In this uncertain, anxiety-inducing and economically scary time, I had debated suspending blog posting, because quite frankly, most of my creative juice is being directed at still having a career when all my future exhibitions, fairs, workshops and plans have been postponed or cancelled. However, I started to consider how important the arts are at a time like this, how we are all watching more TV than ever, listening to more music, consuming online content at a record rate, and generally seeking comfort in beauty, humour and distraction. Yet, simultaneously, creatives and the self-employed are some of those facing the most daunting financial future as a result of Covid-19 (sorry, I was trying not to mention it, but it really is inevitable).
This got me thinking. Why do we seem to be stuck in a cycle of stereotypical ‘starving artists’, despite the arts being one of the only industry that is consistently growing economically? Is it because the wealth within the arts is still hoarded by the 1%, or because creatives are still expected to work for ‘exposure’ rather than a pay check. I hope that in the coming uncertain months, and once things eventually return to a version of normal, we may emerge with a new found respect for artists, makers and creatives, yet in the meantime, I will continue to ponder the notions of high art, how to measure creative success and why it seems a right of passage to sofa surf and eat beans straight from the tin, if you want to be a real artist.
As such, I wanted to share a chapter from my dissertation (The Price of Priceless: Post-truth understanding and influenced valuation in contemporary fine art) where I discuss auction culture, the effect of branding and notoriety, and generally musing around value, judgement, success, and the elite nature of the fine art world…
Don Thompson explains that “branding is the end result of the experiences a company creates with its customers and the media over a long period of time – and of the clever marketing and public relations that go into creating and reinforcing those experiences.” (2012:12) in this definition, we clearly see the identification of the customer, the company and the public, which have not needed such clear distinction when discussing sentimental or symbolic value because these forms of value “[stand] for a surplus and an assumption of meaning and worth that goes beyond the concrete object used to refer to it” (Graw, 2009:23), basically meaning that symbolic value and sentimentality stem from cultural notions of worth and fluctuating prices in relation to a work and not necessarily the work itself. The identification of the three key players in the world of the branded art market are required however because of their individual financial statuses, and respectively, their roles within the spheres of high art. In her 2009 book High Price, Isabelle Graw discusses the shift in recent times (specifically since the 1960s and 70s) in how we view the relationship between artistic success, fame and financial success. Graw writes that even as recently as 40 years ago, “artists who succeeded commercially had to reckon with a loss of artistic credibility”, however, especially with the ‘success’ of the young British artists (yBas) and the like, there is clearly a correlation between artistic credibility/talent and financial success. Damien Hirst provides us with the perfect example in terms of contemporary controversy, Andreas Gursky is the epitome of this notion in the photography world, and Peter Doig and David Hockney are among the key players in contemporary painting. We must note however, despite these artists’ success and apparent fame and fortune, there remains an enormous disparity between the primary and secondary art markets, and the price tags of certain record breaking artworks do not necessarily translate to the payments the artists receive or the profit they make – if any in the case of Gurskey’s record-breaking The Rhine II (1999). Perhaps this was the motivation behind Hirst’s 2008 solo auction with Sotheby’s, where he circumnavigated the commission rates of private galleries which often exceeds 50%. Olav Velthuis discusses the disparity between these sale values as well as pricing mechanisms and how dealers or auction houses capitalise on an artists’ work in Talking Prices, stating:
when it comes to art, the market alienates artists from their work, their labor, and their public, while failing to recognize artistic values; moreover, through the price mechanism, which supposedly reduces all qualities to quantities, the market commensurates what is considered to be incommensurable. (2005: 3)
In this sense we can reflect on how there is a conflict between art as a form of expression or a passion, art as a business and the confusing crossover. Velthuis also identifies how the market has created a “script of pricing” (2005: 161) for a product which should have a subjective value. This idea of a universality of valuation is uncannily similar to Kant’s notion of a collective understanding of the world where all viewers are made equal through opinion, just as Kant ideas now feel archaic or implausible, the notion of a structure, code or “script” of pricing when it comes to the art market and, respectively the success of an artist becomes unsettling.
Part of Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable 2017
In any case, however we measure the artistic success – either by their bank balance or their recognisability – its presence is not by chance. Quite the contrary; fame, fortune and continued success is attributed to careful, considered branding, by the artist themselves, by their agents, their organisations and the gallery and auction houses that represent them. We could spend months analysing the marketing strategies of such artists and the way in which their publicity teams develop brand imaging and fame/infamy, but here I wish to focus specifically on ‘high art’ and its context within the auction house. It is in this context that art becomes the least about art – potentially with the exception of storage facilities – and primarily about wealth, status and image. In Duty Free Art (2017), Hito Steyerl raises the question of whether art can be deemed a currency and if we are to look at the globalisation of auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s then it seems quite clear that Fine Art has now formed its own currency, unaffected by exchange rates, Brexit negotiations or controversial presidencies, as “a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value.” (Steyerl, 2017:182)
Dirk Boll defines the auction house as “an organized way to sell goods to the public by gathering a potential group of buyers, either virtually or in person, at a particular time and under unified guidance” (2011: 31) however it only takes one look at the figures produced by Christie’s and Sotheby’s most recent auction sale figures – published with pride on their websites – to know that these auctions are not for the public, nor for the faint-hearted. The etiquette and social status surrounding the most famous auction houses have transposed their function from a place to celebrate and engage with the arts, to a spectacle of wealth; a way for the elite to “prove to the rest of the world that they are really rich.” (Thompson, 2012:17). This calls into question once again the notion of taste and how the specificity of aesthetic judgement still revolves around a concept of “disinterestedness” which Kant “strove to distinguish” (Bourdieu, 1989: 5), as well as the socio-culturally rooted idea that class and taste are somehow intertwined, as Pierre Bourdieu identifies through the illustration that those exposed to painting in a familial setting from an early age will adopt a different relationship to art than to those who “discover it belatedly” (1989: 75). Perhaps this is why the art auction has been utilised as a high society, exclusive event where one must prove their claim to a seat at the table – or more appropriately their handle on a paddle. I must stress that my debate here is not with the concept of the auction house, nor with the purchase of contemporary artworks; it is with the way the auction house and the act of purchase within the art world is dramatized and made excessive to the point of hilarity, just as Thompson illustrates in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (2012), the way in which a “protocol in the entry hall” (2012: 19) is employed, how many attendees are there just to “impress their friends” (2012: 20) and how prices are displayed in multiple currencies to “remind everyone what an international event this is” (2012:20). These occurrences are nothing to do with the art itself, and certainly not to do with the prices of the contemporary paintings being sold, they are merely showmanship, either for the public to look yearningly upon, or for the attendees to reassure themselves of their own worth, status and desirability - just as we have explored in relation to self-fulfilling prophecy and self-perpetuating beliefs. This spectacle is an unsettling example of how, as Bourdieu states: “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences” (1989: 7) and how the art market operates as a self-perpetuating, social universe.
Yves Klein is an intrinsic player in the debate surrounding value, understanding and judgement of contemporary painting, and one need only examine a few of his works to see the impact he has on the art world, in terms of commodity, and also how he satirised the valuation of art to enforce a wider of understanding of the post-truth ideologies we experience within contemporary painting valuation. The first example of such work is Klein’s 1957 exhibition, where he presented eleven identical blue monochromatic paintings. Each work was prescribed a different price, which Klein attributed to the “unique spirit” (Howarth, 2000:1) of each piece, and viewers chose and purchased the works subject to their interpretation of this “spirit”. What is interesting here is that there was no question that these works should be priced identically because of the physical and aesthetic similarities, potentially this was due to the “spirit” of each work resonating with each viewer in a different way, but more likely this is down to the notoriety of Klein and his unique brand of art. Because of human immanence – more now than at the time of the original exhibition, because of connectivity and technological overload – it is impossible to tell if these works were judged on their aesthetic value, as we can assume that all those attending the exhibition had at least some knowledge of Klein’s work, or alternatively, were influenced to purchase by their peers attending the exhibition. Arthur Danto raises the query of the distinction between the meaning (what the work is about) and the physical view of it when he presents the view of an exhibition of blank, primed canvases in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto declares that when presented with seemingly identical works, particularly those that are untitled “we must go outside the objects and into the atmosphere of their ontological status, and seek criteria underdetermined by their retinal indiscrimination” to “settle the matter of their differentiation” (1974: 140). As such, we see that Danto is also aware of the judgement of an artwork outside of its physical description and the way the artist has chosen to title or present it visually. Surely then, if the differentiation of artworks is key, we are once again reliant on a definition of the correctness of a view of an artwork and hence its value, both financial and sentimental, as such, the judgement of an artwork based on its physical attributes alone is null, because an artwork can no longer be purely physical, it stands “at a distance from reality” (1974: 142).
David Hockney’s record breaking Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972
A similar phenomenon to that of Klein’s pricing structure occurs in the auction house, not only through the physical act of bidding and the human instinct to win, but, as Thompson explores when comparing the psychology of Sotheby’s and Christie’s running consecutive auction nights: “an uncertain bidder is doubly persuaded… The unsuccessful bidder at the first auction may be an even more determined bidder at the second” (2012:21). Put plainly, the influence of peer- or societal pressure can have nearly as much influence as branding or external influence when it comes to the physical purchase of art, linking directly to our desire to be right and knowledgeable; discussed when examining the ‘backfire effect’.
Another Klein work which tackles similar notions of value, influence and purchase/ownership, is his 1959 work Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, in which Klein sold certificates of ownership of empty spaces; on the walls of a building, as square meters of sky above the patron’s head. To complete the exchange, Klein would ask the buyer to burn the document, and half of the gold they paid with would be thrown into the river Seine. The notion of ritual here, directly reflects that of the auction house I have discussed above, yet potentially more interesting is the concept of purchasing an invisible, untouchable artwork. With Klein’s work, this is a conceptual part of the piece, intended to comment on the materiality of art, it’s fluctuating value and concern of authorship, however, in the contemporary art market, we see this notion of an invisible artwork purchase being transferred into a much more disturbing practice. Don Thompson investigates the notoriety of The Gagosian art house and writes how “in about a quarter of cases, clients say ‘I’ll take it’ without ever asking ‘what does it look like? Or ‘How much?’” (2012:38), illustrating the way in which high end galleries and auction houses understand their clients are not even interested in the physicality, aesthetic, meaning or concept of the art, they are instead, concerned with fame, branding and reputation and will happily be the consumers who devour the produce of such galleries that are “selling status as art” (Thompson, 2012:33).
In regards to sentimental and symbolic value, we often attribute the value of a painting to our knowledge of the style, subject or colour, however we also make these associations based on our knowledge of the artist, and the branding of this author. Graw writes that “for an artwork to be valuable it must first be attributed to an author – one could say that it is thereby loaded with intentionality.” (2016: 97), this idea of authorship, value and intentionality prescribes a contemporary ideology of artistic practice which revolves solely around the viewing, reading and understanding of an artwork, based on what the viewer is told it means, and how much it is worth; both economically and conceptually. This manner of understanding is an epitome of contemporary post-truth art critique and exemplifies the nature in which prehension (Whitehead, 1935) is now void in the contemporary culture of visual understanding. Overwhelmingly, the question is why this new approach to valuation and understanding has occurred. Evidently, factors like the backfire effect, urbanization, post-truth ideologies, commodification of the arts and a reliance on status and wealth have all contributed. As we have moved away from Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” (1967), we are now approaching a judgement of art which has circumnavigated appropriation, non-authorship, the readymade and truth, to arrive at a new mode of critique which requires no pure truth, no reality and no individual perceptive code, but is informed entirely by external data, and now, we cannot see the wood for the trees in terms of our own opinions, and have no other choice but to be informed and led – both consciously and subconsciously – by others, or society as a whole.