Why art?

At first glance, the art world and the business world seem, well, worlds apart. Dirty pants and white wine in one, starched shirts and frequent haircuts in the other. But working through the pages of this week’s issue yields a far different perspective.

Art is just a better looking widget, after all. Like any business, it starts with someone who sees a gap that needs to be filled. The vision needs to be executed – finding the real estate in which to work, researching and developing the scheme before eventually manufacturing the product. From there, it’s off to market, soliciting sales reps for exclusive deals to help price and sell the work for top dollar. These independent reps, the gallerists, are in intense competition for the best talent and the most qualified buyers. It’s a wildly splintered market, one affected by names, dates, histories, and individual taste. Not knowing the right buyer for the right product assures failure.

There are no solid numbers on how much fine art contributes to the regional economy, but consider a 2014 report from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. that found LACMA alone had an economic impact of more than $475 million a year and was responsible for more than 3,600 direct and indirect jobs. Add to that the dozen other art museums of note in the county and many dozen more galleries and pretty soon you’re talking serious money. And that doesn’t even take into account the places where the art is made, which in many cases requires an expertise as highly developed as that of any of the aerospace jobs that once dominated the region’s manufacturing industries.

Then there is the aesthetic value of the final product, one that isn’t hidden under the hood of a car or in the code of an app, but which is hung on a wall as a signifier of taste, or values, or, occasionally, wealth.

It may be possible to calculate the economic impact of art to the region, but it is in the incalculable value that real impact comes.