Since the early 2000s, there has been a significant growth in education around the art world, and specifically in the art market, with courses at universities and programs at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Marc Spiegler, the former director of Art Basel, the world’s most important fair for modern and contemporary art, chalks that up to the professionalization of the field.
“The art world is, on the one hand, bigger, on the other hand, more professionalized,” Spiegler said by phone this morning from Switzerland. “It touches much more fields than it used to.”
Spiegler, who ran Art Basel from 2007 to 2022 and now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects including Superblue and the Luma Foundation, is about to launch his own addition to the field: a course, entitled “Understanding Today’s Art World.” The course is part of a new initiative called “Art Market Minds-The Academy” and is being offered by Art Market Minds, the company that has since 2014 organized the Art Business Conference, a series of talks that takes place in London and New York.
The live online course, which starts on February 4, is modeled on the ones Spiegler has been teaching for the past ten years as a visiting professor in the masters program of the Cultural Management Department at Università Bocconi in Milan.
In the beginning, Spiegler said, the Università Bocconi course took the form of a lecture, but a couple years in, he started a module at the end of the class where students took the knowledge they’d gained—combined with their business administration courses—and came up with a new entity for the art world, one that could be a commercial start-up, a government initiative, a nonprofit, or some other form. (One of his students went on to run the innovative online viewing rooms for Art Basel.)
The new online course will follow this same model, with up to 100 students admitted to the lecture portion of the class and 12 projects making it through to the second part, where individuals or groups will work with Spiegler to fine-tune their ideas in terms of market position, SWOT analysis, and so forth. After that stage, the financial team from Art Nova, the parent company of art market minds, will work with the students on business modeling and financials. Each project will have a deck and will be pitched to potential investors. The leaders of the best projects will be chosen to present at one of the Art Business Conferences.
The course, which will cost £750, is aimed at people “who are in other industries and love art and are thinking about trying to understand how the art world works and where they might fit within it,” Spiegler said. “Professionally, it’s people who have been recruited from other industries like luxury, finance, management consulting to work for galleries and auction houses and need to get up to speed very quickly. They could be working anywhere from the cultural department of a government to the wealth management division of a bank.”
“It’s very real world,” Spiegler said of the course. “Two and a half months to take a project from an idea to a pitch deck with financials backing it up.”
