한국미술품 가격지수개발의 필요성

Abstract

This study was conducted in order to determine the need of a Korean Art Price Index which would help raise the legitimate price of South Korean artworks that are undervalued in the global art market. Unlike industrially manufactured products for daily life consumption, the pricing of art is not determined by supply and demand and has yet to be resolved on a global level. The main reason for this issue not being solved is that the criteria that are considered during the process of assessing the value of artwork are not standardized. The prices of artworks applied to creations in the Korean art world are usually determined by artists, galleries or audiences. Despite many efforts to change the practice, in most cases the selling price depends on the size of the artwork as well as the artist's reputation, career and development and reviews by art critics. There are two methods of price determination in the current art market: one method is the price estimation by the gallery and the artist and the other method uses the auction winning bid as basis. This study focused on the latter method, the price formation in the art market determined by auction winning bids, as its criteria are more objective, thus more comparable. As like Korean art market, there is a price system per size in the Western art market, but the price of artwork in the market is justified by the price index of artwork, which is proven as an asset index that can complement it. Since the history of the Korean art market is relatively short, there is a lack of records in sales of artwork, let alone the price development of one and the same work, and the Korean art price index used in many institutions has not gained full support yet. The art index should be in accordance with qualitative standards of artistic value in consideration of the distinct characteristics of the artwork, but the Korean art price indexes developed so far are still in such rudimentary states that they do not yet include those parameters. Due to the lack of a reliable art price index, foreigners as well as Koreans are confronted with irregularities and complications when dealing with Korean art. While considering the unique characteristics of artwork, this study examines the current state of the art market from various perspectives. The KAPPA and KAMP index which were both developed based on literature research, and the globally most reknown art price indexes, Mei Moses Art index and Artprice.com, shall be analyzed in detail in order to determine the necessity of the Korean art index.