2008 in Review

Shepard Fairey's "PROGRESS", "HOPE", and "CHANGE" posters offered tremendous visibility to the Obama campaign. The senator (now president-elect) personally thanked Fairey for making the works.


Ah, 2008 was the year of Obama. D'oh, it was also the year of the recession. From the inspiring president-elect to the sobering new reality, here are the top 5 trends in art in 2008.

1. Artists Heart Obama

Artists have often rallied around political causes, but this year the cause had a face and a name: Barack Obama. It was street artist Shepard Fairey who got the ball rolling, stenciling the now-president-elect’s face in red, white, and blue with the word “Progress” — later changed to “Hope” — underneath. The icon soon became famous and turned into one of the most ubiquitous images of our time.

After that, so many limited-edition prints and auctions for Obama followed suit that it was hard to keep up. Fairey teamed up with MoveOn.org to create a pop-up gallery devoted to art for Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. And the celebration hardly stopped once Obama won: Fairey placed his famous portrait of the president-elect at the center of a new victory design, which was quickly printed on stickers, more limited-edition prints, and posters, while Elizabeth Peyton added a portrait of future First Lady Michelle Obama to her retrospective at the New Museum. Will the Obama lovefest continue once he’s safely sworn in, or will artists have to find a new cause? We’ll just have to wait and see.

2. The Russians Are Coming. Are the Russians Coming?

The Russians are coming. In 2008, this cry, which in decades past signaled (the paranoia of) a communist invasion, came to herald the arrival of the latest class of deep-pocketed art-world financiers. As the year began, the expression might have been tinged with resentment (nouveau riche billionaire oligarchs driving up auction prices), but as 2008 rounded the halfway mark the cry was one of hope (could billionaire oligarchs rescue a teetering art market?). Among the highlights of the Russian year in art: the record-setting auction prices paid for works by Bacon and Koons by Roman Abramovich; the opening of CCCM, aka the Garage, a new art space run by it-girl Dasha Zhukova, who also happens to be Abramovich’s companion; the multi-venue Ilya Kabakov retrospective, the first major exhibition of the most expensive living Russian artist in the country of his birth; and the temporary exhibition in Moscow organized by uberdealer Larry Gagosian, whose gallery admitted to doing half its business with Russians. Alas, by year’s end, one had the sense that that the Russian art moment had passed, with cascading stock markets freezing activity in the local art market and rumors of the postponement of a highly anticipated wedding dashing, or at least delaying, dreams of a new Camelot in Moscow.

3. Museums Show Their Feminine Side

Things have certainly improved for women artists in the past couple decades, but they haven’t gotten so good that the sheer number of major exhibitions this year, particularly in New York, hasn’t felt like a major coup. Louise Bourgeois and Catherine Opie overlapped at the Guggenheim this fall, and on view right now are Mary Heilmann and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum and Marlene Dumas and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA. And it’s not just New York, either: Tara Donovan, who had an installation at the Met earlier this year, now has her first major museum retrospective at ICA, Boston; Bourgeois’s tour includes L.A. MOCA, the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Hirshhorn; and Peyton’s going to Whitechapel in London, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, and the Walker in Minneapolis, which has had a slew of its own offerings this year, including shows by Trisha Brown and JoAnn Verburg. We could get used to this.

4. Unmonumental Everything

This year, the Whitney Biennial curators offered the Beckettian term “lessness” to describe the Zeitgeist reflected in their exhibition. The term well describes one of the most ubiquitous trends of the year, thanks (or perhaps no thanks) to the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental” (which ran through April 9). Presenting three floors of abject found-object sculpture, the exhibition confirmed the lackadaisical, grabbed-it-from-the-sidewalk style as a movement worthy of institutional branding. Soon unmonumental art was everywhere you looked, but even this was not enough to halt the trend — no, sheets of cardboard and droopy carpet scraps continued to appear in gallery after gallery, often sporting a little ripped-out found image from an old magazine to give a hint of enigma. Add some Venetian blinds and a cylinder of faded foam, and you can re-create 2008 on your sidewalk, absolutely free.

5 . The Recession

The fifth item in our top 5 trends of 2008 article is so enormous in scope and importance that it spawned its own list. Here are the top 5 trends of the recession.

1. The Boom Is Over

But what a boom it was! As much as the past year or so will be remembered as the beginning of the end, let us not forget that it also saw the peak of one of the longest art market upturns in history. The thing swelled to epic proportions. New buyers came in from all over the world: A soccer club–owning Russian bought a Francis Bacon triptych for £46 mllion ($86.3 million) at Sotheby’s London in February. The Qatari royal family was revealed as the buyers of a $72.8 million Mark Rothko at Sotheby’s London in May 2007. And, finally, Damien Hirst sold $200 million worth of his own work at Sotheby’s London in September of this year. That, really, was the apex. For on that same day, Lehman Brothers failed, and it wasn’t long before the art market began, finally, to feel the reverberations of the global economic crisis. A few months later, even Hirst laid off some employees.

2. Blood on the Block

The bloodbath began in London, when the annual London contemporary art sales timed to follow the Frieze fair resulted in unusually high buy-in rates. A few weeks later, there were the New York sales, where, yes, a Malevich sold for $60 million and a Munch for $38 million at Sotheby’s. But many lots were bought in, and many prices sank to 2006 levels. In both London and New York, what saved the sales was, in several cases, the houses’ ability to lower reserves; still, Sotheby’s lost big on guarantees, and the recession is sure to put a damper on the practice of giving them. Inevitably, Sotheby’s announced salary reductions and layoffs this month, and Christie’s looks to be following suit, with a reorganization in the works. Phillips’ contemporary sale in New York was particularly dreary — the results couldn’t have been pleasing to the Russian luxury goods concern, Mercury, that had just purchased controlling interest in the auction house — but at least Phillips hadn’t given very many guarantees. The interesting thing was the reaction to those figures, as members of the trade tended to split into roughly two groups: those who thought these sales spelled impending doom, and those who saw them as a return to sanity. The speculators were out; the seasoned collectors — Eli Broad, Donald Fisher — were in. Bargain hunters began to appear. The auction landscape has changed dramatically.

3. Kinder, Gentler (Less Profitable) Art Fairs

The boom spawned a bevy of fairs, which were increasingly seen as the dealer’s last bastion against the auction houses. Jitters had already begun last March, when the Armory Show opened in New York to the lowest U.S. consumer confidence in 30 years, yet things pretty much proceeded as usual. In June, Art Basel may have been quieter, but there was still action. By October, when Frieze opened, things were looking grim on the global economic front — and yet the mood, overall, was one of cautious optimism: Art sold, and dealers talked about a “soft landing.” At Miami in December, though, things started to look shakier. Collectors bought, but much more slowly. Their stampede down the aisles at the starting gun was a thing of the past. There were bargains to be had, with some prices rolling back to where they were two years ago. And second-tier fairs in particular have started to show signs of weakness this year. The Art Newspaper reported that 19 galleries had attempted to pull out of Art Miami, an Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fair, and several non-Miami fairs bowed out altogether this year. Frankfurt bit the dust, Bridge and Pulse canceled their London editions, and most recently, the Asian Art Fair, run by venerable organizers Brian and Anna Haughton, was put on hold.

4. Tough Times for Galleries

And what about all the galleries packing the booths in those fairs? Recessions are, it goes without saying, bad news for galleries. The downturn in the early ’90s saw dealers like John Good and Perry Rubenstein close up shop. (The former went to work for Gagosian, the latter became active in the secondary market and went on, in 2004, to open a successful two-space gallery in Chelsea.) In 2008, changes are again afoot. A few galleries, such as New York’s Clementine, shuttered earlier in the year, citing the new economic realities; Rivington Arms and 31Grand are soon to follow. The bad news also spread to the top tier. The news just recently broke that Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin Miami will be closed all next year — going on "sabbatical," as the director calls it — with plans only to reopen temporarily around the time of Art Basel Miami Beach. Several publications have reported slashed event budgets and new scrutiny over production costs. The future of galleries has become so uncertain that a blog has popped up to chart the various rumors.

5. Museums in Trouble

Just as the juicy scandal of Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme has lately stolen news headlines from the wider financial crisis, the turmoil at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles — the museum spent its endowment over the last eight years and has essentially run out of money — and the subsequent $30 million bailout plan offered by L.A. collector Eli Broad, has taken the spotlight off the broader troubles facing museums in the current economic climate.

The problems began last spring, when interest rates on municipal bonds skyrocketed, causing institutions like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty to have to do some refinancing. In mid-September, Lehman Brothers collapsed, a bad sign for the museums worldwide that have received support from the investment bank, and it wasn’t long before news of museums tightening their belts began to trickle in. The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, cut its operating budget and laid off 25 employees. LACMA implemented a hiring freeze. The Saint Louis Art Museum delayed its expansion plans. Washington, D.C.’s Newseum announced it would reduce staff by 10 percent. The Las Vegas Art Museum had to halve its budget, and its director abruptly resigned. In Southern California, the Pacific Asia Museum and the Bowers Museum announced budget cuts and layoffs and canceled exhibitions. The Getty confirmed that its endowment had gone down 25 percent and that a hiring freeze was in place. And, most recently, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology announced it will lay off 18 researchers and nix its Museum Applied Science Center. Perhaps most alarming, the National Academy Museum in New York deaccessioned two works to finance its operating budget.

The Association of Art Museum Directors responded quickly and forcefully, but one senses that this will not be the last time an artwork is sold to keep a museum open.

Sarah Douglas, David Grosz, Lyra Kilston, Jillian Steinhauer, and Kris Wilton contributed to this article from Art+Auction.