The Illusion of “Speculation” Disguised as Investment

Today’s art market operates on a vast speculative structure camouflaged by the language of “investment.” Artworks are no longer read as products of emotion or thought; instead, they are interpreted as indicators of price volatility.

Galleries function with the logic of asset management firms, artists supply brand value, and collectors behave like market analysts.

The moment artworks are evaluated not for the pleasure of possession but for their expected financial return, the intrinsic interiority of art is pushed further into the background.
 
“Once art begins to speak in the language of the market, aesthetics becomes nothing more than a shadow cast by numbers.”
 


Steve Cohen — A Financial Gaze Reshaping the Way Art Is Seen

Steve Cohen, an American hedge fund manager, has long been known as a prominent collector of contemporary art.

His collecting approach often illustrates a tendency to interpret artworks not primarily as emotional or aesthetic objects, but as assets that can be understood through risk management and portfolio allocation.

In 2019, when Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986) sold for approximately $91 million at Christie’s,some media outlets reported that the piece may have entered Cohen’s collection.

Although this has not been officially confirmed, the event symbolized the degree to which artworks are treated as high-value assets and how financial perspectives increasingly shape the architecture of the art market.
 
Cohen’s perspective represents an expansion of financial language into the cultural sphere—a shift that has become a key lens through which the contemporary art market now operates.


 
Charles Saatchi — The Power of Curating Art Into a Cultural Phenomenon

Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate turned collector, played a pivotal role in the rise of the “Young British Artists (YBAs)” movement in the 1990s.

He actively supported emerging artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas, helping their works expand into broader cultural and popular phenomena.

Saatchi’s strategic curatorial choices and media acumen demonstrated how art could be consumed not simply as creative expression but as a cultural brand and a market phenomenon. 

He was both a patron and a director who shaped the market-oriented structure of the art ecosystem—revealing how art could be transformed into a curatable commodity.
 


Damien Hirst — Between Creation and Market Strategy

Damien Hirst has been one of the most influential figures in the global art market since the 1990s.

His Shark piece (1991) and ‘Pill cabinet’ series confronted themes of death, the body, and memory—works recognized as radical experiments that simultaneously maintained strong market demand.

This unprecedented move marked one of the first large-scale attempts by an artist to construct the market himself by stepping outside traditional distribution structures.
 
Hirst’s practice reveals how artistic innovation and market strategy can intertwine. He became both an artist and a brand operator—a figure emblematic of the dual structure of contemporary art, where creation and commodification unfold in parallel.
 


Art Investment — The Zero-Sum Structure Created by the Marketization of Art

While the art market is often portrayed as a landscape where “Everyone Wins,” in reality, it functions within a structure shaped by scarcity and competition.
 
A small number of artists and works experience dramatic price increases, while countless others remain unseen and unknown. As prices rise, criticism and discourse recede; aesthetic value increasingly takes a back seat to market attention.

“Art no longer interprets the world. It merely reflects the world’s price tags.”

This shift signifies art’s movement away from the language of emotion and thought toward the language of investor psychology and market expectation.
 


Art and Capital — A Relationship of Symbiosis and Parasitism

Capital can expand the reach of art, but it can also transform and weaken its core language. As demand grows, artistic expression tends to simplify; scarcity becomes a metric of return; authenticity is reinterpreted as market trust.
 
The relationship between art and capital is undeniably symbiotic—yet this symbiosis can mutate into a parasitic structure at any moment.
When art begins to reshape itself according to capital’s criteria, its inner language gradually disappears.


 
Returning from “How Much” to “Why”

The term “art investment” may be nothing more than a rhetorical frame created by capital to legitimate its own presence. For art to sustain its original vitality, we must return from “how much an artwork is worth” to “why the artwork exists.”
 
Only when this question is restored can art step out of the market’s game board and once again speak in the language of human perception and thought. The true value of art lies not in price but in the depth of reflection; not in marketability but in the necessity of expression.
 
And this depth remains a domain of human sensibility—one that capital can never truly possess.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects. In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.