The other day I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV with my mom and I noticed that there was a Jeff Koons bunny float/inflatable balloon in the parade! The humongous silver balloon was a blow-up replica of one of his shiny stainless steel versions of kitschy children’s toys. It was a bit of a shock: while the contemporary art world and some museums are a big deal these days, they’re still the preserve of a certain social set. And the audience for the Macy’s parade (on TV and on the streets), would seem to be contained in a separate circle in that particular Venn diagram.
C said that Tom Otterness had one last year, which makes perfect sense as his pieces are clever and funny and kids love them. The Koons balloon, not having a face and all, is kind of scary for the little tykes. We joked about what would come next year — a Richard Serra balloon? A big inflatable version of a twisty slab of rusty steel floating down Broadway?
What’s going on here? Who paid for this? These things must cost a fortune and I can’t find out who underwrote this thing. Who decided a Koons balloon should be included in a parade focused on children and children’s favorite characters? (The other balloons were Shrek, Mr. Potato Head, Kermit, Snoopy and Pokeman.)
I suspect that, as with all branding urges, once a product catches the eye of the public (or a specific subset of the public) and sells, then other consumers — in this case collectors and museums — will want the same thing, or as close to it as possible. Art dealers and collectors might then tactfully urge a successful artist to make more pieces like the one successfully branded, as the “brand”, the icon, is easy to sell and easy to identify. Within such a model, a successfully branded artist might go on to make more or less the same piece over and over again, with slight variations.
We applaud this stick-to-a-good-thing in a classic English shoe, a stapler, or a band saw, but in art it’s mystifying.
Oddly, in the fashion megaverse and some other retail areas, a brand, design or image accepted and successful amongst a tiny (usually wealthy) social demographic means that it will inevitably be desired by those lower down on the social and economic ladder, either via logo imprinted items, knockoffs, counterfeits or copies. The fact that the hoi polloi will now be interested in the item makes it naturally less interesting to the elite. It will go out of favor, and becomes last year’s model, soon to be relegated to the closet or the giveaway pile. If it’s too popular, it can’t be cool anymore. As a result, the creative folks, the designers, feel pressure to come up with a new and different line to appeal to these elites, and as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s called fashion.
Sarah R. suggests the development of fashion trends can occur in reverse as well. This happens all the time, as subculture style is appropriated and adopted by the designers or elite/wealthy, and then sold back to the masses. A classic example is of course the punk style of the mid-70s — by 1977, Cosmopolitan had a fashion spread featuring plastic and safety pins (the punks of course initially borrowed the safety pin from the working class culture where it was used to correct ill-fitting/torn clothing). The article ended with "To Shock is Chic" — so much for subversion! We see this again and again over the past 30 years: grunge fashion for instance, made it on to the runways in the nineties, and the big eighties revival started with street culture before it hit the couture houses. Today corporations have coolhunters to identify trends, and the designers look to them to tell them what will sell. She thinks the emergence of trends is less unidirectional and more of a multi-sourced dialectic these days. And the faster trends are identified, the faster new ones emerge.
Happily, this system of economic and social snobbery (along with the rapid appropriation of designs by the hoi polloi) has become a prod to innovation and invention. The designers and the creative teams have to constantly stay one step ahead of the knockoff merchants and the taste of ordinary folks. Elitism — a natural Darwinian part of sexual selection — is, in this system, a goad to creativity. Not only in the fashion world, but for anything that can be fetishized: electronic gadgets, video games, bands and singers, cars, bikes, and restaurants.
Oddly, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the realm of contemporary art. In the art world, once an artist succeeds in branding his or her name, the system seems to favor steering the artist towards the repetition of that object, with slight variations, for decades. The incentive for innovation and change isn’t there for some mysterious reason. With success, creativity often (not always) comes to a halt, and production begins. To be fair, there are plenty of exceptions, but the numbers that follow this rule are astounding — at least to me. Maybe my definitions are misaligned with those of everyone else?
Perhaps the explanation for this exception lies in the fact that art is not mass-produced, not in the same way as fashion or cars are anyway. Each object is somewhat (albeit subtly) unique, and if purchased, resides in the ownership of a collector or a museum — an individual or a single entity — and its public availability henceforth restricted. So, in order for the whole little art world to consume this brand, it can take decades of production by the artist and his or her staff. These days, Jeff Koons can have a bunny in the Macy’s parade, Richard Prince can print images on Marc Jacobs dresses, and Murakami can design the icons on Louis Vuitton handbags, which only reinforces the art brand as icon. The artist’s status is “safe”, possibly even enhanced, because the “originals” remain forever in limited supply and can only be afforded by a wealthy “discerning” few. However, it’s one thing to be enhanced by luxury goods and another to be featured on cereal boxes, and ads for hair products.
In the last few months there have been a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines about the danger that the new art bubble will burst. Recent auctions at Sotheby’s and Christies would either confirm or deny whether the ever-rising, astounding prices for contemporary art will continue to head skyward. The articles ranged in their positions, and most were simply about the bubble itself and what it means to contemporary art.
It was interesting and a little sad to me that most of the focus in these articles — and there have been lots of them — was on the sums and not the content of the art. But, as more than one writer implied, in many cases the money has become the content. In The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins quoted a gallerist who stated that the value of artwork is now tied to its monetary worth, which means what it sells for at auction. In this system, you are a better artist because your work sells for more money. (Everyone knows this can’t possibly be true — monetary value is about desire, status and scarcity and not about quality. But according to this gallerist, this is the way it is right now.)
Souren Melikian, the auction writer for The Herald Tribune, was the only writer to offer an opinion on the quality of the some of the works on offer. He was scathing, intimating that a Van Gogh was not a very good one, and that a Picasso was “from his cartoon period”, which was not meant as a compliment. He didn’t venture into the contemporary territory too much, though he did submit that Hugh Grant’s Warhol (a portrait of Liz Taylor) was grossly overvalued in the press. The implication was clear: according to Melikian, our valuation criteria for art have become skewed, and money and the auction houses are responsible.
In particular, Melikian worried about the auction house practice of offering guarantees to favored customers selling “important” works. Assuring a customer a dollar amount for the work, whether it is sold or not, is a way for one auction house to grab a customer and a work from another house. In effect, the auction house buys the work and then becomes the seller. In Melikian’s words, “This is a flawed system. It distorts the principle of an auction that is supposed to be an open contest between sellers and buyers, with the auctioneer as a neutral arbiter.”
Of course, there are always fashions and trends in buying art, old and new. Various movements go in and out of favor — some artists become newly appreciated and others are forgotten. That’s where, on a longer time scale maybe, the art world is similar to the fashion world, although it’s dealing less with new creations and more with preexisting works.
An article by Jori Finkel in the Sunday NY Times mentions that certain powerful galleries are providing financial assistance to fund museum shows of their artists at museums (which increases the value of the work). And many of the same galleries now publicly engage in the practice of either bidding up the works of their artists at auction, or buying the works at premium prices, also a way of keeping the perceived monetary value of a work high. (If suddenly one can get the work of a premium priced artist for much less than the ascribed value, the value of ALL that artist’s work — much of it held by esteemed collectors, or the galleries themselves — will drop). This practice, not exactly Kosher, was once semi-secret though insiders knew it went on. It hardly makes for a level or objective playing field. Now, as with many things in the Bush era, formerly hidden practices are brazenly played out in open. The idea of shame has disappeared, probably because in a market driven, dog-eat-dog world, any practice that benefits you is in turn reflexively defined as legitimate.
Of course, the museums deny that their curatorial decisions are affected by the money coming in from galleries, but that’s simply too silly to believe. While the galleries may not be dictating what artists the museums show (though that does seem to happen), the internalized decision process among museum directors and curators cannot help but be affected by what is financially feasible. Some women don’t up and announce that they are attracted to a man because he has money — they just naturally find him more “attractive” and “interesting”. The knowledge of the money figures in some calculation performed by the amygdala region of the brain and voilà, one feels differently, strangely attracted.
One wonders if the quality work by emerging artists who fall outside of the circus tent will necessarily get lost. Some emerging artists are thrown into the limelight perhaps a little too quickly, with detrimental effects. Take some of the bands from the nineties: early on their work was overvalued and written about extensively, leaving them no time or room to develop as the branding process had already been set in motion.
The money amounts are truly astounding. In a speech delivered at the Burlington House in 2004, Robert Hughes, quoting Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, asserted, “[…]no painting is worth $100 million dollars” (though $100 million dollars isn’t worth $100 million dollars any more). He claims that these amounts inevitably distort the perception of any piece of art.
All that said, I find there is still a lot of interesting and inspiring work being done. In some cases the flood of money has allowed some lesser-known artists to be seen and funded, and in other cases the money carrot may unconsciously inspire some creative types to make stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t. Despite all the shouting, noise and crap, one can choose to look the other way and see something genuine and fascinating.
