Cover art: Joey Parlett. Cover design: Garrett Haas.
Excerpts from the first and fourth chapters were published by artnet News surrounding the book's release. An excerpt from the final chapter is available here on the blog, and a detailed description can be found below.
In the simplest terms: If you feel like The Gray Market has helped you figure out the art industry's present, then The Great Reframing may help you figure out its future.
SYNOPSIS: In recent years, observers and participants alike have passionately debated technology’s prospects for altering the art industry, particularly the contemporary gallery sector. A few staunch Luddites aside, many, if not most, now seem to believe that wholesale “disruption” of this specialized market is inevitable. But both parties in this would-be merger harbor grave misconceptions about the other’s business—misconceptions that distort their often-utopian predictions about the “frictionless” and “democratic” future of contemporary-art sales.
The Great Reframing: How Technology Will—and Won’t—Change the Gallery System Forever bridges the gap between these two sides. By unpacking the secretive and counterintuitive dynamics of the 21st-century art market as only a veteran of the industry can, Tim Schneider reveals how and why this unique space dismantles many of digital innovation’s most dependable weapons of disruption. And by elucidating tech’s winner-take-all effects on earlier-adopting cultural sectors like pop music, film, and publishing, he captures the unintended (and unsettling) consequences that e-commerce, data science, and other advancements are likely to unleash on an unsuspecting art industry.
Through this double-barreled approach, The Great Reframing blasts open the debate about how—and how much—contemporary artists, gallerists, and professionals alike need to evolve if they want to avoid being herded onto the industry’s scrap heap in the years to come, beginning right now.