Premise: An exploration of money and art through history. Topics include…

  • Artistic objects in prehistory
  • What do we know about art labor in the greco-roman world?
  • How do you finance a cathedral?
    • Medieval fundraising and cathedrals as “tourist destinations” (for pilgrimages) to boost local economy.
    • Kraus, Gold was the Mortar: The Economics of Cathedral Building —“details the financing and the building of the medieval cathedrals at Paris, Amiens, Toulouse, Lyon, Strasbourg, York, Poitiers and Rouen. The book examines the raising of funds and their expenditure, not only on the Cathedrals themselves, but also on the worldly ambitions of the bishop or archbishop, which went beyond the ‘wars and natural disasters’ theory to explain the reasons that caused the delays in building the cathedrals. The book also looks at the issues of building the cathedrals, such as the availability of finance and how for some there was a steady flow of funds while others suffered prolonged breaks. The book also provides case studies of specific cathedrals and examines how places such as York were held up by the internecine disputes with Canterbury; Toulouse and Poiters by the vast expropriations following conquests; and Lyon by the suppression of the commercial and social hierarchy. All the cathedrals depended on the benevolence of patrons, but the part played by the commoners, as revealed in wills and contemporary documents, was an extraordinary contribution, usually exceeding that of the nobility and royalty and sometimes that of the hierarchy itself.”
  • Rise of Banking and Secular Art Patronage in Italy
    • Usury, compound interest and fractional reserve banking (intro to calculations)
    • Tim Parks Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence—how the Cosimo and Lorenzo used diplomacy, military, philosophy…and art…to get around anti-usury laws.
    • This is a good place to include some elementary compound interest calculations and present value calculations
  • Dutch painting
  • The contemporary art primary/secondary market
  • Financialization of art in the contemporary era
    • Cifuente and Charlin,The Worth of Art: a unique book that looks at how to treat artwork as a very strange (high volatility, low liquidity) financial instrument. Use this to teach some basic financial calculations:
      • the difficulties of art pricing
      • art portoflio managmeent strategies
      • art-secured lending
      • pricing auction guarantees.

  • Damian Hirst—money as an art form (Saatchi tax writeoffs, diamond covered skulls, etc.)

  • Banksy stunts: shredding paintings at auctions, paintings you can’t buy, unprovenanced art

  • Conceptual art and land art (art you cannot “sell”)

  • Tax avoidance
  • Pierson Art in the Age of Tax Avoidance (2023)–“Utilizing the near universe of tax filings, we document both the extent of donations of art to non-profit organizations in the U.S. and their use as a method of tax avoidance.”
  • Pandora Papers reveal 1,600 works of art ‘secretly traded’ in tax havens (2022)