ABSTRACT
Consuming the arts can progress from appreciation – such as visiting art museums in the case of the visual arts or attending the theatre in the case of the performing arts – to greater engagement. With the financial means this may include investing in the arts. Investing in the visual and performing arts is a broad category of activity with varying motivations. Financial investments in any particular market sector are fraught with challenges. As the Ponzi scheme is entering everyday discourse, it is worthwhile to note the perils of speculation based on crowd psychology. Charles Mackay (2003), in Extraordinary Popular Delusions, which first appeared in 1841, examined three financial scandals, including what has become known as Tulipomania: an incident from seventeenth-century Holland, which has some affinities to the arts – not least of all recent works by living artists sold at auction – when people went into debt collecting tulip bulbs. Of course, collecting ceased when a sudden depreciation in the value of the bulbs rendered them worthless (except as flowers). Fred Kelly and Philip Carret both wrote books on financial speculation that were published shortly after the crash of the stock market in 1929. ‘After vanity and greed, perhaps the most malign influence to one making money from the market is the Will to Believe’, according to Kelly (2003: 14), who addressed the psychology of speculation. In a similar vein, Carret (2004: 8) noted: ‘It is quite impossible to draw a sharp line and say of those on one side, “These are investors!” and those on the other, “Those are speculators!” ’. Whereas gamblers make decisions based on hope, ‘speculators are those who use brains’ to find ‘hidden weak spots in the market’, according to Carret (2004: 10), who considers the speculator to be ‘the advance agent of the investor’.1
