| This February, a number of artists, curators, critics and collectors have been ruminating about art and the market. A panel called “Between Fact and Fiction…A Faustian Bargain: Emerging Artists, Critics and the Market” took place at the Hilton Hotel with Jeffrey Deitch, the Rubells, Jerry Saltz and Peter Plagens. With such a momentous title, you might expect world-shaking events—that didn’t happen. Jeffrey Deitch assured us that he had invented the art market and that he had also merged art and entertainment. He also opined that galleries no longer create art history but that art history is written by auction houses—the higher the price, the more important the art—so he claimed. No wonder we are awash in such mediocrity. |  |
Art & Money – E.K. Clark
This February, a number of artists, curators, critics and collectors have been ruminating about art and the market. A panel called “Between Fact and Fiction…A Faustian Bargain: Emerging Artists, Critics and the Market” took place at the Hilton Hotel with Jeffrey Deitch, the Rubells, Jerry Saltz and Peter Plagens. With such a momentous title, you might expect world-shaking events—that didn’t happen. Jeffrey Deitch assured us that he had invented the art market and that he had also merged art and entertainment. He also opined that galleries no longer create art history but that art history is written by auction houses—the higher the price, the more important the art—so he claimed. No wonder we are awash in such mediocrity. Peter Plagens entertained us; Jerry Saltz claimed that the age of innocence was over and that the market is the status quo. Someone asked the Rubells why they had to travel to the end of the earth to find art when there was so much talent in our own backyard. They didn’t have an answer. Perhaps exotic meat tastes better.
At PS1, Alanna Heiss organized a whimsical show called “Not For Sale” because, as she confided, she is allergic to the commercial aspects of art—a bit of a red herring, I think; PS1 doesn’t sell art but is intimately involved in the art market by providing a platform for galleries and exhibiting artists. Nevertheless, artists had many reasons for not parting with their work. The piece and the story I liked best was by Christo, a two inch Package created in the 60s for a cheap collector who didn’t want to pay more than 10 Marks. When he died, they bought it back and have had it ever since.
Elsewhere, David Hammons, an African-American artist and a darling of the white liberal establishment, ironically, selected the L&M Gallery on the Upper East Side to launch his simple minded critique of capitalist consumption and the class struggle—a case of wanting to eat his cake and keep it too. In the elegant former town house, six fashionable furs: mink, chinchilla, wolf, etc.—semiotic signs of wealth and status—are presented on tattered dressmaker’s dummies.
Hammons uses the backs of the furs as canvases for a variety of furious attacks with globs of paint, spatters and even fire, reminiscent of PETA guerilla tactics. Aesthetically and politically, his faux radicality proves unconvincing. In the context of the milieu of the rich or the uninitiated art lover, however, Hammons’ strategy works.
A group of women bedecked in luxurious furs came into the gallery as I stood observing. Chastened by their supposed crimes, they each took off their raiment muttering about PETA and about feeling guilty. The same people would later come back to purchase these trophy works. The Downtown crowd, on the other hand, would have been unimpressed had David Hammons selected a local venue for his exhibition. Context is everything. So much for the semiotics of conspicuous wealth and the meaning of the art object as a “radical” luxury product.
Isa Genzken’s latest post-apocalyptic solo exhibition, at David Zwirner, on the other hand, is positioned at the nexus of art, consumer culture and politics. Following in the tradition of Beuys and the Dadaists, her new work resonates with haunting, social trauma resulting from her bizarre surreal juxtapositions—hundreds of wheelchairs, dolls under torn beach umbrellas, plastic, dripping paint, reflective material, oversized twisted hangers referencing spectral figures, violated couches and arm chairs strewn in the back room. This traumatic visual scenario presents a truly chilling critique of over-consumption, environmental degradation and the collapse of our artistic and cultural heritage.
