Kunstflaneur and the Magnus Resch post

(translated from Dutch by ChatGPT)

A reply based on the following statement: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7428188037966221312-hiyp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAADC39EBiiunbeZ_XKHBXZHO5gSvanDjo90

Dear Magnus,

Less than one percent buy. You pose the question at Harvard Business School, and I can imagine the silence that followed. Eighty thousand visitors at Art Basel Miami Beach, and fewer than one percent actually acquire a work. The rest sip champagne, take selfies, murmur that they are “considering,” and board their flights home.

It sounds like a revelation. But is it?

The art world does indeed love numbers. Visitor counts. Views. Waiting lists. “Sold” stickers strategically placed. But once we start talking about actual transactions, the tone shifts. Money in art prefers to exist as rumor, not as spreadsheet.

Still, I find it curious how quickly attention is dismissed as illusion. As if the 79,200 non-buyers are irrelevant. Looking holds no value. As if the only legitimate outcome of encountering art is ownership.

Perhaps we should slow down.

An art fair is not a supermarket. No one measures a literary festival by how many manuscripts are purchased on the spot. Yet at art fairs, we seem almost offended that most people come to look rather than buy.

That fewer than one percent purchase does not surprise me. Art is expensive. Requires time. Art demands a certain training in desire. Many who wander through those aisles are there to observe how another world operates. To measure their taste against a system that does not always invite them in. To dream, briefly.

Is that a market design problem? Or a problem of expectation?

Your diagnosis is sharp: growth concentrated at the top, the middle eroding, the system structurally narrow. The data supports much of that. Trophy works circulate among the same names, the same collectors, the same auction houses. The rest struggles for oxygen.

But when you say this is not a taste problem but a market design problem, I begin to hesitate.

Transparency → trust.
AI → more buyers.
Blockchain → fairer transactions.

It is elegant. Convincing. Almost irresistible in its logic. And yes, the art world could benefit from greater price transparency. From clearer provenance. From resale royalties embedded into the system rather than buried in legal footnotes. Artists deserve structural fairness.

Yet I wonder: who exactly are we optimizing for?

An AI-powered advisor matching taste and budget, reducing friction for first-time collectors. It sounds efficient. But art is friction. It is hesitation. It is doubt before commitment. The uncomfortable silence before deciding whether a work belongs in your life. Do we truly want to streamline that?

The Kunstflaneur (my alter ego) does not optimize. He wanders, hesitates, even makes mistakes. His taste develops in conversation, in contradiction, in misjudgment. Can an algorithm replicate that without simply reinforcing what is already measurable?

And blockchain: total transparency. Every transaction public. Every owner traceable. Royalties automatically distributed. Efficient. Clean. Just.

Yet art has also always lived in discretion. In the whisper. In the partial unknown. This is not a defense of opacity that protects abuse. It is an acknowledgment that art has never been fully comfortable inside the logic of a perfectly rational market.

You write that the future of the art market will not be decided by taste but by infrastructure. It is a provocative thesis. And partly true. Without infrastructure, trust falters. Without trust, transactions shrink.

But I would invert the claim: infrastructure without taste is hollow.

The art market is not the stock market. It does not function purely on rational calculus. You yourself note that most art is a poor financial investment. Precisely. That is what makes it interesting. It resists the tyranny of yield. It is irrational, stubborn, sometimes absurd.

If fewer than one percent buy, it also means ninety-nine percent do not. Perhaps they cannot. Do not dare. Perhaps they do not know how. But perhaps they simply want to look.

And looking is not a failed purchase

What concerns me more than the low percentage is the concentration of symbolic power within a small circle of gatekeepers. There, I agree. Careers cluster around institutional prestige. Access compounds. Those inside remain inside.

But this is not solved by infrastructure alone. It requires curators willing to take risks. Collectors willing to move beyond the safe names. Critics willing to question consensus rather than amplify it.

Transparency may help. AI may lower entry barriers. Blockchain may enforce fairness. But none of these tools answer the essential question: why do we buy art?

Not to feed a system. Not to optimize a funnel. But because a work unsettles us. Moves us. Refuses to leave our mind. Because we want to live with it.

Perhaps the task is not only to increase the number of buyers, but to deepen the number of engaged viewers. The step from looking to buying should not be a frictionless conversion metric. It should be an organic shift, born from attachment.

Fewer than one percent buy at Art Basel Miami Beach. It is an intriguing statistic. But it tells us nothing about how many visitors encountered a work that quietly altered them. How many conversations were sparked. How many doubts were seeded.

Yes, the future of the art market may well depend on infrastructure. But its soul still depends on that singular moment when someone stands before a work and falls silent.

And that, at least for now, remains beautifully unscalable.