Betting on emerging art: Calculated risk or pure intuition?

01The myth of the reckless artist and what it conceals

The image of the artist plunging into the unknown, driven by a single interior force, is one of the most enduring constructions of Western modernity. Its origins lie in nineteenth-century Romanticism, solidified through the mythology of American Abstract Expressionism — Pollock splattering his canvases in a state of alcoholic trance — and it continues to feed the way the market sells emerging artists today.

Yet look more closely at the great artistic risk-takings of the twentieth century, and you systematically discover an infrastructure of calculation. When Yves Klein presented Le Vide at the Iris Clert gallery in April 1958 — an exhibition that was literally empty, walls whitewashed, nothing else — it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Klein had negotiated for months with Clert, chosen the date with care, orchestrated a vernissage where cocktails dyed blue were served to visitors, turning their urine IKB blue in the hours that followed. Two hundred people queued outside. The scandal was perfectly choreographed.

Similarly, Hirst's direct sale at Sotheby's had been prepared with his team for more than a year, in coordination with communications experts and prospective institutional buyers. The "risk" was real — bypassing the galleries that had made his career was a significant contractual and relational rupture — but it rested on a precise analysis of his own market position.

02When the body becomes the stake: performance as existential wager

There is, however, a category of art where calculation reaches its genuine limits, and that is the category of the body placed in danger. In November 1974, Marina Abramović positioned herself at the centre of a gallery in Naples with seventy-two objects arranged on a table: a rose, honey, wine, scissors, a scalpel, a loaded pistol with a single bullet. The audience was invited to do whatever it wished with these objects, and with her, for six hours. Rhythm 0 was a work whose outcome Abramović herself could not predict. By the end, her clothes had been cut away, her skin slashed in several places, and someone had pressed the pistol to her temple before another visitor deflected the weapon.

What Rhythm 0 tells us is not the recklessness of an artist, but something far more precise: the verification of a hypothesis about collective psychology. Abramović wanted to know how far an audience could go when faced with a consenting, passive person. The experience was philosophically rigorous, even if it was physically dangerous. The risk was real, but it was theorised.

This distinction between calculated risk and authentic danger runs throughout the history of body art. Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm in 1971 (Shoot, F Space Gallery, Santa Ana, California) — an apparently senseless act, yet one grounded in a precise reflection on the Vietnam War and mediated violence. Gina Pane climbed a metal ladder fitted with sharp blades, barefoot, in 1971 (Escalade non-anesthésiée), to denounce the social anaesthesias that render collective pain invisible. In both cases, the suffering body is a conceptual instrument, not a victim of chance.

03Money as revealer: what prices say about risk

Jean-Michel Basquiat was selling his first works for between 200 and 500 dollars on the streets of SoHo in the early 1980s. In 2017, his Untitled (1982) — a skull on a red ground of explosive lines, painted when the artist was twenty-one years old — was hammered down at 110.5 million dollars at Sotheby's New York, setting a record for an American artist. The buyer, Yusaku Maezawa, Japanese billionaire and founder of the fashion site Zozotown, had paid 57.3 million for another Basquiat canvas two years earlier. Between those two purchases, he had doubled his stake in twenty-four months.

These figures are not incidental. They illustrate the fundamental structure of the emerging art market: a massive information asymmetry between those who see early and those who arrive late. Charles Saatchi bought A Thousand Years by Damien Hirst in 1990 for 12,000 pounds sterling — an installation containing a cow whose decomposing head fed flies hatching in an incubator, the flies themselves killed by an electric insecticide device. Thirty years later, comparable works by Hirst fetch several million.

Saatchi did not operate on pure intuition. He bought heavily from artists identified by his advisers, building up considerable stocks, then exhibited those artists in his London gallery to generate the notoriety that appreciated his acquisitions. It is this mechanism that journalist Don Thompson analyses in detail in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (2008): the art market functions less like a stock exchange than like a reputation economy, where a handful of actors with exceptional prescriptive power can transform a modest stake into significant fortune.

04Technical risk: when materials refuse to cooperate

Beyond the market, there exists a risk that collectors and galleries rarely mention: that of the material itself. In 1991, when Hirst presented The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — the four-metre tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde — no one had truly solved the problem of long-term conservation. Ten years later, the animal had partially decomposed despite the formaldehyde, its skin peeling away, its silhouette sagging. The collector Steve Cohen, who had acquired the work for approximately eight million dollars in 2004, had to fund the replacement of the original specimen with a new shark, at an estimated cost of one hundred thousand dollars.

The question raised was not trivial: if the shark is replaced, is the work still the same? Hirst resolved it by authenticating the new specimen, but the debate laid bare a fundamental fragility running through an entire strand of contemporary art — the strand that uses living, perishable, or technologically dependent materials.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres had anticipated this question with considerably more elegance through his candy works, among them Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) — a pile of confectionery weighing 175 pounds, the weight of his companion who had died of AIDS, which the public is invited to nibble away. The work reconstitutes itself indefinitely, each reinstallation being authentic according to his instructions. But this poetic solution to the problem of permanence is only possible because Gonzalez-Torres had integrated it from the outset as the very structure of the work.

The case of Dieter Roth is less reassuring. His Staple Cheese (A Race) of 1970 — cheese sealed inside suitcases, exhibited until complete decomposition and insect infestation — posed genuinely insoluble conservation problems for the museums that attempted to acquire or archive his work. The Museum of Modern Art in Oxford preserved residues of his installations under conditions belonging as much to biology as to museology.

05NFTs, or the illusion of controlled risk

In March 2021, Christie's sold Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) for 69.3 million dollars. The work, a digital collage of five thousand images produced daily over thirteen and a half years, existed only as a JPEG file certified by a non-fungible token on the Ethereum blockchain. The sale, presented as a democratic revolution in art, triggered a speculative euphoria that saw thousands of digital artists creating NFTs in the hope of replicating that result.

Eighteen months later, the artistic NFT market had lost more than 97% of its transaction volume according to DappRadar data. Most works sold between 2021 and mid-2022 were worth less than 1% of their acquisition price.

What is revealing about this episode is the way in which the discourse of "creative risk" served as dressing for classical financial speculation. The digital artists who genuinely benefited from the period — Pak, Tyler Hobbs with his Fidenza project, the artists of Art Blocks — were those who had built collector communities over years, not those who had surfaced opportunistically within the bullish window. Creative risk and speculative financial risk had been conflated, with severe consequences for those who had failed to distinguish between the two.

06What institutions do with risk: between validation and neutralisation

There is a paradox that every actor in the art market eventually observes: the moment a risky work enters an institutional collection, it ceases to be risky. MoMA presented Abramović's The Artist is Present in 2010, transforming a radical performative practice — the body in a state of exhaustion, silent confrontation with strangers for 736 hours — into a major cultural event, complete with ticketing, catalogue, and Netflix documentary. Fifteen hundred people queued to sit facing her. The risk had been institutionalised, which is another way of saying it had been cancelled.

This mechanism of neutralisation is what art critic Julian Stallabrass describes in Art Incorporated (2004) as the systematic absorption of subversion by the market. Banksy attempted to resist it with Love is in the Bin (2018), when Girl with Balloon partially self-destructed as it left a Sotheby's sale where it had just reached 1.04 million pounds sterling. The theatrical coup, prepared months in advance with a shredder concealed in the frame, was intended to show that the auction was destroying art. Sotheby's immediately authenticated the work under its new title, its value doubled, and the incident became the marketing moment of the year.

Here, perhaps, is the most precise formulation of risk in contemporary art: institutions and the market have developed such an efficient capacity for absorption that the only truly unpredictable risk remaining is the one the artist takes with their own health, their legal freedom, or their personal reputation. Everything else — formal provocation, scandalous material, the staging of danger — has become a language the system recognises, valorises, and integrates with disconcerting fluency.

What distinguishes the artists who continue to shift something — Tino Sehgal refusing all photographic or video documentation of his performances, making their commercial circulation structurally difficult; Lee Ufan and his practice of ma, the Japanese empty space as resistance to visual saturation — is less a taste for risk than the rigour with which they protect the space where risk remains possible. Pure intuition, if it exists at all, looks less like a leap into the void than like a very precise discipline of not allowing calculation to colonise everything.