ARTS Until as recently as 10 years ago, the world of contemporary art had as complicated a geography as, well, any other world. London and New York were dominant and although a few über-artists would be reliable museum or auction stars almost anywhere, obstinate national and regional differences persisted. Globalisation and a ravening market, armed with text and image transmitting technologies, are putting paid to all that. Welcome to the emerging world of Big Art.
So. Where to begin?
Why not with the show of London’s Goldsmiths College students, which recently closed at New York’s White Box gallery? In an accompanying release, gallery-goers were told: “Goldsmiths College is the most notorious art school in Britain. Famously the birthplace of the Young British Artists in the late 1980s, Goldsmiths invented the very idea of the celebrity art school for a celebrity-obsessed era.”
It added that members of London’s art world were regularly heading to Goldsmiths degree shows in south London. “Quick: get down there before Charles Saatchi snaps everything up,” it suggested.
The message? The next Damien Hirsts could be right here and you could get their work when it’s still dirt cheap.
Or what of this stock promotion, which sneaked past my spam-catcher?
“Tap into the multibillion-dollar art industry,” it coaxes. The company behind it says it represents “1,200 artists with over 15,000 original works”. The share price? An attractive 55 cents.
The notion that a public exists for art as a financial instrument could hardly be more lucidly expressed.
Or what about the September 12 auction at Phillips, New York? Several seasons back, dealers and artists were expressing displeasure that work was showing up at auction just five or six years after it had left the artist’s studio. At Phillips, at least eleven were painted this year.
The wide geographic reach of the artists was another feature of the Phillips sale. There were well-known names from the US, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, but there was also work from Japan, China, Ukraine and Russia by artists mostly unfamiliar to me.
Many of the elements that have gone into the making of Big Art – the money tsunami, the art fairs, the glut of destination museums – are known quantities. As is the growing number of galleries. “I don’t imagine that a young artist has much of a problem getting a show these days,” the über-artist Jeff Koons observes.
But no market rises forever. The question is: Will the art world snap back to the way things were or have there been transforming changes?
The perception has always been that the contemporary market was generally supported by a few serial collectors – 30, according to the conventional wisdom – so that, as with bloodstock, an informal cartel would impose order.
This may no longer be so.
“What I think has happened is that through all the various media, and the excitement, and a connectedness of art and fashion, and the liquidity of the world, and people getting richer, the interest is much, much greater,” says Nicholas Logsdail of London’s Lisson Gallery. “The number of serious buyers and galleries today is 20 or 30 times greater than it was a few years ago. Maybe 40 times greater.
“I was saying this to a friend a couple of days ago, and he said you’ve got it wrong. It’s not 40 times greater. It’s hundreds of times greater! Now I’m not sure that I buy into that.”
Perhaps reasons can be glimpsed in the commercial history of the culture.
In the 1960s, people with some visual talent had several outlets. They could go into film; magazine design and advertising were exploding; photographers were opening up new territory; there were album covers, rock posters. These have become cultural no-go zones for all but a few.
The art world has become the Last Reservation.
“That’s why I enjoy having a gallery now. It’s this constantly expanding concept of what an artist is,” says the New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. “What I do includes film-makers, designers, musicians. In the early 1990s there was this very narrow art audience. But a large crossover has emerged in the last six years or so.
“It’s a revival of the early 1980s when these entrepreneurs reinvented New York nightlife and brought in the art world. But then it was very underground New York. Now it’s much bigger. And I’m involved in some international networks. It’s very, very large.”
Is this swelling art world producing more good art?
With so many new places, shouldn’t there be more talent around than in the cash-strapped days of the École de Paris and the New York School?
“This enormous expansion of collectors has resulted in a lot of bad art, poor art,” says Logsdail. “And weak art by important artists.”
Hans Neuendorf of the online source ArtNet is more sanguine. “Talent is latent. It’s always there,” Neuendorf says. “But artists have to make a living. So, if there’s no demand, they occupy themselves with other things. However, if there is demand, the talent comes to the fore and you have a thriving art world. And this is what is happening now.
“Of course, you always have a lot of bad things.”
History says most will come a cropper. “The art world needs a healthy cleansing,” says Thaddeus Ropac, who has galleries in Salzburg and Paris. “It will happen. I don‘t think that major artists who have shown their strength over a long period of time will be much affected. They are in the great collections. But many of the young ones will disappear. And others will come.”
For now the bubble is expanding. But Neuendorf believes in unchanging fundamentals. “The real profit is being made by the few that have a little additional knowledge,” he said. Could he give an example? He chortled. “Everything!”
About 18 months ago I was asked to help with the sale of a postwar painting by bringing in an appropriate private dealer. I decided this would be an educational process.
The protocol was hush-hush. I wasn’t told who the seller was. Nobody was to know the identity of more than one principal.
The sum was north of $20m. I was told that only 30 people in the world would be potentially up for the deal. Within 18 hours there were five players.
Within 36 hours, everybody knew exactly who everybody else was. And they didn’t love each other one bit. The deal went ker-blooey. Yes, it certainly was educational.
So the New World Order of Big Art still resembles the wicked old art world more than somewhat. But is it transformed and transforming? I think possibly yes.
