What, then, are we to make of the dramatic changes in the global economy and their ripple effect on the art market? Certainly, I write this letter from a different vantage point than I had while penning my introduction to the 2007 Power issue. Back then—a mere 12 months that feels like an age ago—the market was soaring to unprecedented heights, the big November auctions in New York were yielding $24 million Jeff Koons hearts and $34 million Matisse odalisques, and market watchers (well, let’s just say a certain coterie of pundits) were complaining that the good times were actually bad: bad for the artists, who were too distracted by the wads of cash flying their way to produce work of any real merit, and bad for serious collectors, whom status-seeking neophytes were rapidly pricing out of the market.
Of course, even then the art-market Achilles was displaying an all-too-vulnerable heel. Just a week before the art of Koons and friends attracted record sums, Sotheby’s held a disastrous Impressionist and modern sale—whose results did its stock value no good either—of overestimated, overguaranteed lots, 20 of which failed to find buyers. The Dow had dropped 360 points that day, a prelude to the wild ride we have been on lately, and for the first time in years, collectors seemed to be saying that a marquee name is not enticement enough. Quality and rarity matter, too.
And today? Uncertain economic times have accelerated collectors’ flight to quality. I could make a joke here about declining oil prices making it less painful, at least, to fuel the private jets transporting them there, but, in fact, quality—and its pursuit—are at the heart of this year’s Power issue.
For a dozen years, Art+Auction has been taking very seriously the challenge of highlighting in one special issue the trailblazers who have led the art world in new directions with the aid of the three Cs: character, commitment and chutzpah. (A great eye is vital, too; it’s just not alliterative.) We research and consult and debate, creating lists and distilling them down to an essential core of candidates until a theme emerges that is as clear as crystal. This year’s is embodied in a work shown on pages 122 and 123: the Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s One World/Yek Donia, 2007, a map composed of more than 95,000 Swarovski crystals, because if one phenomenon characterized the art market in 2008, it was the glittering promise of interconnected international economies.
This issue looks at 15 powerhouses who hail from cosmopolitan cultural capitals, both emerging and of long standing. Whether they’re from Beijing, Doha, Dresden or Delhi, all these remarkable women and men know the importance of reaching across borders and forming new alliances to get the job done. Perhaps the best exemplars of this are the Russian collector Dasha Zhukova and the British-born curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, who joined forces to launch Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, one of the most ambitious and certainly the most glamorous exhibition and arts-education spaces to open in the past year. On our cover, they’re shown during a visit to Antony Gormley’s London studio, gazing at one of the artist’s sculptures hanging from the ceiling. And their expressions capture the mood of this issue perfectly. In these challenging times, today’s power motto is undoubtedly “Upward, onward and outward bound.” 

"From the Editor" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.