Why is the art market like a carousel?

Olav Velthuis, the art market author and academic, has found a nifty metaphor to accompany his latest research into how emerging art markets appear: a fairground carousel. Presenting his findings at the three-day Art Market from a Global Perspective conference that he organised in Amsterdam last week (28-30 January), Velthuis explained that, like the carousel, getting a market going is “a hard and tedious process that needs a lot of energy; but once it gets going it gets easier.”Loo