Crashing the Art Market, Japanese Style - artmarketblog.com With all this talk of art market crashes and art market corrections I am surprised that no-one has actually looked at what caused the art market crash that took place around 1991.
the number of Japanese buyers in the market for art experienced a dramatic drop almost immediately. The Japanese had caused an increase in demand for Impressionist paintings but then almost as quickly as they had entered the art market, they disappeared. The sudden decrease in the number of Japanese buyers meant that there weren’t the large number of buyers willing to pay huge amounts for certain paintings leaving the market to question the value of the market as a whole. Once people started questioning the motives of the Japanese buyers all hell broke loose. To be continued…
**Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications.
