Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0000-4886-1449
Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Art History
Reader 1
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy
Reader 2
Bill Anthes
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2025 Kenneth CG Knothe
Abstract
This thesis investigates the financialization of art through the expanding use of art-backed loans and institutional involvement. It focuses on how artworks—once primarily valued for their aesthetic or cultural significance—are now routinely treated as financial assets within the art market. The paper uses case studies from Sotheby’s Financial Services and Mitchell F. Chan’s blockchain-based reinterpretation of Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Wendy Brown, it argues that this shift undermines museums’ roles as cultural stewards and redefines the meaning of value in the art world to something more quantifiable. This thesis calls into question our current understanding and how we as humans protect the inherently valuable symbolic, public, and aesthetic functions of art amid rising financial pressures.
Recommended Citation
Knothe, Kenneth, "Art as Asset: The Rise of the Financialized Art Market and the Abstraction of Value" (2025). Pitzer Senior Theses. 228.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/228
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, Economic History Commons, Finance Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons
