The Pan Review of Books: 33 Artists in 3 Acts

Robert Boyd



Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World was published in 2008. It was a success for two reasons, I think. One, it treated the art world as its subject rather than particular artists or exhibits. Of course she wasn't the first to do this. Art Worlds (1982) by Howard Becker looked at the art world in a broader sense than Thornton did, and in pain-staking detail. Gary Alan Fine examined the world of outsider art in Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity (2004). All three writers are sociologists, which makes their interest in art more than just an interest in aesthetics--they want to know about the range of activities and people involved in this space.

But Thornton wasn't writing an academic text. What she also brought to it was a sharp-witted, first-person journalistic writing style. She is a good writer. I admit that's a highly subjective judgment, but what I mean is that I would probably find her writing entertaining even if she were writing about something I have no particular interest in. How many art writers can you say that about?

After writing Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton became the art correspondent for The Economist. This gave her a platform to write about the art world without having to become an art critic. This being The Economist, a lot of her writing was about the art market. Not having any particular need to suck up to that world, her articles could be quite cutting and revealing. (I think writers like Thornton and Felix Salmon who write about the art market occasionally for general interest publications are for more interesting than professional art market observers like Marion Maneker because they are disinterested--and better writers.)

But writing about the art purchases of ultra-rich can leave one feeling pretty dirty, and Thornton swore it off in a grand and glorious way in her article, "Top 10 reasons NOT towrite about the art market." This was published in 2012 in Francesco Bonami's Tar Magazine. Among her reasons not to write about the art market were that "Oligarchs and dictators are not cool" and "It implies that money is the most important thing about art." She also told readers that there were many scandalous stories she could tell about the art market that couldn't make it past the Economist's lawyers. However bad the art market seems based on her reporting, she implied, the reality is far worse.

That was a good way to end one stage in Thornton's multi-year exploration of the world of art, but the question was, what next? 33 Artists in 3 Acts is the answer. When I heard the title, I was worried that Thornton had abandoned her sociological background and was going to write just about a collection of individuals. But she has placed them to various degrees in a world of friends, colleagues, helpers and family--in short, she is not doing Art 21-style profiles.

The book is divided into three sections: Politics, Kinship and Craft. The last is a bit cheeky--although many of the artists display high degrees of craft in their work (such as Isaac Julien, Grayson Perry and Christian Marclay), the craft she is most interested in is the crafting of an identity as an artist. This is why she wants to interview artists in their studios, because she sees them as places where the artist practices this identity.

Sometimes she is heavy-handed, as when she juxtaposes a chapter on Jeff Koons and a chapter on Ai Weiwei--both similar artists in some ways, but Koons is described as something of a phony in a sharp suit compared to the politically active Ai. The way Thornton splits up the chapters in interesting, too. There are several chapters each for Koons and Ai, reflecting different encounters Thornton had with each artist. This means we see time passing. This doesn't mean much for Koons--his life is on an even keel. But for Ai Weiwei, Thornton interviews both before and after his arrest and detention by the Chinese government. Thornton's admiration of him (and her disdain of Koons) is evident. She writes, "Many Western artists squander their freedom of speech through convoluted forms of self-censorship. It is hard to resist Ai's elation that he is not one of them."

Act II, Kinship, contains two large interlocking sections about Maurizio Cattelan and his friends, curators Francesco Bonami (who published Thornton's essay about quitting the art market beat) and Massimiliano Gioni, and about the family of Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham (and their two daughters Grace Dunham and Lena Dunham). Her interviews with the Dunhams are especially interesting because they start when Lena Dunham is filming Tiny Furniture (which stars herself and Laurie Simmons as her mother, but which Carroll Dunham chose not to be in). This film would establish Lena Dunham's reputation and would lead to her being given a TV show in HBO, Girls, which would shoot her into stardom. Some critics have suggested that Lena Dunham's success is due to some kind of nepotism, which is absurd. No one watches a TV show because of who the star's parents were, and more important, who outside of the art world has ever heard of Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons? Still, the chapters on the various family members do show how much Lena Dunham's upbringing and family background shaped her career path. Not least, it showed her an artistic path she didn't want to take--the elite world of contemporary art where only a privileged few will ever see your art.

One chapter deals with two artists, Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida. I think Thornton included them perhaps to counteract the way the rest of the book deals with so many of the glitterati of the art world--Dalton and Powhida's work together has been specifically critical of the art world. Much of the book deals with artists who operate at the higher levels of the art world which is where the money is. So when she writes about Cattelan, she has him on the phone with mega-collector Dakis Joannou, while writing about Powhida, she refers to his famous critique of the vanity show of work from Jannou's collection at the New Museum.

But the artist Thornton seems to admire the most is Andrea Fraser. The performance and video artist is profiled over several chapters in Act III, which deals with "craft." Fraser is depicted as being simultaneously canny and reckless in crafting her own identity as an artist. The first chapter on Fraser is description of a performance. Fraser is provocative and takes on many personas in the course of the performance, which makes her see a little hard to get a handle on. Her work is based on psychology and psychotherapy, and she looks at other artists' public performance as artists through that lens. But Thornton also mentions how Fraser is a high school drop-out with no university degrees who prior to being hired as an art professor at UCLA lived precariously on little income and carried debt. Part of the work of being an artist may be crafting one's identity as an artist, but being an artist also means living in the real world.

Fraser's most infamous work deals with this--Untitled (2003) is a video of Fraser having sex with an art collector who has paid $20,000 for the experience. The collector also got one copy of the video, which was produced in an edition of five. It feels like a piece of stunt art in some ways, but it's blunt analogy: being an artist in the high end art world is not unlike prostitution. Along these lines,  Fraser also wrote an essay for the 2012 Whitney Biennial called "L'1%, C'est moi," a brutal condemnation of the art market and the extreme inequality that has feeds it. It's worth quoting:

Rather than turning to collectors to subsidize the acquisition of art works at grotesquely inflated prices, European museums should turn away from the art market and the art and artists valorized in it. If this means that public museums contract and collectors create their own privately controlled institutions, so be it. Let these private institutions be the treasure vaults and theme-park spectacles and economic freak shows that many already are. Let curators and critics and art historians as well as artists withdraw their cultural capital from this market. 

I think Fraser's willingness to issue such a full-throated denunciation is part of what Thornton admires. Thornton issued her very public "I quit!," but she still is interested in the world of blue chip art, and that world includes collectors and the market. There is an ambivalence in 33 Artists in 3 Acts. Thornton is not quite willing to go as far as Powhida, Dalton and Fraser in her rejection of the ethical and moral pit of the high-end art market, but she gives them ample space to say how they feel. Meanwhile, she writes about many of today's bluest of the blue chip artists like Koons and Damien Hirst and others, sometimes with disapproval but not always.

I'm not condemning her for her ambivalence, because as ethically screwed up as the big-money art world is, it is fascinating! That's a good deal of the pleasure in reading this book. Thornton is an interested interlocutor, who wants to like the artists and their activities but who approaches most of them with at least a little skepticism. I would say that in this book, the sociologist part of Thornton recedes somewhat in favor of the journalist part, but the sociologist is still there. I've said it before--we need more people with backgrounds in the social sciences writing about art, and if they can write as compellingly as Sarah Thornton, all the better.

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.

It's Time to Short These Links

Robert Boyd

I quit! Sarah Thornton, author of the highly entertaining and insightful Seven Days in the Art World has decided to to stop writing about the "art market." Her reasons are:

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.
2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.
3. It never seems to lead to regulation.
4. The most interesting stories are libelous.
5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.
6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.
7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.
8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.
9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.
10. The pay is appalling.

She goes into a little detail on each of these reasons, and these reasons seem like a more than adequate justification for walking away from this weird and twisted field. Especially reason 8. But the problem I have with this article is that she implies that the high-end market--the market of Sotheby's and Gagosian Gallery and Art|Basel--is the entire market. It may account for the majority of dollars that changes hands, but not the majority of artworks. There are plenty of small and/or regional galleries they stay afloat selling work that cost a few thousand dollars or less. There are artists who sell work out of their homes that do the same--aren't they part of the market? What about Etsy and 20x200? What about arts and crafts shows like the Bayou City Arts Festival? To me, she was missing some pretty interesting market phenomena by looking solely at the big-money plays. Furthermore, if she changed the word from "market" to "economy," she could discuss the world of money in non-profits--a vastly under-reported field, in my opinion. ["Top 10 reasons NOT to write about the art market" by Sarah Thornton, TAR Magazine, Fall 2012]

I quit! (part 2) Not to be outdone, elderly critic Dave Hickey is throwing in the towel, too. As befits his lifetime habit of cranky contrarianism, he throws out a few choice parting barbs.

If it's a matter of buying long and selling short, then the artists he would sell now include Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan. "It's time to start shorting some of this shit," he added.

He also believes art consultants have reduced the need for collectors to form opinions. "It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't," he says. "If you stood in front of a Bridget Riley you have to look at it and it would start to do interesting things. Now you wouldn't look at it. You ask a consultant."

Hickey says his change of heart came when he was asked to sign a 10-page contract before he could sit on a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. ["Doyen of American critics turns his back on the 'nasty, stupid' world of modern art" by Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, The Guardian, October 27, 2012]

Wasn't it always so? Didn't they value highly works by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier in the 19th century that crashed instantly on the artist's death. Didn't the rich look to such consultants avant le lettre as Lord Duveen and Bernard Berenson to make their art purchases? Hickey's 71, so why not retire and toss a few barbs at the art world? But he shouldn't pretend like the current state of affairs in this neo-gilded age is anything new.

All power to the artists and critics! Political art is on a lot of people's minds, especially since the 2012 Creative Time Summit earlier this month. Stephen Duncombe & Steve Lambert of the Center for Artistic Activism respond with an open letter to critics, giving them advice on how to write about political art. They include some seemingly obvious (yet little-followed) advice, such as:

Does it Work? We don’t mean: does it work aesthetically? but does it work politically. This entails asking more questions. Questions like: What does the artist want to achieve with their work? What change do they see happening through their work? How will this change happen? Who is affected, what affect will the work have on them, and what actions will these people take? ["An open letter to critics writing about political art," Stephen Duncombe & Steve Lambert, October 20, 2012]

I think this is a very good question to ask, especially since as activism, so much political art is utterly ineffectual.  (But they left off one obvious question: "Why is this art?" In other words, why make an artistic project out of a piece of political activism? If you are doing community organizing, for example, why graft "art" onto it?) The problem with this open letter is the problem with so much political art--it hectors and insults the very people it is trying to reach. It basically says, unless you do it this way, you are part of the problem. That's the kind of moralistic message that I find easy to ignore.

Seven Days in the Art World

Robert Boyd



Seven Days in the Art World is a useful companion to the The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. It generally reinforces some of Don Thompson's conclusions about the art world and art markets, while providing a human face to many of the participants. It was published in 2008 and reported pretty much at the height of the art world's money craziness. This paperback edition has many new footnotes and an afterward that update events past the financial panic--which obviously affected the art world. Additionally, Sarah Thornton has contributed articles to a special report on the art market in the November 26 edition of The Economist.

The conceit of the book is that each chapter is a description--indeed, an ethnographic investigation--of some event in the art world for one day. The events are a Christie's auction of contemporary art in 2004, a day-long "crit" at CalArts in 2004, opening day at ArtBasel in 2006, the day the Turner Prize was announced in 2006, a February day spent at Artforum in 2007, a day spent with Takashi Murakami at his studios, and opening day at the Venice Biennale in 2007. When you are reading the book, however, all these days seem compressed, as if she is jetting from New York for the auction to L.A. for the crit to Switzerland for the art fair.

The chapter on the auction duplicates much of what Don Thompson wrote about the economics, but she adds details of who is present, where they sit (and the desirability of certain seats over others, not unlike elementary school). What she writes about the press gallery is interesting. It is not always known who is buying (often art advisers and other straw buyers are buying on behalf of a rich collector), but many of the actual buyers are present. Apparently it is hard for the press to see them all, and they are desperate to figure out who bought what. Anyone bidding has lots of money to spend; the lowest estimate that night was $90,000.

Thorton only found one artist present, Keith Tyson. He, more than anyone else, sees the auction as a naked capitalist exercise.

[...]You feel the thrill of capitalism and you get into sort of an alpha-male mentality. [...] I don't have any problem with the market for art. It is an elegant Darwinian system. Some collectors are effectively buying futures options [sic] on a work's cultural significance."

Perhaps because the auction was nearly devoid of artists, Thornton places her next chapter at a critique at CalArts--a place devoid of collectors and dealers. It's a day-long critique with teacher Michael Asher, a conceptual artist. I think part of the reason Thornton looked here was that for a variety of reasons, contemporary art has become very valuable, with huge prices commanded for certain lucky living artists, some relatively young. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even very successful contemporary artists weren't getting rich more-or-less until the 80s. But as the supply of old-master artworks, Impressionist paintings and early modernist works dried up (bought by or given to museums, and removed from the international market by national patrimony laws), contemporary art--of which there is an ever-renewing supply--stepped into the breach. (With museums falling on hard times and deaccessioning like crazy, the market for older works of art may come roaring back. After all, if the choice is between owning a Rembrandt and say, paying the salaries and benefits of 50 police officers for five years, municipalities may have no choice.)  CalArts is one of the places where these future art stars are coming from.

When I was an art student, I hated group crits. I was happy to read Dave Hickey agreeing with me. He hates them for pretty much the same reason my 20-something self hated them.

[...] "I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse."

Chris Burden (who had nothing to do with this particular crit, but who was apparently interviewed by the author while she was out in L.A.) had similar views, expressing them more broadly about art schools in general.

"To be a good artist in the long term, you need to trust your own intuition and instincts," he said. "Whereas academia is based on rational group-think. There is magic and alchemy to art, but academics are always suspicious of the guy who stirs the big black pot."

On the other hand, students can form long attachments during crits. The friendships can combine with critique and form a context within which one can develop one's artistic practice. I think this is obviously true--it's just that it doesn't need the crit to make it happen.

Between the poles of the Auction and the Crit fall the Fair, the Prize, the Studio Visit and the Biennale. There are great observations about the slithery relationship of art and commerce, of collecting and creating, all throughout. The idea, for example, of collecting for the "right reason" (right: love of art, desire to support artists; wrong: speculation, social climbing). The notion of the collector who opens his or her own collection to the public in a purpose-made exhibition space is examined--here we see an intersection again with Thompson. The stated purpose in philanthropic, but as Thornton puts it, "the work of lving artists needs to be pomoted if it is to generate consensus." Hence, the artist benefits from being displayed in Saatchi's gallery, but Saatchi benefits if he helps the artist maintain his reputation.

The odd-chapter out, in my mind, is the chapter on Artforum. Thompson states that art critics are the least influential people in the art world, and lays out a good argument to support this. It is acknowledged in Thornton's book that few people in the art world read art magazines. They look at the pictures. I am guilty of this. I like the reviews in Artforum, but the long articles are almost always tedious. (I always find myself wishing that there more photos!)  Artforum can't survive without dealers, and in a way, the ads the dealers buy are as interesting as the articles. I write this with regret because I'd like the critic to be more important in the greater scheme of things. And I have been really blown away by some of the ideas in Artforum and other art magazines over the years. But the editors must bristle to know that their magazines are primarily illustrated catalogs, a way for dealers to communicate with collectors.

Furthermore, you almost never have writing like Thornton's (or Thompson's) in Artforum. You occasionally have writers who, riffing on Walter Benjamin, discuss in very theoretical terms art and its relationship with capitalism (or "capital," as they like to say). But discussing how an actual work of art actually gets sold is more-or-less verboten, much less the human stories behind these transactions. Thornton's book really foregrounded these human stories, and was really worth reading because of it.