**THE MARKET CAN CAMPUTE; BUT CAN IT PERCEIVE?**

Artificial Intelligence in the Art Market

Algorithmic valuation has entered the art market's vocabulary with considerable ease. Price indices track primary-market momentum; computer vision models parse stylistic signatures across auction records. When Magnus Resch asked - in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this past August - whether artificial intelligence can evaluate art, the question was no longer hypothetical. Resch, who has spent years mapping the art market's structural logic and making its opacity analytically legible, has helped sharpen this debate with intellectual honesty. His conclusion was telling: AI, despite being trained on vast quantities of market data and critical analysis, has not yet proven capable of providing a reliable foundation for evaluating art as a potential investment. Not yet*.

There is something revealing in the specific failure mode of AI art valuation - not that it gets prices wrong, but that it gets them right for the wrong reasons. A model trained on decades of primary and secondary market data will accurately identify the markers of value: provenance, exhibition history, critical reception, institutional acquisition. What it is reconstructing, in doing so, is not taste but its aftermath - the sediment that taste leaves behind once it has moved through the market and hardened into consensus.

Different orders of Inquiry

This is a meaningful distinction. The collector who operates the same way, who reads the record of what has already been valued and positions accordingly, is not exercising judgment but following a single vector - one that points, always, toward what consensus has already settled. That is a useful position. It is not a creative one.

There is a structural distinction between two different orders of inquiry: valuation, which operates on consensus and measurable scarcity, and perception, which operates on attunement - a cultivated capacity to register what a work is doing, rather than what it has sold for. To understand what that second order demands, one might turn, unexpectedly, to a record producer for whom sound was the medium but attention the actual discipline - someone who spent five decades listening not to music, but through it.

*(Magnus Resch, „Kann KI Kunst bewerten?", 27. August 2025, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, faz.net)

Red Hot Chili Peppers and the argument for attention

Rick Rubin is routinely described in superlatives - the man who shaped hip-hop, heavy metal and country within a single career. These descriptions are accurate as far as they go; but what they do not capture is that Rubin is, at his core, not primarily interested in production - he is interested in perception.

He has sat with artists as different as Metallica and Adele, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jay-Z, and in each case the gesture carried the same quality: strip away what is habitual, what is performed, what is there because it has always been there in the musical, artistic and creative storyline of the musicians - and find what remains. Every artist fortunate enough to work with him was given something rare: the conditions to find, or further develop, their own voice. Those who have worked with him describe not a producer who imposes vision but one who creates the conditions for a work to reveal its own necessity.

Tetragrammaton

His curiosity has never been confined to the recording studio. Since launching his podcast Tetragrammaton in 2023, Rubin has sat with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman - whose research into attention and sensory perception maps, from an entirely different disciplinary angle, onto the same questions Rubin has been circling for decades - and with Ed Ruscha, one of the most rigorous conceptual artists working in America today.

His book, The Creative Act is less a work about music than a sustained argument for attention as a discipline that crosses every creative domain - including, as we shall see, the curation of an art collection.

The everyday object in the kitchen

"Even if an element seems static, whether a work of art in a museum or an everyday object in a kitchen, when we look at it deeply, we can see newness. We recognize aspects unnoticed before." (p. 55)

Rick Rubin is not advocating for longer looking as a corrective to distraction. He is making a claim about ontology: a work's meaning unfolds over time, continuously disclosed through the quality of attention brought to it. The object does not change. The perceiver does, and in doing so, changes what the object is capable of being.

There is a detail about Rubin that tends to be mentioned in passing, and deserves more attention: he does not play an instrument... He has never recorded a note, never written a melody, never arranged a chord. By every conventional measure, he is not a musician - and yet he has shaped the sound of the last half-century more than almost anyone who is. What this reveals is something slightly unsettling about the nature of creative authority: that the capacity to perceive what a work needs, and to hold that perception with enough conviction to act on it, is entirely independent of the capacity to make the work oneself. The collector oftentimes occupies this position, though they do not paint, do not sculpt, do not construct - and yet the collection they build is, if approached with the same quality of attention Rubin brings to a session, a creative act of the first order. The question the parallel quietly raises is whether most collectors have understood the seriousness of the role they are already in.

For the collector, this maps onto one of the more persistent problems in the field: trend. The contemporary art market produces aesthetic movements with considerable velocity, and the pressure to position oneself in relation to them, acquiring ahead of the wave, or riding its visible crest, is real and not entirely irrational. But the collector who responds primarily to that pressure has, in effect, accepted the market's perceptual logic as their own. They are no longer looking primarily at the work; they are looking at what the market is looking at.

DNA Molecules, hurricanes and the design of the human face.

"Invisible threads of mathematical harmony are laced through all natural beauty. We can find the same ratios at work in the spirals of seashells and galaxies. In flower petals, DNA molecules, hurricanes, and the design of the human face. Our creations are inspired by the relationships that surround us." (p. 397).

The argument embedded in this observation is structural rather than decorative: coherence is relational. A work does not carry fixed meaning into a collection; it enters a system of relationships - formal echoes, conceptual tensions, historical dialogues - that modify what it is and what the works around it are capable of being.

Collections retrospectively recognized as visionary - those of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, or more recently of Francesca von Habsburg - tend to share this quality: an internal logic so consistent that each addition felt, in retrospect, inevitable. The collector who thinks architecturally, attending to what each work does to the whole rather than what it represents in isolation, is operating at this level.

The works may be uneven by conventional measure.

The field they produce is not..

One of the most consequential of Rubin's distinctions:

"A point of view is different from having a point. A point is an idea intentionally expressed. A point of view is the perspective - conscious and unconscious - through which the work emerges. What causes us to notice a piece of art is rarely the point being made. We are drawn to the way an artist's filter refracts ideas, not the ideas themselves." (p. 178)

The art market rewards points. Artists who address legible subjects are easier to discuss, easier to position, and easier to sell.

The filter through which an artist perceives and organizes the world - the particular calibration of attention, the characteristic way they weight figure against ground, presence against absence - cannot be reduced to a theme or a position. It can only be encountered. The collector who learns to read artists through this perceptual architecture, rather than their thematic program, asks an earlier and more fundamental question: not what the artist is saying, but how the artist sees.

Jay-Z and Johnny Cash

This, ultimately, is the gift the book extends to the collector, the curator, or anyone who understands that sensibility is not a fixed trait but a practice - one that deepens precisely because it is never complete. Just as Johnny Cash, in his final recordings, found not a new voice but the most distilled version of the one he had always had - or as Jay-Z, working with Rubin, stripped back production to arrive at something both rawer and more authoritative - the collector who works with the questions The Creative Act raises may find, through the same process of removal and attention, that they too are capable of a genuinely creative act. Not the acquisition of objects, but the composition of a position.

It is worth noting that Rubin himself, in conversation with Tim Ferriss, was clear that the book offers no toolkit, no set of prescriptions, no extractable method. It is closer, he suggested, to the Tao - a text designed to hover, to resist reduction, to mean something different to each reader at each encounter. Sentences that float rather than instruct. It is this quality that makes it so suited to the collector's situation: the development of taste cannot be taught sequentially. It can only be circled, slowly, from different angles - until something clarifies.

Computational tools will continue to improve price discovery, are likely to reduce information asymmetry, and will make due diligence more efficient. Scholars like Amy Whitaker and Magnus Resch, whose work on art and economic participation has meaningfully shaped how one might think about value, ownership, and artist equity, are helping to build the conceptual vocabulary for a more equitable and legible market.

Curatorial authorship, in my view, belongs to a different order of operation - one that technology will refine around the edges but cannot enter at the centre. Perceptual capacity remains a practice: one requiring time, exposure, genuine risk, and the willingness to be changed by what one stands in front of.

A note, in closing.

There will be those who argue that this distinction is merely temporary - that sufficiently advanced models will eventually learn to approximate taste, to simulate resonance, to replicate the perceptual moves described here. The argument is worth hearing, and then setting carefully aside - not because the technological trajectory is unclear, but because the argument misidentifies what is actually at stake. Curatorial sensibility and computational pattern-matching are not competing methods for reaching the same destination. They are oriented toward different things entirely.

A system trained on the full depth of primary and secondary market data could reconstruct every condition that preceded an act of taste. The judgment itself remains elsewhere.

AUTHOR

Victor Justus Messerschmidt

THE DISCUSSED WORK

Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

PERSONS MENTIONED

Magnus Resch; Rick Rubin; Andy Warhol; Marcel Proust; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Dorothy Vogel; Herbert Vogel; Francesca von Habsburg; Amy Whitaker

Visuals created with Google Gemini.

THE LIBRARY I VOL. 1/26 I What the Algorithm Cannot Hear: On Perception, Taste, and the Art of Collecting.