In the Age of Art: From Consumption to Production — Assumptions and Realities

This paper will begin to address some of the assumptions that have surfaced through unpacking how the ecology feeds, thrives and sustains the distinct layers of the environment available to the audience. In Hong Kong, market dominance has been the catalyst for the growing ecology of visual arts, generating public engagement and sparking interest, facilitating the early exchanges of capital culture and habitus through general interest, public awareness of fine arts and, crucially, increased audience. This is a unique and prestigious environment in which the visual art ecology has had the opportunity to grow, from the public viewing of Salvator Mundi to a shopping mall full of Monet’s. Access to international aesthetic markers across the region is being driven from the distinct parent of commercial marketplace. Art Basel has upped the ante further, with queues of people waiting for tickets. The dominance of private and secondary markets facilitate a unique developing audience and market environment embedded in a vibrant and active trans-global relationship with visual arts. This un-paralleled foundation provides Hong Kong with an acute awareness of contemporary art, the economics of that art and the beginnings of intellectual interactions with artworks and art spaces, in anticipation of meaning-making about visual arts. Hong Kong’s next challenge will be how to use and enrich this foundation, to make bridges to the public sector museums. We are though, in an age of art, the money from the art market has breathed life into the creative industries, giving audience unrivalled opportunity and this consumption has led directly to the production of art.