sam thomson

Artist Futures

Artist Futures is a film created in 2009, exploring the growth of speculative investment in Fine Art as an asset class, along with the impact this investment has had on the Fine Art market, and on the kinds of artwork that get created and promoted.  The script for the film was based on a lecture given at the Institute of Romantic and Germanic Studies, University of London, in 2009 (this department is now called The Institute of Modern Languages Research).  The film is scratch-made and the production quality isn’t high, but it represents an important starting point in my thinking around the cumulative cultural status of art history, and the control and ownership of that history, through the tracking of physical artworks over long time periods.

The video immediately below is the trailer made for the lecture:

The following 5 parts of the film are around 10 minutes long: