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“Every risk is worth taking as long as it’s for a good cause and contributes to a good life.”
102015 | WWW.FORBES.COM
Richard Branson
A teacher of mine once told me that change is the only constant in life. That’s certainly true for the entire editorial team here, which has spent the better part of a year working tirelessly to change Forbes for the better. You saw evidence of that for yourself late last year, when we redesigned this site. Now it’s the magazine’s turn: With our October issue, we’re unveiling a new look for Forbes. We hope you like what you see. Dan Bishop, our design director and Alison Mackey, senior graphic designer worked hard to develop and implement a design that’s elegant, eye-catching and easy to navigate. Once of the most obvious changes, as you’ve probably already noted, is our new logo, our first in seven years. Whether you read us in print or online, you represent a readership that loves science and shares a deep, abiding curiosity about the world around you. With every story we post here, with every issue, with every day, we’re committed to satisfying that curiosity. Quite a few readers noted the absence of our popular Vital Signs column this issue and wondered if it had been eliminated as part of Forbes’s redesign. Not to worry: Vital Signs just took a brief vacation this month. It’ll be back in November, and in future issues of Forbes.
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International
“Pink Heads” (1998), by Fang Lijun, went for $1.7 million.
Pump & Dump By Gady A. Epstein
Only 16 months ago there was no real demand for the work of contemporary artist Liu Anping, who labored in obscurity in Berlin while the art market in his native China was minting fortunes for his old colleagues. So China Guardian Auctions helped make a market for him. “They came to me,” Liu says. At the fall 2006 auction a photograph of Liu’s performance art sold for $9,000. In Guardian’s next auction, last spring, a painting from Liu’s “Sunrise” series sold for $50,000. Another of his Sunrise paintings appeared at Guardian’s next auction in November, selling for $87,000. Just like that, Liu has significant buyers for his work. Or does he? “It is quite strange in the domestic market. I have never met the buyers. In Europe I am always introduced to the buyers by the galleries, in case I can sell more work,” says Liu, who shuttles between continents. In China “it is not as transparent.” It is no secret that the Chinese contemporary art market is blistering hot, but outsiders have little idea of the murky ways the market’s players have been cashing in for the last few years. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, China’s highearning artists, speculators, middlemen and critics have come up with some creative ways to manufacture demand.
Artists are mass-producing paintings, auction houses are working with artists and dealers to juice up prices, and artists are paying for praise and exhibitions to build up their brands. If it were penny stocks being peddled, all this would go under the label of market manipulation. In the art world it’s business as usual. Is there any law to stop a painter from bidding on his own artwork in order to create feverish demand? There isn’t. Creating that next hot artist is an “idiot’s game,” says Liang Changsheng, art director of the Contemporary Artwork Auction firm in Beijing. “First get critics to write about him,” he says. (The critics are paid by artists, auction houses and galleries for this service.) “Then organize exhibitions to introduce his work.” (That’s paid for, too, even at the most prestigious national museums.) “Then you can put the work in auction with an establishing price and buy it back yourself in order to set an example for the public. Of course it would be better if some other bidders join in.” Liang and many others argue that no trick is new in the art business. They note that in the West famous artists historically have used assistants, galleries sometimes buy their own clients’ work at auction to “protect prices,” and Christie’s and Sotheby’s often guarantee minimum sale
prices. The Chinese operators, though, appear to be taking Western practices much further. To the critical eye, the pay-for-play economic climate of China has merged with the insular self-dealing ethos of the art world to form a unique Chinese hybrid that cuts corners in the chase for money. They’re chasing a fortune. In the 2006 and 2007 auctions pieces by the 30 best-known Chinese artists sold for a combined $420 million, according to a Chinese art magazine. A handful of the most famous–Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Wang Guangyi– are reaping untold sums more selling new work directly out of their studios for hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece, and they have a hard time keeping pace with orders, even with assistants. Their prices may only go higher in the short run. But in the long run are they setting up the Chinese art market for a fall? It is difficult to gauge which of the artists are relying most on assistants, but the mass production of their artwork has become unsettling to some of their colleagues and patrons. Says Cheng Xindong, a gallery owner in Beijing, “People will see the difference [in quality], so they will put them to sell. If suddenly you see 50 to 100 pieces of the same kind of work in auction, who will buy? The prices will go down. It’s dangerous for the artist.”
It may be dangerous, but there is cash to haul in. “In my dream budget, I would hire many more assistants,” says Hua Jiming, a 43-year-old artist in Songzhuang, a village on the eastern edge of Beijing that is home to many of the nation’s wealthiest artists. He paints, with the help of an assistant, Warholesque pop confections laden with Communist iconography. Hua points to five similar-looking canvases stacked against one wall and claims they will sell for more than $25,000 apiece. Maybe they will, given the frenzy in the market. But the highest auction price he managed in the fall was $17,000. To generate buzz, Hua pays for praise by the word and by the magazine page, each of which are for sale for cash and paintings. “Personally for me now in China, there are no real art critics,” says Cheng, the gallery owner. “They try to make cooperation with the artists to write good articles–not real criticism, just exaggerate. Then the artist can charge a higher price for the art.” “The same thing goes for a lot of museums and museum shows. A lot of the museums are pay-to-play,” says Pauline J. Yao, an art historian who researched collections of contemporary art on a Fulbright scholarship last year. “It all goes back to the market and auction values.” This presents a dilemma for artists trapped
between their ideals and the desire to make a living. They may decry what they view as a crass, dishonest market, but it’s the only one they have. “I participated in three auctions last year, and beforehand two of these auction companies came to me and suggested I buy the work myself, that I get a gallery to represent me secretly and buy it,” says Li Wen, a performance artist in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Auction house managers, he says, “prefer to train the market and make the price go up gradually. We all know these tricks.” But Liu Anping’s work would appear to be an exception. The artist Liu says that Guardian came to him two years ago to buy his work, at a time when it had very little commercial value. Two years later Liu Anping’s work is selling for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, though he stayed removed from the machinations. “I have nothing to do with the auctions,” the artist says. “I don’t want to collaborate with others to manipulate the price of my own work.”Liu Gang says emphatically there was no trick to this success story. But however the prices are skyrocketing, can it possibly be sustained? Many of the players say yes, that prices will keep going up–so long as people don’t talk too much about what’s really going on. “What we need is more development, not more attacks,” Liang says. “Otherwise the market could be destroyed altogether.”
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Meeting The Man Behind The Brand
Richard Branson
Feature
Adventurer. Trailblazer. Rebel risk taker. Hippy tycoon. Disruptor. Maverick. Billionaire buccaneer.
Richard Branson has been called all these and many more.
The Richard Branson brand, just like that of Virgin, stands alone. Yet on meeting the man behind the larger than life media
persona, I was struck not by his charisma (though he has plenty),
but by his humility. Expecting plenty of ego, I was disarmed by its absence. Instead I encountered a man deeply passionate about
tackling the big challenges of our time – from climate change to
his team at Virgin Unite were no less passionate or purposeful.
leaders –gathered on Necker. We talked about what lights
My experience on Necker Island transcended anything
talents, expertise, and resources to positively impact in the
hedonistic pleasures Necker is famed for. Each of the speakers
help people thrive at work, and disrupt the status quo. To
social inequality, all while having fun on the way. The people in
Sparks of possibility flew fast and furiously among the
40 of us – entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought us up and explored how we can better use our unique
connected simply to business or brand building or even the
world – to solve bigger problems, reduce human suffering,
at our morning “think tank” sessions – who ranged from NASA
use Branson’s catchphrase: to do well by doing good.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg – spoke from the heart,
I gained a wealth of insights into leadership, entrepreneurship
billion people still live on under $2 a day and that the bulk of the
experience itself – being surrounded by passionate people
of people, many far wealthier than Richard Branson.
Captain Mark Kelly to spiritual author Marianne Williamson to
Of course I’m very mindful that few people will ever have
desire to help. While
the opportunity to visit Necker Island. Even more so, that one
and social enterprise, what was even more valuable was the
world’s wealth is held by a very small, privileged and elite group
without pretension and with a genuine
intent on making a meaningful contribution in the world.
If you are literate enough to be reading this then your
ability to effect change is far less dependent on your wealth, status or size of your Twitter following than it is on your belief in
your ability to effect change – starting in your immediate sphere of influence and extending outward in your home, workplace,
community, local government and beyond. And while we may look to politicians and Branson-like power brokers to lead the way, we cannot – and we must not – rely on them to solve our
problems for us. Most of all, we must never underestimate the ripple effect we set in motion when we take responsibility for being the change we wish to see in the world.
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Some call Branson lucky. But while he’s had more hits than
misses since dropping out of high school to start a magazine, not every endeavor has taken off (remember Virgin Cola?). While
interviewing Branson and in our other conversations, I found a man who is every bit human (and somewhat ill at ease with public
speaking).What set him on a different trajectory than so many others has been his daringly big dreams, his willingness to take
bold risks to achieve them and to seize opportunities that others either didn’t spot or were too complacent or timid to pursue. It’s worth remembering that Branson mortgaged his home multiple times in his early days at Virgin Records and nearly died in
his attempt to circumnavigate the globe on a hot air balloon.
At his core Branson is an intrepid entrepreneur who
thrives on challenging what’s possible and improving the status quo – doing things smarter and better and, when
required, stirring up the established power structures in the
process. Whereas many at his stage of life might retire to a golf course, Branson has no intention to slow down. Rather he’s channeling his seemingly boundless energy (he arrived
in from the Congo at 2 a.m. the morning we met where he’d
been looking at sustainable energy alternatives for domestic
use) into the various initiatives of Virgin Unite – finding better ways of doing business through the B-Team, improving social
inequality, and developing renewable energy sources to sustain
humanity far into the future through the Carbon War Room.
Sure, Richard Branson knows how to have fun and infuses it
into everything he’s involved with (did I mention dancing on a bar
with him while doing back up vocals for Estelle?). But for all the fun, fame and wealth, the measure of his legacy will transcend the businesses he’s built (100+ companies employing 60,000
people across 50 countries) or the records he has broken. It will be measured by the lives he has lifted. And at risk of sounding cliché, after my time on Necker Island, he can add one more that list.
Of course we’re not all wired to be like Richard Branson. But
I believe the world would be a far better place if we all embraced more of his “let’s just give it a try” mindset. And for all the things
that the world is short on, there’s no shortage of opportunity to step up to the plate in your daily life, to disrupt that which needs
disrupting and to be more daring in your ambition to create
positive change.That will take courage because it demands risk. But to quote the “rebel billionaire” himself:
“Every risk is worth taking as long as it’s for a good cause and contributes to a good life.”
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