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Jeff Koons' 'Hanging Heart', which sold to the artist's gallerist Larry Gagosian last November for a record price of $23.6 million, making Koons the most successful living artist at auction.
Who put the 'Con' in Contemporary Art?
Last November in New York, Sotheby's held its most lucrative ever contemporary art auction, with $315.9 of sales. But six days before this sale its share price dived overnight by over a third - the result of a dismal modern art auction in London. Art dealers are already celebrating what one called 'the shortest recession in history,' but they are fiddling while Rome burns. The speculative bubble known as the contemporary art boom is about to crash.
The tell-tale sign is not which artists are still making record prices but which buyers. Last November, there was a surge in one of the art market's most dubious activities - of dealers buying works of art by artists they represent at auction. According to auction house sleuths from the specialist press, Bloomberg and The Art Newspaper, the world's biggest gallerists Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian have been buying pieces at Sotheby's and Christies's by their biggest artists, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, while Banksy-dealer Steve Lazarides bought three Banksys at London's last contemporary art auctions. At the auctions in New York last November, records of $11.8m and $23.6m were set for work by Jeff Koons (a huge sculpture of a diamond ring and a heart-shaped helium balloon respectively), but both were bought by Koons' own gallerist, the world's most powerful dealer, Larry Gagosian.
You get a sense of the weirdness of this business if you consider what the financial markets equivalent would be: it's like a C.E.O. of a large company buying up his own multi-million pound shares issue on the stock market. Yet, in the art world, it's an activity which is notoriously difficult to interpret. It could either be read as proof that the people who know best, the art dealers, think the boom in contemporary art still is far from over. Or it could be an action of last resort - a gamble by desperate men to prop up the collapsing market. The classic last phase of a bubble is when individuals who are heavily invested, try to keep the market going by spending ever more money themselves.
The latter negative reading looks nowadays like the likely truth, especially when one considers that it's not only dealers who are at it. Insider dealing is a game the whole family can play in the art world. A record price was set last October at the Phillips De Pury auction in London for an oil painting by the Chinese artist Wang Guangyi, who produces painfully obvious critiques of China's embrace of Western consumerism. "Great Criticism: Coca-Cola" sold for £893,600, 63 times what the original owner had purchased the work for in 1996, but who bought it? The former owner's son-in-law. If dealers and relatives won't help fuel this phoney market, the artist has one other trick up his sleeve: White Cube announced last October that they had sold Damien Hirst's diamond skull to a 'consortium of investors', yet it later emerged that Hirst was a member of the buying group. It's only a small simplification to say that Hirst sold his skull to himself! The cynicism is mind-boggling. Real investors - not art collectors - know what's really going on. That's why Sotheby's share price dropped so hard so fast.
Beyond the cynicism, lies the second of the three characteristics of the boom: absurdity. According to Bloomberg's statistics, prices for contemporary art increased fourfold from 1996 to 2006. Hiscox's researchers say the value of contemporary art increased by 55% and modern art by 44% in just the last twelve months! Most of this art isn't bad, it's just terribly overvalued. Andy Warhol, for example, never made a seventy-million-dollar painting, let alone mechanically-produced silkscreens, yet one of his car crashes, a green one, fetched that sum under the hammer last year. A Rothko also went for over $71 million at auction, while works by Pollock, De Kooning and Klimt each appear to have sold for over $130m in private transactions. The art world defends the boom, and says it is sustainable. The price of art, they will tell you, is simply a function of how rich the world is, and today it is richer than ever before. For most of us even £100,000 seems like an insanely large amount of money to spend on a painting, so what difference does it make if it now costs £10 million or £40 million? The answer is a lot. Comparisons provide the clue to how absurd the prices are; a Klimt, at around £75m, is now more expensive that a Titian portrait, at around £55m, a Warhol makes a Monet at £20m look like a snip. Contemporary art has become a poker game for the richest men and women in the world: they are daring each other to raise the stakes and call their bluff. Long ago we abandoned the idea that art should be beautiful, but it was never meant to become a synonym for obscenity.
Cynicism, absurdity and obscenity are the three key characteristics of this vastly inflated art bubble, and the underlying causes of it are not hard to find: a lack of regulation and a lack of courage. Unlike other commodity and financial markets, there are no rules against insider trading and few that relate to transparency. A narrow clique of dealers and collectors all try and find out what each other's works are going for, which produces intense waiting lists and bidding in the tens of millions for a tiny group of perhaps twenty artists. There's a deplorable gentleman's agreement among curators and museum directors not to express negative views about leading artists.
As for the media, you will search the colour magazines of the art press, like Art Review, Frieze and Art Forum, and find only a small amount of decidedly muted criticism. They are simply in the business of selling art, epitomised by the transmutation of Frieze from magazine to art fair. Today the director of exhibitions of Britain's most successful commercial gallery, White Cube, is also allowed to appear on BBC and Channel 5 as an apparently 'independent' commentator on art - Tim Marlow. The art world is dirty, corrupt and immoral, and, if there was a name for such a crime, these people would be charged with perverting the course of art history.
Of course, the art world's always been like this. The difference is that in the old days the market was so small that these manipulations were a way of protecting talented and impoverished artists from the cruelties of capitalism, but now, in a billion dollar market, they are tools to turn a narrow clique of artists and dealers into multi-millionaires.
The dealers and gallerists have their own explanation for the boom. There's lots of new money around, they say. New collectors from Russia, China and India are joining the market, while countries like Britain have been enjoying a decade of unprecedented growth. Art simply costs more because rich people have more money to pay for it, and the world economy is still strong. Anyway, they say, what people pay for art is not important. It's the art you should be thinking about. That's all that matters. Right now, they might add, the market is going through a 'correction'. Of course, it couldn't maintain the same rate of growth it has enjoyed recently. But there won't be a crash. At the auctions in New York last November, one was quoted as saying that a million dollars was the new ten thousand bucks.
This is the art world version of the patter of a used car salesman, and it's amazing that anyone believes it. Money, finally, is important. Price-tags can't be ignored - it's one way our culture measures historical importance. Today many many totally inconsequential artists are being hailed as geniuses because of the prices their work commands, and scores of really brilliant ones are being ignored because they don't appeal to the tastes of the property developers, hedge-funders and wives of millionaires who buy art.
The dealers are right that there's been lots more money around and that when people have more money than they know what to do with, they look for something to spend it on. But they are wrong to think that what they spend their millions on will retain the value they place on it as long as the whole world is still getting richer. The art bubble is like the dot com bubble: hundreds of millions have been invested in ideas whose long-term value is totally unproven.
London's seen it all before, but not in living memory. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a Victorian art boom in London. Wealthy industrialists and merchants bought the work of 'the Orientalists', terrible history painters like Alma-Tadema and Edwin Longsden Long, who produced bombastic canvases crammed with harems of women in transparent white robes. In 1882, a work by Edwin Longsden Long, "Babylonian Slave Market", achieved a record auction price at Christie's for a work by a living artist - £6,500 which in today's money is £4 million. Ten years after his death, Long's work had lost 90 per cent of its value. His biographer wrote: "One of the Victorian art world's most important figures had drifted into relative obscurity. the throngs of visitors who went to see his work at Burlington House or Bond Street had disappeared, his auction house record dismissed as an isolated sensation."
The paradox is that today there is a lot of reasonably good art about. We are living through a kind of Renaissance - all that money sloshing around, plus popular enthusiasm, plus the 'anything goes' open-mindedness of the era after modernism has lead to an outpouring of creativity, one sign of which is the return of figurative painting. Freize was full of good stuff. I stopped at the booth of Toby Webster's uber-trendy gallery, The Modern Institute, to admire a very elegant wall-sculpture by the leading Scottish artist Jim Lambie, in which he'd arranged several chopped-up halves of old chairs, painted in bright primary colours. He'd made, or had made, a handful of pieces like this. Like vast quantities of British art of the last twenty years it was a good designer joke which translated modernism and abstraction into a quaintly domestic idiom. It was an idea which was definitely worth at least £750. I enquired about the price tag: £30,000.
That's why there will be a crash not a 'correction.' That's also why the 'credit crunch' will have only a limited amount to do with it. There will be a financial wobble, sure, but that will be a catalyst for an intellectual meltdown. It won't happen in one fell swoop - there'll be no Monochrome Monday - but over the next six months, the value of the art market will move in stops and starts inexorably downwards. That will take the 'con' out of contemporary, and leave us, rather fortuitously, with the correct adjective to describe most of the art that's been shown and sold over the last decade - temporary.
Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis is a critic, broadcaster and independent filmmaker, best known for his series about contemporary artists called 'Art Safari'.
Con Man
by Jennifer Higgie
It goes without saying that critics should know their subject. Ben Lewis' odd and ignorant diatribe, 'So Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?' belies such logic. Confusing and conflating market forces with what is actually being produced on the complex and multi-layered stage that comprises the contemporary art world, he writes, 'You will search the colour magazines of the art press, such as frieze, Art Review and Art Forum and barely find a critical article, let alone a critical word. They are simply in the business of selling art, epitomised by the transmutation of frieze from magazine to art fair.' Later on he spits 'The art world is dirty, corrupt and immoral and if there was a name for such a crime, these people would be charged with perverting the course of art history. Of course, the art world has always been like this.'
Phew! Where to start? Lewis, who has never met me or any of the other editors of frieze, appears also never to have read the magazine. Over the 16 years that frieze has been in print we have always enforced the strictest separation between advertising and editorial, a rule that has remained unchanged since the inception of Frieze Art Fair. Since the magazine's beginning, we have aimed to publish only the highest standards of art criticism by established and emerging writers, critics, poets and novelists. To recap: every issue of the magazine includes around seven monographs, a questionnaire, regular columns and 25 reviews from around the world, from a variety of commercial and non-profit galleries, artist-run spaces and museums. We have published numerous themed issues, exploring subjects as varied as the relationship between art and ecology, feminism, slowness and slapstick. We pride ourselves on both the impartiality of our writers, and the quality of their writing. Reviews are often critical, but unlike Lewis, we back up our criticisms with facts and well-argued and researched opinions. Lewis' diatribe is not simply ignorant; it is deeply insulting to a generation of writers who have published their work in frieze and who have only ever approached their work with the highest integrity and rigour.
Lewis seems to think that the art world is a single glitzy, corrupt entity inhabited solely by Damien Hirst, a few lucrative galleries and the auction houses. He doesn't mention the hundreds of artists who work hard every day, often for many years, and barely manage to scrape a living. He doesn't mention the myriad non-profit art spaces, run by sincere, informed people, whose only aim is to expand and explore art's remit in contemporary society. He doesn't mention the countless talented writers who work tirelessly, and often for little reward, simply because writing and thinking about art are integral to who they are. He doesn't mention that most people who visited Frieze Art Fair aren't collectors; they're the general public, who, for the price of a cinema ticket, get to see works of art from more than 150 of the best art galleries from around the world, view a series of curated projects and sit in on an extensive talks programme that every year has included major international critics, curators and artists debating the state of contemporary art.
Lewis is simply perpetuating the kind of anti-intellectual resentment against art that is usually to be found in the tabloids. It is astonishing that the BBC has allegedly commissioned someone so willfully ignorant to make a documentary on the contemporary art market - almost as astonishing, in fact, that someone who professes to be interested in art should be so reductive and unimaginative in his approach to its contemporary manifestations.
Jennifer Higgie, co-editor Frieze |
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| Published on 18-01-2008 |
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The Song Of Wandering Aeongus.
Eamonn. | |
BRAVO BEN!!!!!!
TIME FOR.. " The Emperors Clothes"
PS. Nothing wrong with Christmas decorations, Museum specimens, and ground sheets. Never thought some would pay so much money for them...HO
Hugh Oliveiro www.oliveiroart.com | |
Jennifer Higgle is so remarkably defensive in her comments about her very important magazine that she betrays her own ignorance of what Ben Lewis is actually criticising.
Lewis says that art specialist publications such as Frieze fail to criticize the grip that a narrow group of influential dealers and artists hold on the contemporary art market. Higgle then lists all of the student essayesque subjects that her self-important rag does cover, thus proving - by its very omission - that Frieze don’t deal with important issues that Lewis highlights
To call Lewis anti-intellectual has nothing to do with the point he is making. And that’s the problem with people like Higgle. She thinks art is for intellectuals. When in fact the more you intellectualise art the more ignorant idiots want to buy it.
chunky monkey | |
lepota.....whith best wishes from russia
pokrovecz | |
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