Rich People Things

Robert Boyd



Anton S. Kandinsky, I don't want to be Peggy Guggenheim I want to be Victor Pinchuk, 2009-2010, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in

We've been seeing people jump ship from writing about art and from writing about the art market. Recent auction results seem so absurd that for some, withdrawing in disgust is the only option. It may be an overstatement to say, as Felix Salmon did, that "the courtiers are revolting." But there is a sense that the courtiers are realizing that they are, in fact, courtiers and that's making them uncomfortable. It's one thing to serve art, but serving the global plutocratic elite feels a bit distasteful. Responding to a Charlie Finch piece predicting an imminent art market crash, Salmon wrote the following:

No, Charlie, the art market oligopoly system isn’t going anywhere: if anything, it’s more entrenched than ever. But the people without millions of dollars, the people who try to talk about art but find all conversations ultimately being about money — those people are, finally, getting fed up.

There’s long been a disconnect between critical acclaim and high prices, but so long as the art market pumped money into the broader art ecosystem, no one really minded that. Rather, what seems to have changed is that art — art itself, divorced from commerce — has been drowned in the flood of money. Even the most highbrow museums, these days, only devote major shows to artists who have proved themselves winners in the great game of selling to plutocrats. [...] Or to put it another way, the art market has stopped being a source of fascination and crazy numbers, and has started to be a source of sheer disgust.

The world of high-end art collectors, by contrast, has reached a level of obscenity that the art world more generally can no longer ignore. It’s been clear to the more politically-minded for a while, but now we’re seeing the mainstreaming of attitudes which used to be found only on the far left. Enough of living in a world where an artwork without resale value is worthless. Enough of feeling jealous when some idiot starts selling for ridiculous sums. Enough of a world where the levels of inequality make Nigeria seem positively egalitarian. Yes, artists need to make money, and yes, big collectors shower ridiculous sums onto the art world. But that money isn’t trickling down, and it certainly isn’t respectable.[Felix Salmon, Occupy Art, November 19]

The thing is, this state of affairs is the inevitable result of the increased income inequality in the world. This increased inequality is two phenomena. First, the growing wealth of the third world and former communist countries, which, depending on the country, has benefited a large number of people while uplifting the ultra-rich the most (one might think of such heterogeneous countries as Turkey, Brazil and China) and some where small groups of oligarchs have ended up with almost all the spoils (Russia, Ukraine). Second, the huge growth of inequality within the U.S., where often brilliant persons with huge appetites for risk have pulled far ahead of the rest of us, usually as members of a new rentier class in the now deregulated financial industry. (See Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else for a depressingly detailed account.) Now while such persons could live modestly without a care as to what their fellow plutocrats think of them, we know historically this isn't what happens. Thorstein Veblen had witnessed it in his own time, the Gilded Age, and expensive art is just one more Veblen good (along with Maybach sports cars, Citation jets, and professional sports teams).

That Occupy criticizes this world is unremarkable. But when Sarah Thornton and Felix Salmon cease to find it all amusing, it's serious. The true courtiers can't allow that to go unanswered. With tongue in cheek (I assume), Kenny Schachter wrote, "I suggest all whiners (its practically it’s own movement by now) move to north korea and open an art cooperative. Imagine how long that would last before they either all killed themselves or started auctioning to Kim Jong-il." Marion Maneker accused Sarah Thornton of "histrionics."

What puts the brakes on plutocratic excess is progressive regulation and taxes. That was what happened with the Gilded Age and after the Roaring 20s. It will, I hope, happen again--here, in China, in Russia, etc. It's not easy--the plutocrat class finds it very easy to buy politicians and even public opinion. (Suggest that people who earn millions in dividends pay the same tax rate as a single person earning $70,000, and certain news organizations will call you a "socialist" who advocates "class war.") On the art front, we may be seeing a law that forces the names of consigners and buyers at auction to be made public, which would make some of the more common market manipulations in the art market more difficult. I wouldn't mind seeing a tax on auctions similar to the hotel occupancy taxes that most cities have--particularly if such taxes go to fund non-profits (for instance, the most of the Houston Art Alliance's income is from the City of Houston's hotel occupancy tax). Obviously increased droit moral laws would do some good. I would like to see more organized artist efforts at lobbying for these kinds of reforms.

But if you really want change this plutocratic art culture, reregulate the financial industry (starting with treating "carried interest" as ordinary income instead of as a capital gain), raise taxes on very high incomes, and fight to bring the rule of law to the very rich in countries like China and Russia. These are the things that will reign in the insanity of the ultra-high-end art market.

Frieze new York part 4

by Robert Boyd

(Continued from Frieze New York part 3)

We're near the end of Frieze, finally. I'm going to start this post off with some art and then I have a few concluding thoughts that follow. And if you are into art fair photos, reports for Pulse and NADA are forthcoming!


Michelle Lopez, Blue Angel, 2012, aluminum and automotive paint at Simon Preston Gallery



Barbara Kruger, Too Big to Fail, digital print on vinyl at Sprüth Magers

Good old Barbara Kruger--selling her anti-Wall Street message to the masters of the universe. I can imagine Jamie Dimon buying this and hanging it in the den. After work, he sits down with a brandy and cigar, looks at it with a slight smile, muttering to himself, "Damn straight!".


Asta Gröting at Carlier | Gebauer

Looking at Asta Gröting, I believe this piece is called Mein smart--a cast in polyurethane of the undercarriage of her Smart car. I like it, and it is typical in a way of much of the sculpture here--floor-hugging.


Alice Neel, Ian and Mary, 1971 at Victoria Miro

I loved this Alice Neel painting not just because I love Alice Neel in general, but also because I love the dated hippie-ness of it. Ian seems very aggressive, with his legs splayed out, his colorful clothes and the green in his face. Alice, all pale and wrapped up in herself, is far more retiring.


Roger Hiorns at Corvi-Mora

This piece by Roger Hiorns appeared to be some still-like device for producing foam. The foam was quite thick, as you can see.

I'm afraid I don't know who did the art in the next two photos. Pan readers, here's another quiz. No prizes, except for the gratitude of your humble blogger. Who did these pieces?



I think I saw this large floor piece at Stuart Shave.






I think this may be by Cildo Meireles. It was in the Galerie Lelong booth.

I'm going to close with a quote from Felix Salmon, a financial writer at Reuters who often writes about art. He asks (and answers) the obvious question--why is it that galleries set up at art fairs but not artists representing themselves?

It’s fascinating to me that the imprimatur of high prices is still conferred almost exclusively on those artists with high-profile gallery representation. You’d think that the internet — a medium made for disintermediation — would by now have done a spectacular job of cutting out the middleman and allowing branded artists to sell directly to awed collectors. But that hasn’t happened, and galleries continue to happily introduce big-name collectors to their top artists, comfortable in the knowledge that neither artist nor collector is likely to try to do a deal behind the gallery’s back.

At Frieze, the Gagosian gallery had a stripped down single-artist exhibit of Rudolf Stingel paintings; I’m sure it did very well. But by the same token, if Stingel himself had booked out the exact same booth and exhibited the exact same paintings at the exact same prices, that would have been genuinely shocking, and the organizers would surely have had to deal with a series of extremely upset galleries, just for starters. There are branded artists out there without gallery representation — the Starn brothers are a good example. Given their fame and the number of art fairs every year, it would make perfect sense for them to just send their work from fair to fair, and live on the proceeds. But they don’t, and I’m sure that a large part of the reason is the institutional opposition that any such attempt would run into. Instead, they confine themselves to studio sales, institutional work, and the occasional online special. ["The Business of Art Fairs" by Felix Salmon, May 6, 2012]

Another "branded" artist without gallery representation is Michael Tracy. From what I hear, he just has house exhibits for his devoted collectors. This is how Houston painter Richard Stout makes his living as well. Given this, it doesn't seem totally crazy for some artists to just buy their own booths. Especially at a fair like Frieze that is curated by the organizers. They could ensure only highly salable artists got their own booths and that only work likely to move would be exhibited in them.

But I think what Salmon (and Don Thompson) call branding and what Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital is still important. This means that showing in a gallery confers cultural capital onto an artist, and buying from a gallery confers cultural capital on the buyer. The gallery, in a sense, guarantees quality.

But why should Frieze care? If Bruce Nauman wanted to purchase a booth, why not let him? The reason Frieze cares is because the galleries are their clients. So they can't offend their primary clients. But what might be possible would be for a group of well-off blue-chip artists to put on their own satellite fair. That would be interesting.

Frieze New York part 1

by Robert Boyd

I know I'm a little late on this. I wish I could say the reason is that I am going to have some startling original insights on the state of contemporary art or the art world. But really, this is the first big art fair I've ever attended. I was more like the hillbilly visiting the city, slack-jawed and saying "Gaw-ly!" In fact, I'll outsource my opinions to other writers who have had a little more time to process this phenomenon. And in between, I show some pictures of art that intrigued (or outraged) me.

(This post is divided into four parts not because any given part is long, but because so many artists were discussed, I kept running out of room to tag the posts. I only get 200-odd characters for labels.)

John McCracken, Galaxy, 2008 at David Zwirner

Some galleries were practically like museums--at least in terms of how well-known the work being shown was. David Zwirner was such a gallery.

Dan Flavin, untitled (to dear, durable Sol from Stephen, Sonja, and Dan) one, 1969 at David Zwirner

But Frieze was no museum. I met my friends Mark and Paul there. Both are collectors. Paul is an art fair veteran while Mark had never bought anything from an art fair. Mark was curious why they existed. Indeed, it seems strange that you would go to a tent on an island to see work from galleries that are open all year round in Chelsea. (That said, galleries from all around the world had booths here, so there's that.) This was something that Peter Schjeldahl remarked on in The New Yorker:

The whole idea of staging art fairs in New York may seem odd. Isn't the city a permanent art fair, with hundreds of galleries conveniently clustered in a few neighborhoods? But the gallery-centered template of the art business has changed, and the survival of New York dealers, as of dealers everywhere, now demands that they transport their goods and their personnel from their galleries, which present art with museum-like tenderness and gravitas, to the flimsily walled, cacophonous fairs, even if the trip spans just a few blocks. ["All is Fairs" by Peter Schjedahl, The New Yorker, May 7, 2012]

As a gallery owner friend once told me, he can see as many people in one fair as he might see in his gallery all year. So to answer Mark's question, art fairs exist to make money for galleries. A fair is a concentrated locus of buying and selling. A few people at Frieze were like me--looky-loos with no intention (and no means) of buying the art on display. But a good portion of the attendees were serious buyers. And based on what's been reported, they bought big.

Lisson Gallery had a good opening day at Frieze New York:
Ai Weiwei Marble Helmet, 2010 Sold for €50,000
Anish Kapoor Untitled, 2012 Stainless steel and lacquer Sold for £500,000
Haroon Mirza Scream Heist, 2012, Monitor, table top, speaker cable, amp, DVD/AV player, LEDs, Sold for £30,000 / $50,000
Haroon Mirza Rhizomatic, 2012 LCD monitor, strobe, amp, wood, LED’s, circuits Sold for £24,000 / $40,000
Haroon Mirza Important Information, 2012 modified LED display, headphones Sold for £22,000 / $36,000 ["Lisson Sells at Frieze NY" by Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor, May 3, 2012]

 I was intrigued that high-tech electronic artwork such as the work by Mirza--full of parts that will wear out and become obsolete in a few years--sold so well. But what I think of as salable artwork (paintings primarily, and photos, and some sculpture) goes out the window at a high-end art fair like Fireze. If you can afford to pay $50,000 for a work of art, you can afford to take care of it, even if it is electronic, even if it requires constant monitoring, and even if it requires expensive modifications to your home to display it.

Navid Nuur, Mineralium, 2011-2012, sugar, magnets and iron filings at Alex Zachary Peter Currie

Navid Nuur, Mineralium, 2011-2012, sugar, magnets and iron filings at Alex Zachary Peter Currie

Mineralium by Navid Nuur is literally a pile of sugar and iron filings. Presumably, if you wanted to display this in your house, Nuur would have to personally come and install it. But does sugar last? And doesn't it attract pests? But presumably anyone with the wherewithal to buy this piece also has the means to store it safely.

Buster Graybill, Progeny of Tush Hog at Jack Hanley Gallery

Austin's Buster Graybill had this work, Progeny of Tush Hog, for sale at Jack Hanley Gallery. That yellow stuff is corn, I think. And that's the idea--these objects are meant to be filled with corn and left out in a field, where wild pigs or other critters can root under them and roll them around (causing more corn to fall out). So to own these (properly, at least), you need a ranch out in the country and you need to refill them with corn periodically.

Jim Lambie, Vortex 'Eau de Parfum,' 2012 at Anton Kern Gallery

This piece by Jim Lambie at Anton Kern Gallery, for example, would require their owner to literally build a wall for it, as the "vortex" portion of it is a fairly deep hole the wall.

Cory Arcangel, Bowl of Soggy Cornflakes at Team Gallery

And the funniest example of this is this bowl of soggy cornflakes by Cory Arcangel. I was at the Team Gallery booth looking at some wall tags for a piece of art when I saw a wall-tag that didn't seem to be for any visible piece. It was Bowl of Soggy Cornflakes by Cory Arcangel. I looked around, and sure enough, on the table where the booth employees sat was a bowl of soggy cornflakes. I asked about it and was told that what you got was the bowl, the spoon, a set of instructions, and a certificate of authenticity. You had to supply the cornflakes and milk, and the contents had to be renewed every eight hours. The Team Gallery gallerina I spoke with described the work as a parody of conceptual artworks that were series of instructions--for example, a Sol Lewitt wall drawing. But I think Cory Arcangel was also making fun of art fairs and the people who buy art in them. What was the most ridiculous thing that someone would buy? (I have an email into Team Gallery asking if it sold, and for how much. If they answer, I'll let you know.)

In any case, a person like me with a decent but relatively modest income needs to step outside his worldview to begin to understand what was happening at Frieze.

At Cheim & Read’s booth, partner and sales director Adam Sheffer was practically giddy. “It feels like 2007 all over again!” he exclaimed. The booth sold several Jenny Holzer pieces — an LED sign for $175,000, a bench for $100,000, as well as a work via JPEG — as well as a Chantal Joffe painting for $65,000, a Louise Fishman work for $125,000, and a Bill Jensen for $25,000. Reportedly on reserve was the 2,000-pound Lynda Benglis sculpture oozing out of the corner of the booth, which required the gallery to reinforce the floors underneath in advance of the opening.

London’s Victoria Miro sold several recent works “in the low to mid-six figures” by Yayoi Kusama, who has seen a rush of fresh interest on the heels of her Tate retrospective. “People are incredibly happy to be here,” said dealer James Cohan, who sold a number of pieces by Berlin-based Simon Evans for $30,000 to $75,000 by early afternoon. “They all say, ‘I guess this is going to become the fair in New York.’”

The swift sales continued over at Metro Pictures, where Robert Longo’s large, black-and-white close-up drawing of a waving American flag sold for $425,000 and a Cindy Sherman photograph from 1977 sold for $950,000. Casey Kaplan and Andrea Rosen reported selling out, or very nearly selling out, everything they had on the walls. Kaplan presented a solo show of Garth Weiser’s large, bright abstractions ($35,000-45,000 each). Rosen mounted a solo room of brand new vibrant paintings and wall collages by Elliott Hundley, all sold for $85,000, and an accompanying room of quieter work by Wolfgang Tillmans and Aaron Bobrow, among others. “I tend to bring work under $100,000 to Frieze,” Rosen said. “People who come here like to feel a sense of discovery, but also buy work they know is still reasonably established.” ["Sales Report: Frieze New York Makes a Convincing Case for Itself With an Opening Burst of Business" by Shane Ferro and Julie Halperin, Blouin Artinfo, May 4, 2012] 

Buying work under $100,000 gives the buyer a sense of discovery?

Lynda Benglis, Quartered Meteor, 1969-1975, lead (yes, lead as in the metal) at Cheim and Read

Sean Landers, Around the World Alone (Ancient Mariner) (left) and Around the World Alone (Slocum) (right), 2011, encaustic, terracotta. metal, wood at greengrassi

Sean Landers, Around the World Alone (Ancient Mariner) (left) and Around the World Alone (Slocum) (right), 2011, encaustic, terracotta. metal, wood at greengrassi

These Sean Landers are perfect for the kid's room!

Paul McCarthy, White Snow Dwarf, Sleepy #1 (Midget), 2012, slilcone (blue) at Hauser & Wirth

Everyone seemed to love the facility. Instead of holding Frieze in an existing building, the organizers built their own mile-long temporary structure. Lord knows what it cost.

Let’s begin with the location, for which there has been endless hand-wringing amongst art worlders. How will we ever get to Randall’s Island? Get a grip, people. A ferry to the Island runs every 15 minutes from 35th street and it’s fucking luxurious. Frieze doesn’t feel like a fair, it feels like an event. It’s not quite Venice, but then again most vaporetti don’t have concession stands. [...]

Once inside, the first thing you’ll notice is the design of the fair. Literally everyone we talked to mentioned how much they liked the lighting, which during the day is mostly natural and augmented by giant hanging fluorescents. We also noticed the spacious layout and booth size. Smaller booths rarely looked cramped, and larger booths often had large window like views into their spaces. So. Great.

But also: Buyer beware. Some art looks better here than it will in your home, which is, well, dangerous, given that a lot of the work is also pretty great. ["The Lowdown on Frieze New York" by Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City, May 4, 2012]

And this was part of the feeling of exclusivity that the organizers sought to create. This was evident in many ways. The ticket price ($40/day was meant to frighten away the looky-loos). The curated selection of galleries, which is apparently unusual if I am reading some accounts correctly. (How do other art fairs select their galleries?) The high quality cuisine--whereas if you have a fair in a convention center, you end up with food from whatever concessions monopoly has the contract (think Aramark).

And while Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover tells the NYT that he is “very much pro-democratization and a larger engagement” with the general public, the fair’s location on a desolate island, and its sky-high entry fee, and even its galleries all mitigate against that. It’s the galleries who asked for — and received — fewer visitors, remember, and on Friday night I met one gallerist who was complaining that while she met some very high-end collectors on Thursday, the Friday crowd had altogether far too many “lookie-loos”. ["The Business of Art Fairs" by Felix Salmon, May 6, 2012]

(That gallerist was evidently talking about me and my ilk.)

Making my way into the immense white tent that houses the fair, I was shocked. The spaces are wide-open, well lit, generously proportioned, accommodating, sensual. Ceilings soar; a gentle curve in the tent stops vertigo. "How could an art fair feel good?" I wondered. The two-piered New York Armory Show has become drudgy, crowded, comfortably numb. By now I simply assumed that a big art fair in New York wasn't possible. Then I understood what made this art fair completely different than our own: Oxford!

The founders of this fair are Frieze magazine's English executive publishers, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover. In New York and America, we're great at making things big and democratic, and bigger is better — the largest fair, the most galleries, turnover, largest crowds, two piers. That is why the Armory Show is more like a gloomy zoo, giant but visually dreary, shoddy-feeling, and unpleasant. Worse, because it's democratic about which  galleries may participate, the quality level is low. By contrast, the Frieze Fair mirrors the fact that the art business is not democratic but is based on a semblance of talent and ability, a quasi-meritocracy. The fair exudes a tribal feeling. This may strike some as elitist or about who-you-know, but it's actually a good thing, because the Frieze fair is a much better reflection of the serious-gallery landscape than the Armory Show is. An American group starting a fair would find it uncomfortable to screen galleries. The English, by contrast, view it as a responsibility. That process has the added benefit of taking a place that has often become strictly a trading floor and returning it, somewhat, to being a powwow, one where information, not just money, changes hands. ["Why the Frieze Art Fair Could Solve the New York Art Fair Problem" by Jerry Saltz, New York, May 5, 2012]

(Continued in Frieze New York, part 2)