How does an Art Market work and how can an artist become involved?

Just out of curiosity, and for the sake of clarity @oatmeal1642, are those links actually available to view – or are they links in terms of library resources? Just to give us a clue as to where your professor was coming from, of course.

these are the links:

Art Market Confidence Index
http://www.artmarket.com/
The Toronto Arts Fair
http://www.tiafair.com/

for our presentation, we need to explain the Art Market as if no one knows anything about it, and a lot of the students do not. so, we need to discuss first off, what it is, how it works, how a student may become involved, etc.

The problem with art markets is that they cater for a wide variety of tastes, sometimes they seem to concentrate on one particular type of art, others are more generalized.
Now in my little spot of the UK, there is a fairly large market for Art. We have plenty of art galleries, plenty of art stores…I do recall asking someone who worked at one such art gallery as to how someone would go about selling art through their galleries and essentially it seems to be all down to a long line of starting from simple little open air art galleries, eventually leading up to bigger things but the process does seem to involve an awful lot of word of mouth. Now I don’t know if this is a regional or indeed national thing, it may work differently from continent to continent, but I’m inclined to believe that it would be much the same across the board – although that is a largely sweeping statement that could very well be wrong.

I personally would not take my word for it, and I certainly would not treat it as gospel. This is a very thin ground on which many proverbial minefields exist. So despite all my waffling about what little I do know, I can only point you to the following….

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-art-market-explained-4337

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/03/how_the_art_mar.html

As for getting into the market….this might help…

http://thepracticalartworld.com/2012/01/18/10-ways-to-improve-your-artistic-career-week-1/

I can only hope that these may help you…and I will include the forbidden one liner answer here of “google it.” Worded correctly, Google can yield a surprisingly large number of leads on this subject matter.

Read immediately a fabulous book called Seven Days in the Art World. It will blow your mind and also make you an expert. It’s not
a big book, but it’s jammed with juice. Great fun.

For practical experience, do some volunteer work at your local galleries.

Can you not visit an actual Art Gallery and ask them?

You might wnt to go to a library or bookstore and look for Artist’s Market 2013 . That should give you both general and specific information about the art market world.