Hello, Sotheby’s? I’d Like To Borrow Against My Painting.

“One art-world business is booming: collectors looking to borrow against works they own, especially before the fall sales threaten to lower values. ‘We’ve been contacted by lots of people who are feeling some sort of margin call,’ says Sotheby’s CEO, Bill Ruprecht. Other lenders have virtually stopped lending against art recently, but Ruprecht says Sotheby’s is still ‘very comfortable’ doing so.”

The Meltdown, Explained In Terms Arts People Understand

“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.”