Former Art Basel Director to Teach Course on ‘Understanding Today’s Art World’

Since the early 2000s, there has been a significant growth in education around the art world, and specifically in the art market, with courses at universities and programs at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Marc Spiegler, the former director of Art Basel, the world’s most important fair for modern and contemporary art, chalks that up to the professionalization of the field.

“The art world is, on the one hand, bigger, on the other hand, more professionalized,” Spiegler said by phone this morning from Switzerland. “It touches much more fields than it used to.”

Spiegler, who ran Art Basel from 2007 to 2022 and now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects including Superblue and the Luma Foundation, is about to launch his own addition to the field: a course, entitled “Understanding Today’s Art World.” The course is part of a new initiative called “Art Market Minds-The Academy” and is being offered by Art Market Minds, the company that has since 2014 organized the Art Business Conference, a series of talks that takes place in London and New York.

The live online course, which starts on February 4 and costs £750, is aimed at people “who are in other industries and love art and are thinking about trying to understand how the art world works and where they might fit within it,” Spiegler said. “Professionally, it’s people who have been recruited from other industries like luxury, finance, management consulting to work for galleries and auction houses and need to get up to speed very quickly. They could be working anywhere from the cultural department of a government to the wealth management division of a bank.”

Spiegler has been teaching a similar course for the past ten years as a visiting professor in the masters program of the Cultural Management Department at Università Bocconi in Milan. In the beginning, Spiegler said, the Università Bocconi course took the form of a lecture, but a couple years in, he started a module at the end of the class where students took the knowledge they’d gained—combined with their business administration courses—and came up with a new entity for the art world, one that could be a commercial start-up, a government initiative, a nonprofit, or some other form. (One of his students went on to run the innovative online viewing rooms for Art Basel.)

The second planned online course from the Art Market Minds Academy will follow more closely the model from the Bocconi course. Up to 100 students will be admitted to the deep-dive first  ourse and a maximum of 12 projects, either from individuals or groups will be admitted to the Cultural Catalyst Program. Each project team will work with Spiegler to fine-tune their ideas in terms of market position, competitive business analysis, and so forth. In parallel, the financial team from Art Nova, the parent company of Art Market Minds, will work with the students on business modeling and financials. Each project will create a full pitch deck and then the project’s creators will pitch it to potential investors. The best projects will be then chosen to present at one of the Art Business Conferences.

“It’s very real world,” Spiegler said of the course. “Two and a half months to take a project from an idea to a pitch deck with financials backing it up.”