The African Art Market
African art is being described as the present day and old day’s paintings, installations, sculptures, and other visible cultures from homemade Africans and the continent of Africa. The vend for an African Art is being attributed by specifically by a sort of a network relationship between both Africans and non-Africans intermediary who form temporary links in a chain of transnational supply and demand. The made for sale properties are being collected by African traders who are generally professionals. They move in rural communities to search for anything that can be sold (Ravenhill, 1980). After the properties are collected, the African traders move them from one market to another until they are sold to someone who can sell them direct to the Europeans. The dealers who had direct European contact were mostly Mande, Hausa, and Wolof, who are based in Abidjan in Ivory Coast. By interacting with the Western buyers, the African dealers have a slight understanding of the globe into the objects of the African Art is being moved.
In Africa, the traders usually convey a message in verbal ways on the properties they sell. To the western dealers, the African traders communicate specific details on the property they are selling. This information may include how they got the feature, the data they collected, and where it comes from. On another side, which is to the foreigners, the traders convey a general meaning of the property they are selling. The general purpose includes the cultural significance and the traditional use of the property. This type of information is generally used to get the taste of the westerners and also to increase the chances of selling the property.
Art objects of Africa that are being sold to the west are mostly accompanied with some documentation that mostly tells about the lineage that has a record of the previous owners. These lists of the earlier owners determined the auctioned price of the object. For instance, if a name such as Rockefeller and Picasso are on the list, then the auctioning price will be generally higher than the records of owners who are not known in the market. Before the object leaves the continent of Africa, the lineage is cautiously hidden from other buyers.
The collectors of the objects are mostly interested in learning that track of the purpose of how it moves from the villagers to the market. On the other hand, the tourists who are in Africa are generally interested in knowing the traditional meaning of the art and its general functionalities. The African traders provide the tourist with the object and also the conventional definition of the purpose (Spooner, 1986). Mostly the information that the traders use to sell their properties is generally passed from one trader to another.
In conclusion, the Art traders of Africa link a long chain of spread to an extent they cannot control either the supply or demand of the market. Art traders literally cannot create properties that satisfy the requirement of the market. Also, they cannot create an exchange of properties they have in store. Therefore, the supply and demand principles and generally being control by external forces that are out of the hands of Art traders of Africa. This means that the supply is being determined by the objects available in the village community that includes the skills and manufacturing potential of the present-day artists. Demand, on the other hand, is mainly dependable in the museum exhibition, the western publication, the tourism industry, and the history of auctioning.