Iranian works. Such a situation requires a continuous active intelligent marketing.
Those who know about art market remember that with presence of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonam’s auction houses in Middle East region and increase in price of Iranian artists’ works, the domestic market was suddenly shaken and still many collectors and collectors are still interested in this market due to such international success. They have a strong presence. But it seems that in practice, no organized effort is made by Iran to maintain and develop this position.
According to many experts, serious missing link in advancing development of Iran’s art market is scientific, creative and motivating marketing. Galleries, dealers and even auctions do not make any effort in the process of making buyers, and basically everyone is satisfied with their private life, and a small circle has formed that has no proportion to the number of artists.
Regarding Iran’s 80 million market, there is no targeting and the concentration of galleries is in Tehran, and except for a few big cities, many cities called Iran do not have galleries in the modern sense. This is why visual market of Tehran has become pure. Therefore, it is not strange if price of works of many art elites of our country is still low, and apart from several masters, price of the works of a large number of artists is low.
In the absence of such marketing inside, it is clear that no one has a road map in region and beyond, and fall in value of Rial has caused the few exhibition efforts of private sector on other side of borders to drop to the lowest number in recent years.
This is while world is on wings of virtual networks in your and mine mobile phones, and creative marketing says: You can make wings to fly from this opportunity.
Art theorists believe that first element of artistic marketing is media and production of targeted media content. It is enough to search on Google and see how much Persian and English content is created from Iranian artists and art. We all know answer, we are very poor!
Source: ISNA, Erfan Abdollah Zadeh, Art Expert
