When art went boom

Takashi Murakami
From A-lists to aesthetics – the hot, hip world of contemporary art before the coming of hard times
Angus Trumble
"Seven Days in the Art World is a time capsule of a remarkable period in the history of art. During the past eight years, the contemporary art market has boomed, museum attendance has surged, and more people than ever were able to abandon their day jobs and call themselves artists. The art world both expanded and started to spin faster; it became hotter, hipper, and more expensive."

Since Sarah Thornton wrote these words, and Granta published them late last year, the international market for contemporary works of art has, like every other, been shrinking, and getting slower, colder and much poorer. The comparatively small, interlocking communities of professional artists, critics, auctioneers, dealers, collectors, scholars and curators who are more or less tied to that market now face hard times. So reading this tour d’horizon of what the author more often describes as “the art world” than more accurately “the contemporary art world” is rather like leafing through Country Life in the trenches at Passchendaele, or contemplating high-end millinery on Iwo Jima.

So excessive and so improbable are the phenomena that she describes – “the nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection” – that you cannot quite believe that this is the environment in which those of us whom Thornton describes as “insiders” have been dwelling for so long, and until so recently.

To some extent you find yourself questioning the accuracy of the picture she sketches, since, as she admits, “the art world is so diverse, opaque, and downright secretive, it is difficult to generalize about it and impossible to be truly comprehensive. What is more, access is rarely easy”. Her solution: a sequence of gossipy, fly-on-the-wall, in-depth, behind-the-scenes, cat-on-the-prowl, day-in-the-life narratives set in six cities in five countries in Europe, the United States and Japan. The “ethnographic” technique she describes awkwardly as “participant observation” (meaning observation), augmented by interviews and reportage, is said to be “curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, but easily ignored”. Thornton’s seven days, liberally punctuated by chatty, journalistic datelines such as “8:00 P.M. Less than an hour to go before the fair closes”, are in fact spaced between November 2004 and June 2007.

The first chapter describes a boom-time art auction sale at Christie’s in New York. That occasion and its various participants serve to block in the economic background, taking in, among much else, the three “Ds” which generally flush works of art on to the open market (debt, divorce and death), the “wow factor”, as Thornton calls it, and the current primacy of Andy Warhol, “a globally recognized brand with a fair distribution”, with whom for many younger specialist scholars the history of art now seems to begin – Marcel Duchamp playing the role of Giotto to Warhol’s Michelangelo. She shadows Christopher Burge, Honorary Chairman of Christie’s, who conducts the sale at Rockefeller Plaza. She shares fish carpaccio and sparkling water with Philippe Ségalot, an art consultant who boasts that he has on occasion bid for certain wealthy private clients up to twice as much as they originally agreed to pay. She chats with an elderly private collector who attends auction sales to get a sense of which way the wind of taste is blowing. She talks to a couple of journalists, one of whom says he hates this particular saleroom because “you can’t see the [telephone] bidders”. And in the process she questions the relationship between aesthetic and monetary values. “It’s not fully correlative”, is one answer, a blinding glimpse of the obvious cheerfully furnished by a member of Christie's staff. Meanwhile, Warhol’s “Mustard Race Riot” (1963) goes under the hammer for $13.5 million.

In the second chapter, which is intended to be antithetical, the author sits in on a “crit”, “a seminar in which art students present their work for collective critique”, at the post-studio, anti-craft, periphery-embracing California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. The cast of characters here includes the monkish, wise-owl conceptual artist-professor, and the three MFA students who are there to be “critted”: gloomy, bearded Josh, who identifies with hip hop more than klezmer culture; Fiona, who looks like Frida Kahlo, and sees her practice as schizophrenic because although she does “dry sociopolitical work”, she always has and says she always will paint; and, finally, tomboy Hobbs, who sleeps on the floor of her studio, and says she trusts the “corporeal and crass language of humour and stereotype”, and liberally deploys it in her photographs. Between sessions in classroom F200, and a side trip to Whole Foods, Thornton ponders the question: who or what is a professional artist? She also nudges us towards some reflections on the nature, purpose and limitations of current higher art education.

Thence she brings us to Art Basel, the art fair, rubbing shoulders with the self-appointed crème de la crème, VIP passholders, wealthy art collectors being coy about their shopping habits, and dealers complaining about the location of their stands, and doing their best to talk up the artists. There are a few walk-on celebrity appearances, such as that of the veteran New York dealer Barbara Gladstone, whom one collector sees as “one of my compass points. There is north, south, east, and Barbara”. Her booth is front and centre. “Gladstone admits that her agenda is ‘more complicated than it used to be, now that we take sales for granted’”, meaning that until recently she and other distinguished gallery proprietors were to some extent able to “place” works of art in suitable, desirable, prestigious, or in some other sense advantageous spots, rather than to sell them to the person who happens to be standing at the front of the queue. At its most admirable level, this stratagem was designed to protect the long-term interest of the gallery’s stable of artists, but it is naturally far harder to achieve when times are tough. “Dealers are editors and conspirators”, says Jeff Poe. “We help determine what gets shown and how it gets shown, and we help put art in production.”

From Basel, and the magical realism of retail, we shift to Tate Britain, the judging of the Turner Prize, and the canonization process that is often said to be the special province of the art museum – more and more these days the dedicated museum of modern and contemporary art. Or is that process, in fact, more effectively steered by the opinions of contributors to the prestigious journal of art criticism Artforum International in New York – whose Editor-in-Chief is anxious not to be portrayed as “the toothpaste salesman for a counterculture” – or, indeed, by some sort of consensus that is forged among scholars and teachers of contemporary art practice at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, at which Thornton seeks some illumination in Midtown Manhattan? What are the roles played by curators and critics? “Art criticism is to artists as ornithology is to birds”, answers one wag, while others (apparently more artists than dealers and collectors) question the concept of “a good eye”, because it “evokes a connoisseur with a monocle, or a Cyclops with infallible instincts”. The book carries us ahead to an extended visit to the three-campus studio and design establishments of Takashi Murakami in Saitama and Tokyo, a twenty-first-century Japanese refinement of Warhol’s factory, with a chillingly enormous marketing and publicity apparatus. “Every morning, I upset people”, says the barefoot artist, who is evidently “an unrelenting aesthetic micromanager”. Murakami's assistants agree: “He is always angry”, says one with a shrug. “The atmosphere is usually tense.”

On the seventh day, conspicuously not given over to rest, the author brings us kicking and screaming into the “he’s C-List, she's B-list, Nick Serota is A-List” awfulness of the ceremonies surrounding the launch of the fifty-second Biennale di Venezia, and some ruminations, while doing laps of the Cipriani pool (front crawl), on the nature of the collision at this enormous event of many members of the author’s carefully accumulated dramatis personae.

The book is so sprinkled with picturesque detail – Ricola lozenges, Agnès B here, Prada there, Moët, “HOT DELICIOUS PIZZA”, air-kissing, Bellinis, cell phones and BlackBerries, “the smoky scent of Lapsang Souchong”, “big guns”, private planes, free booze, cigarettes – that as an analysis of how judgements of taste and quality in respect of new works of art are formulated, and by whom, either as a product of consensus, or effective advocacy, or manipulation, popularity, or even good fortune, it too often relies on the concept of complicit insider versus naive outsider, the drifting uninitiated perpetually shut out. Among the author’s many thumbnail sketches there is also a tendency towards caricature. The southern Californian art students tend to be incoherent; certain artists mad or eccentric, and so it is also with creepy curators, scary dealers, soigné auctioneers, and complacent collectors, shuttling between London, New York and various art-posts. The driver of Murakami’s seven-seat Tokyo Toyota is “a cool dude in a fedora and vintage fifties glasses”.

It is among the most anomalous aspects of the contemporary art scene that the more it has prospered lately, the more outrageous has been the hostility and philistinism directed towards it in many places by the mainstream print and electronic media. To some extent, those of us who work in art museums have only ourselves to blame, as we have become steadily greedier for public attention. I was reminded of the media hype surrounding the award of the 2001 Turner Prize to Martin Creed for his conceptual “Work No. 227: The lights going on and off”. When interviewed on television, the stunned artist was inclined to say no more than that the work simply was what it was: the lights going on and off. Cut to Sir Nicholas Serota, whose highly articulate interpretative gloss eventually brought in vestigial recollections of the Holocaust, and, through devious editing, appeared to stray so close to self-parody that it would be hard to invent a more biting satire. Fortunately, however, Thornton seems to take conceptual art seriously, as indeed she respects the bona fide work of all the artists she encounters, and she also resists the temptation to take the kind of cheap shots that are routinely made in the press. In this respect her book performs a valuable service by separating the real from the nonsensical.

Yet the real in Thornton consists entirely of “big ticket” contemporary artists and their work, not the thousands of professional artists who now labour under the rubrics of “craft” (ceramics, textiles, metalwork, jewellery, and so on) or graphic and other, innumerable branches of design, nor indeed traditional art-makers in many parts of the world who are not at all the focus of the international contemporary art trade.

Perhaps one might better see the processes which, until recently, gave forward propulsion to the Saatchi end of that business as taking place within a rather complicated Venn diagram, each element of which consists of concentric circles that define many different degrees of influence, speculation and professional involvement, both good and bad, because, as far as this reviewer is concerned, very few of the scenes that make up Seven Days in the Art World seem at all familiar. This may be due to the fact that there is no longer any such readily definable thing as “the art world”, rather than an endless skein of more or less precarious reputations, a short supply of money, much status anxiety among the rich, and tens of thousands of young artists graduating every summer from hundreds of art schools all over the world.

Ninety-five years ago, in his consistently under-appreciated book simply entitled Art, Clive Bell wrote:

"I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false."

Something of the same shortage of “aesthetic emotion” seems to have characterized the artistic and art-critical climate of New York and London in recent years, and it may be a happy product of the difficult period we now face that, with fewer vernissages, less Moët, tighter budgets and more time to think and look hard, we may hope to encounter better, cheaper contemporary art, in less outlandishly Neronian surroundings. None of which will be of any comfort to artists, the vast majority of whom are banished to the very bottom of this particular food chain, and will no doubt suffer more than anyone in the lean years ahead. Sarah Thornton’s exhausting seven-day excursion, meanwhile, will serve to remind those of us who were ever fortunate enough to do so what it was once like to dance on the brink of a volcano.

Sarah Thornton
SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD
274pp. Granta Books. £15.99.