Richard Wentworth
Last weekend saw the second annual Crunch: The Art Festival at Hay. The rain poured down on the sleepy book town of Hay-on-Wye, famed for its literary festival, and the stormy weather found its onstage equivalent in a torrent of fierce debate. This year's combative line-up included ICA curator, Charlotte Bonham-Carter; prolific art critic, Godfrey Barker; FT arts editor, Jan Dalley; legendary art commentator, Anthony Haden-Guest; artist and critic Patricia Ellis; Independent arts correspondent, Arifa Akbar; sculptor Richard Wentworth; graffiti artist Felix Braun; former head of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Michael Archer; Head of Goldsmiths' Art department Richard Noble and artist Massimo Bartolini.
Over the course of two days, Godfrey Barker exposed the "conspiracy" at the heart of the art world and Julian Spalding branded Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Joseph Beuys "worse than junk."
Spalding, a former director of the Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow museums, also labelled gallerists trumped-up "shop keepers" before warning collectors not to be swayed by contemporary art stars. He criticized museum directors for fabricating a "totally phoney history of modern art" and creating "a huge financial bubble". In conversation with journalist Freddy Barker, he went as far as to call the guilty parties "self deluded courtiers of a naked Emperor".
Speaking in apocalyptic tones, he warned that "the huge prices in contemporary art will collapse as soon as the museum world comes to its senses and promotes the really lasting art of our times."
Godfrey Barker also spoke out against the market, claiming that manipulation of prices at the top end was clear and that sellers, buyers, dealers and artists were party to it. Barker said it was entirely legal but asked if it raised moral issues for anyone present. Michael Archer replied from the audience that he was 'quite indifferent' to it; if speculators made money or got hurt on the art market, it was their own voluntary act. The ever-effusive Anthony Haden-Guest, who on Saturday evening delivered a recital of his own compositions to a packed gallery, declared that Barker was asserting 'a conspiracy theory' and dismissed it as 'ludicrous'.
Barker, who was spotted in the early hours enjoying some graffiti tuition with Felix Braun and Julian Spalding, replied that 'financial planning' might do better than 'conspiracy' to describe what was happening but offered three examples.
One was the $71.7m bid for Warhol's Green Car Crash I made in May 2007 at a time when Warhol's price record stood at $17.4m. The alleged bidder was Joseph Lau of Hong Kong, a Warhol collector. By quadrupling the Warhol record, Mr Lau, if it was him, revalued the Warhol currency and added substantial values to the other Warhols that he owned - $10m here, $5m there and so on. "The rising tide lifted all ships", said Barker with characteristic eloquence. A similar maneouvre had come from Damien Hirst, he argued, in placing a £50m price on his jewelled skull, For the Love of God, which was covered with diamonds costing less than £10m and shown to the public in June 2007. "The £50m price made all other Hirsts look cheap. The market quickly responded and Sotheby's sold Lullaby Spring the same month for £9.65m, almost trebling the current Hirst auction record. These manipulated prices played their part in the higher estimates and prices achieved fifteen months later at Hirst's £111m sale at Sotheby's in September 2008", he continued.
The other example was the sale of Picasso's Dream of 1932 by Steve Wynn, the casino king of Las Vegas to Steve Cohen, the hedge fund king of New York and Connecticut. A price of $139m was agreed between them. At the time the highest known price for a Picasso was $104.1m for the Rose Period Garcon avec Pipe of 1905, a better and subtler picture than The Dream. By adding $35m to the Picasso record and taking care to leak the price to the press, both men added higher values to the other Picassos in their collections. It was wholly legal to do so but, Barker added, it was price manipulation.
The art sessions ran throughout the weekend and offered speakers the opportunity to grapple with the issues at the heart of this year's theme, art in an ephemeral age. Michael Archer described how our hyper-connected society has led to a new era of ephemeral work, defining the visual language of a new generation of artists. For film-maker and critic Ben Lewis, art has become increasingly ephemeral because we are living in an age of increasing permanence.
"It's only because every part of our lives are recorded now - whether via our email archives, or Facebook, or video cameras or CCTV - that artists are comfortable making works that are fleeting, will decay or can only be viewed by a tiny public. The ephemera is both a reaction against and made possible by the ubiquity of technologies of permanence", he said.
Talks ranged from Selling v. Selling Out, which asked whether we can and should sell the temporary, to Ephemeral Art and the Cult of Celebrity, which questioned whether art world celebrity is a means of overcoming the ephemeral. Anthony Haden-Guest, Godfrey Barker, Patricia Ellis and Ben Lewis did battle in a session chaired by Richard Noble, which proved to be one of the punchiest of the weekend.
Lewis argued that celebrity was an all-consuming, infectious concept that had proved ruinous for the likes of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
For Lewis, Warhol's Celebrity portraits and diamond dust gems ultimately only have value because they are made by a celebrity. Often the celebrity artist, he argued, ends up making work that is only about the celebrity they have achieved. Hirst's Sotheby's auction provides a further example. Here was a pile of remakes of old work, whose only value was the fame of the author, and some of which was an ironic comment about the gullibility of the viewers who bought into that myth. "It is a decadent hall of mirrors - a grotesque cul de sac. Celebrity is the way for an artist to write his own death sentence."
He claimed that celebrity is being used by art critics, curators and artists to bring meaning to the artwork. "Celebrity is the last refuge of contemporary art, becoming - wrongly - a value in itself in the critical language of contemporary art, like beauty, mystery or subtlety."
Patricia Ellis was more accommodating in her views, arguing that figures like Gavin Turk and Damien Hirst successfully use celebrity as a medium in their work, whilst Anthony Haden-Guest believed that while some artists are consumed by fame, Dali being a prime example, others, like Warhol and Hirst, cultivate it successfully to further their causes. Managing the media, he argued, is essential for any artist, and PR micro-management is as legitimate as using anonymity to craft a creative persona.
Elsewhere, Charlotte Bonham-Carter described how new ephemeral practices are changing our definition of exhibition space. Frith Street Gallery's Massimo Bartolini celebrated the artist's power to move art away from traditional gallery spaces and help make "the public focus more on human attitudes than on bricks".
Graffiti artist and street art specialist Felix Braun similarly called for a widening of institutional confines, acknowledging the impermanence inherent in the graffiti genre and telling Freddy Barker that "to prefer concrete and rectangular walls is almost perverse."
The 600 visitors that braved the rain to make it to Hay included curators, artists and enthusiasts, all of whom enjoyed live performances from, amongst others, music legend Richard Strange, emerging talent Plaster of Paris, indefatigable youngsters Clean Bandit and industry stalwart Alan McGee.
The festival afforded lesser known groups valuable performance time. With intricate, hand-drawn marionettes, and a surreal mix of puppetry and film, The Paper Cinema breathed new life into performance art. Accompanied by musician Kieron Maguire and aided by video projection, artist Nic Rawling created classic narratives of love, mystery, and, above all, adventure.
"This is precisely the kind of work that would usually be excluded from the mainstream", said Anthony Haden-Guest. "It's fantastic to include it here. It deserves to be seen."
Art work was provided by T1+2 Gallery, Hive Projects, artists Eleanor Lindsay-Fynn, Scott London, Felix Braun and curator Gavin Ramsey. Kate Raggett created a site-specific ephemeral artwork in the globe's garden, using oak tree knopper galls which will be left to disintegrate over time. Emerging artists Ilona Sagar and David Stearn impressed spectators with their treatment of issues including nostalgia and time, while Seecum Cheung's near invisible sculpture hung above our heads like a niggling thought.
London's Open Gallery presented Traces of Dreams, a collaborative piece consisting of 135 video paintings combined using technology developed by the Artscape Project, the group that first defined and elaborated the medium of the video painting in 2002. The video paintings are not shown in a fixed order but change within parameters set by the artists with the consequence that the order of video paintings is never duplicated making the series both unique and ephemeral.
"The Artscape Project was formed to challenge the dominance of narrative in video images and to use the medium of the video painting to escape the familiar discourse of moving images. Traces of Dreams plays on the boundary of the known and the unknown and seeks to take the viewer into the openness of experience and away from the limitations of thought and objectification", said Open Gallery director Will Smith. Within this, Isabelle Inghilleri's Gone Tomorrow depicted the brutal iciness of the Norwegian landscape in a surprisingly delicate way, highlighting the ephemeral nature of aspects of the world around us.
In the venue's lower gallery, Gavin Pearce, of Pearce & Ramsey, created an innovative new project especially for the festival, incorporating work by the Hereford College of Art, local artists and residents. The Hay Art Charter explored what constitutes art and gave participants a deciding role in what was exhibited. "It's a charter by the people, for the people", said Ramsey. This was an ephemeral, pop-up exhibition that, for a weekend at least, gave disillusioned artists control over their work. Like the festival itself - that other strange pop-up, which led us through bracing winds and down winding unlit roads in pursuit of art - in a flash, it was gone.
Bianca Brigitte Bonomi
Crunch: The Art Festival at Hay
13-15 November 2009
Hay-on-Wye
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