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— Deal Life —
It was a daring thing to do, with few precedents -- really just Gustave Courbet's personal Salon des Refusés back in 1850, assembled in protest of conservative judges at the annual Paris art sale and Hirst's own auction of works in his "Pharmacy" series in 2004 (though the latter was small potatoes in comparison). Hirst showed 233 works of art at the White Cube gallery in September, including his brand new "Golden Calf," the carcass of a white bull with horns and hooves cast in 18-karat gold, sporting a solid gold halo above his curly head, submerged in formaldehyde.
Hirst's partisans describe him as a leader among artists in probing and criticizing broad concepts of value in fine art. Last year he cast an actual human skull in platinum and studded it with 8,601 diamonds, creating ostensibly the most valuable sculpture in the world, worth roughly $100 million. A fellow artist in Saatchi's collection and an old Hirst acquaintance, sculptor Marc Quinn, this year cast a solid gold statue of supermodel Kate Moss for a show at the Tate -- it is supposed to be the largest solid gold human figure since ancient Egypt, and it shows Moss in panties and a tank top with her ankles locked behind her head in a yoga pose. To the surprise of many critics, Hirst's Sept. 15 sale went swimmingly, earning him upward of $188 million. The "Golden Calf" sold for almost $14 million, setting a record for the artist at auction. Hirst must be one of the richest artists since Peter Paul Rubens, and he could well count himself one of the luckiest men who ever lived. Because on the same day the auction made him even richer, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, making a lot of other people poorer, and the bull market of the last 25 years was itself dipped in formaldehyde forever. That day tipped the world economic crisis into the open, and say what you will about the talent of artists like Hirst or Quinn, it does appear that since then the age of solid gold, diamond-encrusted sculpture has also come to an end. The 2008 fall auction season started up just three weeks later, and from Asia to Europe to the U.S., it was a disaster. Prices for modern and contemporary art dropped a full one-third to a half all around the world, costing the three big houses -- Sotheby's, Christie's International plc and Phillips de Pury & Co. LLC -- tens of millions of dollars in guarantees. The only publicly traded auction house, Sotheby's, has lost 83% of its stock value since October 2007. All this after the three companies broke through to a billion-dollar international art market for the first time just a year ago. We are still taking measure of the full meaning of this fall's financial market collapse -- is it 1970s stagflation redux or the Great Depression II? Whatever it is, and perhaps encouraged by the concurrent election of a black man as president of the United States, people have been thinking in terms of fundamental change, not only in markets and the social compact but in the highest expression of our culture. And if markets really do determine the most valuable forms of that culture, the crash would seem to imply a coming change in art as well. Hirst, Quinn and their global equivalents (artists like the Americans Jeff Koons, John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage or the Japanese-American Takashi Murakami and Chinese jokester Yue Minjun) have come to dominate art auctions over the past two decades with an art that could be best described as a kind of high pop. Think of it as the new International Style -- cheeky and irreverent, typically high-concept parodies of older art styles or arch send-ups of marketing concepts. It differs from classic American pop of the '60s and '70s chiefly in the sophistication of its technological expertise and, as befits a style prized by a newly coined billionaire elite, in its price tag. People have been willing to pay tens of millions of dollars to get a newly minted chrome steel statue that looks like a blow-up vinyl bunny rabbit (by Koons) or a cast of the artist's own head made with liters of his own blood frozen solid (by Quinn). The buyers of this brand-name irony have often been real estate magnates, energy tycoons, hedge fund managers and private equity investors. We now know that many of these same folks have been wrong about many things recently, from the mystical effectiveness of the free market to the sustainability of real estate prices and how their fall would affect the financial system. Could they actually have been right only about fine art? For most of the 20th century, the history of art has been told as a succession of changing styles -- impressionism led to neo-impressionism, which led to expressionism, and then to cubism, formalism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, and so on, depending on who was connecting the knee bone to the leg bone. But there hasn't been much study of the actual mechanism that causes a change from one style to another. Before the rise of a popular art market, that mechanism was simple: A new king or pope would change styles for his own purposes. When Amenhotep IV became pharaoh of Egypt around 1350 B.C., he became the first head of a major country to promote monotheism as the national religion, and with it he introduced a new art style that was both more realistic than the ancient tradition and more emotionally direct in its treatment of the human figure. New styles can produce vibrant and daring objects with enormous iconic power: A bust done in this new style of Amenhotep's chief wife, the swan-necked Nefertiti, helped shape modern concepts of feminine beauty when German archaeologists discovered it around 1910. The power of patronage has continued to operate into our own time, but in the 15th century, artists themselves were counted as important influences on stylistic change. In addition to the many technical innovations introduced during the Renaissance (mathematical perspective, the revival of fresco, the interest in ancient Greek and Roman examples) there began to be a sense of one man's touch as an engine of art's evolution. Leonardo's sfumato or Michelangelo's musculature were seen as separate from their patrons' interests, and key to art's development. "In all of art history, the one man who has had the greatest impact on stylistic change all by himself has, without a doubt, been Caravaggio," says Jeffrey Wechsler, chief curator for the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University (where a lot of American pop was invented, by the way, by teachers such as Roy Lichtenstein and George Segal). "The line is very clear: Before him [Caravaggio died in 1610] is the Renaissance, and after him, with his dramatic lighting, psychological acuity and receding diagonals, it's all baroque. And it stays baroque, for generations, for literally hundreds of years." All those qualities are there in Caravaggio's most famous painting, "The Calling of St. Matthew," in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome. But that work has something else that is new, and at the time terribly original, certainly as original and disconcerting as seeing Jeff Koons' "Balloon Dog" set among the formal gardens and mirrored galleries of Versailles, as that and other works were this fall. Caravaggio used a democratic realism in depicting the holy men of the Church. St. Matthew was a tax collector, and he's shown counting his coins in a low, dark tavern, surrounded by the toughs who no doubt made it easier for him to collect them. Nevertheless, Christ enters stage right, aligns his arm with the beam of light and calls him away from his money-grubbing pals. Saints had never been seen like this before. The baroque also became the first truly global style, reflected not only in European palaces but in South American cathedrals and the official architecture of any Western colonial cantonment, from Shanghai to Buenos Aires to Cape Town. Until the popular revolutions of the late 18th century, the dominant issue in Western politics was the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants, often played out over colonial possessions, with their analogous differences in economic, legal and social practices. The popular art market -- art made for individuals to buy and not for church or national leaders as a form of mass communication -- was born in the baroque, with the 17th century Dutch middle class, very much on the Protestant side of that dispute. So was capitalism, and a whole host of other aspects of global trade that we recognize today, including financial bubbles. And as the art market developed over time, changes in style became generational, and eventually even more frequent than that. Styles began to war among themselves, like fashions, and for similarly obvious marketing reasons. When impressionism put the kibosh on studio painting at the end of the 19th century, dethroning state-sponsored artists who were heirs to the baroque traditions, a new idea was introduced: artistic obsolescence. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who died in 1905, had been the highest-paid artist of his generation just before the turn of the century, selling sentimental nudes and classical pastiches for the equivalent of a million dollars each in today's currency. Two decades later, he was all but forgotten except as a painter of "saloon nudes." "Bouguereau and Academic painting have never come back entirely, though people have tried to revive their values many times," Wechsler says. "We really don't believe in their vision of what an art object should be. All you have to do is look at the work to see why -- the subjects and the way they're painted seem pompous and absurd. There's an air of high camp about those paintings that makes you want to giggle." Despite the art market that started in Holland, the Church continued to be the biggest funder of art manufacture well into the 19th century, and state sponsorship continued into the 20th. Most art -- the art that millions flood museums like the Metropolitan or the Louvre every year to see -- was made for a religiopolitical aristocracy, for whom luxury was an expression of class privilege. Only a sort of overflow made its way onto the largely Protestant art market. Sotheby's and Christie's both started out in London as rare book dealers, with sidelines in fine art, much of which had been acquired by freebooting families while abroad and sold on King Street. Rembrandt was the first major artist to live by the market -- and he ended up in penury -- but you hear crickets chirping if you ask for another, at least until Courbet in the mid-19th century. The impressionists, who are the beginning of the Modern, were the first school of art free of church or state patronage, yet most of them were either independent of the markets -- Degas, Cézanne and Manet all came from wealthy families -- or opposed them (Pissarro and Picasso were Socialists; Picasso even donated the proceeds from two of his prints to the Communist Party). Modernism was wedded to a spirit of opposition, true to its times in the long, sad slog through the 20th century. It became institutionally dominant, but didn't draw huge crowds, and it is in modern times that art acquires the notion of being "difficult" or needing "explanation." You have to wait for our own day, for Andy Warhol, to find a major artist who is so completely in tune with markets and mass taste that he could say, "Business is the best art, and art is the best business." Last year, Warhol outperformed Picasso to become the world's best-selling artist, bringing in $420 million compared to the Spaniard's $319 million. And for five years now, contemporary art has been the leading category in art sales around the globe, jumping 107% in value from 2006-2007 alone. Everybody wants it, or at least so the markets would suggest, but only in our times would people take the markets' word on art. Which brings us to the ultimate irony in an ironic era: What do you do when the markets begin to turn on the art of the markets? Because turn they have. Take Takashi Murakami, the Japanese artist well known for his updates of Louis Vuitton bags and cutesy, anime-informed plastic sculptures, who runs large studios in Tokyo and Long Island, N.Y. At the Phillips de Pury Frieze sale in London Oct. 17, Murakami's "Tongari-kun," a 21-foot-tall statue made of fiberglass and steel that was the centerpiece of his globe-touring retrospective that ended at the Brooklyn Museum last July, made the cover of the sale catalog and was considered to be the big draw for de Pury. The work was priced at $5.2 million to $6.7 million, but when bids were called, "Tongari-kun" got no offers at all, filling the room with a sudden, hushed silence. Murakami, who was standing right there in the salesroom with his Paris dealer, Emmanuel Perrotin, burst out in nervous laughter, and the sale went on. But it kept getting less funny as the evening continued. American Lisa Yuskavage, who paints large-scale pictures that look like Playboy cartoons from the 1980s, didn't get a bid for "Dark Garden II"; a Richard Prince joke painting (large, otherwise empty canvases on which the New York-based Prince stencils the beginning of a joke, such as, "A priest, a rabbi, and a Hindu walk into a bar ...") got no bids, either. Both artists were selling similar pieces in the single-digit millions just last summer. The London sales only echoed the disaster at Sotheby's Asian sales two weeks earlier in Hong Kong, where works by Chinese art stars failed to sell, leading to a $15 million loss in guarantees for the auction house. (Guarantees are promises by the auctioneer to essentially buy a piece at the low estimate if it fails to get a bid above that amount -- most houses have vowed to severely curtail the practice after this year's losses.) One of the most popular Chinese luminaries, Yue Minjun, paints and sculpts self-portraits with huge, toothy grins, mass-producing these mascots at a factory in Beijing. But Yue, too, failed to sell pieces in Hong Kong and London, where a goofy version of a terra cotta warrior, again a self-portrait with a cartoonish grin, was valued at between $520,000 and $667,000 but failed to sell at all. The press loves those conga lines of zeroes, whether they are getting preposterously longer or drastically shorter. But auctions are a form of theater, and they can be manipulated, especially on the way up. Jeff Koons, who holds the record for a living artist at auction (his "Balloon Flowers [Magenta]," a mirror-finished sculpture that looks like a bouquet of balloons a clown might make at a toddler's party, went for a little under $23 million just last June), wisely held back any signature pieces from the auctions this year. Last year, he headlined at both Sotheby's and Christie's big New York sales, but his dealer had to buy one of his sculptures to keep it from going under its low estimate. "This is certainly not as bad as it was in 1992-'93, at the end of the last market slump," says Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne, a venerable Manhattan gallery known for its German expressionist works. "Many dealers went six months back then without a single sale. Today there is a market -- I would even say that the middle market is beginning to solidify. That is the good news. "But at the top of the market we are seeing a radical adjustment of prices downward. Which may be a good thing, too -- it is certainly long overdue. Prices there have dropped to perhaps 2005 or 2004 levels. Is this the invisible hand of the markets giving us a spanking, or will it become a total panic? It's still too early to say. If you were worth $4 billion before the stock market collapse and now you're worth $1 billion, you're still rich and you still have money for art. Maybe you just aren't going to pay the same amount for the art you buy." And yet it does seem that the art world as we know it is lacking in adult supervision, almost as if it has become a subset of rock 'n' roll, or a campaign by a Hollywood publicity department. The incredible hype over prices that can't really be confirmed plays into a kind of gossipy coverage of culture, not so different from describing the dress an actress wears. No one pays $22 million in cash for art; the payments are often in the form of arcane financial instruments and lucrative and complicated relationships among dealers, collectors and the auction houses. Meanwhile, works within Kallir's own area of expertise, such as graphic work by German expressionist Max Beckmann, remain ridiculously underpriced. "This past season was a serious setback for artists such as Koons, and particularly Hirst," says author and critic Robert Hughes. "Because these prices cannot possibly be sustained. Hirst has said as much to the English press today, telling them he thinks his prices had gotten a little high. That's the most blazing example of artistic hypocrisy I've ever heard. The people who buy this stuff are the most boring barbarians you can imagine, with all the taste of flatworms. They have an ignorant and parasitic relationship to culture. "I can't speculate on what will replace them, because I am not an artist, and there are artists younger than you and me who will be making that decision," Hughes adds. "But I can say that what we did not have 200 to 400 years ago was an obscenely speculative market like we have now. Newness as a value in art is the basis of this hype. ... We cannot have anyone who can draw so well as Rubens today because the current culture does not support the idea of building on a basis of pedagogical respect for older forms. It just isn't taught anymore." The Age of Irony (and Easy Credit) has been with us for so long, that it's hard to say that it is truly over with any confidence. What does it mean that the artwork on the cover of this year's November Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Sotheby's, "Half Face with Collar" by Lichtenstein, valued at $15 million to $20 million, failed to sell? Maybe pop is just taking a haircut. Maybe, if and when the markets zoom back, a giddy silliness, an irrational exuberance, if you will, can reassert itself in global culture. And maybe Koons is the greatest artist who ever lived. After all, he holds the record for most money at auction for a living artist. Hirst thinks highly of Koons: Last year he spent nearly $3 million to buy a Koons sculpture. And Koons? What does he think? Two years ago, Koons also spent $3 million to buy a single work of art. A nude, by Gustave Courbet. |
Last Sept. 15, British artist Damien Hirst, who catapulted to worldwide fame 13 years ago in partnership with collector and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, changed how business is done in the art world once and for all. That morning Hirst opened a two-day personal auction of art straight from his studio in conjunction with Sotheby's in London, with no middleman dealer. Instead, the artist himself acted as his own salesman and manager.
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