At first glance, the global art trade—currently valued around $60 billion—is a miniscule piece of global economic production. But due to the unregulated nature of the art market, it serves a key function within the larger network of the accumulation and distribution of capital worldwide. This deregulated market intersects with the offshore domain in freeports, an archipelago of tax-free storage facilities that stretch from Singapore to Geneva to Delaware. The burgeoning of freeports globally suggests that speculation has become a more prominent pattern of art investment, but it also demonstrates that tax avoidance is a goal of such speculators and the result is that more art works are being taken out of circulation and deposited in vaults beyond the view of regulatory authorities. Despite its size, the art trade can demonstrate broader trends in international finance and, by examining offshore art storage that occurs in freeports, it will be possible to locate some of the hidden mechanisms that allow the global art market to flourish on the margins of the economy as well as to perceive a shift in which the economic value of art works predominates over their cultural value.

Art collectives come into existence for many reasons, whether to collaborate on art making or to generate a space for contemporary art outside of the established channels of exhibition and the art market. These efforts have been captured in recent exhibitions such as The Ungovernables, organized by the New Museum in 2012; Six Lines of Flight, which was launched at SFMOMA in 2013; and Cosmopolis I, organized by the Centre Pompidou in 2017. Artist collectives have received some scholarly attention, primarily as producers of artworks, but their exhibition-making practices have not been explored. Some of the collectives included in these exhibitions have also been very involved in exhibition making themselves. The Indonesian art collective ruangrupa was selected to curate the 2022 edition of documenta. This selection emerges not only from their participation in international biennials and their own exhibition practice in Jakarta—including the organization of regular exhibitions, workshops and film screenings at their compound—but also more ambitions events such as Jakarta 32 °C, a festival of contemporary art and media (2004–2014), or O.K. Video (2006–2018). Another group, the Raqs Media Collective, based in Delhi, curated the Shanghai Bienniale in 2016 and the Yokohama Trienniale in 2020. This paper will connect the local and the global through an examination of art collectives’ community-based work in their own cities, and the way it translates into global art events.

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When setting out to organize this Special Issue of Arts, I began with the goal to survey the emerging field of art market studies but also to expand the notion of the market to include alternatives, such as art collectives and festivals, that challenge the dominance of the market as the pre-eminent arbiter of cultural value

While some aspects of the art market are promoted relentlessly, other elements are kept secret. This chapter will investigate the offshore mechanisms of the art market—Freeports—and how international money-laundering regulations have attempted to clamp down on shady transactions of hard assets, including works of art. Economists have attempted to gauge the scale of offshore investments but the data available about freeports is anecdotal and does not allow researchers to ascertain how much art is stored out of sight. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the way hidden aspects of the art market impact collecting practices. What is more, a new suite of investment opportunities has come into existence as a means of capitalizing on the value of art in storage. This pattern of art investment suggests how much art has become an asset class for the benefit of wealth management. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->