In the art world, the courtiers are revolting:
Dave Hickey, a curator, professor and author known for a
passionate defence of beauty in his collection of essays The Invisible
Dragon and his wide-ranging cultural criticism, is walking away from a
world he says is calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich
collectors who have no respect for what they are doing.
“They’re in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall
profits into art. It’s just not serious,” he told the Observer. “Art
editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All
we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not
worth my time.” …
Hickey is adamant he wants out of the business. “What can I tell you?
It’s nasty and it’s stupid. I’m an intellectual and I don’t care if I’m
not invited to the party. I quit.”
Hickey is only the highest-profile member of a pretty large group:
people who are sick of playing bit parts in a game which has become
entirely about money and ego, with the beauty and power of art having
become just another commodity to be bought and sold. Art critic Jerry Saltz is another:
I still can’t stand it. How a handful of very very rich
people with penises likes buying the work of a handful of artists with
penises for very very high prices in public, in front of other people
with penises and some very tall thin blond people with great shoes and
no penises. Really.
The doyenne of art-market reporters, Sarah Thornton,
has quit writing about the economics of art. She says there are a
hundred reasons for doing so, including the fact that “tightknit cabals
of dealers and speculative collectors count on the fact that you will
report record prices without being able to reveal the collusion behind
how they were achieved”, and that “it implies that money is the most
important thing about art.”
Charlie Finch, too, smells the irrelevance of a world which has
become irredeemably decadent in all the worst meanings of the word — to
the point, this summer, at which he convinced himself
that even the plutocrats would notice, and that the art market would be
crashing hard, right about now. Obviously, that didn’t happen: it’s
almost impossible to underestimate the obliviousness of the
art-collecting elite, who are of course constantly surrounded by
precisely the kind of courtiers — consultants, gallerists, even artists —
who constantly tell them how perspicacious and important they are. Look
no further than former commodity broker Jeff Koons, whose Tulips just sold for $33,682,500 at Christie’s: the last time I saw him he was in Davos,
palling around with a Ukrainian oligarch, and generally solidifying his
reputation among the people who really matter. Insofar, of course, that
the people who really matter are the people you want to continue to
funnel millions of dollars in your direction.
No, Charlie, the art market oligopoly system
isn’t going anywhere: if anything, it’s more entrenched than ever. But
the people without millions of dollars, the people who try to talk about
art but find all conversations ultimately being about money — those
people are, finally, getting fed up.
There’s long been a disconnect between critical acclaim and high
prices, but so long as the art market pumped money into the broader art
ecosystem, no one really minded that. Rather, what seems to have changed
is that art — art itself, divorced from commerce — has been drowned in
the flood of money. Even the most highbrow museums, these days, only
devote major shows to artists who have proved themselves winners in the great game of selling to plutocrats.
This critique, of course, is not a new one, and the Occupy Museums website puts it well:
Museums must be held accountable to the public. They help
create our historical narratives and common symbols. They wield
enormous power within our culture and over the entire art market. We
occupy museums because museums have failed us. Like our government,
which no longer represents the people, museums have sold out to the
highest bidder.
What’s new, I think, is the way in which such sentiments have started
infecting much of the public face of the art world. Not everywhere, to
be sure. Where there are markets, there will always be cheerleaders and
outlets like Art Market Monitor serve the auction houses in much the same way that CNBC serves the NYSE. But now we have Jerry Saltz half-seriously proposing
that all art just be sold at a flat price, and we have Sarah Thornton
complaining about how tax evasion has become endemic in the market, and
we have Larry Gagosian, in his latest court deposition,
squirming when asked how a painting which was consigned to a New York
gallery, and which was sold to a US resident, somehow managed to get
sold out of London. How did the London gallery manage to acquire the
work? “I don’t know the answer to that,” replies Gagosian.
Or to put it another way, the art market has stopped being a source
of fascination and crazy numbers, and has started to be a source of
sheer disgust. The auction records will probably continue to fall: the
small group of ultra-high-end art collectors cannot easily be chastened.
But I’m beginning to see the stirrings of something else: a more
supportive and democratic art world, taken seriously by respected
gatekeepers, which increasingly views the twice-yearly shenanigans at
Sotheby’s and Christie’s as an obscene sideshow rather than as a true
gauge of value. The shiny art selling for tens of millions of dollars is so dumb, and the caricatures
who would emulate its success are so debased, that a lot of really
talented artists and critics and curators and even collectors don’t even
want in any more.
If you look back and forth between art collectors and rapacious
venture capitalists, you rapidly come to the conclusion that if you
compare the two groups, the art collectors come out so much worse.
They’re similar in many ways: you have the “angel” early-stage investors
who go bargain-shopping among the unknowns, all the way through to the
big-money late-stage investors who make a fortune by investing in
established names. And of course you have the majority of investors who
don’t actually make any money at all. But at least there’s something
honest about the VCs, and at least you can say that they sometimes create value.
The world of high-end art collectors, by contrast, has reached a
level of obscenity that the art world more generally can no longer
ignore. It’s been clear to the more politically-minded for a while, but
now we’re seeing the mainstreaming of attitudes which used to be found
only on the far left. Enough of living in a world where an artwork
without resale value is worthless. Enough of feeling jealous when some
idiot starts selling for ridiculous sums. Enough of a world where the
levels of inequality make Nigeria seem positively egalitarian. Yes,
artists need to make money, and yes, big collectors shower ridiculous
sums onto the art world. But that money isn’t trickling down, and it
certainly isn’t respectable. Here’s Thornton:
I have no problem with rich people. (Some of my best
friends are high net worth individuals!) But amongst the biggest
spenders in the art market right now are people who have made their
money in non-democracies with horrendous human rights records. Their
expertise in rising to the top of a corrupt system gives punch to the
term “filthy lucre.”
Remember, this is no bedraggled Occupy activist writing these words;
this is Sarah Thornton, who spent an entire chapter of her art-world book
swimming laps at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice. Similarly, Dave Hickey
was an art dealer himself, once, and has devoted his entire career to
helping young artists become commercially successful. These people made
their peace with the art market decades ago — but now, they are saying,
it has gone too far.
One of the reasons why auctions attract so much fascination is that
they’re pretty much the only place where you can see millionaires and
billionaires competing, in real time, to see who can spend the most
money on a given object. It’s quite a spectacle — but it has very little
to do with art. Or at least, it has very little to do with whatever it
is that most art lovers love. It’s fine to commercialize art, to sell
it, to make money off it. Indeed, I wish that many more fine artists
could do so. But let’s do so on a human scale. Because today’s art
market is so much less than that.
