Theodor Adorno//Carl Andre//Michael Asher//

Jack Bankowsky//Jean Baudrillard//Joseph Beuys//

Luc Boltanski//Pierre Bourdieu//Martin Braathen//
Malcolm Bull//Ian Bum//Maurizio Cattelan//
J J Charlesworth//Eve Chiapello//Sophie Cras//
Anthony Davies//Thierry de Duve//Ruth Diehl//
Dietmar Elger//Marvin Elkoff//Elmgreen & Dragset//
Simon Ford//Hal Foster//Andrea Fraser//Peter Fuller//
Melanie Gilligan//William Grampp//Josh Greenfeld//
Guerrilla Girls//Hans Haacke//Jens Hoffmann//
Michel Houellebecq//Miwon Kwon//Kate Linker//
Liu Ding//Lu Peng//Werner Muensterberger//Ahmet
Ogut//Ursula Pasero//Scott Rothkopf//Charles
Saatchi//Peter Schjeldahl//Thomas Seelig//Tino
Sehgal//Richard Serra//Marc Shell//Georg Simmel//
Barbara Hermstein Smith//Marc Spiegler//Nick
Stillman//Wolfgang Ullrich//Karen van den Berg//
Thorstein Veblen//Olov Velthuis//Dorothea von
Hantelmann//Andy Warhol//Harrison & Cynthia
White//Fred Wilson//Tom Wolfe//Thomas
Zaunschirm//Zhou Tiehai

The Market
Documents of Contemporary Art
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Ldhitechapel Galery
Documents of Contemporary Art

In recent decades artists have progressively expanded the boundaries of art as

they have sought to engage with an increasingly pluralistic environment.
Teaching, curating and understanding of art and visual culture are likewise no
longer grounded in traditional aesthetics but centred on significant ideas, topics
and themes ranging from the everyday to the uncanny, the psychoanalytical to
the political.
The Documents of Contemporary Art series emerges from this context. Each
volume focuses on a specific subject or body of writing that has been of key
influence in contemporary art internationally. Edited and introduced by a scholar,
artist, critic or curator, each of these source books provides access to a plurality
of voices and perspectives defining a significant theme or tendency.
For over a century the Whitechapel Gallery has offered a public platform for
art and ideas. In the same spirit, each guest editor represents a distinct yet diverse
approach - rather than one institutional position or school of thought - and has
conceived each volume to address not only a professional audience but all
interested readers.

Series Editor: Iwona Blazwick; Commissioning Editor: Ian Farr; Project Editor: Sarah Auld; Editorial
Advisory Board: Roger Conover, Neil Cummings, Mark Francis, David Jenkins, Kirsty Ogg, Magnus af
Petersens, Gilane Tawadros
IF ARTISTS
WERE IN

IN 1946, NOW
THEY ARE IN

Allan Kaprow, 'The Artist as a Man ol the* World', l% 4

mm
INTRODUCTION//Q12

VALUE//022
PATRONAGE//048
INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS//CJ84
CRITIQUE//132
BUSINESS ART//182

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES//226
BIBLIOGRAPHY/228
INDEX//234
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS//24C)
VALUE
Georg Simmel Value and Money, 1900//024
Theodor Adomo Aesthetic Theory, 1970//027
Barbara Hermstein Smith Contingencies of Value:
Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, 1988//029
William Grampp Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists
and Economics, 1989//031
Marc Shell Art and Money, 1995//035
Thomas Zaunschirm The Art of Making Money,
2002//039
Wolfgang Ullrich Icons of Capitalism: How Prices
Make Art, 2009//040
Malcolm Bull The Two Economies of World Art,
2011//042

PATRONAGE
Thorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class,
1899//050
Tom Wolfe Bob and Spike, 1968//053
Jean Baudrillard The Art Auction: Sign Exchange
and Sumptuary Value, 1981//057
Werner Muensterberger Collecting: An Unruly Passion,
1994//059
Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke Free Exchange,
1994//061
Richard Serra The Yale Lecture, 1990//063
Fred Wilson Mining the Museum in Me, 2001//064
Elmgreen & Dragset The Collectors, 2009//066
Melanie Gilligan Hedge Fund, 2007//068
J J Charlesworth Bonfire of the Vanities, 2007//070
Andrea Fraser L’1%, C’est Moi, 2011//076
Charles Saatchi The Hideousness of the Art World,
2011//083
INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS
Harrison and Cynthia White Canvases and Careers:
Institutional Change in the French Painting World,
1965//086
Marvin Elkoff The American Painter as a Blue Chip,
1965//088
Josh Greenfeld Sort of the Svengali of Pop, 1966//093
Peter Fuller The £sd of Art, 1970//103
Guerrilla Girls Code of Ethics for Art Museums,
1989//107
Simon Ford and Anthony Davies Art Capital, 1998//108
Martin Braathen The Commercial Significance of the
Exhibition Space, 2007//113
Peter Schjeldahl Temptations of the Fair: Miami Virtue
and Vice, 2006//119
Olav Velthuis The Venice Effect, 2011//121
Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero Large-Scale Art
Fabrication and the Currency of Attention, 2012//126

CRITIQUE
Miwon Kwon Exchange Rate: On Obligation and
Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960s and After,
2003//134
Sophie Cras Art as an Investment and Artistic
Stockholding: Experiments in the 1960s, 2013//139
Michael Asher September 21-October 12,1974. Claire
Copley Gallery, Inc., Los Angeles, California,
1983//145
Ian Burn The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation,
1975//149
Carl Andre Answers in My Disorder, 1976//153
Joseph Beuys What is Money?, 1984//153
Thierry de Duve Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the
Proletarians, 1988//155
Kate Linker Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures
of Barbara Kruger, 1990//156
Dietmar Eiger Behind the Art Scene with Louise Lawler,
1994//159
Zhou Tiehai New Listing, Zhou Tiehai, Rises on Debut
before Reaching Fair Value, 1997//162
Marc Spiegler Museum-Quality Leftovers: Nedko
Solakov, 2005//163
Nick Stillman Reena Spaulings: An Art Brand,
2006//165
Jens Hoffmann When Attitudes Become Commodities
(Become Attitudes), 2007//168
Ruth Diehl Christian Jankowski and the Art Business:
Motif and Strategy, 2008//170
Tino Sehgal and Maurizio Cattelan Economics
of Progress, 2009//172
Ahmet Ogut In Conversation with Murat Alat, 2010//176
Liu Ding Liu Ding’s Store, 2012//180

BUSINESS ART
Andy Warhol The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:
From A to B and Back Again, 1975//184
LuPeng Heading Towards the Market, 1992//184
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello The New Spirit
of Capitalism, 1999//187
Thomas Seelig The Photographic Experience
of Commodities, 2002//189
Jack Bankowsky Tent Community, 2005//191
Hal Foster The Medium is the Market, 2008//198
Scott Rothkopf Takashi Murakami: Company Man,
2007//205
Dorothea von Hantelmann Why Koons?, 2009//217
Michel Houellebecq The Map and the Territory,
2011//223
Industry, commercialism
and the bourgeois are very
much with us. This whole
notion of trying to form
a cult that transcends all
this strikes me as a kind
of religion-in-drag, you
might say. I ’m just bored
with it, frankly

Robert Sm ithson, 'On Ducham p' - Interview with M oira Roth, A rt forum , O ctober 1973
Natasha Degen
Introduction//Value-Added Art

The market - that network of interdependent actors and institutions that produce,
circulate and consume art - has never before been so prominent or expansive. In
the decade from 1998 to 2008, worldwide auction sales of contemporary art
ballooned from $48 million to over $1.3 billion, constituting a more than eightfold
rise in the sector’s market share, from 1.8 per cent to 15.9 per cent of the global fine
art trade.1 By 2012, post-war and contemporary art represented 33 per cent of the
auction market with just over $3 billion in sales.2 Whereas the Impressionist and
modem art sector was once the cornerstone of the art market (just think of the
ebullient 1980s), it is now ceding its prominence to contemporary art, which,
unlike work of earlier periods, boasts a theoretically infinite supply.
Collectors’ heightened interest in contemporary art has coincided with the
globalization, deregulation and financialization of the world economy - and,
more pertinently, its resultant wealth creation. For nouveaux riches - those whom
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu characterizes as having abundant economic capital
but deficient cultural capital - the acquisition of art is doubly beneficial. Not only
does it offer the advantages of luxury good consumption (i.e. ‘honorific’
conspicuous consumption), it also conveys aesthetic sophistication. Contemporary
art is conspicuous without the requirement of connoisseurship; the attributes
ascribed to it - progressiveness, innovation, audacity - appeal to the self-made;
its relatively low price points (except at the sector’s highest strata) feed into the
perception of its speculative potential. Moreover, as a tangible asset that can be
traded in any currency, art is seen as a hedge against inflation and currency
devaluation. Collected by American financiers, Russian oligarchs, Emirati royals
and Chinese tycoons, contemporary art is especially useful in this respect; a kind
of aesthetic lingua franca, it does not rely on any one market. Its infrastructure
has proliferated globally - in the form of biennials, MoCAs, art fairs, mega-gallery
showrooms, and auction house outposts - and each year, according to a 2013
report by the art market information service Artprice, over a million dollars’
worth of contemporary art is offered at auction in 40 cities, both established
centres and parvenus, including Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Hangzhou,
Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei
and Tokyo.3 These developments are fostering a homogenization of taste. ‘While
wealthy Belgians used to spend their money differently from wealthy Indonesians’,
writer and sociologist Sarah Thornton explains, ‘this is decreasingly the case.’4
The growth of the market undoubtedly has influenced artistic practice -

12//INTRODUCTION
 encouraging the creation of digestible, eye-catching, commercially-attuned
work, expanding the possibilities of production, morphing studios into business
enterprises, and enabling artists to exist more like philosophers than craftsmen.5
The market has also become a subject of art; it is a force to be resisted, derided,
exploited and embraced.
The five sections that comprise this book - Value, Patronage, Institutions and
Networks, Critique and Business Art - are designed to offer a broad,
interdisciplinary introduction to the evolution of the art market, its relation to
value, and its effect on artistic practice. Recent years have seen a renewed
interest in the subject, as evidenced by manifold exhibitions and publications,
including journalistic accounts, investment guides, institutional histories,
works of cultural economics and studies in the sociology of art. All too often,
however, these works remain confined to their respective disciplines. This
volume brings artists, economists, art historians, sociologists, journalists,
philosophers and even the odd novelist into conversation.
The first section, Value, features a polyphony of perspectives on the interplay
between aesthetic and exchange value. The two values are widely regarded as
separate and exclusive, but this section contends that they are in some ways
analogous. The selection that opens the book, from sociologist Georg Simmers
fin-de-siecle tome The Philosophy o f Money, is predicated on the idea that the
distance between subject and object establishes value; the rarer the object, the
more restrictive its price, the more difficult it is to obtain, the greater its
economic value. The universal significance of distance, according to Simmel,
links economic and aesthetic valuation: ‘When I call an object beautiful, its
quality and significance become much more independent of the arrangements
and the needs of the subject than if it is merely useful’, he writes.6 Such detached
regard, where the subject is not interested in the object itself but in the way it
stimulates one’s faculties, produces value - via a state of appreciation - distinct
from a utilitarian satisfaction of needs. Significantly, this distance does not
provoke alienation but desire. In the next extract, from Theodor Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory, the narrowing of the distance between the viewer and the
artwork is treated as symptomatic of the ‘de-aestheticization’ of art and,
ultimately, the convergence of the artwork and the commodity. In an age of
overproduction and obsolescence, Adorno affirms, the commodity’s use-value
declines in importance relative to its symbolic value (prestige), whereas the
artwork becomes increasingly commodified and heteronomous.
To consider a work of art in economic terms is to invite accusations of
pragmatic instrumentality and crass materialism. Yet, as the authors included
here assert, artificially to exclude economics from this discourse is to obscure the
dynamics of value. Extracts from literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s

Degen//Value-Added Art//13
1988 book Contingencies o f Value and economist William Grampp’s 1989 book
Pricing the Priceless critique the segregation of art from economics and describe
value as the product of a radically contingent economic system. Price, Grampp
posits, is the best metric of an artwork’s value (as a distillation of all other kinds
of value: intrinsic, aesthetic and symbolic). The commodification of art engenders
the creation of indices and databases that measure art’s symbolic and exchange
value - by ranking artists by reputation and fame (e.g. Kunstkompass or Artfacts),
by charting prices achieved at auction (e.g. the Times-Sotheby Index or Artprice),
or by gauging market confidence (e.g. ArtTactic). Inspired by the innovative
methodologies pioneered in world literary studies by Pascale Casanova and
Franco Moretti, Malcolm Bull employs such data to map world art. Other texts
included in this section hold that art is less like a commodity and more like
money itself, with common characteristics and equivalent affective qualities:
Literary critic Marc Shell claims that art and money share an internal logic, both
being auratic, representational practices. In both cases, art historian Thomas
Zaunschirm adduces, the final authority is the recipient: money that a national
bank has not yet issued is worthless; yet, in the event that it is stolen, it becomes
commensurate with the money that has been regularly issued and circulated.
Similarly, art relies on the trust and confidence of its users, attaining value
through the recognition of the art world. According to art historian Wolfgang
Ullrich, if the yearning for the sublime is the hallmark of modern art, high and
especially record prices - being astonishing and incomprehensible - most
effectively evince art’s sublimity and ‘otherness’.
Patronage opens with an extract from Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 analysis of the
consumption patterns of the socio-economic elite, The Theory o f the Leisure Class,
in which the economist and sociologist introduces two influential concepts:
conspicuous consumption - the ostentatious display of wealth to acquire status
or prestige - and pecuniary canons of taste - a term that relates taste to the
conflation of price and value. (‘[Any] valuable object in order to appeal to our
sense of beauty must conform to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness
both’, he writes.)7 Although Veblen does not specifically mention art, his
treatment of consumption as a means of accruing social and symbolic capital
sets the stage for this section. Tom Wolfe’s portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull
lampoons the collectors as aspirational and grasping, but also offers a
contemporary vision of Veblenian social positioning. A text by Elmgreen &
Dragset on The Collectors, the artistic duo’s contribution to the 2009 Venice
Biennale, presents artworks as signifiers of class and identity. For this project,
the duo transformed the Nordic and Danish pavilions into two faux-residences
- a middle-class family home and a gay bachelor pad - replete with coded art,
furniture and decorative objects. Theorist Jean Baudrillard and psychoanalyst

14//INTRODUCTION
Werner Muensterberger both turn their attentions to the art auction as a site of
agonistic competition. The function of the auction, according to Baudrillard, is
the production of a community of privileged peers, defined not only by purchasing
power but by the sumptuary and collective act of exchanging sign values. For
Baudrillard, the collector’s unique, fetishist passion for the artwork is established
on his recognition as a peer, whereas, for Muensterberger, it is derived from
individual emotional and experiential conditions.
Patronage evolves with the economy. In the post-war period, as corporations
grew in size, corporate art collections proliferated. Excerpts from a dialogue
between Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke and a lecture by Richard Serra present
corporate patronage as a potential threat to art’s autonomy. (Fred Wilson
expresses a similar apprehension of the distortion art undergoes when it is
appropriated by an individual or institution; when an artwork becomes part of a
collection, he explains, its meaning changes, becoming more about the collector
than the artist.) More recently, the financialization of the economy coincided
with the influx of bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity executives to
the art market; globalization begot the rise of collectors from emerging
economies; income inequality contributed to the increased participation of high
net worth individuals. Critic 1) Charlesworth and artists Melanie Gilligan and
Andrea Fraser detail these demographic shifts and note the complicity of artists;
the ‘avant-garde’ are now more like their patrons - in terms of their socio­
economic and educational backgrounds - than ever before.
Art’s distribution and legitimation systems - comprising the commercial
gallery, the museum, the art press, the auction house, the biennial and the art fair
- are the subject of the third section. Institutions and Networks begins with an
extract from Harrison and Cynthia White’s seminal study of the demise of the
Salon and the rise of the dealer-critic system in nineteenth-century France.
Although the present system of distribution traces its origins to this historical
moment, the model was greatly refined and expanded after the Second World
War. In the late 1950s, Peter Wilson of Sotheby’s transformed wholesale auctions
into glamorous evening galas and dealers such as Leo Castelli evinced a new kind
of professionalism, commercial savvy and public relations acumen. (Myth­
making, Castelli says in a 1966 article excerpted here, cannot be ‘adequate’; it
demands considerable resources.) For the first time, the avant-garde became
wealthy and widely-lauded, as the 1965 article The American Painter as a Blue
Chip’ attests. The usage of ‘blue chip’ - a term that refers to high-value stocks of
well-established companies with stable earnings and no extensive liabilities -
suggests that contemporary American art was perceived as a relatively safe
investment. Not unlike today, the expansion of the market in the 1960s presented
an opportunity for profit; by 1970, the critic Peter Fuller was documenting the

Degen//Value-Added Art//15
emergence of art funds and other art investment vehicles. His piece The £sd of
Art’ is included in this section.
If institutions, in the words of anthropologist Mary Douglas, ‘systematically
direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms compatible
with the relations they authorize’, then the integration, cooperation and
ideological unity of art world actors can be viewed as evidence of art’s
institutionalization.8 By emphasizing both the objecthood and the autonomy of
art, these actors enhance art’s exchange (rather than social) value and enable its
withdrawal and reification, thus perpetuating the art industry. The ambiguous
ethics of this synergetic and self-validating system are manifest in the Guerrilla
Girls’ ‘Code of Ethics for Art Museums’, whose satiric ten commandments ‘bear
direct resemblance to real events at US art museums’.9 The complot between
commercial and non-commercial players is explored by sociologist Olav Velthuis
in a text on the relationship between the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest
biennial exhibition of contemporary art, and Art Basel, one of its most established
and prestigious art fairs. Venice - with its ban on commerce, its emphasis on
young talent, its preference for less-commodifiable media such as installation
and video art, and its proximity to Basel (being held a week or two in advance of
the fair) - exerts a strong influence on the market. Because the legitimacy of
validating institutions (e.g. the biennial) is related to their apparent objectivity,
the boundary between commercial and non-commercial activity appears starkly
defined and strictly policed. In reality, the lines are blurred: Martin Braathen
draws parallels between displays in the museum, the commercial gallery and the
department store; Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero observe that the studios
of Ai Weiwei, Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Paul
McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Tobias Rehberger, Anselm Reyle, Tomas Saraceno
and others now resemble those of large architectural practices, industrial
workshops and corporate advertising agencies.
The fourth section, Critique, presents a spectrum of artists’ critical reactions
to the market since the 1960s. The post-war expansion of the art market caused
unease; the anxiety of the ‘power of market values to distort all other values’ is
expressed by conceptual artist Ian Burn in the first selection.10The ‘dematerialized’
visual experiments of the 1960s and 70s - including conceptual art, Land art,
Happenings, performance, process art and activist art - were understood as anti­
establishment efforts to demythologize and decommodify the artwork.11
However, according to a text by art historian Miwon Kwon, this shift from art as
product to art as idea or art as action mirrored the shift of the economy towards
services, information and ‘experience’. (Artists’ ‘reifications of abstract relations
to production as stockshares, contracts, liens, options and paper money’, to
borrow Minimalist artist Carl Andre’s words, were not ‘anti-bourgeois’; they

16//INTRODUCTION
followed the logic of financial markets, currency exchange and interest rates.)'2
Thus the radicality of dematerialized art does not lie in its subversion of the
commodity form, Kwon claims, but in the alternative models of exchange it
proposes - in particular that of the gift economy.
Joseph Beuys’ slogans ‘Art = Capital’ and ‘Creativity = Capital’ serve as a
shorthand for his activist, anti-capitalist aesthetic practice - a social concept of
art that attempted to transcend the narrow confines of the institutionalized art
world. This utopian vision was represented allegorically in his 1981 work Raum
90.000 DM, which consisted of five disused industrial drums and a copper bathtub
filled with sulphuric acid. The bathtub and its corrosive contents were enveloped
in a layer of clay and branded with the work’s price (the 90,000 Deutsche Marks
of its title). As art historian Thierry de Duve explains here, Beuys, ‘who understood
materials like no other’, knew the clay would contract and end up cracking, giving
the appearance of the font of creativity (the bathtub) breaking free o f ‘its sheath
of reification’.13 In contradistinction to Beuys’ vitalism is the cool, critical attitude
of works produced between the mid 1970s and mid 1980s by the New York
‘Pictures Generation’, such as Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler - both of whom
are discussed in this section. Kruger’s collages, with their pithy, declarative
captions, verbalizing unspoken truths, and Lawler’s photographs of collectors’
homes with artworks in situ both lay bare the mechanisms of the market.
In recent years, artists have responded in various ways to the market’s
commodifying thrust and their presumed complicity as producers. Reena
Spaulings, the artist collective spawned by New York gallery Reena Spaulings
Fine Art, exposes the art world’s appetite for marketable personalities and
saleable radicality.14Tino Sehgal challenges the conventions of the art economy
by rejecting any material exchange.15 Liu Ding uses the model of a shop to probe
the creation of value in the art world: series of artworks become ‘product lines’;
everything of value - tangible or intangible - is assigned a price.16 Two texts
concern the exhibition as a site of institutional critique: Nedko Solakov’s 2005
exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich, titled ‘Leftovers: A Selection of My Unsold
Pieces from the Private Galleries I Work With’, exclusively featured unsold
work, culled from his dealers’ storerooms. By forcing the museum to collaborate
openly with commercial galleries, by lavishing attention on ‘inferior’,
‘unsuccessful’ works, and by undermining the museum’s auratic function, it
confronted a number of taboos. When Jens Hoffmann was asked to curate a
group show for a commercial gallery in 2007, he organized an exhibition of
over two dozen international artists whose practice addresses the role of the
art object in the marketplace. Yet Hoffmann’s caveat - that all of the artworks
had to be sold together rather than individually and maintained as an indivisible
group - ensured that business would not proceed as usual.

Degen//Value-Added Art//17
 Where does critique end and complicity begin? Practitioners of what critic
Jack Bankowsky identifies as ‘Art Fair Art’ use the fair as a platform to counter,
complicate, defamiliarize and parody its mercantile machinations. Although
institutional critique is a clear antecedent, Art Fair Art, according to Bankowsky,
‘is predicated on the realization that art, particularly art that presumes to stand
in some critical - or better, simply revealing - relationship to the institutions to
which it is bound, cannot exist at a supposedly purifying distance from the point-
of-purchase universe.’17 By bringing its artists visibility and luring critics to the
fair, it serves as an effective value-adding strategy for both.
However, Business Art, the organizing principle of the fifth and final section,
goes beyond complicity; here the market is a medium of art. In 1975 - the same
year as Ian Burn’s anti-market call-to-action - Andy Warhol declared that
‘Business Art is the step that comes after Art’, ‘making money is art’, and ‘good
business is the best art’.18(Inevitably, this section opens with an excerpt from The
Philosophy o f Andy Warhol.) At various points, Warhol’s brand included a
magazine, a television studio, a rock band, books, B-movies and celebrity
endorsements. Yet, as critic and curator Scott Rothkopf notes, Andy Warhol
Enterprises was perhaps ‘less like a proper commercial endeavour than a
glamorous house of cards buttressed by the sale of its figurehead’s paintings’.19
His epigones, latter-day artist-entrepreneurs such as Damien Hirst and Takashi
Murakami, studied his tactics (don’t be afraid of making money, embrace yourself
as a brand, do editions, strike a balance between populism and exclusivity) and
quickly surpassed the master.
The success of Business Art is reliant on the artist-brand. A branded
commodity appeals to consumers’ desire for individuality and distinction, yet it
submits to the uniformity of the brand-identity, bolstering the brand’s recognition
value. Andreas Gursky’s large-scale photographic works, curator Thomas Seelig
suggests, operate in a similar way. Although each image captures a unique subject
and a singular moment, each conforms to a signature ‘look’ - that of cold,
impartial precision. For instance, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (1997), which
graces the cover of this book, flattens the frenetic activity of the market floor into
an edgeless pattern of collective existence. Despite their diversity, all of Gursky’s
subjects - among them, North Korea’s mass games, a tiled floor, Formula 1 pit
stops, a German asparagus farm - are given the same abstract, deadening
treatment; the sublimity of Niagara Falls (Niagara Falls, 1989) is equated with the
banality of beige carpet ( Untitled 1 (Carpet), 1993). Unsurprisingly, given his
brand recognition value, Gursky is the world’s most expensive photographer.
New collectors in particular are drawn to branded art; for the unseasoned and
uncertain, overwhelmed by the pluralism and inaccessibility of contemporary
art, brands are reassuring.20 Spectacular, accessible and immediate, such art has

18//INTRODUCTION
the same seductive quality as lurid advertising. An essay by art historian Dorothea
von Hantelmann characterizes Jeff Koons’ oeuvre as polemically inclusive and
inviting. Rejecting the avant-garde’s anti-bourgeois historical position, Koons
aims to empower the viewer; his universal and universally-pleasant motifs
(hearts, flowers, jewelled rings, inflatable toys, etc.) do not require an art
education or a specific cultural background. Moreover, the monumental scale of
a Koons, the opulent materiality of a Hirst and the detached, god-like perspective
of a Gursky embellish collectors’ egos. The spate of new collectors has only
enhanced this genre’s brand equity. When Damien Hirst bypassed his dealers
and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s in 2 0 0 8,39 per cent
of the buyers had never bought contemporary art before and 24 per cent of them
were new to Sotheby’s.21 It was a cross-branding triumph.
The dichotomy of money and art - derived from the Christian separation of
the material and the spiritual, perpetuated by the institutional disunion of the
commercial and the non-commercial - has a different history in non-Western
societies. In a text from 1992, Chinese critic Lu Peng welcomes the arrival of the
art market, proclaiming that ‘art ought to be produced for the purpose of sale’.22
This enthusiasm may reflect that, in post-socialist China, an economic system
for art promised autonomy from the communist system of state sponsorship
and institutional affiliation. Murakami - that conspicuous double agent of high
and low - situates his practice within the Japanese aesthetic tradition, which
makes little distinction between fine art and mass culture. As Rothkopf writes,
Murakami ‘gets to play both Walt Disney and Roy Lichtenstein’, using the same
modelling company to manufacture his ‘original’ sculptures and his Japanese
shokugan (literally, ‘snack toy’) figurines.23 Murakami’s constellation of
commercial activities - from his multinational corporate empire, Kaikai Kiki
Co., Ltd., to his collaboration with Louis Vuitton - best exemplify the recent
convergence of art and business. Not only has commerce been incorporated
into artistic practice, but, according to Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s
influential 1999 book The New Spirit o f Capitalism, managerial discourse has
assimilated artistic attitudes and attributes. An extract from Michel
Houellebecq’s 2010 novel The Map and the Territory concludes this section and
the book. Its title, based on semanticist Alfred Korzybski’s aphorism that ‘the
map is not the territory’, alludes to the relationship between representation
and reality. Appropriately, its protagonist, called Jed Martin, is an artist. The
reader first encounters Jed at work on Je ff Koons and Damien Hirst Dividing Up
the Art Market, a quasi-history painting mythologizing the moment when Hirst
replaced Koons as the number one selling contemporary artist in the world.
The canvas, of course, is a representation, but its subjects - or, rather, their
branded personae - are also abstractions. The art world’s ‘reality’ is highly

Degen//Vcdue-Added Art//19
mediated, and its favour contingent. As Jed’s dealer later tells him, ‘we’re at a
point where success in market terms justifies and validates anything, replacing
all the theories. No one is capable of seeing further, absolutely no one.’24

1 Noah Horowitz, The Art o f the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 2011) 8.
2 Georgina Adam, ‘The Art Market: Sparky sales and circuit breakers’, The Financial Times (28
December 2012). Although the auction market is not representative o f the entire art trade, its
results are public, unlike gallery sales. Auction sales thus act as a market bellwether. Economist
Clare McAndrew also estimates that post-war and contemporary art was the largest art market
sector in 2012, although she assigns it a 43 per cent share by value, with ju st under 4.5 billion
Euros in sales - its highest ever recorded level. (Clare McAndrew, The Global Art Market, with a
Focus on China and Brazil [Helvoirt: The European Fine Art Foundation, 2013])
3 'The art market in 2012: The emergence of Asia as a decentralizing and liberalizing factor in the
art market’, Artprice (29 January 2013).
4 Sarah Thornton, T h e art of recession-dodging’, The Guardian (5 February 2012).
5 The last clause is a paraphrase of a quote by museum director and former dealer Jeffrey Deitch:
‘We’re in a post-conceptual era where it’s really the artist’s idea and vision that are prized, rather
than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today our understanding of an artist
is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.’ (Mia Fineman, ‘Looks Brilliant on Paper. But Who,
Exactly. Is Going to Make It?’. The New York Times. 7 May 2006.) See also Diana Crane, ‘Reflections
on the Global Art Market: Implications for the Sociology of Culture’, Sociedade e Estado, vol. 24,
no. 2 (May 2009).
6 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy o f Money (1907), ed. David Frisby (London and New York:
Routledge, 2 0 0 4 ) 74.
7 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory o f the Leisure Class (1899) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 87.
8 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986) 92.
9 Guerrilla Girls, Confessions o f the Guerrilla Girls (London: Pandora, 1995) 63.
10 Ian Burn, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’ (1975), in Alexander Alberro and Blake
Stimson, eds, Conceptual A rt: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
1999) 320; reprinted in this volume. 14 9 -5 2 .
11 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International, vol. 12. no. 2
(February 1968); Barbara Rose. ‘Why Read Art Criticism?’, New York Magazine (3 March 1969).
12 Carl Andre. ‘Answers in my Disorder’, in Carl Andre and Jerem y Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘Commodity and
Contradiction, or, Contradiction as Commodity’, October, vol. 2 (Summer 1976) 103; extract
reprinted in this volume, 153; see also Sophie Cras, ‘Art as an Investment and Artistic
Shareholding Experiments in the 1960s', American Art, vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013); extract
reprinted in this volume. 1 3 9 -4 4 .
13 Thierry de Duve, ‘Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians’, October, vol. 45 (Summer 1988)
61; extract reprinted in this volume. 155-6.

2 ©//INTRODUCTION
14 Collaborative creation has ideological currency within an art market o f ‘unique’ luxury objects
and branded personae. Bernadette Corporation and Madeln Company are two apposite

examples.
15 Even painters have attempted to dematerialize their practice. Both Richard Wright and Liu
Xiaodong have held exhibitions in commercial spaces w here they painted directly on the
gallery walls, foregoing canvas and demanding that their works be whitewashed at the
exhibition’s conclusion.
16 Other artists share Liu Ding’s interest in ways in which a work o f art accrues value: for his
ongoing project Uncertain Capital (2 009 to the present), Wang Sishun melts coins into an ingot
and sells the object, converting the profit into coins o f equivalent value; these are melted down
again and sold, ad infinitum. As the market system takes its course, the resulting object becomes

incrementally bigger and bigger. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau create interactive
installations to investigate how value accumulates. For The Value o f Art (2010), they bought a
painting at auction and then embedded sensors within it to measure how long viewers stand in
front of the canvas. They also installed an integrated billing machine to continuously update the
work’s price, combining information about its purchase and production costs with the amount
of attention it receives.
17 Jack Bankowsky, T ent Community: Jack Bankowsky on Art Fair Art’, Artforum (October 2005)
23 0 ; reprinted in this volume. 191-8.
18 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy o f Andy Warhol (From A t o B and Back Again) (London: Cassell. 1975)

92.
19 Scott Rothkopf, ‘Takashi Murakami: Company Man’, in Paul Schimmel, ed., © MURAKAMI, exh.
cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum o f Contemporary Art, 2007) 157; extracts reprinted in this
volume. 2 0 5 -1 7 ; see also Allison Unruh, ‘Interview with Vincent Fremont’, in Allison Unruh and
Sarah Urist Green, Andy Warhol Enterprises, exh. cat. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2010).
20 See the chapter ‘Branding and insecurity’, in Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The
Curious Economics o f Contemporary Art and Auction Houses (London: Aurum Press, 2008).
21 ‘Hands up for Hirst’, The Economist (9 September 2010). Even though the sale commenced the
same day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, it achieved a total o f £111.5 million, with a sell-
through rate o f 97 per cent.
22 Lii Peng, ‘Heading Toward the Market’ (1992) in Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese A rt: Primary
Documents (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010) 290; extract reprinted in this volume,
184-6.
23 Rothkopf (2007), op. cit., 134.
24 Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le territoire (2010), trans. Gavin Bowd, The Map and the Territory
(London: William Heinemann, 2011) 129; extract reprinted in this volume, 2 2 3 -4 .

Degen//Value-Added Art//21
VALUE
Georg Simmel
Value and Money//1900

[...] I would like to show the universal significance of distance for supposedly
objective valuation, by an example that has nothing to do with economic values
and which, therefore, illustrates the general principle, namely aesthetic valuation.
What we call the enjoyment of the beauty of things developed relatively late. For
no matter how much immediate sensual enjoyment may exist even today in the
individual case, the specific quality of aesthetic enjoyment is the ability to
appreciate and enjoy the object, not simply an experience of sensual or supra-
sensual stimulation. Every cultivated person is able to make a clear distinction in
principle between the aesthetic and the sensual enjoyment of female beauty,
even though he may not be able to draw the line between these components of
his impression on a particular occasion. In the one case we surrender to the
object, while in the other case the object surrenders to us. Even though aesthetic
value, like any other value, is not an integral part of the object but is rather a
projection of our feelings, it has the peculiarity that the projection is complete.
In other words, the content of the feeling is, as it were, absorbed by the object
and confronts the subject as something which has autonomous significance,
which is inherent in the object.
What was the historical psychological process in which this objective aesthetic
pleasure in things emerged, given that primitive enjoyment, which was the basis
for any more refined appreciation, must have been tied to direct subjective
satisfaction and utility? Perhaps we can find a clue in a very simple observation.
If an object of any kind provides us with great pleasure or advantage we experience
a feeling of joy at every later viewing of this object, even if any use or enjoyment
is now out of the question. This joy, which resembles an echo, has a unique
psychological character, determined by the fact that we no longer want anything
from the object. In place of the former concrete relationship with the object, it is
now mere contemplation that is the source of enjoyable sensation; we leave the
being of the object untouched, and our sentiment is attached only to its appearance,
not to that which in any sense may be consumed. In short, whereas formerly the
object was valuable as a means for our practical and eudaemonistic ends, it has
now become an object of contemplation from which we derive pleasure by
confronting it with reserve and remoteness, without touching it.
It seems to me that the essential features of aesthetic enjoyment are
foreshadowed here, but they can be shown more plainly if we follow the changes
in sensation from the sphere of individual psychology to that of the species as a

24//VALUE
whole. The attempt has often been made to derive beauty from utility, but as a
rule this has led only to a philistine coarsening of beauty. This might be avoided
if the practical expediency and sensual eudaemonistic immediacy were placed
far enough back in the history of the species, as a result of which an instinctive,
reflex-like sense of enjoyment in our organism were attached to the appearance
of objects; the physico-psychic connection would then be genetic and would
become effective in the individual without any consciousness on his part of the
utility of the object. There is no need to enter into the controversy about the
inheritance of such acquired associations; it suffices here that the events occur
as if such qualities were inheritable. Consequently, the beautiful would be for us
what once proved useful for the species, and its contemplation would give us
pleasure without our having any practical interest in the object as individuals.
This would not, of course, imply uniformity or the reduction of individual taste
to an average or collective level.
These echoes of an earlier general utility are absorbed into the diversity of
individual minds and transformed into new unique qualities, so that one might
say that the detachment of the pleasurable sensation from the reality of its
original cause has finally become a form of our consciousness, quite independent
of the contents that first gave rise to it, and ready to absorb any other content
that the psychic constellation permits. In those cases that offer realistic pleasure,
our appreciation of the object is not specifically aesthetic, but practical; it
becomes aesthetic only as a result of increasing distance, abstraction and
sublimation. What happens here is the common phenomenon that, once a
certain connection has been established, the connecting link itself disappears
because it is no longer required. The connection between certain useful objects
and the sense of pleasure has become so well established for the species, through
inheritance or some other mechanism, that the mere sight of these objects
becomes pleasurable even in the absence of any utility.
This explains what Kant calls ‘aesthetic indifference’, the lack of concern about
the real existence of an object so long as its ‘form’, i.e. its visibility, is given. Hence
also the radiance and transcendence of the beautiful, which arises from the
temporal remoteness of the real motives in which we now discover the aesthetic.
Hence the idea that the beautiful is something typical, supra-individual, and
universally valid; for the evolution of the species has long ago eliminated from
these inner states of mind anything specific and individual in the motives and
experiences. In consequence it is often impossible to justify on rational grounds
aesthetic judgments or the opposition that they sometimes present to what is
useful and agreeable to the individual. The whole development of objects from
utility value to aesthetic value is a process of objectification. When I call an object
beautiful, its quality and significance become much more independent of the

Slmmel//Value and Money//25

arrangements and the needs of the subject than if it is merely useful. So long as
objects are merely useful they are interchangeable and everything can be replaced
by anything else that performs the same service. But when they are beautiful they
have a unique individual existence, and the value of one cannot be replaced by
another, even though it may be just as beautiful in its own way.
We need not pursue these brief remarks on the origin of aesthetic value into
a discussion of all the ramifications of the subject in order to recognize that the
objectification of value originates in the relative distance that emerges between
the direct subjective origin of the valuation of the object and our momentary
feeling concerning the object. The more remote for the species is the utility of
the object that first created an interest and a value and is now forgotten, the
purer is the aesthetic satisfaction derived from the mere form and appearance of
the object. The more it stands before us in its own dignity, the more we attribute
to it a significance that is not exhausted by haphazard subjective enjoyment, and
the more the relationship of valuing the objects merely as means is replaced by
a feeling of their independent value. [...]
The economic form of value lies between its two limits: on the one side is
the desire for the object, arising from the anticipated satisfaction of possession
and enjoyment; on the other side is the enjoyment itself, which is not strictly
speaking an economic act. If the argument is accepted that the direct
consumption of wild grain is not an economic act (except to the extent that it
economizes on the production of economic values), then the consumption of
real economic values is itself no longer an economic act, for these two acts of
consumption are totally indistinguishable. Whether somebody has found, stolen
or cultivated the grain does not make the slightest difference for the act of
consumption and its direct consequences.
The object, as we have seen, is not yet a value so long as it is only the direct
stimulant and a natural part of our sentiments inseparable from the subjective
process. The object has to be detached from this in order to gain the specific
significance that we call value. Desire by itself cannot bring about value unless it
encounters obstacles; if every desire could be satisfied completely without a
struggle, the economic exchange of values would never have developed, and the
desire itself would never have reached a high level. Only the deferment of
satisfaction through obstacles, the fear of never attaining the object, the tension
of struggling for it, brings together the various elements of desire; the intense
striving and continuous acquisition.
But even if the strongest element of desire came only from within the
individual, the object that satisfies it would still have no value if it were
abundantly available. The whole genus of things that guarantee the satisfaction
of our wishes would be important to us, but not the limited portion that we

26//VALUE
acquire, because this could be replaced without effort by any other portion. Our
awareness of the value of the whole genus would arise from the idea of its being
absent altogether. In this case, our consciousness would be simply determined
by the rhythm of the subjective wishes and satisfactions, without paying any
attention to the mediating object.
Need and enjoyment alone do not comprehend either value or economic life,
which are realized simultaneously through the exchange between two subjects
each of whom requires a sacrifice by the other (or its equivalent in the self-
sufficient economy) in order to be satisfied. Exchange, i.e. the economy, is the
source of economic values, because exchange is the representative of the
distance between subject and object which transforms subjective feelings into
objective valuation. (...)

Georg Simmel, extracts from ‘Value and Money’ section. Philosophie des Geldes (Leipzig: Duncker &
Humblot, 1900); trans. (from 1907 edition) Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, The Philosophy o f Money
(London and New York: Routledge, 2 0 0 4 ) 7 3 - 5 :8 9 - 9 0 (paragraph breaks have been introduced here
for ease of reading; there are none in the source text).

Theodor Adorno
Aesthetic Theory//1970

[...] Art responds to the loss of certainty it has suffered by making concrete
changes in its mode of perception and procedure, on the one hand, and by pulling
on its own concept as on a chain, trying to get away from its substance as art, on
the other hand. What is involved in this process can best be shown by looking at
low-brow art and entertainment, integrated, administered and qualitatively
changed as they are today by the culture industry. Entertainment has never been
reducible to the concept of pure art, which is itself a fairly late product of
historical development. It always protruded into the sphere of culture as living
proof of culture’s failure. In fact, much like humour then and now, entertainment
has willed that failure of culture. Duped by the culture industry and hungry for
its commodities, the masses find themselves in a condition this side of art. In so
doing they are in a position to perceive the inadequacy though not the untruth of
the present life process of society more nakedly than those who still remember
what a work of art used to be. They push for the desubstantialization (Entkunstung)
of art. Unmistakable symptoms of this tendency are the passionate urge to violate

Adorno// Aesthetic Theory//27

and meddle with the work of art in ways which do not allow it to be what it is;
to dress it up; to shorten its distance from the viewer; and so on. The masses
want the shameful difference separating art from their lives eliminated, because
if art were to have any real effect on them it would be that of instilling a sense of
loathing, which is the last thing they want. These are some of the subjective
predispositions that make it possible to line up art on the side of consumer
goods. Objective vested interests do the rest.
Granted, art may not be outrightly consumable like a commodity. But there is
at least a parallel here between the masses’ reaction to art and their relation to
real consumer goods. This is all the more true in an age of over-production, where
the material use-value of commodities declines in importance, where consumption
becomes vicarious enjoyment of prestige and a desire to keep up with the Joneses,
and where, finally, the commodity character of consumables seems to disappear
altogether - a parody of aesthetic illusion. Of the autonomy of works of art, which
incites the wrath of the consumer of culture when he realizes that he is taken for
something better than he thinks he is, of that autonomy nothing is left but the
fetish character of commodities. [...]
The old relationship between the viewer and the viewed is stood on its head.
By treating works of art like mere facts, the modern attitude attempts to
commodify and sell cheap even the mimetic moment of art, which is the opposite
of a thing-like essence. Today the consumer is allowed to project his impulses and
mimetic residues onto anything he pleases, including art, whereas in the past the
individual was expected to forget himself, lose himself in art in the process of
viewing, listening and reading. Ideally, the individual effected his identification
with art not by assimilating the work of art to himself but by assimilating himself
to the work. This is what the term ‘aesthetic sublimation’ was meant to denote.
Earlier on, Hegel had called the same mode of conduct freedom towards the
object. In so doing he paid homage to the idea of a subject which becomes a
spiritual subject only by externalizing itself in an object, in contrast to the
philistine who craves art for what he can get out of it. If art is viewed as a clean
slate for subjective projections, it loses its distinctive character.
The two extreme forms of Entkunstung of art, therefore, are reification - art
viewed as a thing among things - and psychologism - art viewed as a vehicle for
the psychology of the viewer. The reified works of art, which have ceased to
speak, are made to say the things the viewer wants them to say and which are
the stereotyped echo of himself. [...]

Theodor Adorno, extracts from Asthetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970); trans. Christian Lenhardt, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1984) 2 4 - 5 ; 31 [footnotes not included].

28//VALUE
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives
for Critical Theory//1988

Contingency and Interdependence

All value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent
quality nor an objective property of things but rather an effect of multiple,
continuously changing and continuously interacting variables, or to put this
another way, the product of the dynamics of a system, specifically an economic
system. It is readily granted, of course, that it is in relation to such a system that
commodities such as gold, bread and paperback editions of Moby-Dick acquire
the value indicated by their market prices. It is traditional however, both in
economic and aesthetic theory as well as in informal discourse, to distinguish
sharply between the value of an entity in that sense (that is, its exchange value)
and some other type of value that may be referred to as its utility or use value or,
especially with respect to so-called non-utilitarian objects such as artworks or
works of literature, as its intrinsic value. Thus it might be said that whereas the
fluctuating price of a particular paperback edition of Moby-Dick is a function of
such variables as supply and demand, production and distribution costs, the
publisher’s calculation of corporate profits and so forth, these factors do not
affect the value of Moby-Dick as experienced by an individual reader or its
intrinsic value ‘as a work of literature’. These distinctions, however, are not as
clear-cut as they may appear.
Like its price in the marketplace, the value of an entity to an individual subject
is also the product of the dynamics of an economic system: specifically, the
personal economy constituted by the subject’s needs, interests and resources -
biological, psychological, material, experiential, and so forth. Like any other
economy, moreover, this too is a continuously fluctuating or shifting system, for
our individual needs, interests and resources are themselves functions of our
continuously changing states in relation to an environment that may be relatively
stable but is never absolutely fixed. The two kinds of economic system described
here are, it should be noted, not only analogous but also interactive and
interdependent, for part of our environment is the market economy and, conversely,
the market economy is composed, in part, of the diverse personal economies of
individual producers, distributors, consumers, and so forth. At the same time, it
must be emphasized that any particular subject’s ‘self - or that on behalf of which
he or she may be said to act with ‘self-interest’ - is also variable, being multiply
and differently configurable in terms of different roles, relationships and, in effect,
identities (citizen, parent, woman, property owner, teacher, terrestrial organism,

Herrnstein Smith//Contingencies of Value//29

mortal being, etc.), in relation to which different needs and interests acquire
priority (and, as may happen, come into conflict) under different conditions. (...)
The various forms of interdependence emphasized here have considerable
bearing on what may be recognized as the economics of literary and aesthetic
value. The traditional - idealist, humanist, genteel - tendency to isolate or protect
certain aspects of life and culture, among them works of art and literature, from
consideration in economic terms has had the effect of mystifying the nature - or,
more accurately, the dynamics - of their value. In view of the arbitrariness of the
exclusion, it is not surprising that the languages of aesthetics and economics
nevertheless tend to drift towards each other and that their segregation must be
constantly patrolled.1 (Thus, an aesthetician deplores a pun on ‘appreciation’
appearing in an article on art investment and warns of the dangers of confusing
‘the uniqueness of a painting that gives it scarcity value ... with its unique value
as a work of art’.)2 To those for whom terms such as ‘utility’, ‘effectiveness’ and
‘function’ suggest gross pragmatic instrumentality, crass material desires and the
satisfaction of animal needs, a concept such as use value will be seen as irrelevant
to or clearly to be distinguished from aesthetic value. There is, however, no good
reason to confine the domain of the utilitarian to objects that serve only
immediate, specific and unexalted ends, or for that matter to assume that the
value of artworks has altogether nothing to do with pragmatic instrumentality
or animal needs.3 The recurrent impulse and effort to define aesthetic value by
contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other nameable
sources of interest or forms of value - hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental,
historical, ideological, and so forth - is in effect to define it out of existence; for
when all such utilities, interests and other particular sources of value have been
subtracted, nothing remains. Or to put this in other terms: the ‘essential value’ of
an artwork consists of everything from which it is usually distinguished. (...)

1 [footnote 4 in source) The magnetism or recurrent mutually metaphoric relation between

economic and aesthetic - especially literary - discourse is documented and discussed by Marc
Shell in The Economy o f Literature (Baltimore, 1978), and by Kurt Heinzelman in The Economics o f
the Imagination (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1980).
2 [5 j Andrew Harrison, Making and Thinking (Indianapolis, 1978) 100.
3 [6) See George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, ‘De Gustibus non est disputandum’, American Economics
Review, no. 67 (March 1977) 7 6 -9 0 , for an ingenious and influential attempt (at the opposite
extrem e, perhaps, of Baudrillard's) to demonstrate that differences and changes of behaviour
(including aesthetic behaviour) that appear to be matters o f ‘taste’ and, as such, beyond
explanation in econom ic term s can be accounted for (a) as functions of subtle forms o f ‘price’
and ‘income* and (b) on the usual econom istic assumption that we always behave, all things
considered, so as to maximize utility. As Stigler and Becker acknowledge, however, recent

30//VALUE
 experimental studies o f ‘choice behaviour’ in human (and other) subjects suggest that this latter
assumption itself requires modification.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, extracts from Contingencies o f Value: Alternative Perspectives fo r Critical
Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1988) 3 0 -3 1 ; 33.

William Grampp
Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics//1989

[...1 ‘To attempt an estimate of the money value of the contents of our museums
would be an intellectual vulgarism ... A great collection is a service to society as
free from the rules of demand and supply as the service of the law.’ This was said
by T.R. Adam some fifty years ago. About twenty-five years ago the National
Bureau of Economic Research wanted to know the value of the collections of
museums when it was making an estimate of the capital stock of the United
States. The Bureau was told by museum authorities that such an enquiry was
out of the question because the collections consisted of objects that were
‘priceless and irreplaceable’. Later the authorities relented but no doubt held to
their initial view that art should not be valued on the market. The view is
centuries old and is honoured in the present. In a conversation with the director
of an American museum that is highly respected and rich, I asked why the value
of the collection was not on the balance sheet. ‘Because it is not for sale’, he said
firmly. I then asked, not innocently, if the building was for sale, since its value
was reported. He then said that what is most wrong about the art world today
is the attention it pays to money values. [...]
Consider now what economics can say about what art is worth, or its value,
specifically, whether the price of a painting is related to or determined or
influenced by its intrinsic quality, merit or aesthetic value. The question stated
still more specifically is whether the prices of paintings are proportional (at least
ordinally) to their aesthetic value. For example, if for any reason the world of art
believes painting A is superior to painting B, is the price of A likely to be higher
than the price of B? The answer in my opinion is likely to be yes. That opinion
rests on several kinds of evidence, namely, (a) private collectors are reasonably
well informed about what they buy and sell, dealers are well informed, and major
museums are very well informed; (b) while the market is not perfectly competitive
- since works of art are not homogeneous - there is reason to believe the range

Grampp//Prlclng the Priceless//31

within which prices are set defines the limits of aesthetic value; (c) prices set at
auction and values given in tax inquiries are consistent with the aesthetic quality
of the works; and (d) the prices received by the major artists of the present are
consistent with the professional judgment that is made of their work. [...]
There is considerable evidence that the market in art is reasonably well
informed, meaning by ‘reasonable’ that the people who buy and sell spend time
and money to inform themselves to the extent that the expenditure is worthwhile.
A collector who had an eye on Rembrandt would not spend as much as a museum,
and a museum would not spend as much as the Amsterdam research project,
which itself does not have unlimited resources to invest in information. Major
collectors usually are knowledgeable about their particular interests -
knowledgeable about aesthetic considerations, about considerations of an art-
historical nature, and of course about prices. Moreover, they often seek expert
opinion about what they mean to do. An interesting feature of American
collecting is that much has been done by businessmen who have gone about it
with the efficiency and dispatch that made their enterprises profitable and
enabled them to become collectors.
Museums are the other component of the art market. No one would deny that
considerations of aesthetics and art history govern their decisions to buy and
sell. This does not mean each museum would assign the same value, economic or
aesthetic, to a given work. To some it would be worth less than to others, because
they have different goals, some are nearer than others to realizing them, and
given the goals and the extent to which they have been realized, there are
differences among museums in the value of information. [... ]
There is another kind of evidence of the consistency of economic and aesthetic
value. It is that information about auctions is widely reported. That is in keeping
with a standard proposition in economics according to which the more informed
that buyers and sellers are about a market the more efficient it is likely to be. The
market for art is not efficient in the way the market for securities is efficient.
There is no reason to believe it should be, because the cost of making it so would
probably be greater than the gain. However, it is a market where bids and offers
reflect the merit or esteem in which a work of art is held by critics, museologists,
art historians and connoisseurs.
About auctions there is abundant information, although, to be candid, an
economist would like still more, and that is a statement or classification of the
prices at which given works have been sold at different dates. What is available
and is especially interesting is the classification of the works of an artist according
to their authenticity; whether a given work was done entirely by him [or her! or
very probably was done by him alone, whether it was partly done by him,
whether by his students, by assistants in his workshop, or under his influence, or

32//VALUE
whether it is a work done in his style while he was living or later. In addition,
there is information about where the work was before it came to the given sale
together with the names of the buyer and of the auctioneer, the place and date of
the sale, the material of which the work is made and what it is about (for example,
painting on copper of two figures, landscape in background, dog lower left
comer). In addition, there is of course the price, yet that, mirabile dictu, is not
clear. Sellers may set a maximum or reserve price, and if the bidding does not
reach it a bid is made at the reserve price by an agent of the auctioneer, and the
work is returned to the owner. The fact may be reported later or discovered or
may never be known. How many prices are real and how many are fictitious, the
auctioneer and seller alone know. However, I would not be surprised to learn
that most prices are actual prices; that is because sellers must pay the auction
house a commission whether the work is actually sold or only seems to be.
The information about the market has a cost, and it is paid by the people who
use, buy and sell art. The information would not be collected, distributed and
paid for if the market was indifferent to aesthetic quality. The art market is not
indifferent, no more than is the museum world. There is in fact a striking
resemblance between the way museologists classify art according to its
authenticity and the way the market classifies it. The similarity is interesting to
an economist and should also be interesting to people in art. I do not mean the
market and the museums always agree on attribution or authenticity but that
both attend to it closely. An instructive comparison can be made between Art
Prices Current, a kind of trade publication, and the Census o f Pre-Nineteenth-
Century Italian Paintings in North American Collections by Burton B. Frederickson
and Federico Zeri (1972). Art Prices Current lists the sales of the work of any one
painter in descending order of the probability of their being autograph (done
entirely by the painter named), with those most probably so at the head of the
list and at the bottom those not done by him at all but only in his style. Not
surprisingly, the prices drop as one goes down the list. The Census reports
whether the painting is autograph, if it is a copy, has been done by a follower of
the painter, has been done in his manner, is of the school of the painter, whether
the attribution is uncertain, whether the attribution is to more than one painter,
or if the painting is an ‘imitation’, which implies it is a forgery.
If the classification of a painting is changed, whether by the market or by
expert opinion, the price is almost certain to change simply because (as I have
been at pains to explain) the opinion of the experts is the principal determinant
of price. [...]
The consistency of values is also indicated by a practice of the Internal
Revenue Service, a surprising source of information about aesthetics, but one to
be noticed. It has an Art Advisory Panel of twenty-five members who are dealers,

Grampp//Prlcing the Priceless//33

museum officials, scholars and people from auction houses. They meet
periodically to advise the IRS about what it calls the ‘fair market value’ of works
of art that appear on tax returns as bequests, gifts or charitable donations. An
unsurprising feature of the practice is that the panel finds the value of many of
the works is overstated (in 1981,71 per cent of those that appeared on personal
income tax returns). What is more interesting and may be surprising to the art
world, although not to an economist, is that the estimates which members of the
panel make are similar. That is, the scholars and museologists concur with the
dealers and auctioneers (not, in all likelihood, to the last dollar, however). (...)
The last kind of evidence that bears on the consistency of values has to do
with living artists: with the standing they have in the art world and the prices of
their work. This information was brought together from time to time in the 1970s
by the late Willi Bongard of Cologne, an economist, art journalist, teacher and
man of parts. He made a judgement of the standing of an artist by noting the
recognition the artist received in such ways as being in the permanent collections
of museums, by one-man shows, group shows, by the notice received in
periodicals and television, and by other marks of esteem. Dr Bongard boldly
assigned numerical values to each mark according to his estimate of its
importance. Thus an artist was assigned 300 points for each work in a major
museum like the Metropolitan and 200 for each in a museum not quite as major
like the Art Institute of Chicago or the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; if the
artist was mentioned in Art Actuel he received 50 points and in Connaissance des
Arts 10 points. This was done for a large number of artists, and the 100 having the
greatest number of points were ranked according to their totals. Dr Bongard then
obtained the current price of a representative work of each of the 100 and added
it to his compilation. The two numbers invite a statistical analysis because the
point value of each artist is an indication of the aesthetic value of his work, and
the price of a representative work is of course its economic value.
With the help of a colleague, I did a regression analysis of the information in
order to see if the price of a painter’s work was consistent with the points
assigned to him and I found it was. The correlation was far from perfect, but the
results did show that as the number of points increased 10 per cent, the price of
the representative work increased 8 per cent. (The coefficient of aesthetic value
was .59 with t = 4.2, and R2 = .25.) (...)

William D. Grampp, extracts from Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics (New York: Basic
Books, 1989) 2 4 ; 2 6 ; 2 9 ; 3 0 -3 1 ; 32 [footnotes not included].

34//VALUE
Marc Shell
Art and Money//1995

Western art, whether or not its subject matter is monetary, frequently takes on a
monetary patina or aura. [...]
In considering the monetary aura of artwork in the West it may be heuristically
useful to begin with an elementary hypothesis. Plato founded philosophy in the
distrust of money and art taken together.1 But in the broad spectrum of Judaeo-
Christianity one group, often figured as Jewish, is relatively comfortable with
money and uncomfortable with representational art while another group,
frequently reckoned as Christian, is relatively comfortable with art and
uncomfortable with money.2 It is, according to this stereopticon, the essence of
Judaism to reject representational art and the essence of Christianity to expel
changing coins from the temple.3
What is it about money that irks Christianity? One answer would be that
Christianity, unlike ‘paganism’, has a universal God, like Judaism; and Christianity,
unlike Judaism, has an incarnate God, in some ways similar to paganism. Money is
a particularly tender subject in Christian thinking because money is a universal
equivalent and also because money expresses, as does Jesus as god-man, a
manifestation of an ideal and a real thing. Money is thus understood as a
manifestation of authority and substance, of mind and matter, of soul and body;
money is the expression of inscription and inscribed. This makes money
disturbingly close to Christ as a competing architectonic principle. (‘No graven
images may be/Worshipped - except the currency’ was the ironic quip of the
ambiguously Christian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.)4 When Christians say that Jews
wickedly worship money as a graven image and good Christians do not, this is
usually a projection onto others’ religion of what the speaker fears to be true about
his own.5 Judaism, perhaps, simply absorbs or deals with money with less
discomfort than Christianity because Judaism does not treat money together with
God in such a way that money becomes an architectonic principle that, like the
money devil in Christian mythology, defines God by an apparent polar opposition.

Icon and Inscription

To whom then will ye liken God?

- Isaiah, 40:18

The tendency to merge money with art is often misinterpreted as essentially a

Shell//Art and Money//35

late capitalist phenomenon.6That is why, in essaying to comprehend the fetishism
of money and the different viewpoints on money held by theologians and modem
philosophers, it is useful to consider how the ‘spirit of the marketplace* or ‘money
spirit’ is a spiritual model not only for our era but for other eras as well. There is,
for example, the iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries in
Byzantium. (Byzantium itself, of course, looks back to ‘older’ theological
expressions of the merger between aesthetics and economics.)
In Byzantium the words of Isaiah were much debated: ‘To whom then will ye
liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? The workman melteth a
graven image [pesel ], and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth
silver chains.’ (Isaiah, 40:18-19). These words, quoted by John Hylilas to the
iconodule (or icon-serving) Pope Leo in the tenth century,7 allude to the
commandment from Sinai, ‘Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image.’
(Exodus, 20:4).
Graven images - ‘graven’ in the King James version is not a bad translation of
the Hebrew8 - are all too easy to confuse with coins. A coin is a combination of a
politically or aesthetically significant engraving with an economically valuable
material - an inscription with an inscribed thing. In so far as a coin is an ingot, its
real material is the conveyer of value. Or so we say. In so far as a coin is aesthetic
or political, it is the intellectual inscription or drawing that suggests value. But
spirit and matter, ideal and real, inscription and inscribed, are inextricably linked.
‘The true inscription’, writes G.E. Lessing in On the Epigram, ‘is not to be thought
of apart from that whereon it stands or might properly stand.’9
In this respect coins are both economically valuable things and visually
aesthetic objects:

The material or commodity ... on which coin [engraving] appears is, unlike
Gutenberg’s paper or the painter’s canvas, an especially valuable one. The
pictorial or verbal impression in this material changes it (aesthetically) from a
shapeless, if valuable, piece of metal into a sculptured ingot; and, more
significantly, that impression changes it (economically) from a mere commodity
into a coin or token ... of money ... The sometimes beautiful impressions on
ingots transform them into always useful tokens: dulce et utile. This
transformation distinguishes minting from other kinds of sculpturing (even
those that fashion equally valuable metals); and it distinguishes [specifically]
monetary [drawings and] inscriptions from other kinds.10

Coins, which were among the first widely produced publications and
reproductions in history, were icons with a value at once spiritual and material,
or aesthetic and economic.

36//VALUE
 The American sculptor David Smith wrote that ‘the association of art with the
graven and golden image... makes art taboo’.11This way of putting things, though
tendentious, at least serves to explain why the iconoclast controversies in
Byzantium privileged debate about whether coins in general - all coins regardless
of their particular ‘type’ - were iconic or idolic images. An icon, after all, is like a
coin when its inscription’s claim about the material qualities of the inscribed
thing (weight and purity of substance) are ‘true’, or ‘equal to’ its actual qualities.
(The traditional definition of truth as adequatio res et intellectus - the unifying
adequation of the thing with the intellectual conception of it - is, as Heidegger
seems to suggest in ‘On the Essence of Truth’, in this sense numismatic. In Being
and Time an anti-Semitic Heidegger notes wrongly that this definition of truth
was essentially Jewish.)12 An icon, like a coin, is an instance of intellectual value
invested or impressed in a material thing. (Like all coins, the real - the term
specifically names the coin that circulated in Spain and elsewhere - is composed
both of its ‘real’ material and its ‘royal’, or rial inscription.)13When this adequation
breaks down, numismatics as well as iconology is affected. Certain theorists
argue that this breakdown occurred when the first numismatic engraving
claimed, by virtue of some political or religious authority, a status unwarranted
by sole virtue of its ingot’s physical qualities.
The first coin engraved with the numeral 2, insists one theorist of art, was the
earliest conceptual art: it fiduciarily dissociated symbol from thing.14 Or as in
Anton Stankowski’s [photomontage print] One Becomes Two (1990), the coin
multiplies by an amoeboid division. In 1969 the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles
placed a stack of one hundred one-cruzeiro bills on a pedestal, pasted on the
stack a label titling it The Tree o f Money, and authoritatively priced the stack and
label at two thousand cruzeiros for both together.15 The same theme is explored
by Marcel Broodthaers in his 1971 project, a ‘contract proposed by the financial
section of the Department of Eagles’ for a fictive ‘Museum of Modern Art’, in
which the price of a stamped ‘kilogram of fine gold in the ingot’ is fixed at double
the current rate for the gold alone. To a journalist’s question, ‘Should I understand
that it is a matter of literature?’ Broodthaers wrote out his answer: ‘Silence/
absence -> gold theory.’16 [...]

1 Marc Shell, ‘Ring of Gyges’, in The Economy o f Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993).
2 Apparent counter-examples would involve the iconoclasm of Calvinist Geneva and ninth-century
Byzantium. See Moses Hess, ‘Ober das Geldwesen’ (On the essence o f money), in Schriften (1837—
50) (Berlin, 1905). Many people disapprove of general statements distinguishing Jews from
Christians: in the name of religious tolerance, for example, some would-be universalists assert that
all religions - indudingjudaism and Christianity - are ‘essentially’ the same; others ignore or deny

Shell//Art and Money//37

 even such rudimentary differences between Judaism and Christianity as the latter’s claim that God
is incarnate in the body of a man - or the former's claim that he is not - and the latter’s persistently
recurrent definition of its doctrines in opposition to the former's doctrines (see Marc Shell, Children
o f the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993] 186-9).
3 For Jews, ‘he who denies idols is called a Jew ’ (Megillah, 13A, cf. Daniel, 3:12) [...]
4 Robert Minton. John Law: The Father o f Paper Money (New York: Association Press, 1975) 81 n.
Clough lived in the nineteenth century.
5 Moses Mendelssohn, ‘Jerusalem, or On Religious Authority and Judaism’ (1838); in Jerusalem and
Other Jewish Writings, ed. and trans. Alfred Jospe (New York: Schocken Books. 1969) 82. ‘Am Bild
des Juden, das die Volkischen vor der Welt aufrachten, drucken sie ihr eigenes W esen aus’
(Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung (1947) 151; trans. John Cumming, Dialectic o f
Enlightenment [New York: Herder & Herder, 1972] 168-9).
6 It is as if, in an erratic twist, self-styled modern Europeans - and Americans - were identifying
themselves with the sort of fetishism that they generally claim belongs properly only to so-
called primitive peoples. [...]
7 Edward J. Martin, A History o f the Iconoclastic Controversy (London: SPCK, 16 4 -5 ).
8 The same God who disallows the graven image [pesel] commands Moses to engrave the stone
tablets of the law. ‘And the Lord said unto Moses: ‘Hew thee [pisaMic/ia] two tables o f stone like
unto the first’ (Exodus. 34:1).
9 Gotthold Lessing,Zerstreute Anmerkungen iiber das Epigramm {1771); trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson.
The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947) 9 -1 0 ,
10 Marc Shell, ‘Language of Character', in The Economy o f Literature, op. cit., 62; 6 5 ; and Shell, '“W hat
is Truth?”’, in Money, Language and Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
11 In Barbara Rose, ed., Readings in American Art Since 1900: A Documentary Survey (New York:
Praeger, 1968) 245. Smith's statem ent was made in 1953: ‘A Symposium on Art and Religion’.
12 Heidegger, who criticizes this definition of truth as specious 'common sense', projects onto Judaism
the problems in the traditional Christian view of truth. Thus he carefully suggests in Being and Time
that Thomas Aquinas took the idea and phrase adequatio res et intellectus from the Jewish Isaac
Israeli (c. 8 5 5 -9 5 5 CE). And Heidegger blames Isaac Israeli - more than Aquinas or Avicenna (Abu
Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) - for the subsequent widespread use of the term adequatio. [...]
13 See Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. ‘real’ and ‘rial’. On the sang real, see below.
14 Cf. Andreae, ‘Mogliche Zusammenhange zwischen der Entwicklung des Geldwesens und der
Erkenntnissen der Konzeptkunst’, 76.
15 Guy Brett, Transcontinental: Nine Latin-American Artists (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery/London:
Verso, 1990) 40.
16 Marcel Broodthaers, interview with journalist, in his Sale o f a Kilogram o f Fine Gold in the Ingot
(1971) (Dusseldorf: Galerie Konrad Fischer, 1987).

Marc Shell, extracts from A r t & Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995) 7 -10.

38//VALUE
Thomas Zaunschirm
The Art of Making Money//2002

[...| Nobody would deny that art is created from non-art, from material or things
or ideas. No individual work claims to be able to represent everything abstractly,
as money, which can therefore be used to buy everything, does. Between the
condition of nothing and the buyer there is always the work of art, whose value
is an act of recognition. Even Jean Tinguely’s construction of the Meta-Matic
painting machines of 1959, which represented an attempt to remove self and
personality, to distance himself from his art, is an individual achievement. Clearly
in this case it is not the paintings produced but the painting machine itself which
becomes the art. So the risk factor has to be seen in connection with each
individual work, and not with a general money value. Theories of art offer no
assistance here, because they are concerned with quality and not quantity. The
term ‘property premium’, meaning the granting of credit on the basis of property,
is nevertheless not completely useless. Nobody would grant an artist credit, or
buy his work, purely on the grounds of wealth. The parallels are restored,
however, through the copyright-protected concept o f‘intellectual property’, that
is the individual creativity of each artist, where recognition of this, and value
attribution, is due in no small degree to the trust of other customers, gallery
owners and the market. (...)
The final authority is actually the recipient. The value of money is not
guaranteed by the national bank that issues the money; it is the borrower himself,
who receives no money without security. He is the final link in the chain of those
who give up the property premium. The money that the national bank has not yet
issued remains worthless. Should it come to a robbery of this unissued money
however, there would be no difference from money which has been regularly
issued. The argument that this money that is in circulation is in reality no better
than counterfeit money is one restricted to the realms of theory. In the field of art
too, everything which is produced only attains value through the recognition and
acceptance of both the art world and the market. The uncritical belief in a priori
value prevents understanding. The value of both money and art has nothing to do
with their origins; it results from the trust and confidence of their users. (...)

Thomas Zaunschirm, extract from T h e Art of Making Money’, in Money and Value: The Last Taboo
(Zurich: Edition Oehrli, 2 0 0 2 ) 105 -6.

Zaunschirm//The Art of Making Money//39

Wolfgang Ullrich
Icons of Capitalism: How Prices Make Art//2009

[...] While the awareness of large sums unquestionably alters the perception of
art, in the middle of all this is the object for which the money has been paid,
namely the work itself, and what observers want is to pinpoint its particular
value: to find all that money once again in the artwork, to see what distinguishes
such an expensive object from any other. And so they look with more attention,
practically through the detective’s magnifying glass. Where is the particularly
fine workmanship or extraordinary material? Should we not see a far greater
profusion of resources, greater intensity, brilliance and presence than in the
case of less costly objects? These investigations generally lead nowhere. No
sensational technical quality is found, especially in modern art. But poor
visibility fosters heightened sensibility. Astronomical sums seem all the greater
the less we can actually see.
Money remains present in any case, in that price functions as an assertion of
value, suggesting that the work of art in question must be great. Instead of being
solely an indicator of a value, price also enhances consideration and thus comes
paradoxically to pave the way for further increases as though it were a constituent
element of the artwork as such. Otherwise, it is the oracles of the art world,
above all institutions like museums and the antiseptic ’white cubes’ of modern
galleries, which pass judgement and thus ‘make’ what is generally regarded as
art. Whatever is presented in a ‘white cube’ is looked at with greater attention
and respect for the sole fact of being exhibited in that place. A great deal of
modern and contemporary artistic production would be quite unthinkable
without this institution. Readymades, for example, would be wholly
undistinguishable from the everyday objects that they actually are. The general
public is intimidated in these cases just as it is by exorbitant market prices. They
understand that what is presented is art but cannot recognize it as such.
Despite the analogies between the white cube and market prices, however,
the particular value set for a work presents itself in different ways in the two
cases. In the museum, the work becomes an item for exhibition. It is free, stripped
of all reference to everyday life, and thus ‘estranged’. Instead of being perceived
with all its normal connections like other things, it is isolated, and for this reason
the focus of particular attention. As few other points of reference are provided
for the understanding, however, the work remains extraneous and
incomprehensible. And it is precisely this aura of mystery that enhances its
meaningfulness. Price instead creates references. Something with a price tag

40//VALUE
attached is evaluated in the universal language of money. It enters into relations
with all the other things that have prices. The more something costs, the greater
its distance from everyday goods and its proximity to others, to those with very
high prices. If a museum reconsiders the significance of a work by exhibiting it in
absolute terms, it is also reassessed on the market, as always happens when
something is offered at a higher price and thus incorporated into a real world
where everything is more expensive and presumably better. It is just the few
record-breaking works that constitute a class apart. By comparison with these,
even what forms part of the most lavish lifestyle appears comparatively
economical and middle class.
Ever since hype made its appearance on the art market, critics have also
realized that talking about high prices generates meaning. As a result, art has
come to be discussed almost exclusively in terms of money over the last few
years, even in newspaper supplements. Reviewers make a point of recalling how
much an artist’s works cost and the prices they have fetched at auctions. This
also happens when there is no new record to make public. It is always and in any
case a way of expressing appreciation for an artist. Works for which no bids have
been made in an auction are not even mentioned. Critics also delight, however,
in associating the significance of dead artists that have now attained classic
status with the vast sums that have been paid for their works, as though figures
were capable of expressing their value with greater clarity and solemnity than
words. A price list thus dispenses with the need for complicated and often
garbled verbal promotion and description of the specific qualities of a work. The
emotionalism often characterizing artistic commentaries gives way to the
sublimity of figures with a great many zeroes. [...]
Whoever recognizes the yearning for the sublime as the hallmark of modem
art will also see that with the boom of the market over the last few years, high and
especially record prices have suddenly come to promise exceptionality and lofty
feelings more than anything else. What was done in the era of the avant-garde
movements with radical abstractions, daring readymades and performances that
broke all taboos is obtained today through art fairs and auctions. The sublimity
and ‘otherness’ of art is made manifest It astonishes because there is often nothing
comparable in terms of price. It becomes all the more incomprehensible the
harder it is to see why anyone should pay so much for a work, just what makes it
so special, and what you get in return for the money. [...]

Wolfgang Ullrich, extracts from ‘Icons o f Capitalism: How Prices Make Art’, in Jam es Bradbume,
Piroschka Dossi, Boris Groys, Franziska Non, Pier Luigi Sacco, Julian Stallabrass, Wolfgang Ullrich, Art,
Price and Value: Contemporary Art and the M arket (Florence: Centro di Cultura Contemporanea
Strozzina, 2 0 0 9 ) n.p. [footnotes not included].

Ullrich//Icons of Capitalism//41
Malcolm Bull
The Two Economies of World Art//2011

World Art
(...) For artists, the primary measure of market success is price rather than
volume of sales. However, price, as an indication of the value placed upon the
work in the art market, does not necessarily tell the whole story. It reveals the
cost of acquiring ownership of a particular object and related products (the
equivalent perhaps of the value of an original manuscript and the associated
copyright for literary or musical works) but nothing about its value in the eyes of
other viewers. This cannot easily be measured by the sale of reproductions, but
something can potentially be said about the frequency and location of exhibitions
and the numbers who attend them.
Artfacts.net provides an artist ranking which ranks tens of thousands of artists,
both living and dead, according to their exhibition profile since 1998 (the living
having a distinct advantage in this regard).1 This is not a measure of financial
success but rather an attempt to measure artists’ relative success within another
economy, the economy of attention. The theoretical basis for this idea, derived
from the German economist Georg Franck, is that attention is an economy distinct
from the money economy, but one which operates on similar capitalist principles.2
On this model, the museum curator or gallery owner is effectively an investor who
lends his or her capital (in the form of the exhibition space and its associated
cultural prestige) to the artist, in the expectation of a return in the form of enhanced
attention for the museum or gallery in question. Profit on that investment can be
calculated in terms of the amount of additional attention attracted to the investor,
minus the initial investment. The resulting ranking is therefore not a direct
evaluation of critical or commercial success, but simply a measure of the amount
of investment in a particular artist within the economy of attention, based on the
number and location of the exhibitions in which they have participated (it does
not, however, measure the return on that investment in terms of attendance).
What picture of world art can be gained from these artist rankings? By this
measure, too, the hegemony of the old centre remains unchallenged. World art
as it emerges from the Artfacts rankings remains dominated by Western Europe
and the United States, which even on the most restrictive criteria (assigning
artists to their country of origin rather than that of later residence) together
account for 87 of the top 100 artists. The four countries with the largest number
of artists in the top 100 are the United States (30), Germany (16), France (13), and
the United Kingdom (7).

42//VALUE
 However, taking the top twenty ranked artists from each of these countries,
it becomes clear that there have been significant shifts over time. The median
date of birth in the French top twenty is 1886. In contrast, the median date of
birth for American and German artists is 1938 and 1942 respectively - a testimony
to the strength of the post-war generations in both countries, while the median
date of birth for British artists is 1963 - a tribute to the success of the YBAs. Of
the top fifty living artists over fifty years old, 22 are American, 9 German, and 2
British, but of the top fifty living artists under fifty years old, 12 are British, 7
German and only 5 American. The figures suggest that, although the core remains
solid, what might be thought of as the ‘Greenwich meridian of art’ has moved
from Paris to New York, and may in the future move from New York to London.
The rankings on Artfacts are interesting in their own right, but they are
perhaps most illuminating when compared with those on Artprice.com, which
provides an annual ranking of artists solely in terms of the value of their annual
turnover at auction.3 Although this measures only sales at auction, and takes no
account of sales from galleries, it is perhaps the best indicator of an artist’s long­
term economic success because, until a secondary market has been established,
it is usually unclear what, if any, market value an artist’s work really has.
Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of the artists achieving a high turnover at
auction are old or dead. However, because the data are compiled annually, the
Artprice ranking responds more quickly to new developments than a cumulative
ranking like that on Artfacts. World art as it emerges from Artprice looks
somewhat different. It is the world not so much of the old G7 but of the G20 -
countries with the highest GDP overall, rather than just those with the highest
GDP per capita. Whereas Artfacts’ top 100 in 2007-8 included only two Asian
artists (one Korean and one Japanese), on Artprice the top 100 includes sixteen
Asian artists and five Russians. Overall, the top 100 is dominated by France (26),
the United States (21) and China (12), but of these, all but one of the French
artists and five of the Americans are dead, whereas the majority of the Chinese
are living. In Artprice’s ranking of contemporary artists (i.e. those born since
1945, both living and dead), nineteen of the top fifty are Chinese, with ten from
the United States, and five each from the UK and Germany.4 If the Greenwich
meridian in the attention economy measured by Artfacts has shifted from Paris
to New York to London, that of the market measured by Artprice would appear
to have moved from Paris to New York to Beijing.
If we include only the living artists in the two rankings, and then put the two
sets of data together, it is possible to produce a matrix of the contemporary art
world that takes into account both market value and exhibition activity and shows
the relationship between them. I have correlated the data on the living artists in
the Artprice top 500 and the living artists in the top 250 on Artfacts, 136 from the

Bull//The Two Economies of World Art//43

former and 167 from the latter. Taking the top 136 from each data set (which
includes all those who appear in both) there is an overlap of only 38, which means
that of the 234 artists, 16 per cent are to be found in the highest ranks of both and
84 per cent are not. At this level at least, there seems little direct correlation
between success in the art market and in the attention economy.

The Art Pyramid

Some artists, however, are near the top in both indices. The diagram [opposite]
shows the 38 who are in both the top 500 on Artprice and the top 250 on Artfacts
in 2008. In addition, along the sides of the pyramid, it shows those who are in the
top 200 on art price and the top 500 on Artfacts (to the left), and those are in the
top 100 on Artfacts and the top 1,000 on Artprice (to the right).
At the apex there are 15 artists who enjoy great success in terms of both
exhibitions (top 100) and auction results (top 200): five Americans (Ruscha,
Koons, Prince, Twombly and Stella) - seven if you count Bourgeois and Kabakov
(bom in France and Russia respectively but now US citizens) - five Germans
(Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Gursky and Kiefer) and three British artists (Hirst, Gilbert
and George and Hockney). Of this group, all but one is a painter or sculptor, with
several working in both media.
Along the left-hand side of the pyramid are artists who are in the top 200 on
Artprice and between 101 and 500 on Artfacts, i.e. those whose success is greater at
auction than at exhibition. Painters predominate but there are also three sculptors
famous for large-scale public projects - Kapoor, Christo and Gormley. Most striking
is the way in which nationality is distributed along this axis: moving down from
the apex, where Americans and Germans are dominant, we encounter first the
Japanese, then the British. Below the base of the pyramid are those whose success
is distinctly one-sided, i.e. in the top 200 on Artprice but below the top 500 on
Artfacts (22 out of the 50 living artists in the top 200 on Artprice). Most of these are
painters from economically important countries marginal to western culture -
above all China (13), but also India (3) and Indonesia - who can be found alongside
older western artists with traditional styles like Auerbach and Soulages, and artists
who stand outside the art world altogether, like the graffiti artist Banksy.
On the right-hand side of the pyramid a very different pattern emerges. Those
immediately below the apex (i.e. in the top 100 on Artfacts but 201-500 on
Artprice) are distinguished not by nationality (seven of them are either American
or German, with an Austrian and a Canadian alongside) but by medium - four are
photographers and only two are primarily painters. Similarly, those further down
(in the top 100 at exhibition, but only 501-1000 at auction) are mostly mixed-
media artists and or from secondary centres, e.g. smaller European countries
bordering Germany, or else the west rather than the east coast in the United

Bull//The Two Economies of World Art//45

States. Below the base of the diagram on the right are 26 of the 63 living artists
in the top 100 on Artfacts, artists at the top of the attention economy whose work
has not established itself in the secondary market (i.e. is outside the top 1,000 on
Artprice). They come mostly from the United States and Western Europe, but four
of them are French, seven are women (as many as appear in the rest of the
diagram) and ten of them are primarily video artists - the last of particular
significance because of resistance to the sale of video art at auction.5
If extended, the matrix that emerges from these two data sources could
potentially be used to do many things - track the shape of an artist’s career;
examine the distribution of different types of work; explore the fate of a particular
set of attributes and the variations they undergo. The diagram here is merely a
snapshot of the apex of the system at a particular moment in time, but, limited
as it is, it suggests the variables that may also structure the larger field. On one
axis, success in the art market is correlated with medium (and, more weakly,
coming from a large rather than a small country), in a hierarchy that goes from
painting to sculpture, to photography, to video and performance. On the other
axis, success in the attention economy is unrelated to medium (or size of country),
but associated with proximity to the centre of western culture in a progression
that goes from the United States to Germany and Western Europe, to Japan, and
then to the rest of the world. One consequence of this is that artists from the
same place who use the same medium or technique are often found clustered
together - German painters at the apex, Anglosphere painters at the lower left,
European sculpture on the lower right, LA artists in the right-hand corner. But it
is the clusters below the base that pose the great questions of the immediate
future: Will Chinese painting establish a global audience, and will video conquer
the secondary market? And also perhaps implicitly answer a current one: ‘Why
is there not more Chinese video art?’
Artists whose success is evaluated by other criteria also form a cluster.
Plotting the living winners of the Praemium Imperiale on this matrix (names
highlighted in bold) shows that most are to be found either in the highest market
category (the top 200 on Artprice) or the highest exhibition category (the top 100
on Artfacts) or in both: the fifteen artists at the intersecting area at the apex
include seven winners. This provides at least semi-independent confirmation of
the value of both indices, and indeed of the usefulness of combining them, for
although it shows that prestige within world art can be derived from either the
art market or the attention economy, it also reveals that it is most likely to accrue
to those artists who enjoy success in both. [...]

1 [footnote 8 in source) www.artfacts.net

2 [9] Georg Franck, ‘The Economy of Attention’, Telepolis (7 December 1999); see also Richard

46//VALUE
 Lanham, The Economics o f Attention: Style and Substance in the Age o f Information (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 2006).
3 [ 10) ‘Art Market Trends 2008* (www.artprice.com)
4 [ 11 ] ‘Le Marche de 1’art contemporain 2007/2008’ (www.artprice.com)
5 [12) See Noah Horowitz, ‘Value Added: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Marketplace’, PhD
thesis, Courtauld Institute o f Art, London (2007).

Malcolm Bull, extract from ‘The Two Economies o f World Art’, in Jonathan Harris, ed.. Globalization
and Contemporary A rt ( Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 181-5.

Bull//The Two Economies of World Art//47

1997 and 2007 from

5.9 to more than 10.9 million,

has recovered from its
PATRONAGE
Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class//1899

[...] During the earlier stages of economic development, consumption of goods

without stint, especially consumption of the better grades of goods - ideally all
consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum - pertains normally to the
leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally, after the later
peaceable stage has been reached, with private ownership of goods and an
industrial system based on wage labour, or on the petty household economy. But
during the earlier quasi-peaceable stage, when so many of the traditions through
which the institution of a leisure class has affected the economic life of later times
were taking form and consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional
law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform, and
any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an aberrant form, sure to be
eliminated sooner or later in the further course of development.
The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the
staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency,
but his consumption also undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of the
goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics,
shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements,
amulets and idols or divinities. In the process of gradual amelioration which
takes place in the articles of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate
aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more
elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain
the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and
seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since
the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it
becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and
quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.
This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in
eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the
training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer
simply the successful, aggressive male - the man of strength, resource and
intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it
now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the
noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in
creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in
seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers and the narcotics.

5Q//PATRONAGE
This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the
demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his
life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning
how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the
requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of
goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a
seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise
good manners [...]. High-bred manners and ways of living are items of conformity
to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the
gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided
effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method.
The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the
giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. (...)
The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification
of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty. Our higher
appreciation of the superior article is an appreciation of its superior honorific
character, much more frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its
beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present,
consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as a constraining
norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and
guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved
as beautiful and what may not.
It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and blend, that
a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness is most difficult in any
concrete case. It frequently happens that an article which serves the honorific
purpose of conspicuous waste is at the same time a beautiful object; and the
same application of labour to which it owes its utility for the former purpose
may, and often does, give beauty of form and colour to the article. The question
is further complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the precious
stones and the metals and some other materials used for adornment and
decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous waste to an antecedent
utility as objects of beauty. Gold, for instance, has a high degree of sensuous
beauty. Very many, if not most of the highly prized works of art are intrinsically
beautiful, though often with material qualification; the like is true of some stuffs
used for clothing, of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects would scarcely
have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized objects of pride to
their possessors and users. But the utility of these things to the possessor is

Veblen//The Theory of the Leisure Class//51

commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty than to the honour which their
possession and consumption confers, or to the obloquy which it wards off.
Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are beautiful and
have a utility as such; they are valuable on this account if they can be appropriated
or monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted as valuable possessions, and their
exclusive enjoyment gratifies the possessor’s sense of pecuniary superiority at the
same time that their contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty,
in the naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their
monopolization or of their commercial value. ‘Great as is the sensuous beauty of
gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction to them, which they
would never have if they were cheap.’ There is, indeed, in the common run of cases
under this head, relatively little incentive to the exclusive possession and use of
these beautiful things, except on the ground of their honorific character as items of
conspicuous waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial exception of
articles of personal adornment, would serve all other purposes than the honorific
one equally well, whether owned by the person viewing them or not; and even as
regards personal ornaments it is to be added that their chief purpose is to lend
eclat to the person of their wearer (or owner) by comparison with other persons
who are compelled to do without. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty
is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is that any
valuable object, in order to appeal to our sense of beauty, must conform to the
requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But this is not all. Beyond this
the canon of expensiveness also affects our tastes in such a way as inextricably to
blend the marks of expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features
of the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation
of beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful
features of the expensive articles. They are pleasing as being marks of honorific
costliness, and the pleasure which they afford on this score blends with that
afforded by the beautiful form and colour of the object; so that we often declare
that an article of apparel, for instance, is ‘perfectly lovely’, when pretty much all
that an analysis of the aesthetic value of the article would leave ground for is the
declaration that it is pecuniarily honorific. (...)

Thorstein Veblen, extracts from The Theory o f the Leisure Class: An Economic Study o f Institutions (1899)
(New York: Macmillan, 1902); reprinted edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 0 0 7 ) 5 2 -3 ; 8 6 -8 .

52//PATRONAGE
Tom Wolfe
Bob and Spike//1968

Look! She beckons! With those deep high-class black eyes! Here at a dinner
party in Alfred Barr’s apartment, in a room full of men who get their shirts hand-
laundered at 90 cents a shirt by Forziati on East 74th Street and women who start
getting ready for dinner with, first off, a little hair action at 4 p.m. by Kenneth on
East 54th Street - here in this room she beckons. Liza, Liza Parkinson, Mrs Bliss
Parkinson, president of the Museum of Modem Art, daughter of Cornelius Bliss,
niece of Lillie P. Bliss, who was one of the founders of the museum, sister of
Anthony Bliss, the president of the Metropolitan Opera Association - Liza, the
very embodiment of all that is most social, high class, Protestant tree-of-life and,
embossed-watermark-writing-paper in this whole art world social thing - Liza
beckons to Spike. And Spike catches Bob’s eye across the room. And Bob gives
Spike the high sign. Go, girl, go. This is the moment - beckoning black eyes!
Bob and Spike - Spike - when Bob, Robert Scull, America’s most famous
collector of Pop and other avant-garde art, first met his wife, Ethel, Ethel Redner
of West 86th Street, on a blind date back in 1943, he said to himself, ‘Ethel, what a
terrible name’. So he called her Spike. Spike’s family had some dough, but Bob and
Spike were so broke that they were living in one room on West 56th Street with a
Murphy bed. They got a $12 membership in the Museum of Modem Art, three
blocks away, on West 53rd Street, and used the museum, the garden, the restaurant
and everything, as their living room, to entertain guests in. Is that irony or isn’t it?
Bob got very interested in the art there and started a phantom art collection,
writing down the names of pictures he wished he had, on a piece of shirt cardboard
in his wallet. By 1947 or 1948 Bob started in the New York taxi cab business, which
was a very rough business at that time, full of - well, don’t ask. Half the guys were
rejects from the Mafia shape-up for hotel house dicks. But Bob started making
money, and the rest is history. He started actually buying pictures himself. He had
to put up with a lot of ridicule and everything, like the time in 1959 when he
bought Jasper Johns’ beer cans, two cans of Ballantine Ale, as a matter of fact, but
everybody called them the beer cans, and the magazines and newspapers came
around to take pictures, and he was very proud about buying Jap’s beer cans.
Would you believe they were only making fun of him? Yeah! Kids used to come to
his kids in school and say, ‘Hey, is your old man the nut who bought the beer
cans?’ But he kept on collecting, and pretty soon Robert Scull became synonymous
with Pop art, and Bob and Spike are just getting in tight with the very social
Museum of Modem Art crowd and finally here is the big dinner in Alfred’s

Wolfe//Bob and Spik®//53

apartment - Alfred Barr is the curator of the Museum of Modern Art - [...]
Finally - the moment arrives. Bob and Spike are both eating with the Continental
style they now use, holding the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right. Liza
Parkinson beckons, motions to Spike to come aside so she can talk to her. Those
deep dark aristocratic eyes - she is the whole thing in the whole social thing of
the art world - and Bob gives Spike the high sign, and right away, without having
to say a word to each other, Bob and Spike both figure the same thing. This is the
moment. Liza is going to say to Spike something like, Could you serve on this
board or whatever, or could we get yours and Bob’s advice on this or that vital
project, or, at the very least, would you come to such-and-such a dinner - you
know, something that will symbolize the fact that Robert and Ethel Scull are now
in the inner circle of the whole thing - and Liza draws Ethel aside and then Liza
- regal eyes! -pops the question -
Afterwards, when Spike comes back, Bob can hardly wait.
‘What did she say?’
‘Are you all set?’ says Spike.
‘Yeah - ’
‘You sure your heart’s OK?’
‘Yeah - ’
‘She said, “Ethel, would you mind telling me who does your hair?”’
Who does your hair?
‘Well - what did you say to that?’
‘I told her.’
Then what did she say?’
‘She said would I ask him if he could do hers.’
‘That’s all she said?’
‘No. She wanted to know how much it was.’
Well, there it is. It is just an incident, but it gives an idea of what Bob and
Spike are up against in this whole art world thing. Bob does everything right,
better than right, in fact. He rises out of the Lower East Side and its psychological
affiliates, the Bronx and Long Island, to an eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue
overlooking the park and a summer place in East Hampton. He amasses a
collection of Pop art and op art and primary art, in fact, everything since abstract
expressionism; that is actually better than the Museum of Modern Art’s in that
area. Like a lot of ambitious guys who had to take the night-school route, he
studies his field very thoroughly, talks to the artists themselves for hours on end,
until he probably knows more about Pop art and post-Pop art than anybody in
the country except for Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Henry Geldzahler and a couple of
others. He probably knows a lot more about it than Alfred Barr. Yet what do they
want from Bob and Ethel Scull at the Museum of Modern Art? They want $1,000

54//PATRONAGE
a year so they can be on the International Council and they want Ethel to help
organize a party - and where does she get her hair done?
Who needs that? This season Robert and Ethel Scull are transferring their
backing from the Museum of Modern Art to the Whitney. All right, the whole art
world is not going to flip over backwards like Charlie Brown in the comic strip
over this, but it’s a sign of this whole social thing in the art world that nobody
knows anything about. They can talk about modem art and contemporary art all
they want. But it’s the same old social thing that’s been going on in art for a
hundred years, the flutey bitones of the Protestant cultural establishment, and -
But then Spike looks at Bob, and Bob looks at Spike and he shrugs and wraps
his clavicles up around his head and breaks into a smile, in a primordial gesture
of the New York streets, the What Are You Gonna Do Shrug, and he says:
‘Spike, you know what my philosophy is? My philosophy is, enjoy.’ [...)
Bob and Spike are the folk heroes of every social climber who ever hit New
York. What Juarez was to the Mexican mestizo - what John L Sullivan was to the
Boston Irish - what Garibaldi was to the Sardinian farmers - what the Beatles are
to the O-level-dropout £8-a-week office boys of England - what Antonino Rocca
is to the Garment Center aviator Puerto Ricans of New York - what Moishe Dayan
is to the kibbutzim shock workers of the Shephelah - all these things are Bob and
Spike to the social climbers of New York.
In a blaze of publicity they illuminated the secret route: collecting wacked-out
art. It was a tricky business. Art has been a point of entry into New York Society
for seventy-five years or more. Duveen, of course, made millions selling cultural
immortality to John D. Rockefeller and Henry Clay Frick in the form of Old Masters.
After World War I the Protestant elite turned to Recent Masters as well. The
Museum of Modern Art, after all, was not founded by intellectual revolutionaries.
It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr’s living room, with Goodyears, Blisses,
and Crowinshields in attendance. They founded the museum in order to import
to New York the cultural cachet of the European upper classes, who were
suddenly excited over the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist masters such as
Cezanne, Picasso and Braque. In either case, Old Masters or New, the route was
through art that had been certified in Europe.
Bob Scull had started out collecting Renaissance bronzes, but he quickly
found out two things: (1) after World War II the prices of certified art, even in an
esoteric field like Renaissance bronzes, were rising at a rate that made serious
collecting out of the question; (2) the social world of certified art, even modern
art, was a closed shop controlled - despite a dazzling aura of cultural liberalism
- by the same old Protestant elite. Then, in the late 1950s, a great thing happened;
Pop art; and pop publicity for Pop art. In the financial world they speak of the
tens of millions a man would be worth today had he invested $10,000 in IBM in

Wolfe//Bob and Splke//55

1926. But who ever has the daring or the foresight to do these things at the time?
Bob Scull. Socially, Scull achieved a stock coup of IBM magnitude by plunging on
the work of a painter, Jasper Johns, in 1959 and 1960. (...)
Bob’s art kick, as I say, was tricky business. The economics of collecting the
latest thing in art, as Bob has been doing, are irrational. A collector can count on
the latest work by almost any of the current avant-garde artists to depreciate
more drastically than a new car; it will lose one third to one half its value the
moment it is bought. The explanation gets at the heart of the whole business of
collecting the latest, the most avant-garde, the most wacked-out in painting. The
price of, say, a new Lichtenstein or a new Johns or a new Stella is not determined
by market demand in the usual sense (i.e. a mass of undifferentiated consumers).
Aside from museums, the market is, in effect, some ten or twenty collectors,
most of whom are striving to become Bobs and Spikes, although they would
bridle if it were ever put to them just that way. The game, when one is collecting
the latest thing - as opposed to certified Old or Recent Masters - is to get one’s
hands on just that: the latest thing by a promising avant-garde artist and,
preferably, to be publicized for purchasing it. One has ... The new Lichtensteinl
The new Poons! The new RauschenbergI The new Dine! The new Oldenburg! The
competition to buy it hot from the studio is what drives the price up in the
galleries. Once that little game is played out, the resale value may be but a
fraction. The galleries dealing in the hottest avant-garde artists are driven to
frantic juggling to make sure each of the handful of players wins about every
now and then and remains interested. Collector X got the first shot at the last hot
one - so Y gets first shot at the next one; and so on.
So Bob Scull got an idea. Why not get to the artists before their work reaches
the gallery even? Why not do even better than that - why not discover them?
One evening a friend of Bob’s, a psychiatrist, said to him: ‘Bob, did it ever
occur to you that when you commission young artists to create works of art, you
may be influencing the course of art history?’
Patron. Shaper o f history. If the truth be known, it had already crossed Bob’s
mind that he had influenced art history by buying twenty works by Johns in 1959
and 1960. Before that, Johns was just some kind of odd man out in the art world,
some guy from South Carolina trying to bug the establishment with his fey,
representational rendition of banal objects. The fact that he was actually being
collected - well, that’s what started Pop art. Yes, that thought had crossed Bob’s
mind. But why not go even one step further - discover the greats of tomorrow
yourself and commission the future of art history. (...)

Tom Wolfe, extracts from ‘Bob and Spike’ (1968), The Pump House Gang (London: Black Swan, 1989)
17 3 -4 ; 1 7 5 -7 ; 1 7 8 -9 ; 186-7. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

56//PATOONAGE
Je a n Baudrillard
The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary
Value//1981

Transmutation of Value
In the crucial moment of the auction, money is nullified as a divisible exchange
value and is transsubstantiated by its expenditure into an indivisible sumptuary
value. Thus it becomes the homologue of the painting as a sign, a unique and
indivisible object. There is no longer an equivalence, but an aristocratic parity
established between money, which has become a sumptuary material through
the loss of its economic exchange value, and the canvas, which has become a sign
of prestige (hence an element of the restricted corpus that we call ‘painting’)
through the loss of its symbolic value.1

Sodal Relation
In the sumptuary act, money is nullified as a general equivalent, as form and so
as a specific (capitalist) social relation regulated by this form. The social relation
instituted in this act by the auction is still one of aristocratic parity (among
partners). Contrary to commercial operations, which institute a relation of
economic rivalry between individuals on the footing of formal equality, with
each one guiding his own calculation of individual appropriation, the auction,
like the fete or the game, institutes a concrete community of exchange among
peers. Whoever the vanquisher in the challenge, the essential function of the
auction is the institution of a community of the privileged who define themselves
as such by agonistic speculation upon a restricted corpus of signs. Competition
of the aristocratic sort seals their parity (which has nothing to do with the formal
equality of economic competition), and thus their collective caste privilege with
respect to all others, from whom they are no longer separated merely by their
purchasing power, but by the sumptuary and collective act of the production
and exchange of sign values.
Here is the matrix of ideology - in the coherent logic of a system of production,
exchange and social relations that is radically different from the system of
production, exchange and social relations based on the economic. Ideology is not
a mysterious duping ( trucage) of consciousness; it is a social logic that is
substituted for another (and which resolves the latter’s contradictions), thus
changing the very definition of value. In our failure to recognize this, we have
always reverted back to the rather embarrassing psychology of ‘interiorization’.
But whence arises this strange perversion of ‘consciousness’ - mystifying itself,
and abandoning itself o f ‘ideological values’ - when the social actors who are the

BaudriUard//The Art Auction//57

subjects of this consciousness continue to produce their ‘objective’ social
relations? Indeed, when consciousness decides to flip over to the ‘objective’ side,
it becomes revolutionary, and we call it the prise de conscience! What a strange
bourgeois novel psychology is - yet it profoundly infects revolutionary theory.
In fact, what is called the ‘psychology’ of the art lover is also in its entirety a
reduction from the system of exchange. The singularity that he asserts - that
fetishist passion for the object lived as an elective affinity - is established on his
recognition as peer, by virtue of a competitive act, in a community of the
privileged. He is the equal of the canvas itself, whose unique value resides in the
relation of parity, of statutory privilege, which, as a sign, it maintains with the
other terms of the limited corpus of paintings. Hence, the ‘elitist’ affinity between
the amateur and the canvas that psychologically connotes the very sort of value,
of exchange and of aristocratic social relation that is instituted by the auction.
The passion of the amateur is ignited by the latent summation, by the exalting
and continual obsession of all other amateurs, just as the fetishized value of the
canvas, his mana is made from:

- its differential reference to all the other canvases in the same sublime sphere of
status;
- its pedigree, its genealogy, that is, its signature and the cycles of its successive
owners.

Thus, it is not the psychological relation of the individual to the object that gives
birth to fetishism and that sustains the principle of exchange. ‘Object Fetishism’
never supports exchange in its principle, but the social principle o f exchange
supports the fetishized value o f the object. (...)

1 [footnote 4 in source] ‘The price at which a canvas is sold is not the measure of its value in the same
way as for an article of consumption. The price only has meaning at the very instant of sale, by the
game of competition in which it is the relative equivalent of the absolute values and significations
to which the painting refers.’ P. Dard and J. Michner, £tude sur I'echange de valeur. In fact, it is no
longer a price but a wager (enjeu). Moreover, for real players, money won in the game remains
marked by it and cannot be spent for useful economic purposes: it must be put back into the game,
poured back into it, ‘burned’ - in a way, it is the part maudite [accursed share] of Bataille.

Jean Baudrillard, extract from Pour une critique de I’economie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard,
1972); trans. Charles Levin, For a Critique o f the Political Economy o f the Sign (St Louis, Missouri: Telos
Press. 1981)117-18.

58//PATRONAGE
Werner Muensterberger
Collecting: An Unruly Passion//1994

[...] All auction sales follow certain prescribed procedures, which form a clearly
delineated, ritualistic pattern. In Britain particularly, the calm and seemingly
dispassionate conduct of the auctioneer stands in sharp contrast to the tension
found among some of the bidders. And it is instructive to observe the bidders’
behaviour. Fear, covetousness, greed - all combine to build an occasionally
hysterical fever arising not only out of the urge to possess. There is also the
contagion of the frenzy and the direct challenge of competition.
In this sphere of one-upmanship, unconscious impulses of rivalry, fear of
failure and feelings of inferiority may often be counteracted by deceptive, and,
indeed, self-deceptive, forms of ambition and manic extroversion. This
atmosphere in the salesroom, not unlike that of a poker game, frequently tends
to incite unconscious cravings for possession, triumph and trophy-gathering that
culminate in the crescendo of not only carrying away the prize but often also of
attracting attention and even applause. Was it the intention of some collectors to
put themselves on the stage?
But the majority of collectors do not attend auctions, and not many of those
who do exhibit extremes of behaviour. Still, the circumstances may be persuasive
enough to bring otherwise less overt character traits to the fore. The atmosphere
of rivalry and intrigue, the chance of immediate rewards, and the prospect of
acquisition of objects someone else once owned and so provided with a pedigree,
all help to create an environment in which decision-making can become quite
independent of a bidder’s better judgment.
I remember that on one occasion, a few days before an auction sale, a young,
well-informed collector of old medals gave me an illuminating description of
the historical and aesthetic elements, the rarity and variations in design of some
pieces included in the sale. He also gauged their true market value, and after
some calculations and careful consideration, he informed me that he had
decided to bid on two special items in the sale the importance of which nobody
else would fathom. And, he added, under no circumstances would he go beyond
a certain price.
On the day of the sale I saw him once again, and once more he repeated his
resolve not to exceed his carefully established and realistic limit. Somewhat later
I saw him again in the salesroom. Shortly after the first and less important items
had been sold, a middle-aged man entered the room. His presence seemed to
cause a stir among a few of the people at the sale. A bit later the first medal my

Muensterberger//Collecting: An Unruly Passion//59

friend had wanted was offered. After a few hesitant moments he nodded at the
auctioneer. There were several other bidders, and soon the price had reached the
high estimate in the catalogue although it was still below the limit the collector
had set for himself. For a few moments there was no other bid. But just before the
auctioneer’s hammer went down, the newcomer signalled a further bid.
Now a chase began, with each denying the other the triumph. It soon became
apparent that whoever finally got the medal would win only a Pyrrhic victory. As
is all too common at auctions, the collector had abandoned his resolve and had
not unexpectedly made a higher bid than the medal was worth. What is more, he
had also abandoned his rational self. Indeed, the very climate of the sales room
environment has impelled many collectors to abandon logical decision and self-
restraint in favour of competition and, not inconceivably, exhibitionistic grandeur.
In this case. I believe, the collector gave in to his possessive instinct This in turn
triggered a fugue state, brought on by fear of a narcissistic humiliation in case he
had to suffer defeat at the hands of a competitor.
Or did the medal become more desirable merely because someone else
wanted it? And, possibly, did the medal, rare and exceptional as it was, actually
become a love object?
The event itself ended pitiably. Later, at home with his booty, the collector
started to cry and shudder like a helpless young boy, confused and guilt-ridden,
full of self-reproach, angst and torment. It was a kind of ex-post-factum self­
punishment.
This is a concrete illustration of a characteristic super-ego decompensation in
a particular social and public milieu. But as this milieu supports narcissistic
action for self-enhancing aims, it also tends to induce alterations in autonomy
and critical judgement. The collector wanted to show ‘them’. He also had the
self-deceptive conviction that he alone knew, better than his symbolic fathers or
brothers, or the fraternity in the auction room, the true worth of the medal, and
that he had made a discovery and, by implication, deserved the trophy.
The charged atmosphere of the gambling casino and the auction room tends
to create a proto-hypnotic ambience among those in attendance. As a result,
judgement and perception can be blunted or reduced and it is at this time that
the passive-receptive longing of the gambler or the object hunger of the collector
succumbs to the potentially mesmerizing effect of the room itself.
Characteristically, people tend to be ‘carried away’, as the self-explanatory
expression implies. (...)

Werner Muensterberger, extract from Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives

(Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994) 2 4 5 -8 [footnotes not included].

60//PATRQNAGE
Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke
Free Exchange//1994

Pierre Bourdieu Private patronage is in fashion. Some PR firms, for example, are
hired to help businesses choose the best place for their symbolic investments
and assist them in establishing contacts in the worlds of art or science.
In face of this, critical awareness is nil, or almost nil. People move along in
a dispersed manner, without collective reflection. The same is true in relation
to state-commissioned works (which we call ‘appels d'ojfre'). Lacking a collective
strategy, researchers run the risk of having their objects of study, their
problematics and their methods imposed by their funding agency. We are
currently in a situation quite similar to that of the painters of the quattrocento
who had to struggle to win the freedom to choose, if not their subject, at least
their ‘style’. Perhaps because as artists you are more exposed to these threats
- and have been for a longer period of time - and also because your own action
has led you to develop defences against the increasingly subtle strategies of
business to subordinate or seduce artists, you have a particularly lucid
perspective on the threats that the new economic order represents to the
autonomy of the intellectual ‘creators’.
Indeed, it may be feared that recourse to private patronage in order to
finance art, literature and science will gradually place artists and scholars in a
relationship of material and mental dependence on economic powers and
market constraints. In any case, private patronage may justify the abdication of
public authorities, who use the pretext of the existence of private patrons to
withdraw and suspend their assistance, with the extraordinary result that
citizens still finance the arts and sciences through tax exemptions. Furthermore,
they finance the symbolic effect brought to bear on them to the extent that the
funding appears as an example of the disinterested generosity of the
corporations. There is, in this, an extremely perverse mechanism which
operates in such a way that we contribute to our own mystification ...
But it would also be necessary to analyse the effects of the material and
symbolic exchanges that are ever more frequently instituted between corporations
and certain categories of intellectual producers, through handsomely
remunerated ‘interventions’, ‘consultations’, ‘councils’ or ‘conferences’, as well as
the formal or informal contacts developed in the framework of missions,
commissions, associations or foundations. Corporations have thus been
successful, at least in France, in making dependent on them a good number of
journalists, above all television journalists, by offering them what are called, in

Bourdieu and Haacke//Free Exchange//61

the language of the milieu, ‘menages ’ - that is, well-paid participation for leading
discussions or communications training courses. And many media intellectuals
have entered the show business o f conferences for executives which permits
them to earn the equivalent of a month’s salary in one evening- It is not easy to
measure the doubtlessly insidious effects of these kinds of practices, but it is
improbable that they increase independence from economic powers and, more
generally, from the values of money and profit, against which the literary and
artistic worlds were, at least initially, constituted.

Hans Haacke I think it is important to distinguish between the traditional notion

of patronage and the public relations manoeuvres parading as patronage today.
Invoking the name of Maecenas, corporations give themselves an aura of
altruism. The American term sponsoring more accurately reflects that what we
have here is really an exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the
sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored. Most business
people are quite open about this when they speak to their peers. Alain-
Dominique Perrin, for example, says quite bluntly that he spends Cartier’s money
for purposes that have nothing to do with the love of art.

Bourdieu Does he say in black and white, ‘It is to win over public opinion?’

Haacke Yes. In his own words: ‘Patronage [le mecenat] is not only a great tool for
communication. It does much more: it is a tool for the seduction of public
opinion.’1 It is, in fact, the taxpayers who cover what corporations save through
tax deductions on their ‘generous contributions’. In the end, we are the ones who
wind up subsidising the corporate propaganda. Seduction expenses not only
serve the marketing of products like watches and jewellery, as would be the case
with Cartier. It is actually more important for the sponsors to create a favourable
political climate for their interests, particularly when it comes to matters like
taxes, labour and health regulations, ecological constraints, export rules, etc.

Bourdieu I once read an article which recalled that in businesses in the United
States, this type of practice is justified by what is called the check account theory,
the theory of the (symbolic) bank account. A foundation that makes donations
accumulates symbolic capital of recognition; then, the positive image that it is
thus assured (and which is often assessed in dollar terms, under the heading of
good will, on business account sheets) will bring indirect profits and permit it,
for example, to conceal certain kinds of actions.

Haacke To quote Monsieur Perrin: the strategic goal is to ‘neutralize critics’.

62//PATOONAGE
Bourdieu In the world of high fashion, it is well known that the annual presentation
of the new collections assures designers the free equivalent of hundreds of pages
of advertising. The same goes for literary awards. In all cases, it is a question of
controlling the press and getting it to write favourably about the companies at no
cost. Firms that invest in patronage make use of the press and oblige it to mention
and praise them. In a very general sense, economic leverage is exerted on cultural
production largely through the medium of the press, particularly through the
seduction it exerts over producers - especially the most heteronomous - and
through its contribution to the commercial success of works. It is also exerted
through dealers in cultural goods (editors, gallery directors, among others). It is
above all through journalism that commercial logic, against which all autonomous
universes (artistic, literary, scientific) are constructed, imposes itself on those
universes. This is fundamentally harmful, since it favours the products and
producers who are most directly submissive to commercial demands, such as the
‘journalist philosophers’ of whom Wittgenstein speaks. [...]

1 (footnote 7 in source] Alain-Dominique Perrin, ‘Le Mecenat franqais: La fin d’un prejuge’.
interview with Sandra d’Aboville, Galeries, no. 15 (Paris, October/November 1986) 74.

Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, extract from Libre-echange (Paris: Editions de Seuil/Dijon: Les
Presses du reel, 1994); English translation, Free Exchange (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) 15-19.

Richard Serra
The Yale Lecture//1990

[...] Large scale site-specific projects which do not allow for secondary sale are
hardly ever considered to be a worthy investment. For that reason the concept of
site specificity and corporate sponsorship are antithetical. Corporate sponsorship
for the art breeds economic opportunism and reinforces palatable artistic
conventions. Artists who willingly accept corporate support likewise submit to
corporate control. In effect, they become puppet creators. Their hands and minds
are set in motion by external strings: supply upon demand, accommodation with
consent. Corporate funded artworks are often advertised as public service.
Slogans such as ‘art for the people’ mask the cynicism of commercial and political
manipulation, which would like to make believe that we all live in a homogeneous
society of consumers. Cultural and educational inequalities based on economic

Serra//The Yale Lecture//63

inequality are a reality which needs to be revealed and not glossed over by a
populist notion of art for the people. This aspiration of art cannot be to serve and
thereby reaffirm the status quo by delivering products which give people what
they want and supposedly need. Marketing is based on this premise. By mimicking
the strategies of the media, Warhol became the master of art as a commercial
enterprise. The more one betrays one’s language to commercial interests, the
greater the possibility that those in authority will reward one’s efforts. If artefacts
do not accord with the consumerist needs of people, if they don’t submit to
exploitation and marketing strategies, they can be voted ad hoc into oblivion.
Tolerance exists only for officially sanctioned ideas. Submission is at the core of
the problem. For sure there is relief in submission to authority. But how much of
our autonomy do we cede to a government, for example, that pursues policies
which we find contradictory to our basic beliefs. At one point one must say that
such and such a policy is nonsense. If one remains silent and does not speak out,
it is tantamount to abdicating responsibility [...]

Richard Serra, extract from ‘The Yale Lecture’, Kunst & Museumjoumaal, vol. 1, no. 6 (1990) 2 3 -3 3 .

Fred Wilson
Mining the Museum in Me//2001

(...) It is fascinating to see what happens when my own work is collected. It has
been my experience that when art joins a collection it shifts meaning and
becomes more about the collector than about the artist. This is especially the
case if the work is displayed in the collector’s home. Once a piece of mine was
sold at a museum auction after a fierce and expensive bidding war. With the
body of Hermes and the head of Anubis, the sculpture commented on the
relationship between ancient Greece and Egypt, and between contemporary
people of European and African descent. But the collector enthusiastically
exclaimed, *1 love the sculpture; it looks like my dog! ’ I have at times come across
my work at parties in the homes of wealthy people; misplaced and mute as a
stuffed bird or bear, it seems to function there as a trophy acquired in a foreign
land, as if it has been bagged during an art safari. In an interior design magazine
I once found photographs of a princess’s fabulous home. To my surprise, each
room featured photographs of mine. These photographs, however, are intended
to hang together; their full meaning is elicited by their juxtaposition. Arrayed as

64//PATRONAGE
 they were around the house, they became nothing more than pretty pictures. It
was as if a debate was taking place between a decorator, say Martha Stewart, and
me - instead of between the images themselves - and Martha was winning.
When race enters the picture the context can get particularly charged. I once
had to stop a well-meaning European curator from putting one of my photographs
of a mammy cookie jar on the cover of an exhibition catalogue. This group show
of the works of black artists, ‘Postcards from Black America’, was to travel around
Europe. My photograph was mural-sized; the scale as well as the image itself
were meant to convey sadness and heroism. Reducing it to the size of the
catalogue and emblazoning the title of the exhibition across it would have
reinscribed the stereotype I hated, negating the complexity I had hoped to reveal.
When my photos and sculptures of mammy and pappy salt shakers and cookie
jars are displayed individually, either in non-thematic museum exhibitions or in
collectors’ homes, they take on institutional and individual perspectives,
including racist viewpoints. Viewers often assume that since the museum staff
or collector is white, the artist is as well, and work that is about a struggle to
understand one’s own identity in the face of a racist world can become an
unambiguously racist statement.
When I see my work in a major collection I am thrilled. But I am also conflicted.
As a decipherer of display, I know that my own work - now untouchable in a
glass display case - is also no longer mine. When 1 come across my art in this
context, I almost don’t recognize it. In a sense, it has lived in another world for so
long that it no longer speaks my language. As in Pygmalion, the transformation
has concealed its roots.

Fred Wilson, extract from ‘Mining the Museum in Me’, in Lisa Cohen, ed., Pictures. Patents, Monkeys
and M o re ... On Collecting (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001) 5 4 -5 .

Wilson//Mlning the Museum In Me//65

Elmgreen & Dragset
The Collectors//2009

[...] We were approached to do the pavilions [the Nordic and Danish pavilions at
the 53rd Venice Biennale] about a year and a half ago. As an art space, we knew
that the Nordic pavilion was problematic, but we also knew we would love to live
there. We thought, ‘Well, let’s make it a home.’ The Danish pavilion’s architecture
features a mix of late classicism and typical Northern European functionalism.
With its weird extension and its clash of styles, it looks like a home that has been
in the same family for generations. The Nordic pavilion has a more playful design
and could easily be turned into a California Case Study House look-alike. It also
has this open structure, in which it would be awkward to make partition walls. It’s
so much like a bachelor pad - in this case, the home of a lively gentleman who has
been living his hedonistic lifestyle in this gorgeous setting with embedded seating
and built-in beds and a transparent bathroom. It is a very exhibitionistic interior,
very LA, very Austin Powers, very David Hockney - and very gay.
If the Nordic pavilion is more Hockney, then the Danish pavilion is more
Hitchcock. It’s a middle-class family home divided into several rooms, including
a library accessible only via a broken staircase. Downstairs, you can sit on couches
designed by the Norwegian design company Norway Says. There are also books
on art, on collecting and on architecture - since our fictional family-father was
an architect. He likes order. The family doesn’t collect only artworks; they also
have a collection of flies - hundreds of ordinary flies pinned up with names
under them - and a collection of Weimar porcelain, which we actually borrowed
from the Milan dealer Massimo De Carlo. There’s evidence of a lot of small
accidents in the house. Rumour has it that the parents got divorced and the
teenage daughter left home at a very young age. Outside the pavilion there is a
for sale sign, and visitors will get tours by a real estate agent. Hopefully, the sale
will add to the cultural budget in Denmark.
Once the tour is finished, the public will be shown the neighbouring house,
because if you want to buy a house, you need to know your neighbours. That
house is inhabited by the Mysterious Mr B., the naughty bachelor, who not only
collected contemporary artworks that promoted his sexual identity, but also
swimwear from his ex-lovers. Unfortunately, Mr B. is now floating facedown in
the swimming pool outside the pavilion. Meanwhile, inside there are young men
drinking vodka tonics and hanging out in white T-shirts and faded jeans.
Mr B. has a lot of works by artists whose sexual identity would correspond to
his own: there’s Wolfgang Tillmans, Hernan Bas, Henrik Olesen, Elmgreen &

66//PATRONAGE
Dragset, Terence Koh, Pepe Espaliu and of course Tom of Finland. Tom of Finland
was one of the artists who came to our mind first, because the deal is that when
you get the Nordic pavilion you have to include artists from the other Nordic
countries. It’s so obvious to use Tom of Finland - he’s a national representative
already. One of the things we wanted to do in the Nordic pavilion was to show
how different ‘queer’ works can look. At the same time, we didn’t really want to
make an exhibition about sexuality - we just wanted to make a sexy show. In
that vein, there will be naked black-and-white photos by Tillmans and two of
Koh’s re-creations of David (with enlarged penises).
In the Danish pavilion, there’s a bit of Bergmanesque family drama; we
suppose there’s a bit of Michael Elmgreen’s family in it as well, unfortunately; he
left home fairly early, too. In the pavilion, there are two Stella replicas by Sturtevant.
We ourselves are very fond of remakes; we often make copies of other artists’
works and place them in new contexts, so we are big fans of Sturtevant. Klara
Liden has made the teenager’s room; with a dog flap out to the free and punky
interior, this room indicates the absolute last hope for this family.
One of the things we wanted to stress with our exhibition is that collecting is
not only about markets and auctions and investment and who is hot and who is
not. Lots of people collect for other reasons - their own beliefs, political views,
sexual identity, or because they have a passion for a certain artistic approach.
Some people collect because it’s a tradition in their family or because they have
a neurotic need for order in their life or out of vanity or to give back something
to society. We find it interesting, this belief that objects brought together can
constitute an identity. [...]

Elmgreen & Dragset and David Velasco, extract of the artists' statements from conversation with
David Velasco, Artforum, online edition (1 June 2009).

Elmgreen &Dragset//The Collectors//67

Melanie Gilligan
Hedge Fund//2007

In a recent interview with Portfolio magazine Tom Wolfe said that if he were to
write Bonfire o f the Vanities again today, hedge fund managers would be his new
‘masters of the universe’. Such a title fittingly describes not only the prominent
cultural influence of hedge fund managers in their new-found roles as powerful
art collectors and prime real estate owners (sections of New York and Connecticut
are now called Upper and Lower Hedgistan), but more disturbingly their
mounting control over global economic wealth. The annual personal profit of the
highest paid hedge fund managers (the top three earning over SI billion a year
each) amounts to more than the total gross domestic product of Bahrain, Jordan,
Ethiopia or Jamaica. One study estimated assets under management of the hedge
fund industries (a group of only 9000 companies) totaled S1.9 trillion in 2006
and grew by 24 per cent that year. Every week waves of newspaper articles
enumerate new ways in which hedge funds dominate the world market. In equity
and debt markets hedge-fund trading now accounts for more global financial
activity than banks do. Masters of the planet at the very least.
Hedge funds are unregulated and secretive investment companies that admit
only large institutions and extremely wealthy investors. They are unprecedented
vehicles for wealth creation, employing a wide range of investing methods
including conventional market trading, leverage (i.e. borrowing larger sums in
order to increase returns), derivatives such as options and futures, and ‘short
sales’. In their perpetual quest for higher returns, hedge funds make often short­
term bets on an ever-expanding array of asset classes including not just stocks,
bonds, commodities and currencies but anything from securitized debt portfolios
(debts converted into tradable capital market instruments) to artworks. Hedge
funds got their name from a frequently used technique called ‘short-selling’, a
‘hedging’ method for benefiting from devaluation: by borrowing stocks or other
financial instruments, selling them off and then buying them back once their
price has fallen, the fund profits from the difference. In addition to pure
speculation, many funds buy up shares in companies and then seek to increase
share value through compelling those companies to change their business
strategies - which can include cutting costs, slashing wages and downsizing -
their leadership, their capital structure, or even force sales. (...)
In recent years many hedge fund managers have become high-profile
collectors of art, treating it as a new asset class. As hedge fund wealth has grown
exponentially in this decade, fund managers’ penchant for post-war ‘masters’

68//PATRONAGE
and contemporary art has helped drive the global art market to heights equalled
only in the heady 1980s. Artists favoured by hedge-fiind managers have skyrocketed
in price; for instance, fund manager adoration has caused the value of Richard
Prince’s work to rise five-fold in the past three years. Recent buys such as last year’s
purchase by Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital, of a Willem de Kooning painting
for S137.5 million or the $80 million paid for Jasper Johns’ False Start by Ken Griffin,
founder of Citadel, establish new precedents for the value of works. Amy
Cappellazzo of Christie’s described Griffin’s Johns purchase, which exceeded the
artist’s auction record by almost five times, as having a ‘permission-giving’ quality.
In other words, paying large amounts gives other collectors permission to further
inflate prices. Apart from major auction purchases, the hedge fund industry also
supports a great deal of buying in lesser-known contemporary art. In addition to
investment in art by fund manager mega-collectors such as Cohen, who has
personally spent more than $600 million on artworks, hedge funds specifically for
trading art have also sprouted up but so far with apparently limited success.
Beyond the evident increase in economic symbiosis between the art market
and finance capital, the way that the ‘masters of the universe’ have adopted such
prominent roles in the art world cannot simply be chalked up to wealthy investors
finding another market to toy with. According to some art world professionals
there is a definite correlation between hedge-fund managers’ art-buying
sensibilities and the business they are in. The hedge fund manager’s predilection
for contemporary art rather than a Rembrandt or a Manet expresses his or her
‘riskophilic’ tastes and constant pursuit of the right kind of profitable edge, useful
qualities not only for playing the art market but also for a dealer selling art or, in
some cases, an artist producing it. As such, the hedge fund manager’s appearance
on the art-world stage extends beyond the predilections of a few wealthy
individuals, indicating instead a collective gravitation towards a sphere with
which they feel a particular affinity. In their work, these titans of global economic
markets profit from risk, requiring the ability to turn everything, even loss, into
gain and exploit subtle relational differences within a system where positions
are transitory and new strategies are constantly adopted to maintain profitability.
Perhaps they are drawn to contemporary art and art-world practices because
they recognize some of these principles and modes of operating in today’s
version of aesthetic avant-gardism. [...]

Melanie Gilligan, extracts from ‘Hedge Fund’, Texte zur Kunst, no. 6 (June 2007) 7 6 -8 2 .

Gilllgan//Hedge Fund//69
J J Charlesworth
Bonfire of the Vanities//2007

If the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its
growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit: it must be spent, willingly or not,
gloriously or catastrophically.1

That’s Georges Bataille, writing in the opening to his eccentric work on economic
theory, The Accursed Share. Whilst it doesn’t much function as an orthodox bit of
economic analysis, its central theme of how the unproductive surplus of a system
relates to ‘luxury’ hits a chord at a time when the art world is ever more
preoccupied with the remarkable gains of the art market.
On 7 February [2007] Sotheby’s held the most successful contemporary art
sale ever staged in Europe, totalling £45.72m, with the unprecedented sale of
Peter Doig’s White Canoe (1990-91) selling for £5,732,000. At a conference at
Tate Britain on ‘The Rise of the London Art Market’ over the following two days,
The Art Newspaper's art market editor Georgina Adam could point out that the art
market had reached the kind of levels not seen since the peak of the last art-
boom and the end of the 1980s, and which presaged the art market crash at the
turn of the 1990s. The mainstream press is full of reports and feature articles
breathlessly asserting the deranged excitement of the current boom, tinged with
more disgruntled mutterings about the ethics of record corporate bonuses for
city fat-cats, hedge funds muscling in and distorting the prices of young and
emerging artists, and super-rich Russians spiking prices on contemporary art at
the top end of the market.
So inevitably, with the art market in such supercharged growth, there’s plenty
of hand-wringing about whether, in some tragic repeat of the early 1990s, the art
market bubble is ‘going to burst’. In its regular survey of art market confidence,
ArtTactic could report that the surge in confidence witnessed was flattening out,
and that collectors feared that a global economic slowdown would be the art
market’s greatest risk.
There’s a kind of banality to this statement, akin to the assertion that a survey
of turkeys reveals that most turkeys agree that the onset of Christmas would be
a bad thing. Breathless excitement and premonitions of doom go hand-in-hand,
and yet there is something unconvincing about current preoccupations with
whether the art market’s growth is ‘sustainable’, and which currently postpones
discussion of more substantial questions: what if the ‘boom’ doesn’t stop, what
might that signify about the changing shape of the art world, and what are the

70// PATRONAGE
consequences of this for art making, for the role it plays in contemporary culture,
and for the possibility of a critical art in a scene increasingly dominated by the
gravitational pull of art’s commercial systems?
Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s world head of contemporary art, should have a
slightly better grasp than most on the art market’s current situation; quoted in
Vanity Fair’s recent art special issue, he suggests that ‘we have never operated in
a post-Communist economy vis-a-vis the art market in the twentieth century.
For the first time in history since 1914 we are in a non-cyclical market. But people
don’t get it. People make predictions from a market that once existed strictly in
America and Europe.’2 Meyer’s suggestion that the art market should be regarded
as non-cyclical is of course provocative, coming from the person who has most to
lose, along with all those who would follow his advice. In the current issue of
Printed Papers the artist Liam Gillick remarks on Meyer’s comments at last year’s
post-Marathon talks event at the Serpentine Gallery, querying Meyer’s turn to
the idea of a new ‘bourgeoisie’ as the foundation of the new art expansion:

Meyer... talked about the return of the bourgeoisie - the rise of the bourgeoisie’s
interest in contemporary art - as the main engine of success and art market
expansion. This was at the crux of his argument as to why this is not a cyclical
boom, in his opinion, but a sustained situation, and this is also a way of talking his
way out of a potential economic collapse in the auction houses.3

Gillick’s pinpointing of the re-emergence of a ‘new bourgeoisie’ is important, but it

is Meyer’s pragmatic and professionally anecdotal understanding of the ‘new
bourgeoisie’ that has some partial truth. Meyer’s argument is based on the
experience that the rich are turning to contemporary art, and that this quantitative
transformation, with its implied broadening of the art market’s consumer base,
will make it less prone to the ‘cyclical’ boom-bust that followed the misfortunes of
the more traditionally narrow consumer base of past art markets. This is the view
from inside the goldfish bowl, as it were: there just seem to be more and more
buyers turning up, and for a professional auctioneer, it cannot slip your notice that
the very wealthy are no longer buying Old Masters and Chippendale furniture, but
turning towards the hip, youthful forms of contemporary art.
What Gillick is sensitive to, on the other hand, goes beyond the horizon of
Meyer’s view of the art world. Meyer’s comments try to rationalize in cultural
terms (the tastes of the new art collector) what is an economic phenomenon of
the last decade, a phenomenon which - in terms of ‘cyclical’ markets’ - seems
not to fit the boom-bust, expansion-recession business cycle model of traditional
economics. And yet it acknowledges two emerging realities, without knowing it;
first, the change in the character of capitalist dynamism in the west, and second,

Charlesworth//Bonfire of the Vanities//71

its consequences on the luxury-consumption sector of the economy of which the
commercial art market is a part.
Two years ago, the economist Phil Mullan wrote a compelling, if overlooked,
analysis of contemporary global economic trends, examining why recent
economic patterns in the Western economies no longer conform to what
economists have learnt to expect from historical experience. As Mullan put it,
‘Many commentators are aware that there is something odd about the world
economy today. This economic cycle has many unusual and perplexing features.
It is even difficult to identify what stage we are at on the basis of using the normal
four phases of [the recession-expansion] cycle.’4
A key observation of Mullan’s analysis is that the growth curve of the Western
economies is flattening; that’s to say that over the past two decades recessions
have become less severe, whist post-recessionary booms have become equally
unpronounced, so that the economic ‘peaks and troughs’ of the traditional
business cycle have tended to become less pronounced, leading to historically
low increases in GDP. As Mullan argues, ‘[this] shift is not the result of the
supposed “revolutionary dynamism” of the new Information Economy, which
was said to have changed the rules of business and eliminated cyclical downturns.
Rather it is a symptom of the weakness of economic dynamism.’
Mullan’s analysis is useful in a consideration of the art market because some
of the phenomena associated with this weak dynamism have a lot to do with the
money that the art market is based on. Of particular significance is the observation
that business investment (profits reinvested by business into the expansion of
productive activity) is peculiarly low, whilst corporate profits are exceptionally
high so soon after the most recent recessionary dip. As the New York Times could
report last August [2006], US corporate profits as a share of GDP are the highest
since the 1960s, whilst wages are at their lowest share on record.5 Business
profits are similarly high in the UK.
That companies are ‘flush with cash’ is a situation that extends to the final
beneficiaries of this profit-rich, cash-rich, low-growth corporate era. Citing a
report on top incomes, the New York Times article revealed that ‘in 2004, the top
1 per cent of earners - a group that includes many chief executives - received
11.2 per cent of all wage income, up from 8.7 per cent a decade earlier and less
than 6 per cent three decades ago.’ The relatively undynamic, under-investing
contemporary economies of the West are nevertheless rich in profits and
extremely ‘liquid’, and all that cash looks for somewhere to go. If it’s not property-
buying or wild speculation on the hoped-for instant returns of internet stocks,
art is one place for it, as one part of the larger luxury goods sector which, as
Georgina Adam noted at the Tate’s conference, simply did not exist a generation
ago on the scale that it does today.

72//PATRONAGE
 So nervous headlines about city-boy bonuses distorting the property market
and the art-world ‘new money’ of hedge funds distorting the art market are the
social and cultural outcomes of a significant change in how the profits of capital
are used. Critically, if one agrees with Mullan’s account of the emergence of the
‘slow drift economy’, the sluggish but stable nature of economic growth no longer
suggests the possibility of the kinds of cyclical recession witnessed at the
beginning of the 1990s, and which provided the basis for the art market crash at
the time. So rather than the reorientation of the wealthy to contemporary art
being an explanation for the current boom, it is no more than a reflection of the
significant expansion of the group of high-income consumers who are not
necessarily in the business of speculation for investment, but are effectively in
the business of, as Bataille would put it ‘squandering the surplus’; or in everyday
terms, spending the cash that comes to them on the things they like, and which,
in the Western capitalist economies, is not being put to better use.
There is in one sense nothing new about this; the history of modern art
from the nineteenth century onwards finds art defined, enabled and constrained
by the artist’s relationship to the private collector, and the wealth that enables
artists to make artworks, if it isn’t forthcoming from the state, comes in its
greatest part from the surplus that the wealthy have to dispose of (not forgetting
that the state, in capitalist countries, is another form of that wealth). By and
large, forms of contemporary cultural production continue to be defined by
their relationship with the market that sustains them, and the production of
contemporary art is at present expanding to meet that growing demand. From
within the culture of contemporary art it is difficult for commentators to
express more than a sort of concerned anxiety about whether the way the art
market is expanding is ‘unsustainable’. Such preoccupations with ‘bubbles
bursting’ are invariably guilty displacements of the vague sentiment that
something about such an expansion is morally questionable, but in which one
feels complicit, and not inherently about the objective questions of what
underpins the market’s expansion.
Meyer, on the other hand, doesn’t have a problem with the rapprochement
between artists and the new bourgeoisie:

In 1863 in Paris, in the Salon des Refuses, artists separated from their bourgeois
patrons. They started to paint things that people didn’t understand, and the avant-
garde was created. It took 100 years for the bourgeoisie to realign their aesthetics
with the contemporary artists. John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Richard Prince -
they’re all smart, and they make the perfect objects for bourgeois environments.
Artists today don’t have any intention of reforming the bourgeoisie. They’re
actually happy with it.6

Charlesworth//Bonfire of the Vanities//73

Meyer’s chirpy indifference, for all the absurdity of the idea that artists could
ever ‘reform the bourgeoisie’, masks a more serious point about the position of
artists in relation to the context they inhabit. For what is hidden in Meyer’s slick
historical elision is that the separation of artists from their bourgeois patrons,
and the emergence of the avant-garde, happens in the period in which, for the
first time, society becomes culturally and social polarized by the active emergence
of the working class as a social force. The tensions of patronage, class allegiance
and the desire for autonomy are all active in the way artists produced and
negotiated the terms of the avant-garde.
The modern age was defined by the polarization of society along the lines of
class confrontation - up until, that is, the end of the Cold War, and the defeat of
the working class movement in the 1980s. The art world of the twenty-first
century, then, could be seen as the nineteenth century in reverse - the ‘new
bourgeoisie’ and artists, minus the social and political agency of working people,
and the door pushed open at the turn of the twentieth century - political, social
and cultural - has swung shut again with that century’s demise.
As Mullan observes, the absence of social conflict ‘has made it easier to
withstand and work through economic challenges in a less destructive way than
in the past’; capital has been freer to restructure and cost-cut than before, which
is why wages and pensions have been continuously under pressure, even in the
current period of ‘slow drift’ growth.
So the booming art market is only one, refracted view of the broader
transformation of the relationship between capital, production and working
people, a transformation which is distinct from the dynamic and destructive era
of early capitalism. In the West at least, what we’re observing is the - strictly
speaking - decadent character of an economy that prefers expending its surplus
over putting to productive use, or to the benefit of working people.
But here, the relationship of working people to production and culture has
also changed. In a footnote to The Accursed Share Bataille comments that ‘it is
assumed that if industry cannot have an indefinite development, the same is not
true of the “services” constituting what is called the tertiary sector of the
economy ... which includes specialized insurance organizations as well as the
work of artists.’7 Writing sixty years ago, Bataille could not have foreseen how
productive industry would be eclipsed by the rise of the service sector, by finance
and culture. ‘The work of artists’ is part of that shift, an expansion that reveals
something about ordinary life in the advanced economies. In Britain, the decline
in industrial manufacturing has been matched by the expansion of employment
in the service sector, a shift which, with the politicization of the ‘creative
industries’ has encouraged a cultural outlook in which leisure and culture become
the symbolic cornerstone of production as well consumption. Little wonder then

74//PATRONAGE
that young people increasingly aspired more to careers in the creative industries;
in the UK graduates of creative art and design courses have shot up in the last
decade, whilst student numbers in ‘serious’ subjects have declined.
Who wouldn’t make such choices? Who wouldn’t forego a job in Starbucks or
the local call centre for a more attractive, possibly lucrative job as a ‘creative’.
And within that sector, who wouldn’t opt for the lifestyle career of artist - the
new aristocrats of service sector employment? Capital’s ‘flight from production’
appears in the ‘glorious’ squandering of its excess through such channels as the
art market, so expanding the production of art in the process. It is no surprise
that so much recent commercial art embodies the individualized expenditure of
labour; the return to skill-based techniques in painting, to high-craft investment
in objects, narrates the tension between labour and luxury that lies behind the
relationship of artist to collector.
Of course, there is no reason why artists cannot turn this situation to their
advantage. For once, there is a substantial commercial base for their work, but
for the moment, art’s market is fuelling the production of work that echoes the
broader conflation of production and luxury expenditure that lies behind it, and
the sentiments of the ‘new bourgeoisie’. Abandoning the commercial art world
to its own devices might be a missed opportunity, however. Instead, channelling
the wealth of the art market to more unpredictable, critically independent ends,
prising open once again the proximity between artists and their patrons, may be
a culturally and politically worthwhile challenge. In any case, ‘hoping’ for the
bubble to burst may prove to be a longer wait than anyone expects.

1 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (1 9 4 6 -4 9 ), vol. I (New York: Zone Books. 1991) 21.
2 Tobias Meyer, quoted in ‘Money On the Wall’, Vanity Fair (December 2006).
3 Liam Gillick, ‘Selected Transcription from Talk at UN Plaza, Berlin, 2 0 0 6 ’, Printed Project, no. 6.
4 Phil Mullan, ‘It’s Capitalism, but not as we know it’ (5 January 20 0 5 ) (http://www.spiked-online.
com )
5 ‘Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity’, New York Times (28 August 2006).
6 ‘Money On the Wall’, op. cit.
7 Bataille, The Accursed Share, op. cit., 192

JJ Charlesworth, ‘Bonfire o f the Vanities’, A rt Monthly, no. 305 (April 2007).

ChaTlesworth//Bonfire of the Vanities// 75

Andrea Fraser
L’1%, C’est Moi//2011

How do the world’s leading collectors earn their money? How do their
philanthropic activities relate to their economic operations? And what does
collecting art mean to them and how does it affect the art world? If we look at
the incomes of this class, it is conspicuous that their profits are based on the
growth of income inequality all over the world.
This redistribution of capital in turn has a direct influence on the art market:
the greater the discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the higher prices in
this market rise. The situation, it would seem, urgently calls for the development
of alternatives to the existing system.
Who are the collectors of contemporary art today? The ARTnews 200 Top
Collectors list is an obvious place to start. Near the top of the alphabetical list is
Roman Abramovich, estimated by Forbes to be worth $13.4 billion, who admitted
paying billions in bribes for control of Russian oil and aluminium assets.1 Bernard
Arnault, listed by Forbes as the fourth richest man in the world with $41 billion,
controls LVMH, which, despite the debt crisis, reported a sales growth of 13 per
cent in the first half of 2011.2 Hedge fund manager John Arnold, who got his start at
Enron - where he received an $8 million bonus just before it collapsed - recently
gave $150,000 to an organization seeking to limit public pensions.3 MoMA, MoCA
and LACMA trustee Eli Broad is worth $5.8 billion and was a board member and
major shareholder of AIG. Steven A. Cohen, estimated to be worth $8 billion, is the
founder of SAC Capital Advisors, which is under investigation for insider trading.4
Guggenheim trustee Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who is also chairman of the Hellenic
Federation of Enterprises, recently called for ‘modem private initiative’ to save the
failing Greek economy from a ‘bloated and parasitic’ ‘patronage-ridden state’.5
Frank J. and Lorenzo Fertitta were the third and fourth highest paid men in the US
in 2007, according to Forbes. Guggenheim trustee David Ganek recently shut down
his $4 billion Level Global hedge fund after an F.B.I. raid.6 Noam Gottesman and
former partner Pierre Lagrange (also on the ARTnews list), earned £400 million
each on the sale of their hedge fund GLG in 2007, making them ‘among the world’s
biggest winners from the credit crunch’, according to The Sunday Times. Hedge
fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin supported Obama in 2008 but recently gave
$500,000 to a political action committee created by former Bush adviser Karl Rove
and was also seen at a meeting of the right-wing-populist Koch Network.7Andrew
Hill’s $100 million in compensation in 2009 led Citigroup to sell its Philbro division,
where he was the top trader, after pressures from regulators to curtail his pay on

76//PATRONAGE
the heels of Citigroup’s receipt of $45 billion in US federal bailout funds (he
subsequently moved the company offshore).8J. Tomilson Hill is one of a number of
principles of the Blackstone Group investment firm who were listed among the 25
highest-paid men in the US by Forbes in 2007, with $46.3 million in compensation
that year. (Fellow Blackstone cofounder and Frick Collection and Asia Society
trustee Stephen Schwarzman recently compared Obama’s effort to raise the tax
rate paid by private-equity managers on their profit shares, currently taxed as
capital gains at 15 per cent, to Hitler’s invasion of Poland).9 And there is Damien
Hirst, estimated by The Sunday Times to be worth £215 million. Peter Kraus collected
$25 million for just three months’ work when his exit package was triggered by
Merrill Lynch’s sale to Bank of America with the help of US federal funds.10 Henry
Kravis’ income in 2007 was reported to be $1.3 million a day.11 His wife, economist
Marie-Josee Kravis, who is MoMA’s president and a fellow at the neoconservative
Hudson Institute, recently defended ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ against ‘Europe’s
“social capitalist politics’” in Forbes.com. Daniel S. Loeb, a MoCA trustee and founder
of the $7.8 billion hedge fund Third Point, sent a letter to investors in the midst of
recent federal budget negotiations that led the US to the brink of default, attacking
Obama for ‘insisting that the only solution to the nation’s problems ... lies in the
redistribution of wealth’ (the negotiations concluded with drastic cuts and no tax
increases).12 Dimitri Mavrommatis, the ‘Swiss-based’ Greek asset manager, paid
£18 million for a Picasso at Christie’s on 21 June 2011, when Greeks were rioting
against austerity measures. And of course, there is Charles Saatchi, who helped
elect Margaret Thatcher. Peter Simon, the founder of one of the UK’s biggest retail
chains, was paid a £16.4 million dividend this year by his company, which is based
in the British Virgin Islands, where there is no capital gains or corporate tax and
the income tax is zero. The firm of MoMA chairman Jerry Speyer defaulted on a
major real estate investment in 2010, losing $500 million for the California State
Pension Fund and up to $2 billion in debt secured by US federal agencies.13 And
there is Reinhold Wurth, worth $5.7 billion, who has been fined for tax evasion in
Germany and compared taxation to torture.14He recently acquired ‘Virgin of Mercy’
by Hans Holbein the Younger, paying the highest price ever for an artwork in
Germany and outbidding the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main,15
where the painting had been on display since 2003.
Until about ten years ago, one of the most widely cited texts by an economist
about the art market was a paper called ‘Unnatural Value, or Art Investment as a
Floating Crap Game’, written in 1986 by William J. Baumol. Baumol analysed
‘several centuries of price data’ and came to the conclusion that the real rate of
return on art investments was basically zero - hardly an encouragement for art
collectors.16 In 2002, two New York University-based economists, Jiangping Mei
and Michael Moses, claimed to prove him wrong17 and began publishing an

Fraser//L'l%, C’est Moi//77

analysis of art auction results that showed art outperforming many other
investments. This was the beginning of the Mei Moses Art Index (as well as their
art consulting business. Beautiful Asset Advisors), which quickly began to appear
on art investment websites and in publications like Forbes, playing a significant
role in the development of the art investment industry.
Finally, a couple of years ago, a group of economists began to look at these
comparative indexes not simply for evidence of art’s investment value, but for an
explanation of its price structure. William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog and
Christophe Spaenjers suspected that equity market returns actually have a direct
impact on art prices by increasing the buying power of the wealthy. So they
compared art prices to income measures. As they report in their paper ‘Art and
Money’, analysis did not find a relationship between art returns and ‘overall income
variables (such as GDP or total personal income)’ but only with income inequality:
art prices don’t go up as a society as a whole becomes wealthier, but only when
income inequality increases. Their analysis suggests that ‘a one percentage point
increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 per cent triggers an
increase in art prices of about 14 per cent’. They conclude: ‘It is indeed the money
of the wealthy that drives art prices. This implies that we can expect art booms
whenever income inequality rises quickly. This seems exactly what we witnessed
during the last period of strong art price appreciation, 2002-2007.’18
A quick look at the Gini index, which tracks income disparity worldwide, shows
that the countries with the most significant art booms of the past two decades
have also experienced the greatest rise in inequality: the US, Britain, China and,
home to the most recent boom, India. In the US, at least, the steep increase in
inequality has been reported widely for years, with economists like Paul Krugman
and fellow Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz sounding alarms in the mainstream
press. Even The Economist has shown concern. Recent articles have focused on new
data showing that the top 1 per cent now take 25 per cent of the income and
control 40 per cent of wealth in the US, up from 12 and 33 per cent 25 years ago,
while the income of the bottom 99 per cent has not risen since 1993. This brings
inequality in the US back to 1929 levels and close to the current level of Mexico.19
With regard to the art market, however, focusing on the 1 per cent is
misleading. The threshold for 1 per cent status in the US in 2008 was an annual
gross income of $380,354 - hardly the makings of a significant collector. It is only
at the 1 per cent threshold of $1,803,585 that we begin to encounter our patron
class. As Goetzmann et al. note, art prices, like real estate prices in desirable
cities, rise with income inequality as the wealthy outbid each other for rarefied
properties. Steeply increasing top incomes set off an equally steep inflation in the
goods and services associated with affluence20 resulting in a downclassing of
formerly affluent income levels. In the art world, this has effectively priced

78//PATRONAGE
professionals and other traditionally art-supporting groups out of the market.
More broadly, it produces a distortion in the perception of wealth, as members of
the top 20,10 and even 1 per cent may no longer perceive themselves as affluent.
The art market boom of the past decade has been associated widely with
the rise of HNWIS (high net worth individuals) or ultra-HNWIS (people worth
over SI million or $30 million respectively), terms popularized by the World
Wealth Reports that Merrill Lynch and CapGemini began releasing in 1997.
These reports show the total wealth of HNWIS exploding from $19.1 trillion in
1997 to $42.7 trillion in 2010. Art+Auction recently celebrated trends
documented in the 2011 report: the number of HNWIS worldwide, which
almost doubled between 1997 and 2007 from 5.9 to more than 10.9 million, has
recovered from its 2008 dip to pre-crisis levels; best of all, HNWI demand for
‘investments of passion’ - including cars, boats, jets (29 per cent), jewellery,
gems, watches (22 per cent) and art (22 per cent) - has also rebounded!21
But it is not only the market-based sector of the art world that has benefited
from the rise of HNWIS. Since public arts funding has mostly declined in Europe
and North America since the 1980s, it must be assumed that, directly and indirectly,
this increasingly concentrated private wealth has also fuelled the enormous
expansion in the past few decades of museums, biennial exhibitions, studio art
and art related degree programmes, art publications, art residencies, awards, etc.
In the United States at least, the causes of rising inequality are relatively
clear: anti-tax and anti-government politics that reversed progressive taxation
and led to corporate and financial deregulation; political and legal assaults on
organized labour that led to falling wages and, together with deregulation,
removed any checks on skyrocketing executive compensation. These politics
have been supported by a hugely successful culture war that has effectively
identified class hierarchy and privilege with educational and cultural capital,
rather than economic capital, for much of the US population outside of urban
centres. It is also clear that financial deregulation played a major role in the
subprime crisis, as did the cheap credit that propped up consumer spending
and the real estate market as real wages declined. And it is also clear that the
sovereign debt crisis that has followed the subprime crisis will only further
increase inequality as austerity measures are implemented to protect banks
and bondholders. The pain of cuts to cultural budgets is hard to compare to the
impoverishment inflicted on millions by mass foreclosures and job loss; the
bankruptcy of pension plans; cuts in public sector wages, in health care, in
support for the unemployed, for students; with steep increases in the cost of
education, etc. Anyway, we can always turn to HNWIS, who continue to privatize
profits at pre-crisis rates. And as our survey of Top Collectors shows, many of
our patrons are actively working to preserve the political and financial system

Fraser//L’l%, C’ost Mol//79

that will keep their wealth, and inequality, growing for decades to come.
Except to stalwart adherents of trickle-down theory, it must be abundantly
clear by now that what has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the
rest of the world. How can we continue to rationalize our participation in this
economy? In the US, it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that
can escape it. The private nonprofit model - which almost all US museums as well
as alternative art organizations exist within - is dependent on wealthy donors and
has its nineteenth-century origins in the same anti-tax and anti-government
ideology that led to the current situation: the principle that private initiatives are
better suited to fulfil social needs than the public sector and that wealth is most
productively administered by the wealthy. Even outside of institutions, artists
engaged in community-based and social practices that aim to provide public
benefit in the context of budget cuts may be just what George H.W. Bush called for
when he envisioned volunteers and community organizations spreading like ‘a
thousand points of lights’ in the wake of his rollback in public spending.22
If our only choice is to participate in this economy or abandon the art field
entirely, at least we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical
or political art practices or - adding insult to injury - social justice. Any claim that
we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized
by the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality
- the (not so) new legitimation function of art museums. The only ‘alternative’
today is to recognize our participation in that economy and confront it in a direct
and immediate way in all of our institutions, including museums and galleries, and
publications. Despite the radical political rhetoric that abounds in the art world,
censorship and self-censorship reign when it comes to confronting its economic
conditions, except in marginalized (often self-marginalized) arenas where there is
nothing to lose - and little to gain - in speaking truth to power.23
In the US, the duplicity of progressive claims in art may also contribute to the
success of culture warriors and right-wing populists in convincing economically
and culturally marginal populations outside of urban centres that progressive
politics is just a ruse of cultural and educational elites to preserve their privilege.
In our case, they may be right. It increasingly seems to me that politics in the art
world is largely a politics of envy and guilt, or of self-interest generalized in the
name of a narrowly conceived and privileged form of autonomy, and that critique
most often serves negation in a Freudian rather than a Marxian sense, distancing,
above all, these economic conditions and our investment in them.24 As such, it is
a politics that functions to defend against the contradictions that might otherwise
make our continued participation in the art field, and access to its considerable
rewards - which have ensconced many of us comfortably among the 10 per cent,
if not the 1 per cent - unbearable.

8Q//PATRONAGE
 In Europe, however, there may be more choices as long as direct public
subsidy exists. The debt crisis is pushing more and more of the European art
field towards the US model. The British Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, recently
called for an ‘American-style culture of philanthropy’ to save the arts in Britain
from a 30 per cent cut in the Arts Council and a 15 per cent cut in funding for
museums.25 Don’t do it! Let this tale of inequality and crisis in the US be a
cautionary one. Rather than turning to collectors to subsidize the acquisition of
artworks 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. At the very least, we must begin to evaluate whether
artworks fulfil, or fail to fulfil, political or critical claims on the level of their
social and economic conditions. We must insist that what artworks are
economically centrally determines what they mean socially and also artistically.
I believe that a broad-based shift in art discourse can help bring about a long
overdue splitting off of the market-dominated sub-field of galleries, auction
houses and art fairs. Let this sub-field become the luxury goods business it
already basically is, with what circulates there having as little to do with art as
yachts, jets and watches. European museums have the potential to be the
birthplace of a new art field that could emerge from this split, where new forms
of autonomy can develop: not as secessionist ‘alternatives’ that exist only in the
grandiose enactments and magical thinking of artists and theorists, but as fully
institutionalized structures, which, with the ‘properly social magic of
institutions’,26 will be able to produce, reproduce and reward specific and, let’s
hope, more equitably derived and distributed forms of capital.

1 Dominic Kennedy, ‘Chelsea owner admits he paid out billions in bribes', Irish Independent (5 July
2008).
2 Stephanie Clifford, ‘Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves’, New York Times (3 August
2011).
3 Will Evans, ‘CA pension overhaul group gets grant from Texans’, San Francisco Chronicle (12
August 2011).
4 Azam Ahmed, ‘DealBook: SAC Capital Said to Face Insider Trading Inquiry’, New York Times (1
June 2011).
5 ‘Annual General Meeting o f SEV Hellenic Federation o f Enterprises, adress [sic] by SEV
Chairman Mr Dimitris Daskalopoulos, May 2 4 ,2 0 1 1 ’ ( http://www.sev.org.gr/online/viewNews.
aspx?id-1918& m id=&lang-en)

Froser//L'l%, C’est Moi//81

6 Azam Ahmed. ‘Dealbook: For Level Global, F.B.I. Raid is a Final Blow’, New York Times (4 March
2011).

7 ‘Chicago Billionaire Leads Hedge Fund Shift Away from Obama’, abcnews.go.com (7 December
2010); Kate Zernike, ‘Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead’, New York Times (19
October 2010).
8 Dealbook. ‘Ex-Citi Trader, Hall, Raises $1 billion’, New York Times (21 June 2010).
9 Mark DeCambre. 'Blackstone Chief Schwarzman likens Obama to Hitler over tax rises’, The
Telegraph (16 August 2010).
10 Heidi N. Moore. ‘Deal Journal: Merrill Lynch’s Peter Kraus Collects $25 Million, Then Resigns’,
Wall Street Journal Blogs (22 December 2008).
11 Dealbook, ‘Henry Kravis in Focus as Buyout Backlash Spreads', New York Times (6 December
2007).
12 Azam Ahmed, ‘Dealbook: Writing Again, Third Point’s Loeb Takes Swipe at Obama’, New York
Times (24 July 2011).
13 Charles V. Bagli and Christine Haughney, ‘Wide Fallout in Failed Deal for Stuyvesant Town’, New
York Times (25 January 2010).
14 Melanie Ahlemeier, ‘Die Rache des Schraubenkonigs’, Siiddeutsche.de (18.12.2008)
15 Rose-Maria Gropp, ‘Deutschlands teuerstes Kunstwerk’, faz.net (14 July 2011).
16 The American Economic Review, vol. 76, no.2 (May 1989) 10-14.
17 ‘Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces’, in New York University Finance
Working Paper, no. 0 1 -1 2 (February 2002).
18 ‘Art and Money’, in Yale School o f Management Working Paper, no. 0 9 - 2 6 (Yale School of
Management, 28 April 2010).
19 ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’, Vanity Fair (May 2011).
20 ‘Economics: Free Exchange: The Cost of Living Extremely W ell’ (Economist.com)
21 Roman Kraeussl, ‘Following their Passions’, Art+Auction (Summer 2011).
22 George H.W. Bush. Inaugural Address (20 January 1989).
23 I began much of this research in spring 2010, when Artforum asked me to contribute to their
summer issue on museums. Artforum declined to publish my text, which detailed the involvement
of MoMA trustees in the subprime crisis. That research developed into an initiative called Artigarchy,
an interactive web-based data platform that would track the political and economic affiliations of
top collectors and trustees. 1 have yet to find an art organization willing to take it on.
24 See Andrea Fraser, ‘Speaking of the Social World ...’, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 21, no. 81 (March 2011)
1 5 3 -6 .
25 Quoted in Charlotte Higgins. 'Will Philanthropists Save the Arts?', The Guardian (21 October
2010).
26 Pierre Bourdieu and Lo'ic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992) 117.

Andrea Fraser, ‘L’1%, C’est Moi', Texte zur Kunst, no. 83 (September 2011) 114-27.

82//PATRONAGE
Charles Saatchi
The Hideousness of the Art World//2011

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is

the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and
oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were
found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year’s spectacular
art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside
St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled
socializing, from one swanky party to another.
Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as
cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.
Do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? Or do they simply enjoy
having easily recognized, big-brand name pictures, bought ostentatiously in
auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes, floating
and otherwise, in an instant demonstration of drop-dead coolth and wealth.
Their pleasure is to be found in having their lovely friends measuring the weight
of their baubles, and being awestruck.
It is no surprise, then, that the success of the uber art dealers is based upon the
mystical power that art now holds over the super-rich. The new collectors, some of
whom have become billionaires many times over through their business nous, are
reduced to jibbering gratitude by their art dealer or art adviser, who can help them
appear refined, tasteful and hip, surrounded by their achingly cool masterpieces.
Not so long ago, I believed that anything that helped broaden interest in
current art was to be welcomed; that only an elitist snob would want art to be
confined to a worthy group of aficionados. But even a self-serving narcissistic
show-off like me finds this new art world too toe-curling for comfort. In the
fervour of peacock excess, it’s not even considered necessary to waste one’s time
looking at the works on display. At the world’s mega-art blowouts, it’s only the
pictures that end up as wallflowers. (...)

Charles Saatchi, extract from ‘The Hideousness of the Art World’, The Guardian (2 December 2011).

Saatchi//The Hideousness of the Art World//83

No matter how far we go,
art continues to exist in

a world unto itself,

a world populated by

critics,
gallerists,
dealers,
artists,
directors,

all speaking their own

private language.

A world that is highly

realized and comely
- a kind of

managerial sublime

M«iuri/io Ciiltc'liin, (>th Caribbean Uicnnial. 2001

INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS
Harrison and Cynthia White
Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change
in the French Painting World//1965

(...) The Impressionists seemed to mark a basic new era in art, primarily because
they ushered in a new structure for the art world. Let us call this new institutional
system the dealer-and-critic system. |...)
It was artists, not paintings, who were the focus of the dealer-critic
institutional system. The new system triumphed in part because it could and did
command a bigger market than the academic-governmental structure. Equally
important, however, it dealt with an artist more in terms of his production over
a career and thus provided a rational alternative to the chaos of the academic
focus on paintings by themselves.
Dealers and critics were not selfless in their relations with artists. Rather,
their own interests required them to look at artists more than at individual
paintings. A current painting as an isolated item in trade is simply too fugitive to
focus a publicity system upon. One does not buy a copy of a recognized painting:
the next best thing for inspiring the warmth of confidence in the breast of the
shrewd but nervous buyer is a younger sibling of the recognized painting.
Independent merit of a painting in and of itself was a principle directly hostile to
the institutional imperatives of the dealer-critic system and to the social and
financial needs of the artist.
Good prices for individual paintings did not satisfy a painter if they were
realized at erratically spaced times. Committed to a middle-class way of life by the
whole ethos of the Academic system, he wanted above all a predictable income,
the hallmark of the middle-class concept of a career. This was the carrot Durand-
Ruel wielded with such success that other dealers followed. In the 1600s Herman
Becker in the Netherlands had developed the same scheme of buying the output of
painters - among them, Rembrandt - for what amounted to a salary. The need was
not idiosyncratic to nineteenth-century French artists. From all points of view,
then, it was the career of an artist that had to be the focus of the system.
Speculation became an important ingredient of the new system. Famous
paintings of past centuries had long been recognized as a safe investment with
growth potential, suitable for international exchange. But changes in value were
usually too slow to warrant the term ‘speculation’. In any case, the dealers and
buyers for such paintings operated at a higher financial and social level than most
buyers of contemporary paintings. Initial prices for current Academic favourites
were also so high that they could hardly be looked to for large windfalls.
The new dealer-critic system had a built-in motive for encouraging innovative

86//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

work: tapping the fever for speculation which possessed much of the nineteenth-
century French middle class. The financial speculation in art found its cultural
counterpart in the speculation in taste. As critics and dealers were wont to say to
the ‘discerning buyer’: ‘In twenty years he will be considered a master - and his
painting will be worth a fortune!’
But speculation is doubly dangerous when the supply of objects is elastic.
Monopoly of an artist’s production was important in making speculation rational;
Durand-Ruel in his first daring coup bought up almost the entire production of
several Barbizon painters. The speculative motive reinforced the concern of the
dealer with the total career of the painter.
The Durand-Ruels, father and son, were superb judges of painting: as their
clients developed a faith in this judgment, speculation came to seem prudence.
They were also superb businessmen who saw how to reap ransoms as well as
commissions by patiently holding some as well as placing other works of
potential claimants to the throne of painting.
'Master and Pupils’ had been the natural guild grouping for the evaluation of
art. This had been carried over into the Academic view as a focus on ‘schools’, and
initially the ‘school’ view was applied within the dealer-critic system. This carry­
over of the ‘schools’ concept - which could apply equally well to paintings and
painters - did not survive long in the dealer-critic system (although it has
remained a central concept in art history). The Impressionist group shows, for
example, soon withered in favour of one-man shows. Dealers early favoured the
latter scheme, for just as individual paintings did not fit the exigencies of selling,
neither did groups of always-diverging careers. [...]

Harrison and Cynthia W hite, extracts from Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French
Painting World (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965) 2; 9 8 - 9 [footnotes not included]. © University of
Chicago Press.

White//Canvases and Careers//87

Marvin Elkoff
The American Painter as a Blue Chip//1965

(...) Up until the end of World War II, great modern art was always assumed to
be School of Paris. American artists themselves were Francophiles, and the
collectors more so. Adolph Gottlieb, one of the four of the five leaders of the
Abstract Expressionist generation that has dominated American art until recently,
remembers that up until the end of the war he assumed that this situation would
go on forever. And suddenly it began to dawn on people, first on the painters,
that Americans were doing the best and most original art in the world. Soon the
French were the ones doing the imitation. The process has already begun with
Pop art, which now has imitators in almost every country.
Though painting power, along with so much other power, came to America in
the 1940s, there was still no money. But a painter like Willem de Kooning,
America’s most famous and most highly rewarded avant-garde painter, looks
back regretfully to that period. He appreciates his great current success and his
money, but he felt more reality then, more security, more exuberance. ‘First there
was this underground reputation we had in the late 1930s and during the war,
you know, one painter for another, by ourselves, to hell with the rest’, he says,
with a Dutch accent that you almost forget because of his hip, loose style.
‘Whoever figured on a big success? That sounded crazy. Then after the war the
reputation was above-ground, you know, the critics, a few dealers like Charles
Egan. Still no money. But excitement.’
Today the paintings of de Kooning, now sixty, sell for anywhere from $3,000
to $35,000, according to size. He is involved in the seemingly endless task of
building a studio-house in East Hampton (costing over $100,000).
De Kooning speaks of the huge house as if it were a piece of reality he could
mine from a fantasy of wealth and success that never seems too firm or credible,
even to an artist of his stature. He is nervous about his reputation, which is under
attack, nervous about his next show. He works slowly and few people have seen
his recent work. He seems intent on conveying that he really does not make all
that much money, after taxes. On the other hand, he insists that he does not want
to seem ungrateful to the American government by complaining about the taxes.
These proper statements seemed odd coming from a man who feels himself
in the romantic tradition of Van Gogh, but only if you read them without hearing
the odd combination of irony and innocence that hovers under the words.
The big money did not come into art until the mid 1950s, as late as 1958-59
for most of them. ‘Poor Jackson (Pollock, who died in an accident in 1956] started

88//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

it all and he died before the money came’, says de Kooning. Only eight or nine
years ago, though his world fame was second only to Pollock’s, de Kooning still
had little money. Sidney Janis, whose gallery handled his work, had turned down
a group of his paintings about women. Around Christmas time, when de Kooning
needed money to pay his mother’s hospital bills, he offered these for sale from
his studio. (He was then sharing a house in Bridgehampton, Long Island, with
Ludwig Sander and the late Franz Kline.) Martha Jackson bought a number, which
accounted for a fine show she had the next year. It was as late as 1959 that Janis
held the historic de Kooning show, when all his paintings were sold the first day
for a total of $150,000. De Kooning says it was so unnerving he wished he were
back on the WPA [federal Works Progress Administration] project.
De Kooning displays a childlike surprise, almost entirely sincere, at his fame,
especially when it comes in the form of governmental recognition. (‘Me! Who
expected it. I came here as a stowaway, a kid of twenty.’) One night the government
traced him to a dinner at the sculptor Ibram Lassaw’s in East Hampton. A man
named Goodman left a message that President Johnson wanted to give de
Kooning the Presidential Medal of Freedom and would he please call back. His
first impulse was to figure out who was playing the practical joke. He was finally
persuaded to make the call, and then had to be persuaded to go to Washington.
It would have seemed like reverse snobbery, he said, not to go when such famous
people as Leonard Bernstein would be there. As so often with celebrities, he was
most impressed with the other celebrities.
Gottlieb’s success came about the same time as de Kooning’s - Gottlieb at
sixty-one is a year older - but his life is very different. De Kooning would prefer
to be left alone out in East Hampton; he lives there all year, and goes along with
the business side of it only in so far as he is pulled into it or persuaded it is
necessary. A sturdy, direct and businesslike man, Gottlieb is always Gottlieb and
one feels he does simply that which he has to do to maintain his success. It was
only eight years ago that he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, only four years
ago that he bought a handsome $75,000 summer house on ‘Millionaire’s Row’ in
East Hampton, formerly owned by Jacqueline Kennedy’s aunts. In the late 1930s
he spent his summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for $25 a month. In the
early 1950s in Provincetown he still spent no more than $300 for the summer.
Now once each summer in East Hampton, Gottlieb throws a huge and stylish
cocktail party for perhaps two hundred people - artists, gallery owners, and the
local rich who are often the collectors. This year there were several maids,
several bar tenders, and a local policeman to keep traffic moving. Everyone but
the painters seemed to enjoy the party. To them it was clearly a business
occasion; the strain on their faces showed it.
The rise of these older painters - Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and

ElkoH//The American Painter as a Blue Chip//89

others, in addition to Pollock, de Kooning and Gottlieb, who though various in style
are known as the first generation of Abstract Expressionists - was very slow and
modest until the late 1950s. Most of them either had wives with jobs or worked
themselves. The wives of both Newman and Gottlieb, for example, were teachers.
In 1946-47 Gottlieb sold all his paintings to the Kootz Gallery for $3,000. In
1960 a single painting sold for twice that. Today, especially after winning the
recent Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Bienal, a large Gottlieb will go for $10,000
to $15,000.
In 1957, after leaving his teaching job at Brooklyn College, Mark Rothko had
difficulty raising enough money to make a trip to New Orleans - a matter of $600
or $700. When he came back he found he had made sales worth $10,000. Today,
because of taxes, he refuses to sell more than four or five paintings a year, and
there is a long, long waiting list. Each of his paintings, since he paints large, sells for
$15,000 to $25,000. Last year he rejected a sale to The Four Seasons because he did
not like the idea of his paintings being hung in a restaurant. ‘I did them a favour’,
he says. ‘My paintings might have been bad for the digestion of their patrons.’
In 1955, Newman was selling nothing at all. And now, according to collectors,
it is an ordeal to get one at $15,000. Newman has been known to inquire where
the collector will hang it, what paintings it will be near, and how sincere he really
is in his desire for the painting. In other words, does the collector love him for his
investment possibilities or does he really love his work.
In 1957, Janis Gallery had a hard time selling large Franz Kline paintings for
$1,200; today they go for $25,000.
A Pollock bought for $8,000 in 1954 is now worth more than $100,000.
Whereas prices had been rising steadily, it was his death in 1956 that triggered
the beginning of the rise to a new plateau. Then, about three years later, prices of
Pollocks jumped enormously and drew other prices up with them.
To one collector, these masters of the first generation have now ‘become a
bunch of accountants. They’re guarded, wary, suspicious.’
Another collector sympathizes with them, sees them as Depression-bred,
and as suspicious and quirky because of the country’s rejection of their work
until they wore on to fifty.
Both the first and second generations of Abstract Expressionists have been
characterized as rougher, more drunken, brawling and womanizing, angrier and
less given to the amenities than the generation that followed. Henry Geldzahler,
Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan
Museum, who is very friendly and involved with the younger painters, threw a
large party last year where some of the older artists met the young generation of
Pop and hard-edge people (to deal in at least two categories). To Robert Motherwell,
younger than the first generation but considered part of it, there was a whole

90//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

difference in style of life as well as style of painting. The younger painters were,
he says, so much more polite and sweet, so much less angry and brawly.
Certainly the biggest reason is that painters, far from being rejected by society,
are in fact drawn into a too passionate, if not too pure, embrace. To be outside
society had been a twisting and frustrating experience. But it also protected the
artist from distortions of success, from all the familiar vices that beset the other
entertainment worlds. The painting world is closest of all to that of fashion and
the theatre. Unlike the movies, or even publishing, where a product is thrown
out into the world of millions who then either take it or reject it, paintings are
thrown to a limited audience, a more homogeneously rich audience, almost in a
face-to-face situation. It thereby takes less to make a trend, and to break it.
This audience is restless for the new, needs the new as a distinguishing
accoutrement. It uses painting as a sign of rising social status in a world where
minks, swimming pools, foreign travel and huge homes no longer carry enough
distinction or have the same personal appeal - for most collectors do like
painting: it is not just a flip of the coin between race horses and painting. Since
painting becomes a way of identifying oneself, there is a tendency to pick up
some new trend in painting - to become among the first collectors to buy a
certain kind of far-out work.
Investment in painting becomes uncertain in this atmosphere, especially
among the second line of collectors. The sudden rise of Pop art almost paralyzed
the art business for a while. Art sales were seriously hurt in 1963 because no
one knew what effect Pop’s success would have on art prices, or how long Pop
would last. In Los Angeles, said one gallery owner who had returned from there
in the Summer of 1963, sales were at a standstill and galleries were on the
verge of closing.
The Pop revolution was a perfect example of the fact that the small, compact
world of modern painting is moved more quickly and easily than other culture
worlds. Observers say that Pop took off - as opposed to developing slowly,
which it would have done anyway - because of the support of three collectors:
Mr and Mrs Robert C. Scull, Mr and Mrs Burton G. Tremaine, Jr, and Mr and Mrs
Albert A. List.
What happens in situations like this, where changes are sudden, fads steadily
changing, is that painters have their eyes cocked on their market as well as on
their paintings. They suffer the anxiety of a Marc Bohan or an Yves St Laurent
preparing for a spring showing. That goes for everyone, but most intensely for
the young, who are bred to making it, anticipate making it. A noted collector
pointed out a double rub: that fathers still don’t want their sons to be stupid
enough to be painters; and if they don’t make it in this success world, they appear
doubly stupid. Young painters ask in effect: ‘What’s the se cre t... how do you

Elkoff//The American Painter as a Blue Chip//91

make i t ... how do you become a successful painter?’ Since they now believe it
can be done, they want to know how to do it.
When a young painter says this, he usually does not have in mind calculatedly
painting for a certain market - opportunism is more complex and interesting
than that, more intertwined with self-delusion. He usually has in mind that his
paintings are just as good or as bad as another’s; he feels all he lacks is the special
selling mystique.
It is a too easy cynicism to consider a change of style an opportunistic change,
for there are two histories to art, an internal stylistic history, and an external one
of markets and collectors. Styles dry up, just as markets do. (...]
The more the art world operates as a Bourse, the more a painter becomes a
commodity, a measurable amount of concretized fame. (‘I don’t collect Jasper
John’s paintings’, said a collector, ‘I collect Jasper Johns.’)
Jim Dine talks of the need of insulating oneself against it and reports that too
many painters do it with drinking. Unreality is at work here, too; there is too
great a gap between what one is and does and has learned to expect, and what
one gets from the world. It is all too like the problem reported by a psychoanalyst:
Dr Charles Socarides said that he had found increasing problems among
executives, who were unable to justify the huge salaries they were making.
As fame moves fast, as fads move quickly, as reputations move and perhaps
can be moved up and down quickly, it becomes necessary to rationalize
production as businessmen do in other industries. Thus a new kind of
professionalism emerges in the dealer world - symbolized by Leo Castelli. It is a
professionalism marked by efficiency and the more streamlined public-relations
methods of the modern business.
This new professionalism shows itself in the smallest ways, according to an art
reviewer. If you need a photograph or biographical information from the Castelli
Gallery, you get it at once, and most courteously. On the other hand, an equally
large but less modern gallery is often without the photograph, or the information,
and if they have the photograph, testily demand a dollar for it. Castelli sees himself
merely as a man trying to promote the art he loves, of promoting a life he loves. To
him, the newer kinds of painting are part of a general new spirit of the arts to
which he feels committed - Nouvelle Vague - in movies, Absurd Theatre, a certain
fashion exuberance of Paris. He is delighted when Terry Southern wants to have
his picture taken at the Castelli Gallery during a Pop show, when Antonioni in
Rome contacts him to tell of a movie he wants to make about Pop painters. He is
trying to recreate the Surrealist milieu he enjoyed in pre-war Paris.
But others give him credit for more businesslike motives. They feel he watches
the market like a research analyst, attempting to rationalize his market and
anticipate trends. His talent for this draws nothing but admiration from collectors

92//INSnTUTIONS AND NETWORKS

and competitors alike. The Green Gallery’s Richard Bellamy admits his own
innocence in the face of Castelli’s wisdom. He tells how Castelli wanted to make
su re the Green Gallery held its first Rosenquist show at the same time as Castelli
h e ld his show of Roy Lichtenstein - best-known for his comic-strip paintings -
thereby creating a sense of movement to build up the enthusiasm of collectors,
museums and the press. For the same reason, Castelli himself says, he urged
Andy Warhol to go to the Stable Gallery, Dine to Janis, rather than his own gallery.
(This year Warhol has come to him after all.)
Though committed to Pop, he also has Action painters in his gallery. There was
a time, say close observers of the Castelli phenomenon, when he seemed to be
hedging by diversification. But these same observers say that Castelli now foresees
a long and rich life for Pop artists that originally he shunted off to other galleries.
Castelli denies that he is such a trend watcher. But if he isn’t, he should be. For
if it took only three collectors - or four or five - to accelerate (so astonishingly)
the growth of Pop in the tight little world of art, how many will it take next time,
and when will it happen?

Marvin Elkoff, extracts from ’The American Painter as a Blue Chip’, Esquire (January 1965) 3 7 -4 2 ; 112.

Josh Greenfeld
Sort of the Svengali of Pop//1966

It was like a scene out of an old Warner Brothers movie; one almost expected
Bogart to appear at any moment.
The two men were walking briskly down East 77th Street in mid afternoon
brazenly carrying a lumpy, dirty grey cloth bag, the kind that might be used for
gold dust or stolen goods. One of the men was small, trim, nattily dressed; he had
the face of a rodent, an intelligent sensitive rodent, wary of scientific experiment.
The other man was younger, taller, fatter, flamboyant in a red vest; his face was
like a cherub's. The dirty grey bag swung jauntily from his hand.
The small man pecked his head toward the bag. ‘Careful’, he warned.
The cherub laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I’m guarding it with my life.’
On the east side of Lexington Avenue the two men walked a half-block north,
then ducked into a hallway, climbed a flight of stairs, and pushed open a door
marked; Rudolf Granec - Picture Restorer. Although no parrot was perched upon
his shoulder, Granec had been expecting them. He pointed to a huge painting

Greenfeld//Sort of the Svengali of Pop//93

leaning against the side wall that he had just fitted with Plexiglas mountings. It
consisted chiefly of broad painterly dabs, but embedded in the upper left comer
was a realistic photo reproduction of a network of derricks or towers strung
lattice-like across a horizon. The painting, hinged in the middle, was designed to
be hung in two separate panels, four inches apart, and at the moment a clothes
line attached to a pulley was strung limply across the middle of it.
The two men studied the painting the way a man might inspect his own face
in the mirror before deciding to shave. Finally, the taller one stepped forward and
hung the dirty bag - carefully chosen by the artist himself - from the pulley. The
clothesline became taut; the bag, containing sand, drooped but did not touch the
floor. The idea of stress was evident.
‘Perfect’, said Ivan Karp, the cherub, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery.
‘Voila’, said Leo Castelli, the little man.
A ‘Studio Painting’ by Robert Rauschenberg that had been sold for $18,000
was now ready for delivery.
The art world likes to look down its nose at dealers. It hates to consider itself
dependent upon direct liaisons with the middle class. It therefore assigns them
no importance in the eternal scheme of things, little importance in terms of
shaping the present scene. Artists are important; critics are important; collectors
are important. But dealers? It hates even to think of them: dealers are like
retailers, merely necessary for trade. So dealers carefully cultivate unobtrusive
airs, low postures. They do not demand acknowledgment of their rightful dues,
but they know their power. They know they are the middlemen in a society
based upon middlemen.
Although Castelli has never lifted a beer can to canvas, never raided a pantry
for sculpture and never sent the family snapshot collection to the photo­
engraver, he is widely considered the Svengali responsible for the art explosion
known as Pop; in 1961 his gallery first showed the comic strip blow-ups of Roy
Lichtenstein. He is also held by many to be the hero - or the culprit - leading the
assault against Abstract Expressionism. To some people Castelli is a gallant
pace-setter, courageously venturing out to the edge of a vision, while to others
his vision seems narrow and shortsighted and his courage merely a tenacious
obsession with fashion.
The Leo Castelli Gallery grosses close to a half-million dollars annually,
dealing solely in the works of a group of young American artists whose ages -
with one exception - range from the late twenties to the early forties. If not the
dominant voice in new American painting, it is certainly the most spectacular
one. Rauschenberg and Johns are its grand old masters; Warhol, Lichtenstein,
and Rosenquist represent it on the Pop front; Stella and Poons, Chamberlain and
Bontecou, are among the other stars in its very special sky.

94//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

 The gallery functions with the very latest in chaos. It has a copying machine,
carefully kept archives, photographs of each painting in the gallery, stacks of
monographs about its better-known painters, files that record the travels of each
work, a full-time secretary, a full-time registrar of records, a full-time bookkeeper
from the Bronx. The operation is the envy of lesser galleries. They regard it as
cold, efficient, public-relations wise, sales-promotion hip.
Unlike most American gallery owners, Castelli guarantees the painters in his
stable a fixed monthly sum that ranges from $400 to as much as $2,000 and $3,000,
adding up to an artists’ payroll of more than $15,000. ‘Some of these payments go
to artists who haven’t produced a saleable work in years’, says Karp.
‘One thing I know about Leo’, says one of his artists. ‘If I ever needed some
extra money he would break the walls to get it for me.’ But generosity also creates
dependency. An artist formerly associated with the gallery says: ‘Those monthly
cheques are deadly - and degrading. Leo’s holding on to you piece by piece.’
The advances are like a salesman’s guarantee against his commissions. Castelli
shares 50/50 with the artists on sales. Some galleries charge 33 per cent
commission, but they usually bill the artists additionally for expenses; Castelli
pays them all. And there are galleries that keep two-thirds of the profits.
Castelli does not consider himself unduly lavish. ‘It’s mostly a matter of
arithmetic and it’s often completely academic’, he says. ‘If an artist’s work is selling
I usually owe him money at the end of the year. If the work isn’t selling, I have the
artist’s work for myself at 50 per cent of the sales price. And that can turn out to be
a profitable investment On the other hand, I might not be able to give it away.’
Though it is not uncommon for galleries to sign up artists with 18-page
contracts, complete with sub-clauses and option renewals, Castelli’s agreements
are strictly verbal. He laughs at the idea of signed contracts. ‘What would I do if
an artist wanted to leave me? Go to court? Ridiculous! An artist isn’t a business.
He isn’t a factory.’ Castelli shudders at the undignified prospect.
The price structure in painting is never decided by the gallery, according to
Castelli, but by the market: auctions, people selling paintings to each other,
museum acquisitions. Prices can be artificially increased, of course, by cornering
a market or manipulating auction sales prices. One ploy works like this: a dealer
will put up for auction a work by one of his own artists, then enthusiastically bid
up the price to a new high. If someone buys it, fine. If not, because the bidding is
furtively anonymous, it is simple for the dealer to ‘buy’ back the work himself,
making it appear that the artists’ other works on display at the gallery are price-
tagged at bargain levels. Castelli claims he never indulges in such practices
because ‘for one thing, it ties up too much capital’. But not long ago, painter Larry
Rivers was rumoured to be at odds with Castelli because of alleged skullduggery
at an auction where a Rivers painting did not fetch an expected top price.

Greenfeld//Sort of the Svengall of Pop//95

 In a comment characteristic of the art world’s discretion, all Rivers now says
about Castelli is: ‘Leo is sort of a nice man. He once gave me $25 to buy supplies
in the early 1950s when I really needed it. I thought he was a da Vinci scholar
at the time.’
When it comes to attention-getting there is simply no other gallery quite like
Castelli’s.
*1 always believed a world reputation was necessary for my artists’, Castelli
says. ‘For years and years I made sacrifices in sending paintings over to Europe,
in seeing to it my painters had shows there.’ Some of Castelli’s sacrifices were
repaid, with interest, two years ago when Rauschenberg became the first
American to win the major award of the Venice Biennale, the International
Painting Prize.
According to critics, Castelli handpicked the American Biennale commissioner,
the eight American representatives (four of whom were from his gallery) and the
American judge. He then went off to Europe and began to work on the other
judges - two Italians, a Swiss, a Brazilian and a Dutchman - as if they were
delegates to a political convention, soliciting votes on behalf of Rauschenberg by
convincing each judge separately of his impending landslide victory. Then, on
judgement day, Castelli arranged for a load of extra Rauschenberg pictures to be
transported from the American Consulate to the Biennale pavilion by gondola,
swamping the competition in a wave of publicity.
‘I was somewhat responsible for the Rauschenberg victory’, Castelli does
admit, ‘because I did a lot of work from the beginning, not just a month or two
before the Biennale. Rauschenberg had much exposure. He had had great shows
in England. Sweden, Denmark, Germany - everywhere. I was never unconscious
of Europe. And to the Europeans Rauschenberg was obviously interesting.
‘As for the rumours of a conspiracy between me and Alan Solomon, the
American Biennale commissioner: ridiculous. Alan Solomon is an independent
man; our tastes just happen to coincide. Of course, I didn’t talk to the judges. Oh,
I knew Sam Hunter, the American judge, but he wouldn’t talk to me about his
vote. And there was no mysterious canal ride.
‘What happened was this: I was asked if Johns and Rauschenberg could be
shown in the American Consulate since the works of two other American painters
were so large they could be shown only at the Biennale pavilion. Even though the
pavilion was the favoured spot, I agreed. But then Rauschenberg was acclaimed
the winner. There weren’t any Rauschenbergs at the pavilion, so I had to arrange
quick transport. That was the mysterious, evil canal ride.
‘Afterwards, some people decided that since it wasn’t natural for an American
to win the Biennale, the whole thing had to have been rigged. But, you see, it was
the most natural thing in the world for Rauschenberg to win.’

96//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

 Castelli’s defence notwithstanding, it is known that the first person invited to
be the American judge turned down the job because he felt he would be unable
to exercise his own opinion - whatever it might have been - in the face of the
Vote American, Vote Rauschenberg steamroller Castelli had started. ‘One of the
most unattractive of Castelli’s activities was the Biennale’, says a noted museum
director. ‘But if Leo’s conduct was not exemplary, it was certainly not singular
either. Everybody knows Venice is totally corrupt. After all, it is in Italy and the
prizes are only arrived at by battle and negotiation.’ Another veteran of the art
scene adds: ‘Leo got carried away.’
Castelli is all Continent and sophistication and the right year for Moselles; he
talks with a kind of stuttering mellifluence, like that of a nervous schoolboy
asking for a date with a half-memorized speech. He is ever ready to spring from
the waist with one of the fastest bows in the West; he is politeness and good
manners and quiet dress, with the white of his shirt cuffs showing just right. In
music, his tastes are baroque; in literature, he likes Dostoevski, Graham Greene
and Jane Austen. He is a man of Kultur who can speak five languages. He is the
compleat gentleman.
Yet, if S.N. Behrman, the stylish purveyor of drawing-room comedies, proved
the ideal biographer of Joseph Duveen, the most celebrated art dealer of his
generation, then Eugene Ionesco is the appropriate chronicler of Castelli. For
Castelli in art, like Ionesco in the theatre, delights in using simple platitudes to
create the odd effect, to convert what was designed as a flimsy toy into a
seemingly serious plaything, to enlist the vulgar and the mundane to serve the
absurd, the bizarre, the other-worldly.
Castelli likes to talk as a painter might talk, or as a painter should talk, but as
a painter rarely talks. This is charming; it is good salesmanship, highly effective;
it is also second-hand. ‘A painter paints what he sees’, he says. ‘Years ago the
painter went out and painted a tree. But that’s been done. The Pop artists came
along and painted the secondary images rather than the primary ones because
that’s what they saw: the comic strips, the billboard. They saw these secondary
images freshly.
‘Now I find what’s happening with Superman and Batman utterly boring; it’s
the vulgarization of Pop, so to speak. But what Lichtenstein did, for example, was
to take sex, war - the way they are idealized, and the visual elements of a comic
strip which are extremely interesting if you blow them up - and transform them,
simplify them. And he used isolated painterly elements: an abstract-
expressionistic background or something art nouveau in the lines.’ Castelli picked
up a Lichtenstein reproduction in a magazine showing a close-up of a fighter
pilot, a VOOM explosion to his right, a balloon issuing from his mouth with the
words: ‘Okay Hot Shot Okay I’m Powering.’

Greenleld//Sort of the Svengali of Pop//97

 ‘Here’, said Castelli, ‘is a very beautiful one.’ A debatable estimate, a visitor
suggested. Why should anyone want to pay lots of money for such a painting?
Castelli pinched his shoulders and turned his palms upward. ‘Why should
anyone want to buy a Cezanne for $800,000? What’s a little Cezanne, a house in
the middle of a landscape? Why should it have value? Because it’s a myth. We
make myths about politics, we make myths about everything. I have to deal with
myths from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. And it becomes harder and harder. We
live in an age of such rapid obsolescence.
‘Painting is what it is, what artists make of it. One has to accept what painters
do. One does not have to like it, but one cannot discard it; one can lament a
certain fashion, but one can’t do anything about it. One just cannot say: ‘This is
not art, it will go away.’ Who decides what is art? Who is responsible for the
decision? Not I. Certainly, not I.’ What is his responsibility then?
‘My responsibility is the mythmaking of myth material - which, handled
properly and imaginatively, is the job of a dealer - and 1have to go at it completely.
One just can’t prudently build up a myth.
‘1will tell you a story: About five years ago, a friend of mine who is the editor
of a small but influential international magazine came to me. He said he would
like to have an article about one of my painters. I suggested which painter I
thought he should have an article about. He asked if I might know the proper
person to write such an article. I said I certainly did. There was one professor who
I thought would be ideal for the task.
‘So I talked to this professor. I asked him how long it would take him to write
the best article. He said it would take six months. I asked him how much money
he would require for his valuable time. He told me. Now, this turned out to be
five times more than the magazine could afford to pay. So I agreed to put up the
other 80 per cent.
‘There is your evil Leo Castelli.
‘People will say I was buying a critic. I wasn’t buying a critic. I was making it
possible for a critic to function. People will say I bribed. I never bribed. When I
saw a possibility I did something about it.
‘I can tell you the article was first-rate, epoch-making, not shoddy. There is no
such thing as adequate myth-making.’
The modern art world in America - how many people can fit on a single East
Hampton beach blanket? - is small but discreet. Critics and collectors, museum
directors and dealers, who might criticize Castelli among themselves, tend to
clam up when it comes to discussing Castelli for publication. Since he is basically
one of ‘them’, he must be protected from outsiders. They also fear that any
disparagement of Castelli might have a dampening effect on new American
painting in general because of the Castelli Gallery’s leadership. And in some

98//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

cases, those who would fault Castelli - even by implication - do not want to risk
tarnishing the reputations of the one or two painters within the gallery whom
they might profoundly admire.
‘Leo is a curious, resolute man’, says a painter known to have his difficulties
with Castelli, ‘but his gallery livens up the scene.’
‘How can anyone ever get mad at Leo?’ asks an art-world habitue. ‘He’s selfless;
he’s enterprising; he doesn’t exploit his artists; and he doesn’t make money.’
‘Leo is kind, charming, generous’, says an artist formerly with the gallery, ‘And
also totally corrupt. But in a nice way, of course.’
‘I like Leo. I’m all for him’, says Thomas Hess of ARTnews.
‘But he does have a penchant for making curious mistakes. He’s a dealer: a
dealer is a dealer. And one has to remember that he isn’t even very successful.
The Wildenstein Gallery probably makes more on one painting than Leo has
made throughout his entire career.’
One of Castelli’s most celebrated ‘curious mistakes’ was over a David Smith
sculpture. Smith had painted it orange, but Castelli, deciding it might sell better
in stainless steel, removed the paint. Smith immediately protested, demanded
that the work be returned to him, and restored the coat of orange paint.
Another sculptor, Gabe Kohn, encountered a similar problem. Kohn liked to
leave rough surfaces on his work. But he had to be careful, once the work was in
Castelli’s hands, lest it be smoothed and polished. Kahn has since left the gallery.
If such decisions are inexplicable in aesthetic terms, they are the understandable
lapses one might expect of an ambitious shopkeeper who over-anxiously packages
his goods. However, Castelli recently committed a serious error in public relations,
an area in which ‘he usually functions expertly. When Joseph T. Fraser of the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts approached him to secure the work of some
Castelli artists for the Pennsylvania Academy’s 161 st annual show, Castelli declined
to cooperate. Later he said that he worked only with museums that cooperated
with him. The Academy, established in 1805, had good cause to be irritated by the
impoliteness of the young, upstart Castelli Gallery.
The idea of having an enemy disconcerts Castelli. ‘Leo’, says a friend, ‘feels
badly if the cab driver doesn’t like him.’ ‘Oh yes’, Castelli ruefully reflected one
day recently, ‘I suppose I do have some enemies. I’m supposed to be a success
and there are always those jealous of success. For example, there are those
unsuccessful abstract expressionists, the secondary ones, who don’t respect me.
They accuse me of killing them; they blame me for their funerals. But they were
dead already. I just helped remove the bodies.’
Some of Castelli’s best enemies are his friends: the people he likes to talk
with, be seen with, party with. Many of them decry, in the phrase of William
Seitz, director of the Poses Institute of Fine Arts at Brandeis, ‘the transformation

Greenfeld//Sort of the Svengali of Pop//99

of art into fashion’ which the Castelli Gallery seems to champion. They tend to
agree with critic Clement Greenberg that much of the art shown by Castelli
represents ‘an episode in the history of taste’, rather than in the history of art.
‘Castelli is interested only in lightweights’, comments an expert. ‘Leo is
allergic to strong stuff. He’s had shots at heavyweight art and run away. He
doesn’t know how to sell a serious painter. Pop and novelty were his personal
taste and he happened to hit the right thing at the right time. Now he has to
worry about the strong danger that his gallery will fall out of fashion. But let him
have his fun while he’s at it; he’s a symptom, a passing ephemeron - every art
dealer is. You’d have to have a good dose of paranoia to think he’s a menace.’
An old Castelli associate disagrees. ‘Leo likes to tiptoe smartly past scenes,
never a witness or a participant, never experiencing it really because he finds any
breakthrough of emotion embarrassing’, he says. ‘What makes Leo so dangerous
is that nobody is ever afraid of him.’
Castelli’s career teems with juxtapositions of the ordinary and the unexpected,
the cliche and the unique.
Although ajmost 59 years old, he has the lithe, youthful body of an acrobat.
Although long-divorced from Ueana Sonnabend, his closest business dealings are
with her Paris-based gallery. (He is now married to Antoinette du Bost.) Although
now a kingpin in his field, he did not commit himself fully as a dealer until after his
fiftieth birthday. And although his gallery is flag-hanging, super All-American in
substance, the operational style is distinctively European, like its maestro.
Castelli was born the son of a banker in what seems like another age - in
Trieste under the flag of the old Hapsburg Empire. His father was of Hungarian
origin; his mother came from an old Trieste family. As a boy during World War I
Castelli lived in Vienna, but he was later raised as an Italian when Trieste became
part of Italy in 1919. After receiving a law degree from the University of Milan,
toying with the idea of a literary career, dabbling in a local insurance firm and
enjoying a fling as a ‘playboy on a limited string’, he moved on to Bucharest.
There, Castelli became a bank functionary (his father sat on the board of directors)
and married Ueana, daughter of a wealthy Romanian industrialist.
Still restless, in 1937 he had himself transferred to the bank’s offices in Paris.
He became absorbed in the art of the day, the surrealism of Max Ernst and
Salvador Dali, Leonor Fini and Eugene Berman, and joined forces with architect
Rene Drouin in establishing the Place Vendome Gallery.
In 1941 Castelli came to America, studied graduate history at Columbia and
military intelligence at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and returned to Europe in 1944
as an intelligence agent in Rumania. His assignment was to maintain contacts
with the underground.
After his Army discharge Castelli became a sweater manufacturer in the New

ioo//iNSTrnmoNS and networks

York garment centre but maintained his contacts with the art world: he was an
a g e n t in the sale of some Kandinskys, had joint ventures with Sidney Janis (even
th e n a prominent dealer), summered in East Hampton, sipped at the Cedar Bar in
Greenwich Village with Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Kline and arrived at the
firm conviction that ‘while Europe was drying up as an art source America was
flourishing.’ In 1957 he opened his own gallery.
Several years earlier, Castelli had informed Jackson Pollock of his intention.
‘Don’t do it, Leo’, Pollock had said. ‘You aren’t tough enough.’
The Leo Castelli Gallery is housed in a stolid, smooth, white stone residential
building at 4 East 77th Street just off Fifth Avenue. Inside, one is greeted by a
Marienbad corridor, a white stairwell, maroon plush carpeting. In the light at the
top of the stairs hangs a Lichtenstein: a pointed gun, like the Uncle Sam finger in
the recruiting poster: beneath the phallic gun sits a Chamberlain sculpture, a
heap of mashed fenders that might have been collected from the auto wrecker’s
by Goldfinger’s Oddjob.
Whatever Castelli’s taste, and no matter how he arrived at it, he has managed
to keep his head conspicuously above water in a very tough business. ‘The good
part of Leo as a businessman’, says Friedl Dzubas, a painter who has known him
for 18 years, ‘is that which makes him so unbusinesslike. The whole setup is so
unexpected. He doesn’t want to mention the dirty word “money”; he’s a
phenomenon, not like the others. People like to come to him because they feel he
is giving them something special. And he is. Imagine: they come to a man to
spend $10,000 and he doesn’t want to talk about the $10,000 at all. So they talk
around; they talk as layman to layman, as fellow art lover to fellow art lover, as
gentleman to gentleman. It’s all very flattering - and effective - and deceiving.’
The Castelli Gallery doesn’t depend on the maestro’s soft sell alone. In the
wings - and sometimes on centre stage - is its director, cigar-chomping Ivan
Karp. The author of the Pop novel Doobie Doo, Karp is Bronx-born, Brooklyn-bred
and sometimes considered crude in contrast to the wispily smooth Castelli. His
down-to-earth sales techniques, however, are unassailable.
For example, it was Karp who negotiated the sale of the Rauschenberg ‘Studio
Painting.’ When the collector asked the price, he forthrightly replied: ‘I could tell
you $20,000 and we could haggle for a while and then I would finally come down
to $18,000 and not go a penny lower, because I couldn’t. So if you don’t want to play
games and waste time, I’m telling you it’s $18,000.’ And the deal was settled.
If the collector had been greeted by Castelli a conversation something like
this would have taken place:

Collector How much is this Rauschenberg?

Castelli Do you like it?

Greenfeld//Sort of the Svengali of Pop//101

 Collector Yes.
Castelli I’m glad you do.
It’s a very important painting, I think, one of Bob’s best.
Collector How much is it?
Castelli I’m very fond of it. It certainly makes a significant statement.
Collector What’s the price?
Castelli The price? Oh yes, the price. Well, theoretically it’s $20,000.
But if you really care for it we can talk about that.

Karp, who also is president of the picturesque Anonymous Arts Recovery Society,
an organization dedicated to salvaging the last artistic remains of abandoned
and torn-down buildings, plays a key role in the operation of the gallery. He looks
at the slides any prospective newcomer first brings to the gallery, and he goes on
pilgrimages to track down the way - out. ‘Ivan is now an underground expert’,
says an anonymous vice president of the Anonymous Arts Recovery Society. ‘He
knows as much as, if not more than, anybody else about what’s going on in the
hidden comers of the art world.’ Castelli, on the other hand, moves in small, well-
travelled circles. His Fifth Avenue apartment, a half-block from the gallery, is a
mixture of old France and new art. His social, business and personal lives revolve
completely around art. And since he believes that art reputations are built
tediously on a repetitive principle, he is at work constantly. ‘Leo puts up a new
tent every night’, says Dzubas, ‘and he always has to be ready for it to be blown
down.’
Painter Willem de Kooning is less charitable on the subject of Castelli’s
promotional techniques. After viewing an exhibition at the gallery some years
ago, de Kooning is said to have remarked, according to legend: ‘That son of a
bitch, Castelli. He has the nerve to sell anything. He could even sell beer cans.’
Jasper Johns, hearing of the incident, then proceeded to create his famous beer
cans. ‘Of course’, says Castelli today, ‘now they’re quite priceless. For Jap just
didn’t paint beer cans. He cast them in bronze. They’re beautiful and important
objects.’ And they sold in four figures.

Josh Greenfeld. ‘Sort of the Svengali of Pop', New York Times Magazine (8 May 1966) 3 4 -5 5 .

102//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

Peter Fuller
The £sd of Art//1970

Until quite recently, if one spoke to any dealer or auctioneer about the intricate
economics of the art game - if he could be persuaded to say anything at all - he
would explain that when the stock market was in the doldrums, the art market
benefited, because investors rushed gleefully from equities to art in their search
for rapidly appreciating capital assets; and when the stock market boomed, the art
market followed suit, as there was more money around to spend on luxury goods.
Nobody in Bond Street or St James’s is saying that any more. Business is not
just bad, for many galleries it has been virtually non-existent this year; and there
has been a recession in sales which parallels that of the drooping fortunes of
Throgmorton Street [the London Stock Exchange].
Admittedly, since the war, the art business has expanded at an unprecedented
rate. Prices rocketed; turnover soared; a major sale, from being a minor event of
concern only to a select circle of dealers, now receives international news
coverage, and a whole army of new collectors emerged - ranging from the small
men, who wished to buy two or three pictures in their lifetime, to the pension
funds and financial trusts who increasingly came to allocate 2 per cent of their
income to direct investment in art.
According to the Times-Sotheby Index, between 1951 and the middle of 1969,
the cost of living in Britain doubled. During this period, British shares quadrupled,
and those of the United States went up fractionally more. Old Master paintings,
however, went up by seven and a half times, Impressionists by 18 times, and
modern paintings by an alarming 23Vi times. Sotheby’s turnover figures are, if
anything, even more impressive. Turnover for the 1948-49 season was a mere
£1,455,861. By 1968-69 it had topped the £40 million mark - if one includes the
business done by the overseas auction houses it had acquired in the meantime.
It is probable that when Sotheby’s 1969-70 figures are published, they will show
a further increase. But there is good reason to take these figures with more than
a little cynicism. Under ‘turnover’, they include ‘buying-in’ prices - i.e. the
amount apparently realized by a work of art which failed to reach its reserve
price, but which was in fact repossessed by the seller on payment of a small
percentage of the highest bid to the auction house.
Of course, in an era of prosperity, the buying-in figures are of no significance.
Nobody is told when a work is bought-in, allegedly so as to protect its chances on
reappearance in the saleroom; and it is something that is very hard to detect even
if one is present at the sale. But when there is less money coming into the market.

Fuller//Th© £sd of Art//103

the concealment of buying-in helps to hide from the eyes of the public the fact that
there is a slump. Vendors continue to put optimistic reserves on their work, which
are not achieved; and so they, too, repossess their pictures, and the volume of
business done appears to be far greater than it is in fact. One dealer estimates that
the buying-in rate at Sotheby’s this year has been running at 60 per cent. (...)
There are indications that the Dow Jones crisis has severely reduced the
amount of money which has been invested in the auction rooms, reserves have
not yet been adjusted accordingly, so business is simply fading away. Nevertheless,
the intimate association between art and capital investment remains.
Earlier this year, the Jersey International Bank of Commerce appointed the
Hon. James Dugdale, a former employee of Sotheby’s New York branch, Parke-
Bernet, as a full-time art adviser, with a brief to advise the bank and its clients on
which paintings to buy for their investment potential. Dugdale favours Hockney
and Richard Smith (this year’s British entry for the Venice Biennale) among
Britain’s moderns.
There is, too, the spate of ‘art funds’, based on the unit trust principle. The
Swiss-based Fine Art Fund, for example, offers prospective investors a stake in
the ‘world’s great works of art’. The fund’s ‘portfolio’, according to the hand-out,
‘could conceivably include Rembrandt, Picasso, Cellini and Chippendale’. The
remarkable capital appreciation which these artists have accrued is emphasized,
just as if what was being offered was valuable commercial stock.
The objections to these funds are self-evident, even if one ignores aesthetics.
It is almost impossible to place a meaningful value on units, because the value of
a picture is hypothetical until it has been sold. Only by resorting to complicated,
artificial devices can the funds pay a dividend to investors. Even promises of
‘balanced portfolios’, based on international masters, are unlikely to alleviate
doubts in the minds of the sceptical.
The entry of large amounts of ‘investment’ resources into the art market is
often defended on the grounds that wherever the money is coming from it is
bound to benefit both the trade and the entire art world. However, this is not
necessarily so. As the art market becomes increasingly linked to what is happening
in other financial markets, independence is lost, prices of pictures fluctuate wildly
according to the prevailing economic climate, and, more seriously, this weight of
financial backing is being poured into a diminished and impoverished arena. This
results in the inflated reputations for artists of no significance, simply because it
is of advantage to vested interests to bolster them.
Of course, the economics of dealing with living painters are often very
different from these high-powered market manipulations; but essentially the
problems are similar. The dealer in living artists, too, is faced with shrinking
supply, because more and more work which is being produced by the present

104//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

generation of painters is totally unsuitable for retailing as a commodity.
The change in the status of a work of art from object to experience is a crucial
one, aesthetically, economically, politically and socially. In a world subjected
perpetually to the media barrage, it is scarcely surprising that the gilt-edged
individual masterpiece should quickly lose its validity. The consumer society
embraces concepts of mass availability and inherent obsolescence which are
clearly incompatible with the inaccessible, elitist tradition of easel painting.
However, so long as art retains its commodity status as prestigious saleable
property, there is a convenient market niche for it to occupy, even after its social
significance has dwindled to almost nothing.
Painting as such could only occupy a dominating position in the visual
consciousness of the public when it enjoyed a retinal monopoly. Now it has to
compete against the tide of pictorial imagery produced in advertising, cinema,
television, magazines and all the gaudy, exciting stimuli of the McLuhan era.
This has led to a division in the art world. The dealers accentuate the ‘status’
value of a painting over its visual significance. But the artists are battling to produce
a new visual language, more appropriate and adaptable to contemporary society.
The attempt has necessarily involved a rapid and absolute decline in the concept of
‘painterliness’ and the creation of works which cannot conveniently be packaged,
catalogued, sold as luxury consumer goods with, a built-in investment potential.
Increasingly, the best work produced today rejects the ingredients necessary
for success in the art market. A degree of inimitable ‘craftsmanship’; a ‘unique’,
readily recognizable style; convenience of shape, size and materials; and essential
durability - all are vital if work is to be easily sold through either the galleries or
the salerooms. The visual arts in recent years have taken the opposite direction.
Simultaneously, there has been an avid, almost rapacious, attempt by the
market to assimilate work which is clearly not readily adaptable to it. If Marcel
Duchamp’s famous objet-trouve, the urinal signed R. Mutt, came up at Sotheby’s
tomorrow, it would undoubtedly fetch an extremely healthy sum. The French
artist Yves Klein succeeded in selling the ‘contents’ of an empty gallery, and
Andy Warhol sold his ‘Pop Art Jewelry’, which consisted of three ‘Ritz Crackers’
in a plush-lined box.
The Dadaists’ objet-trouve was a real, political attempt to produce ‘valueless’
art. But as long as there is an object, it will acquire a market price, if only that
accorded to it, icon-like, by sustained veneration over the years. In the latter years
of his life, Duchamp even went so far as to produce an edition of six of the famous
urinal - a tacit admission that as a protest it had been rendered impotent.
Perhaps more important were the abstract expressionists. Although they
hung tenaciously to the idea of two-dimensional ‘painterly’ art, much of what
they produced was clearly not destined for posterity, because it was liable to

FuUor//Th© £sd of A rt//105

disintegrate physically. This made it impossible for dealers to reassure clients
about future capital appreciation.
Pop art reflects the built-in obsolescence of the imagery and materials with
which it is concerned. It witnessed the total decline in the emphasis on
‘craftsmanship’. Andy Warhol often never touched his works, but produced them
by directing followers in a factory. Clive Barker, the English pop sculptor, who
chromium plates everyday objects and images seen in paintings, rarely handles
any materials except his telephone to ring up first his caster, then his plater.
The art experience has come to lie in the interaction between object and
viewer, far more than in any ‘value’ inherent in the object itself. The most recent
movements in art have taken the process even further. It would be possible for the
average amateur handyman to make exact reproductions of much of the work of
the minimal school, whose exponents banish illusion - since the Renaissance, a
vital ingredient of marketable art - to produce simple forthright visual statements,
such as Ad Reinhardt’s ‘Ultimate Paintings’, a series of black squares.
The auto-destructive artists Gustav Metzger and John Latham actually relied
on the process of destruction rather than the business of object-making to
communicate, and this was the real break. Once art had been ‘dematerialized’, the
path was open for the conceptualists, who exhibited in a lavish ICA exhibition in
London last year [‘When Attitudes Become Form’] under the slogan ‘Live in Your
Head’ the most enterprising dealer would find it hard to sell in the saleroom a
telephone conversation with American artist Walter De Maria, or Louw Roelofs
documentation for iron poles placed at strategic points on Hampstead Heath.
Kinetic art, with its emphasis on movement and light rather than on static
matter and substance, and the work of the environmentalists, who create an art
experience through the total use of a given space, are similarly concerned with
the ‘de-objectification’ of art. Recently, Larry Bell, Doug Wheeler and Robert
Irwin, three Los Angeles artists, exhibited their environments at the Tate. Each
one relied on the minute adjustment of visual stimuli, to such an extent that the
visibility of lines on the floor, or fingermarks left by visitors on whitened walls,
emerged as major irritations.
Such work poses numerous problems. One may incline to welcome the
emergence of new artforms which cannot be intimately linked to the existing
commodity market in art, but where is the finance for this art, and for the men
who make it, to come from? A whole new set of necessary collaborations emerge,
which are not necessarily better than a deliberate, self-conscious link with retail
sales mechanism.
In place of moneyed patrons, artists have to woo the state, the large national
museum, and often industry, or the commercial firms that produce the materials
and the technical know-how.

IO6//INSHTUTIONS AND NETWORKS

 One can only expect an artist to be delighted to receive a grant from the British
Council, or a consignment of steel tubes from Tube Investments for the furtherance
of his work. But as the private buyer diminishes in importance in the art world
(Kasmin, the top Bond Street dealer in English and American modern painting,
says he only knows five English individuals who will spend more than £2,000 on a
modem picture), the state and big industry are acquiring a real monopoly over
creativity in the visual arts. The dangers should be self-evident. (...)
At the moment, there appears to be no solution to this dilemma. Nor do the
artists who invade the Arts Council, demanding increased patronage, or who solicit
the assistance of industry, realize that they are substituting one form of tyranny for
another. For many artists - including the majority of Pop painters, making icons to
the consumer society - the need to function within a capitalist framework is far
from incongruous. But, since Pop, a new generation of artists has grown up, left art
schools and started to create a new, articulate, genuinely revolutionary art,
detached from object slavery - only to watch it be assimilated by anonymous,
established patronage, as Duchamp’s urinal was castrated by the market.

Peter Fuller, extracts from ‘The £sd of Art’, New Society (9 July 1970) 64; 6 5 -6 .

Guerrilla Girls
Code of Ethics for Art Museums//1989

I Thou shalt not be a Museum Trustee and also the Chief Stockholder of a Major
Auction House.

II A Curator shalt not exhibit an Artist, or the Artists of a Dealer, with whom he/
she has had a sexual relationship, unless such liaison is explicitly stated on a
wall label 8 inches from the exhibited work.

III Thou shalt not give more than 3 retrospectives to an Artist whose Dealer is
the brother of the Chief Curator.

IV Thou shalt not limit thy Board of Trustees to Corporate Offices, Wealthy
Entrepreneurs and Social Hangers-on. At least .001 per cent must be Artists
representing the racial and gender percentages of the US population.

Guerrilla Girls//Code of Ethics for Art Museums//107

V Thou shalt not permit Corporations to launder their public images in Museums
until they cleaneth up their Toxic Waste Dumps and Oil Slicks.

VI Thou shalt provide lavish funerals for Women and Artists of Colour who thou
planeth to exhibit only after their Death.

VII If thou art an Art Collector sitting on the Acquisitions or Exhibitions

Committee, thou shalt useth thy influence to enhance the value of thine own
collection not more than once a year.

VIII Thy Corporate Benefactors who earn their income from products for Women
and Artists of Colour shall earmark their Museum donations for exhibits and
acquisitions of art by those Groups.

IX Thou shalt keep Curatorial Salaries so low that Curators must be Independently
Wealthy, or willing to engage in Insider Trading.

X Thou shalt admit to the Public that words such as genius, masterpiece,
priceless, seminal, potent, tough, gritty and powerful are used solely to prop
up the Myth and inflate the Market Value of White Male Artists.

Guerrilla Girls, Code o f Ethics fo r Art Museums (1989), in Confessions o f the Guerrilla Girls (London:
Pandora Press, 1995) 63. © Guerrilla Girls. Courtesy of www.guerrillagirls.com

Simon Ford and Anthony Davies

Art Capital//1998

‘It was the most moving evening of my career at the Royal Academy’, said Norman
Rosenthal (Evening Standard, 24 September 1997). ‘There were 1,500 people here
[at the ‘Sensation’ opening], from the greatest and the goodest to the most marginal
people who get into these things: young people, the artists themselves, RAs.’
Amongst the greatest and the goodest were leaders of industry, politicians,
television executives and property developers. The quote raises at least two
questions. Firstly, why are the great and the good suddenly so keen to be associated
with contemporary art? And secondly, what kind of ‘marginal’ role can artists
expect for themselves in the rebranded new art world order of London?

io8//iNSTmmoNS an d networks
 T h e answers to these questions will not be found in art magazines, exhibition
catalogues or in the increasing number of sycophantic feature articles in weekend
newspapers and lifestyle magazines. These days if you want to know what is
happening in the art world you have to look beyond the promotional blurb of the
‘o n message’ hucksters to the financial and marketing media. In the 1990s London
started to swing when the City told it to, when culture became strategically
linked to inward investment. In the words of Colin Tweedy, the Director General
o f the Association for the Business Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA), we are seeing
a ‘surge to merge culture with the economy’ (Sunday Times, 19 October 1997).
Until quite recently, contemporary art in Britain had a real image problem: it
just wasn’t sexy enough. Art had to getyounger, more accessible, more sensational.
In short, art had to become more like advertising. A few culture entrepreneurs,
encouraged by business contacts, set about transforming sections of the art
world into a thriving enterprise zone. Initially the main movers behind this
rebranding exercise were those members of the sponsorship industry that
recognized the potential of brand building through lifestyle marketing. Hungry
artists and cash-strapped institutions were in a weakened position, unable to
refuse. Soon they were begging for it.
There are a number of theories as to why business leaders should want to
influence and direct culture. The most compelling is linked to global financial
markets and London’s bid to consolidate its position (achieved over the last five
years) as the European financial services centre. Culture is an important element
of the marketing mix that sells ‘London’ - the other factors being a conveniently
placed time zone that straddles the US and Japanese markets; the English language;
a relaxed regulatory environment; strict employment laws (low strike rates) and
EU membership. All else being equal, culture (and cuisine) provided the added
value that kept London ahead of Berlin, Frankfurt or Paris. When Newsweek called
London ‘the coolest city on the planet’ business leaders basked in what the Financial
Times (27 November 1997) called ‘reflected self-image’ where ‘decision-makers
want to be living and working in places which reflect well on them’.
Another theory, not unconnected to the first, is that promoting national
culture abroad generates higher export earnings at home and, just as importantly,
attracts tourists. To become a tourist trap the modern city requires its Grands
Projets, like the Tate Gallery of Modern Art at Bankside and the New Millennium
Experience (NME) at Greenwich. Both projects are part of a bid to make London
‘The Millennium City’ and both carry the qualified support of London’s business
leaders as represented by organisations such as London First, founded in 1992,
and its inward investment subsidiary London First Centre, founded in 1994.
London First is one of eleven organizations that form London Pride Partnership
LPP, together with Ministers from the Cabinet sub-committee for London,

Ford and Davies//Art C apital//109

recently formed the Joint London Advisory Panel in 1995. Another associate o f
London First is the Central London Partnership which, with the Tate Gallery, the
Financial Times and Mercury Asset Management (major shareholders in Christie’s,
sponsors o f‘Sensation’), helped sell the idea of a pedestrian bridge linking Bankside
with the City. The Millennium Bridge - like Clement Greenberg’s metaphor of the
‘umbilical cord of gold’ that links the Avant Garde to the ruling class - will serve as
a potent symbol of culture’s ever-multiplying links with capital.
The millennial celebrations also form a key part in the ‘rebranding of Britain’
strategy, which began to make the headlines in May 1997 with the Design Council’s
‘New Brand for New Britain’ discussion paper. In July the English Tourist Board
launched a new corporate identity. In September Demos published its Design
Council funded report, Britain: Renewing Our Identity, at the same time as the
British Tourist Authority unveiled its new logo. November saw the Anglo-French
Summit at Canary Wharf where ‘design guru’ Terence Conran supervised fixtures
and fittings. The ‘big idea’ according to Peter Mandelson, Minister without Portfolio,
was that the old image of ‘beefeaters, warm beer and afternoon tea, and cricket
and village greens... was misleading. An enormous amount of Britain’s trade now
is caught up in our creative industries’ ( The Observer, 9 November 1997).
To help these industries the Government set up The Creative Industries Task
Force chaired by Chris Smith. Established in July 1997, its stated aims are to: 1)
provide coordination between the activities of different Government
Departments; 2) boost the generation of wealth and employment in the creative
industries; and 3) increase creative activity and excellence in the UK. In addition
to government representatives such as Mandelson, ‘great and good’ members
include Richard Branson of Virgin, Alan McGee of Creation records, fashion
designer Paul Smith and Eric Salama of advertising giants WPP.
Unsurprisingly there were no representatives from the contemporary art
world, including the Arts Council. Such an exclusion can only be taken as a sign
of the Government’s belief in the irrelevance of contemporary art to the creative
industries and, in particular, its depreciation of the Arts Council. Mark Fisher, the
Arts Minister, recently told the Financial Times (11 /12 October 1997): ‘We want to
make bodies like the Arts Council more strategic and less concerned with petty
detail.’ With a reduced role as an advisory body, direct control of fund allocation
would pass over to the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport, thus cutting down
on administrative costs and doing away with the largely mythic ‘arm’s length’
principle of government intervention in cultural policy. With a clear Government
agenda to support the most popular and profitable parts of the creative industries
the Arts Council is clearly seen as an outmoded hindrance to ‘modernization’.
It is unlikely, though, that Government policy will lead to full privatization.
Business sponsorship, despite major increases in the last twenty years, according

IIO//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORK?

to a 1996 Policy Studies Institute report Culture as Commodity?, made up only 4
per cent of total support for the arts in the financial year 1993-94. It should not
be surprising then that some of the strongest arguments for continued public
subsidy come from the business community itself. Groups such as ABSA’s Creative
Forum for Culture and the Economy provide networking opportunities for
business and arts professionals to discuss and lobby on just such matters. It also
runs a Placement Scheme and Board Bank, ‘dating agencies’ where middle and
senior managers are matched with the boards of arts organizations. ABSA also
manages the Pairing Scheme, a Government initiative where sponsorship money
can be matched pound for pound.
Although ABSA’s latest survey for 1995-96 estimated that sponsorship was
slightly down on the previous year’s record high, the signs this year are for a
return to rising levels of sponsorship. The picture, though, is clouded by a shift
away from traditional sponsorship projects towards a more ‘hands-on’
relationship with culture. The most obvious example of this has been the recent
explosion of ‘art exhibitions’ taking place in shops. The thinking behind this
strategy can also be traced to developments in marketing theory.
The contemporary visual arts (after successful rebranding) can now be relied
upon to deliver particular audiences; broadly speaking the social categories AB
and Cl, and more specifically, the design- and style-conscious young opinion
formers. The problem for businesses trying to reach these influential but
marketing-literate categories of consumers is that they do not respond favourably
to conventional advertising and marketing techniques. What the marketing
people advise is to associate brands with particular lifestyles. The fashionable
image of the yBa, promoted in magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Dazed and
Confused, fits the bill perfectly. Shops that jumped on the credibility bandwagon
included Egg, Monsoon, Squire, Jigsaw, Habitat, Selfridges, Paul Smith, Harvey
Nichols and Whiteleys Shopping Centre.
Media exposure is the most important factor in art’s much touted new
accessibility. With ‘star’ artists taking on the role of media personalities, debates
about contemporary art work on a ‘nuts ‘n’ sluts’ talkshow level, and are
dominated by ‘human interest’ values (e.g. the artist as victim, the artist as rags-
to-riches success story, the artist as rebel, the artist as pop star). The art sells the
artist, and its price is directly connected to the added value associated with the
artist’s media profile. This is because consumers value shared cultural experience
and are willing to pay extra to commune with celebrities.
‘Post-Diana’ artist Martin Maloney, in Guardian Weekend (27 September
1997), has a theory for this new popularity: ‘Artists are working in a way which
is softer and more romantic now. They are in tune with the public, which believes
in feeling and emotion.’ He then goes on to promote Habitat, in particular, as

Ford and Davies//Art Capital//111

having ‘tuned in with the move towards making things easy on the eye, more
concerned with the everyday’. What the article did not mention was that since
August 1996 Habitat and Guardian Media Group pic have run a joint customer
database for marketing purposes. This database is partly made up of names
collected through subscriptions to Habitat’s Art Broadsheet (edited by Carl ‘Minky
Manky’ Freedman and Ben Weaver) and its invitation lists to instore exhibitions.
In the Financial Times (17 November 1997) this strategy is called ‘relationship
marketing’, where customers trade information about their income and lifestyle
in return for special offers and ‘loyalty cards’. With repeat business accounting,
on average, for 90 per cent of company profits, this form of marketing is based on
the belief that ‘marketers must take steps to “own their customers” to survive in
an increasingly competitive environment’.
Artists, in order to take advantage of these new cross-promotional
opportunities, are finding it necessary to redefine and diversify their practice.
They sell services to a variety of clients outside the ‘mainstream* gallery system,
from advertising companies and property developers to restaurateurs and interior
designers. As John Warwicker of Tomato recently told the Guardian (27 October
1997), large companies and rich backers ‘buy into people they see as working on
the cutting edge of that culture ... because they need to be seen as part of that
culture’. But to what extent are artists in control of this process? Poorly prepared
in matters of business, the artist’s desperation for any type of exposure is often
exploited. Is it, then, really the case that artists, as David Barrett asserted in Art
Monthly (211) ‘embrace the market in a thoroughly professional way’?
Most artists have a long way to go before they can claim professional status.
Apart from the few ‘stars’ that the art market’s ‘winner takes all’ economy can
sustain, most ‘artists’ either practise other professions, have a private income or
rely on state benefits. Much art activity is run on a voluntary basis, with little
consideration for contracts, rates of pay or conditions of service. Strictly speaking,
most artists are just about on a par with skilled manual labourers rather than
associate professionals. With the surge to merge in full swing, and the shift to a
service-based culture industry, a new ‘artist’ will emerge that claims professional
status as a ‘broker’; a mediator rather than a producer.

Simon Ford and Anthony Davies, ‘Art Capital’, Art Monthly, no. 213 (February 1998) 1 -4 .

1^//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

Martin Braathen
The Commercial Significance of the Exhibition
Space//2007

[...] In 1930, the Ukrainian-American architect Frederick Kiesler claimed that the
connection between art and commerce in the United States began when ‘modern
art reached the American masses through the department store’. In his book
Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, Kiesler wrote polemically
that modern art was introduced to America ‘first, as a new style in textile design
for women’s fashions, second, as a means of shop window decoration, [and third]
in store decoration and expositions’.1 Walter Benjamin also commented on the
relationship between art and commercial spaces in his discussion of the arcades
in Paris in the 1820s, writing that they were ‘centres of commerce in luxury
items’ in which ‘art enters the service of the merchant’.2 For Kiesler and Benjamin
alike, art has a shared past with retail, one rooted in mass culture. Or, as Andy
Warhol later remarked, ‘department stores are kind of like museums.’3
Both the museum and the department store display precious objects, and
more importantly, both institutions engage two prominent features of bourgeois
public culture: the refined leisure of connoisseurship and the entertaining
consumption of shopping.4 While historically - and in very general terms -
museums may cater to connoisseurs and department stores to consumers, one
special kind of institution has always blurred these roles. The commercial gallery
emerged in the late nineteenth century in the gap between museum and
department store: it is at once a store for art and a space of display. In some ways,
commercial galleries operate in parallel to museums, sharing artists and artworks,
staff and organizational structures (i.e. directors, curators, art handlers, etc.).
Both function as sites for connoisseurship and discourse: reviews of gallery
shows and museum shows are presented in the same media and are often
indistinguishable, and many gallery visitors, like museum visitors, cannot
actually purchase the art on view. And like museums, commercial galleries
occasionally display works that are not for sale, be they works borrowed from
private collections or site-specific commissions. Even in terms of spatial design,
the two kinds of institutions have evolved similarly: both matured from the salon
model, in which works were hung densely, often in ornamental spaces, and
developed towards the ‘neutral’ white cube.5
Of course, museums and commercial galleries differ in significant ways,
namely in how each is financially structured, and, in turn, in how their economic
underpinnings are manifest spatially. Donations in the form of memberships,
gifts, sponsorships, grants and public support are crucial for not-for-profit art

Braathen//The Commercial Significance of the Exhibition S p ace//113

spaces. Signifiers of these modes of support are often discreetly visible in exhibition
spaces, in forms as various as plaques with contributors’ names and donation
boxes. These markers signify the institution’s dependence on external support as
well as its anti-commercial position. Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Projects: DONATIONS
(2000) is a replica of an institutional donation box, carved in wood and painted.
While its presence in the gallery of The Graduate Center, New York, may seem to
offer a reminder that the space is a not-for-profit one, the work was first displayed
in a commercial gallery show. But the box is impossible to open, and the money
within - accumulated in several showings of the work since 2000 - is thus a pure
investment in the work’s own value and inaccessible to any other use. Another
work by Bakker, the site-specific Untitled Project: FINAL SALE ($59, $79, $99) (2007),
plays on the absence (or only very subtle presence) of price labels in art institutions.
Precisely mimicking price signs in adjacent stores, Bakker’s carved and painted
signs are placed in the gallery windows that face Fifth Avenue, thus visually
connecting the gallery to its commercial environment. Bakker’s signs contain only
non-specific text and numbers (‘Sale’, ‘$59’, ‘$79’, ‘$99’), and rather than referring
to specific objects serve as ambiguous signifiers of the function of the artworks
that passers-by see in the background. The work also plays on the gallery space’s
former function as a department store, humorously commenting on the similarities
between spaces for sales of luxury goods and spaces for display of art.6
The hidden economic infrastructure of the commercial art gallery is often
rejected by many artist-run art spaces. While such spaces are similar to museums
in that the art on view is not normally for sale, and support comes from private
or public donations, they are dramatically different in other ways. The artist-run
space is often established in opposition to the bourgeois tradition of museums,
on the one hand, and the commercialism of for-profit galleries on the other.
These breaks with tradition and the market are frequently signified in explicit
spatial terms. By applying an anti-white-cube aesthetic for a rougher, unfinished
look, the space of the artist-run gallery lays bare its disconnection to the
commercial art market through almost Brechtian means. The Verfremdungseffekt
[defamiliarization effect] advocated by Bertolt Brecht was intended to ‘prevent
the [theatre] audience from losing itself passively and completely’ and to turn
the audience into ‘a consciously critical observer’.7 In a similar manner, if the
typical white cube gallery attempts to conceal its financial underpinnings behind
what often seems to be a platonic idealizing of art in an isolated space, the
deliberate trash aesthetics of non-painted walls and badly maintained interiors
function in an opposite way. The artist-run space may alert the audience to the
seduction of the white cube by appearing so different from it, and, in the best of
cases, remove the illusion of the artwork’s detachment from the political and
economic contexts within which it is produced.

114//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

 In several works, Marianne Heier has considered the spatial strategies of
non-profit art institutions. Her Permanent Installation (5,783 Euros) was performed
\n 2 0 0 5 in one of Berlin’s most prominent artist-run spaces, Sparwasser HQ.
Known for its strongly anti-commercial stance, Sparwasser HQ. was physically
decaying when Heier was invited by two guest curators to contribute an artwork
to a group show. In the work, which consisted of an inaugural speech and the
donation of a cheque, Heier considers the relationship between art’s critical
potential and the spatial context in which it is encountered. While the white
cube has been blamed for emphasizing an artwork’s formal qualities at the
expense of its critical ones, Heier remarks in her speech that art with a critical
agenda risks marginalization when presented in a dilapidated environment.
Instead of primarily emphasizing the art on view, down-at-heel spaces run the
risk of conjuring the romantic and conservative idea of the studio of the suffering
artist genius. The speech ends with the declaration that ‘good and serious art
needs and deserves to be seen in good and serious surroundings’, and Heier
giving Sparwasser HQ a cheque for 5,783 Euros (approximately $7,000).
Earmarked for architectural improvements to the space, the donation took literal
form as a new spatial framework for the display of work in the future. Heier had
earned this money selling her art and working as an art critic, museum guide and
gallery warden. Permanent Installation thus connects the economies of commercial
and non-commercial art institutions. In the process, Heier reveals how the
financial independence claimed by non-commercial galleries is relative, and
often based on substantial personal investments. Permanent Installation was at
once a critique and a generous gift, one that Sparwasser HQ hardly could reject
- though they accepted it rather reluctantly.
What the commercial gallery shares with the museum in spatial and
organizational respects, it shares with the store in its reason for being: museums
are almost always non-profit institutions kept alive by public or private donations,
while galleries are profit-making enterprises financed by sales. Most intellectual
discourse on art, both in academia and in reviews, omits this crucial distinction;
seldom is an artwork evaluated in terms of its status as marketable asset. But the
balance between an artwork’s cultural credibility and its potential sales value is
significant and upheld by both gallerists and art buyers. This connection is
explored in Fia Backstrom’s A New Order for a New Economy (2006-7). The work
considers the economic basis of Artforum by drawing attention to its large volume
of full-page advertisements for commercial galleries. Interspersed with the
magazine’s scholarly articles and reviews, these ads function as a second layer of
discourse, connecting editorial content directly or indirectly to the art market.
A New Order presents the ads from the April 2007 issue of Artforum, prized
from their original context and installed as a frieze running around the gallery.

Braathen//The Commercial Significance of the Exhibition Sp ace//115

From a distance, they are not necessarily recognizable as ads, and sorted formally,
they turn into colourful decoration. But a closer look reveals how Backstrom
draws out the visual similarities between the ads, grouping them by content,
colour and/or compositional layout to highlight the branding strategies of
different galleries. By making visual puns between the ads (several ads with a
vegetation theme are grouped together, fading into a set of green abstractions,
which abut ads with human formations, etc.), she reverses the process by which
works from the advertised exhibitions are edited and cropped to make them
stand out among the hundreds of other advertisements. Furthermore, by turning
a two-dimensional form into a striking spatial feature, Backstrom creates a highly
charged framework for the other works on view, reminding viewers of the
exchanges that can take place between non-commercial projects (such as the
Whitney Independent Study Program curatorial exhibition) and the commercial
art market. The exhibition of art in not-for-profit exhibition spaces, for example,
can still heighten its market value as well as enhance the visibility of the artist.
This ambiguous relationship is also considered in Christian Jankowski’s Point
o f Sale (2002), which explores the economic strategies of the art gallery vis-a-vis
its cultural credibility and expectations about its appearance. By allowing a
business consultant to interview his gallerist, Michele Maccarone, and her
downstairs neighbour, a low-voltage electronics merchant named George
Kunstlinger, Jankowski compares the two small-scale, commercial, niche
enterprises in terms of location, marketing strategies, pricing structures and
relationship to clients. The video reveals how galleries often rely heavily on private
money, networking with other galleries, establishing intimate relationships with
collectors and creating hype about their artists. This differs greatly from the
merchant’s intent to provide, first and foremost, a large assortment of products to
a wide array of customers. At the end of the video, the consultant’s advice to the
gallery is a reminder of the difficulty of selling art using a conventional business
model, without knowledge of the art world’s coded means of ensuring cultural
credibility. His advice is to secure a steadier income for the gallery by extending
its ‘product catalogue’ to include serial editions and prints.
As a three-channel video, Point o f Sale takes the form of a dialogue between
the participants. In a confusing move, Jankowski has Kunstlinger and Maccarone
swap lines; Kunstlinger, who is older and wearing a yarmulke, comments on the
complexities of selling art from a basement crammed with cardboard boxes and
electronics, while Maccarone, a young woman dressed in black, talks about 220-
volt equipment in an art gallery with white walls. Hence our expectations about
the appearance of both art dealers and art galleries are challenged, and the
disjunction of hearing and seeing Kunstlinger awkwardly discuss the business of
art is both funny and revelatory.

116//INSnTUTIONS AND NETWORKS

 The establishment of a trustworthy gallery atmosphere is a theme also
hum orously considered by Fareed Armaly and Christian Philipp Muller’s Auftakt
(^ 990y The work was originally conceived within the context of the ‘Koln Show’,
an extensive event arranged by several of the most prominent galleries in Cologne
at a time when the city played an important role in the international art market.
All of the galleries were located in the same building, and the staircase connecting
them became a main arena for socializing. To contrast the silence of the white
gallery spaces, the artists piped a piece of muzak, or what they called ‘functional
music’, through the stairwell.
Fora subsequent touring exhibition, the artists then brought the ambience of
the ‘Koln Show’ to a series of galleries in Stuttgart, Graz and Zurich, exporting the
sound of the region’s commercial art centre to its relative periphery. While the
recording was played in transitional spaces outside of the galleries (Auftakt
means ‘prelude’), the work also consisted of a series of five silk-screened, framed
texts exhibited in the gallery spaces. The texts were excerpts from sales brochures
for muzak about constructing environments for stimulating human behaviour.
Armaly and Muller added texts of their own, similar in style and tone, extending
their construction of the perfect gallery opening atmosphere: an environment
for socializing, networking, spectatorship - and economic transaction.
In Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa (2005), the artists examine commercial
architecture as a frame of consumption. Built as a white, minimalist store
featuring a display of the fall 2005 collection of Prada shoes and handbags, the
work is located in the desert outside of Marfa, a small Texas town known as a
centre for Land art and Minimalism through the presence of Donald Judd’s
Chinati Foundation. But the store is sealed, and the items on view purely for
display rather than sale. On one level, the work functions as a comment on those
strategies of physical dislocation from the commercial gallery that are often
associated with site-specific work. Prada Marfa suggests that these dislocated
artworks can just as easily become sites of fashionable consumption, namely for
the quickly growing field of ‘art tourism’ and its seemingly endless itinerary of
art fairs. Echoing a recent claim by the architect Rem Koolhaas that, principally
as a result of capitalist development, ‘shopping is arguably the last remaining
form of public activity’, Prada Marfa can be pessimistically interpreted as making
the point that commercialism has outpaced any activity that does not have a
market value.8 Former ‘disinterested’ bourgeois public activities, such as art
connoisseurship, are gone, leaving only shopping - in its many guises - in their
wake. Yet the work also occasions another reading of the situation. As a mock
store with a sealed entrance, Prada Marfa dislocates not only the artwork but also
the actual marketplace, the store, to an abandoned site. Rendering its commercial
function totally useless, the only thing left is a desolate ruin of yesterday’s fashion.

Braathen//The Commercial Significance of the Exhibition Space//117

As the commodities are gradually covered by layers of dust and the minimalist
architecture eroded by sandstorms, the work may become a cultural relic, leaving
viewers only its criticism of a consumption-oriented art market to ponder. (...)
The gallery space is, and has always been, an inevitable site for commercial
exchange, where artworks are changing hands and displayed as merchandise for
potential customers. But it has also always been - simultaneously - a site of
critical struggle. As several works in this exhibition demonstrate, commercial
circulation does not always negate critical potential. When Frederick Kiesler
stated that ‘the moral question of art and commerce is, as far as the architect is
concerned, a dead duck’, he acknowledged that architectural influence on this
relationship is limited. But he also believed that spatial design can still prompt
the spectator to ‘recognize his act of seeing, as participation in the creative
process’, bring out the critical potential of the work on display, and ‘convey its
message without loss of its specific meaning’.9

1 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s,
1 930)66.
2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1 9 2 7 -4 0 ); trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1999) 15.
3 Andy Warhol, quoted in Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) 77.
4 In Paris this connection between shopping, art enjoyment and bourgeois life is emblematized by
the fact that the Louvre, the first French public museum, opened in 1793, right after the revolution
had appropriated all royal treasures as public property.
5 This parallel lasted until many museums, beginning in the 1960s, discarded the white cube for
more spectacular and sculptural architecture, while it has continued as the dominant architectural
mode for commercial gallery spaces. Regarding the white cube’s neutrality, see Brian O’Doherty,
Inside the White Cube (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
6 The Graduate Center is located in the former B. Altman & Company Department Store Building
on Fifth Avenue, built in 1905-1913 and operated as a department store until 1989.
7 Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 99.
8 Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Sze Tsung Leong, et al.. Harvard Design School
Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001) n.p.
9 Frederick Kiesler, quoted in Frederick Kiesler, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1989) 6 2 -3 .

Martin Braathen, extract from ‘The Commercial Significance of the Exhibition Space’, in The Price of
Everything - Perspectives on the A rt Market (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art Independent
Study Program/New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) 9-17.

118//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

Peter Schjeldahl
Temptations of the Fair: Miami Virtue and Vice//2006

In contemporary art, this is the decade of the fair, as the 1990s were the decade
of the biennial. Collectors, with piles of money, have displaced curators, with
institutional clout, as arbiters of how new art becomes known and rated, and
therefore of what it can mean: less and less, after qualifying as the platonic
consumer good. The situation was vivid at the recent fifth annual Art Basel Miami
Beach - so named by its founder Samuel Keller, the director of the long-
established Art Basel in Switzerland. It was crazy fun. Close to 200 top and/or
trendy galleries (the best, Keller said, of 650 applicants), from 32 countries, had
spaces in the Miami Beach Convention Center. About a dozen other, lower-
wattage fairs dotted the city. The list of ancillary shows and events was tiring just
to read. Then there were the parties. Pretty people of the world were in town
with no intention of wasting their vitality on art appreciation. ‘Art fairs are the
new disco’, the veteran art journalist and bon viveur Anthony Haden-Guest said.
Sidewalk crowds paraded dreamy fashions. Fair-certified VIPs had fine views of
them from inside traffic-jammed, chauffeured cars. Haden-Guest noted that the
sponsors of art events used to be companies hard up for respectability, such as
Philip Morris; the classy UBS, augmented by BMW, Bulgari and Netjets, backed
Miami Basel (the fair’s vernacular moniker). There were even artists on hand, as
awkwardly interested as cows at a creamery.
Mutual intoxications of art and money come and go. I’ve witnessed two
previous booms and their respective busts: the Pop 1960s, which collapsed in the
long recession of the 1970s, and the neo-expressionist 1980s, whose prosperity
plummeted, anvil fashion, in 1989. In each instance, overnight sensations
foundered and a generation of aspiring tyros was more or less extirpated. (They
were out of style before the market revived.) But tough economic times nudge
artists into ad hoc communities and foster what-the-hell experimentation. The
1970s gave rise to gritty conceptual manoeuvres, supported by government and
foundation grants, non-profit institutions, and a few heroically, or masochistically,
committed collectors. The 1990s were dominated by festivalism: theatrical, often
politically attitudinizing installations that were made to order for a spreading
circuit of international shows and contemporary museums and Kunsthallen. I
disliked the 1990s. I knew what all the righteously posturing art was for, but not
whom it was for. It invoked a mythical audience, whose supposed assumptions
were supposedly challenged. I missed the erotic clarity of commerce - 1give you
this, you give me that - and was glad when creative spunk started leeching back

Schjeldahl//Temptations of the Fair//119

into unashamedly pleasurable forms. Then came this art-industrial frenzy, which
turns mere art lovers into gawking street urchins. Drat.
Fairism (if you will) is inexorable, given today’s proliferation of galleries
(hundreds in New York’s Chelsea alone). No one with anything else to do can
more than sample the panoply. ‘Fairs are important for big galleries’, the gallerist
Marian Goodman said to me. 'For small galleries, they’re vital.’ I asked many
dealers how much of their annual income comes through fairs. Answers varied
from ten per cent to 'well over half, spiking in the range of a third. Beyond that,
non-participation may be suicidal, risking losses not only of revenue but of artists
whose loyalty depends on how gamely they are promoted. The dealer Brooke
Alexander said, ‘The art world is so event-driven these days that if you don’t take
part in the major fairs you almost don’t exist in the public mind.’ (‘Major’ includes
the original Basel; Frieze, in London; and New York’s Armory show, with ARCO,
in Madrid, and F1AC, in Paris, close behind.) Another goad to fairism is the
accelerating encroachment of auction houses on the contemporary market,
competing with galleries for choice works and pace-setting sales. Amy
Cappellazzo, who is in charge of contemporary art at Christie’s, crowed in a
recent interview, ‘We’re the big-box retailer putting the mom-and-pops out of
business.’ Fairs give the little stores conglomerate muscle.
The typical contemporary art object, judging from Miami Basel, is well crafted,
attractive, interesting enough and portable. It may be figurative or abstract and in
any conceivable medium: a pleasantly ungainly painting by Peter Doig, a tiny
sculpture by Tom Friedman, a video stunt by Tony Oursler. Not only is there no
leading style; there is no noticeable friction between one style and another. These
impressions might fade if you focused on any particular work, but fairs destroy
focus. Thousands of works co-existed cosily in Miami, sharing a pluralism of the
salable. Talent counts; ideas are immaterial. Exactly one work drew raves from art
people who still crave audacity: the New York dealer Gavin Brown left his large
space almost bare but for a crumpled cigarette pack (Camels, perhaps to evoke the
Middle East), which, attached by a fishing line to an apparatus high overhead,
slowly and hypnotically flew above or skittered along the floor. Conceived by the
Swiss artist Urs Fischer, this squandering of prime showroom real estate on the
trashed container of an addictive product was a smart insult to the occasion,
though an awfully mild one. (The piece sold for $160,000.) A decade ago, much
new art was eyebrow-deep in critical theory. Now it seems as carefree as a
summertime schoolboy, while far better dressed. [...]

Peter Schjeldahl, extract from Tem ptations o f the Fair’, The New Yorker (25 December 2 0 0 6 ) 148.

120//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

Olav Velthuis
The Venice Effect//2011

When the Venice Biennale was founded in 1895, one of its main goals was to
establish a new market for contemporary art. A sales office assisted artists in
finding clients and selling their work, a service for which it charged 10 per cent
commission. The office was successful: by the end of the first edition, more than
half of the works exhibited had been sold. The organizers earned so much in
commissions that they were able to donate a handsome sum of cash to charity.
Sales remained an intrinsic part of the biennale until 1968, when leftist
students and intellectuals sought to occupy the Giardini’s exhibition grounds as
part of their widespread revolt against bourgeois culture. They vilified the
biennale as a playground of the rich that promoted the commodification of
culture. During their occasionally violent clashes with the police, students
carried posters with slogans like ‘Biennale of capitalists, we’ll burn your
pavilions!’ and ‘No to the biennale of the bosses.’ Their protests did not go
unnoticed, for the biennale’s board decided to dismantle the sales office.
Commerce was now taboo in the Giardini. While many of the achievements of
1968 have since been discarded, the biennale’s ban on sales remained. Its
commissioners and curators have time and again framed the exhibition as a
locus for experiment rather than commerce, elaborating on the fundamental
differences between the institution and the art fair, and downplaying its impact
on the market. For instance, when Daniel Birnbaum, director of the 2009 edition,
revealed the list of artists he had invited to the Arsenale, the president of the
biennale, Paolo Baratta, emphasized that the director’s job is ‘not to give the
latest quotation on the market for contemporary art’.
But if past attempts to ban commerce from the biennale have been serious,
they have also been in vain. For instance, in 2007, London’s White Cube gallery
had sold the majority of the works by Tracey Emin in the British pavilion before
the biennale had even opened officially. In the same year, the French super­
collector Francois Pinault snapped up a series of paintings by Sigmar Polke in the
Padiglione Italia [adjacent to the Arsenale], much to the dismay of some museum
directors, who, as Pinault put it mischievously in a recent interview with the
Financial Times, arrived ‘un peu apres’.
No matter how hard its curators have tried to deny it, the biennale’s impact
on the art market is notable: showing in Venice speeds up sales, gets artistic
careers going, cranks up price levels and helps artists land a dealer ranked higher
in the market’s hierarchy. While business may be conducted in a more circumspect

Velthuis//The Venice Effect//121

way than at an art fair or in a commercial gallery, and money may not be changing
hands in the Arsenale or the Giardini, the market is never asleep. During the
biennale’s opening days, dealers such as Berlin- and London-based Spriith
Magers, with five artists in Venice this year, or Zurich-based Eva Presenhuber
(seven artists in this year’s edition), will be gauging how deep the interest is in
specific works on display, calculating the best way to ‘place’ pieces in the hands
of trusted collectors or schmoozing with museum curators. To exploit the Venice
Effect, numerous others exhibiting at the biennale, among them, Jennifer Allora
& Guillermo Calzadilla (Lisson Gallery) and Barbara Visser (Annet Gelink Gallery),
will have works for sale at Art Basel, the world’s most important modern and
contemporary art fair, which opens its doors only a week later (15-19 June).
Their dealers’ credo: ‘See it in Venice, buy it in Basel.’
So what causes the Venice Effect? The easy answer is that showing in Venice
is widely perceived as a signal of artistic quality, lending legitimacy to an artist’s
oeuvre and therefore contributing to shaping collectors’ tastes (read: their
willingness to pay for art). In this respect, Venice is, of course, far from unique.
Dozens of other biennials around the world, such as Documenta in Kassel, but
also museums and art critics, as well as influential market players such as
Pinault or Charles Saatchi and dealers such as Larry Gagosian or Hauser & Wirth,
send out signals of their own. It would therefore be easy to overstate the
biennale’s power to make or break artistic careers. The days of 1964, when
Venice awarded the top prize to Robert Rauschenberg, and by doing so imported
Pop art into the canon of art history, are long gone. Leafing through past
catalogues, the dominant impression is not of the scores of artists whose careers,
like that of Pierre Huyghe in 2001, were launched at the biennale, but of all the
artists who have been almost forgotten since.
Nevertheless, compared with those of other institutions, the signals sent out
by the biennale have a relatively strong effect on the market because of their
pure, fresh, independent and highly visible character.

Paradox 1: Purity produces market power

In the contemporary art market, economic value can only be established if it is
backed up by artistic value: a growing body of research shows that the reputation
of an artist (the sum of all the solo and group shows in museums, monographs
published, acquisitions of works by institutional collections, etc.) is one of the
best predictors of price levels. The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
accounted for this correlation: the type of capital around which the art world
revolves is not economic or financial, but symbolic. Possessing symbolic capital
means having the power to ‘consecrate’ works of art. It is accumulated by
curators, critics and all the other brokers of taste who populate the art world.

122//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

T h e y do so by demonstrating their independence from the market, by ignoring
commerce, by showing an autonomous interest in art, in experimentation
rather than mundane monetary matters. But once such symbolic capital has
been accumulated, it can be converted into economic capital: the stronger the
artistic reputation, the stronger the sales and the higher the prices. Thus the
paradox is that the curator’s resistance to commerce and Venice’s official status
as a non-selling event, is exactly what makes its quality signals influential in
the art market.
The importance of purity is illustrated by Ireland’s contribution to this year’s
edition. When the country announced the name of the commissioner for its
pavilion, Emily-Jane Kirwan, and the artist exhibiting there, Corban Walker, it
stirred up controversy. Kirwan is a director at New York’s Pace gallery, one of the
world’s most established art dealers, which represents Walker. In The Art Newspaper,
a veteran biennale curator who wished to remain anonymous called it ‘a terrible
decision’ to put an entire pavilion in the hands of an art dealer and her protege,
arguing that ‘certain lines must not be crossed, certain categories must not be
confused or conflated, and ethical standards must be strictly applied.’

Paradox 2: The fresher the signal, the stronger its impact

While, in the past, inclusion in the Venice Biennale would crown the end of an
artist’s career, now it often marks its beginning. To show their independence
from the market and their ability to spot new talent, the biennale’s directors and
curators have increasingly focused on young artists who are not yet household
names. In this competition to send out fresh quality signals, which has hotted up
due to the worldwide proliferation of biennials, curators are now engaging in a
reverse generational race. The press release of the list of artists invited by Bice
Curiger emphasized that 32 were born after 1975. The paradox is that the more
virginal these young artists’ curricula are, the stronger the Venice Effect will be
for them. Referred to by the late American sociologist Robert Merton as the
Matthew Effect (‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, according to the
gospel of St Matthew), their participation prompts many more curators and
collectors to pay attention to their work. For the few older artists in Curiger’s
‘Illuminations’ exhibition, such as James Turrell or Elaine Sturtevant, Venice will
be just one more line on their CVs. Likewise, the market for Christopher Wool is
unlikely to change much due to Curiger’s invitation: his 1990 canvas Blue Fool
was sold at Christie’s New York last year for $5m (with buyer’s premium), making
him the most expensive artist included this year. But they are the exceptions to
the rule. The market for most of the artists selected by Curiger are nowhere close
to established. And while the commissioners of the national pavilions tend to
invite artists who are better known, of all the participants this year, only one out

Velthuis//The Venice Effect//123

of five has ever achieved an auction price of more than $25,000. Half of them
have never been sold at auction. Anya Titova, the second youngest artist to
participate in the biennale, does not even have a dealer representing her.

Paradox 3: Independence financed by the dealers* money

Curators have another instrument to demonstrate their independence vis-a-vis
the market: focusing on artists who make work that is hard to sell, such as
installations or videos. In the past couple of decades, these non-commodities
have slowly crowded out the commodities at the biennale. But paradoxically this
has done little to decouple Venice from the market. One reason is that powerful
dealers are interested in representing artists who create non-commodifiable art
for similar reasons to curators: it allows them to prove that they not only want to
make a quick buck from selling smart paintings and photographs or from trading
on the secondary market. In other words, representing these artists produces
symbolic capital for these dealers.
An important practical reason why the focus on non-commodities has failed to
decouple Venice from the market is that the biennale itself lacks the funds to
produce, ship and install these large-scale works. Therefore the financial
involvement of dealers is indispensable. Here the decision to stop selling in 1968
has taken its revenge, because it resulted in a steep drop in revenue for the biennale.
The same hand that pushed the sales commissioner out pulled the art dealers in.

Paradox 4: Visibility because of proximity to the biennale

The Venice Effect not only depends on the purity, freshness and independence of
its signals, but also on their high visibility. The 2009 edition attracted more than
375,000 visitors. In itself, this number is hardly staggering if one takes into
account that the biennale lasts for almost six months. In the same year, solo
shows of Pipilotti Rist at the Museum of Modern Art or Cai Guo-Qiang at the New
York Guggenheim Museum attracted more visitors. But in terms of the audience’s
composition, the biennale is hard to beat: functioning as the art world’s equivalent
of Cannes, which on the side of its film festival hosts the main international
platform for the movie business, the entire industry convenes in Venice.
Obviously Venice’s importance to the art industry is related to its attractive
location and to its status as the oldest biennale which has served as a (counter)
model for the dozens of other biennials established in the last couple of decades.
But another reason is its proximity - both in time and place - to the centre of the
international contemporary art market: Art Basel, which opens only a week after
Venice (the two usually follow each other) and attracts a largely similar crowd of
art professionals. The structural position of Venice and Basel in the global art
world overlaps in several respects. First of all, presenting an instant overview of

124//INSTCTUTIONS AND NETWORKS

today’s worldwide art production, they provide a means for both curators and
collectors to economize on search time. This is particularly important for the art
market’s clientele whose scarcest resource is not money but time: travelling
regularly to individual museum or gallery shows out of town has become a
luxury that the richest can no longer afford, unlike the leisure class of yesteryear
who used to be the main customers. Visiting fairs and biennials in order to save
time and travel costs is all the more important in an art world where ‘local’ has
become a pejorative term. As The Economist put it: “‘local artist” has become a
synonym for insignificant artist... “International” is now a selling point in itself.’
In other words, a global habitus is expected from all members of the art industry.
Both Venice and Basel enable this habitus by temporarily bringing the globally
consecrated supply of art under one roof.
Second, the continuing success of both Basel and Venice in attracting art
crowds should be seen in the light of a wider culture of events. Within this
culture, the consumption (but not necessarily acquisition) of contemporary art is
packaged as a social and cultural experience, livened up by the artistic
performances, seminars and round table discussions of experts that have now
become standard elements of both the fair and the biennale.
Third, Basel and Venice derive their central role in the art industry from the
latter’s status-driven nature: both the biennale and the fair are finely-tuned tools
that reflect and reproduce status hierarchies. They distinguish visitors by
providing selected groups with VIP treatment, access to pre (and pre-pre-)
openings, after-parties on expensive billionaire’s yachts, or visits to the villas of
collectors living close by. Those types of access are broadly recognized as signs of
status among the cultural elite: the more exclusive the venue, the more status
access to that venue produces.
In short, asking what the impact of Venice on the art market is poses the
wrong question: without institutions such as the biennale, it is impossible to
conceive of a contemporary art market to begin with. And vice versa: without
the art market, the biennale would no longer flourish. To annul the Venice Effect
seems impossible, but if the curators and commissioners want to try, here is the
recipe: follow Ireland’s example of appointing art dealers as the commissioners
and curators; invite artists with a chock-full rather than a virginal curriculum;
postpone the opening a couple of weeks so that it can no longer be attended as
part of a 21st-century Grand Tour that also includes Art Basel.
It is unlikely that any of these measures will be adopted soon by the biennale’s
organizers. And why would they? It may go a long way towards decoupling
Venice from the market, but at the cost of turning the institution into an
irrelevancy. In the end, the problem may not be the Venice Effect itself, but the
art world’s anti-commercial ideology, which makes curators uncomfortable

Velthuis//The Venice Effect//125

about this effect. As Curiger argued recently in an interview: ‘What happens to
an artist once you’ve approached him or her is beyond your control. Artists are
not throwaway objects - if they sell well, does that mean that their work doesn’t
mean anything any more?’

Olav Velthuis, 'The Venice Effect'. The Art Newspaper, online edition (3 June 2011) (www.
theartnewspaper.com)

Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero

Large-Scale Fabrication and the Currency
of Attention//2012

[...] Initially, the phenomenon of large-scale art fabrication has to be seen as

dependent on the continuous growth of the entire art field. This development
gained momentum in the 1980s. Since then, we have seen a boom of newly
constructed museums, an increase in the number of art biennials all over the
world, long queues in front of museums,1 and ever-expanding galleries, which
by now reach massive proportions. The scholar and critic Andreas Huyssen
observed over fifteen years ago that ‘the museum’s role as site of an elitist
conversation, a bastion of tradition and high culture gave way to the museum
as mass medium, as a site of mise-en-scene and operatic exuberance.’2 And the
art trade grows along with it. It expands, however, not only in ‘blue-chip’ or
premium sectors - which account for only 2 per cent of total sales - it expands
horizontally.3 The reasons behind this boom are varied. The electronic
information channels of the Internet contribute considerably to a form of global
attention which is both ubiquitous and simultaneous. However, the principal
effect of a raised societal level of attention for art is that artists are being
required to provide work for larger and larger showrooms. This is accompanied
by the anticipation that any exhibition can present new pieces and that, if
possible, artists can display their works at several places simultaneously. The
increased demand has, without doubt, had a significant effect on the way art is
produced: ‘With these demands, no artist can still afford personally to put the
finishing touches on each object’, says art fabricator Ted Lawson, who operates
the studio ‘Prototype NY’, used by artists such as Mariko Mori and Jeff Koons
since the 1990s. ‘You will never be able to fill a gallery space if you are busy
with sanding every single detail on your own.’ Accordingly, the forms of

126//INSTITUnONS an d networks
production we call large-scale art fabrication have established themselves
firmly in the last few years.
In our research heuristics we link three phenomena with the notion of large-
scale fabrication: first, the aforementioned increase in size of these projects,
leading to a new form of monumentalism. After this year’s Frieze Art Fair, for
example, George Waser, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung's culture correspondent in
London, reports of the ‘ostentatious’ and ‘colossal dimensions’ of works with
which exhibitors are vying for attention. He mentions an oversized coat hanger
by Mark Handforth and a twelve-foot ‘Credit Card Destroying Machine’.4
Secondly, the term ‘large-scale art fabrication’ describes a form of
organization based on the division of labour between ever increasing amounts
of people, which is an inevitable consequence of the new emphasis on scale.5
Thirdly, large-scale fabrication describes the phenomenon of establishing
large-scale studios with a number of workforces ranging from several dozen up
to 200 employees - since the turn of the millennium artists have been seen
buying up entire factory units in order to accommodate production resembling
a medium-scale manufacturing enterprise. In doing so, these studios align
themselves with the organizational forms of the so-called culture industry. The
studios of Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Reyle, Paul McCarthy, Tobias Rehberger,
Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Tomas Saraceno, Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei,
Matthew Barney, and others, resemble the large studios of architectural
practices, industrial workshops or corporate advertising agencies. The
nineteenth-century romantic notion of the lone artist in his garret with his
artistic struggles seems overwhelmingly outdated. Many large studios are
incorporated and registered as a company and need a turnover of millions of
euros or dollars simply to sustain themselves.

Seven Reasons for the Enlargement of Art Production

At first, it seems axiomatic that there is a direct connection between the
development of large studios and the developing premium price sector in the art
market. How else could Koons employ a staff of around 150 if not through a
steady demand for his work? It seems that the upscaling of production is related
essentially to the emergence of a new class of customers, the globalization of the
art market, new attention economics and the distinctions of a media-based, so-
called network society. However, on closer consideration, it appears that there
are other and more complex causal factors. Along with the influence of a growing
art trade since the 1980s, at least six other reasons can be found.
It could be argued that art production on an industrial scale existed prior to
the arrival of the expanding market - before today’s system of fairs and galleries6
(viz. the Land art movement in the late 1960s). Many artists of both sexes

van don Berg & Pasero//Large-Scale Fabrication and the Currency of Attention//127
decided at that time to operate in the public arena, away from the systems of
museums and galleries, beyond the urban, in the wider landscape, in what
Rosalind Krauss in her groundbreaking 1979 essay called the ‘Expanded Field’.7
In the 1970s, sculptors such as Richard Serra proceeded to invade the urban
realm with large-scale sculptures, exploding existing notions of studio art.
Richard Serra described this later, in 1985: The studio has been replaced by
urbanism and industry. Steel mills, shipyards and fabrication plants have become
my on-the-road extended studios.’8We can clearly identify this impulse to move
beyond the boundaries of art institutions as another of the main reasons for an
increase in large-scale fabrication.
In the 1970s, however, this had involved a struggle against considerable
opposition: there was no market or appetite for these kinds of projects,9 and
the attention Serra’s works attracted was at first negative. Conservative factions
and politicians in Bochum and New York fought actively for the removal of his
sculptures. His projects initially struggled to find an audience. ‘I know that
there is no audience for sculpture, as is the case with poetry and experimental
film’, said a resigned Serra at the time.10 It would be inappropriate to compare
the reception of these projects with the event culture of today, but they
definitely created a stir. Radio and television reports recorded and revelled in
the controversy around art pieces that occupied public space in an entirely new
way. Serra’s work attracted public attention, whether by accident or design.
From this perspective, the new media attention in the 1970s counteracted the
marginalization of art. A negative attention currency, generated by the media
in form of criticism, broke the narrow mould of an art world restricted to the
elitist world of experts and expanded the public perception of art.11This impulse
to put voluminous projects into public space in order to both resist the
marginalization of art and gain a new quality of attention could thus be seen as
a third reason for the large-scale bias.
A fourth reason to enlarge the scale of artworks resulted from a cumulative
disproportion between the domestic scale of traditional sculptures, such as
Henry Moore’s or Max Ernst’s pieces or even projects such as Constantin
Brancusi’s Endless Column, and heavy industry products, such as tower cranes,
cargo ships, skyscrapers and other entities which progressively coined the
image of the cities. Parlour-format bourgeois sculptures produced in a studio
could not compete with this new world of artefacts or with the increasing
magnitude of buildings in the expanding urban space. Against this background
it was necessary to reposition sculptures and art projects within a history of
contemporary artefacts. ‘The design and the material and the large scale became
expressive values and the artists aspired more and more to measuring themselves
with the public dimension of the work’, writes Italian critic and curator Germano

128//INSTmmONS AND NETWORKS

Celant.12Artistic methodologies were linked with the dimensions of the everyday
and its objects in urban and rural surroundings.13
Furthermore, a fifth reason for the enlargement followed a reconceptualization
of the relationship between the artwork and the observer. At that time, the
emerging concept of ‘environmental art’ was highly informed by the idea of
dispensing with the detached observer and seeing him rather as active, as a
protagonist physically involved with the work; as someone confronted with the
actuality of his surroundings instead of disconnected objects on pedestals. It was
exactly this approach that brought with it fundamental consequences for the
production of art. It is clear that raising 15-metre-tall steel plates in an inner city,
or stretching a curtain 400 metres across a Rocky Mountain valley, can no longer
be achieved by an individual artist in the isolation of his studio. This development
is more fundamental than Marcel Duchamp’s much-quoted - and often overrated
- invention of the readymade. The ‘post-studio’ era it has ushered in is linked
directly with a radical change in the way art is both fabricated and organized.
This new magnified scale not only required highly specialized production
techniques and allied trades and crafts in order to be realized, it also required
pre-financing and the location of available space. And with this, the exhibition
system became more important. Increasingly, it was the exhibition itself that
became the actual reason for the production of art. Galleries and museums
offered the suitable infrastructure for the final realization. Works of art were no
longer held available in the studio but were originated for specific exhibitions -
those works, at least, which were realized on a larger scale.
All this occurred at the same time as the ascent of a new actor in the art
world: the curator. The emergence of this new key figure was no accident, it
happened for pragmatic reasons; the exhibition space is no longer simply the
site of presentation and reception but has also become the site of production.14
This may well be the most profound change in the relationship between artists
and their audiences in recent years. It has led to an entirely new dynamic and
set of attention economics. Exhibition institutions and galleries now play a far
more significant part in deciding and defining what can be realized and what
cannot, and they therefore remove a large part of the responsibility for this
from artists, with the ambitions of the curators and institutions increasingly
influencing the processes of realization. Collectors are also moving into this
sector, and for the same reason. The location where art is displayed - at least
this is what our interviews have shown - is increasingly setting the standard
for the effective realization of pieces of art. This yields a collateral expansion in
ever-more-spectacular projects. In this context, curators are not independent
of an intensifying public-political pressure focused on footfall and quotas; or,
indeed, independent of their own career ambitions. In this, the ascendency of

van den Berg 8c Pasero//Large-Scale Fabrication and the Currency of Attention//129

the curator is the sixth factor that has advanced the dynamics of perfection and
scale considerably. The figure of the curator is at the centre of a new attention
economics and is eclipsing the previously dominant role of the artist.
A seventh and final aspect in connection with this increase in scale is the
convergence of artistic production with other cultural and creative industries.
Since the 1990s, new production models have evolved, stemming from a
generally accepted, conceptually triggered weakening of the clear distinction
between high and low art. Warhol’s factory became, in part, a paradigm for
artists like Koons, Murakami and Hirst, who went on, as much-censured business
artists, to position and value their work relative to the possibilities and
dimensions of the film or luxury goods industries whilst actively working in the
same field by designing cars and handbags and by producing and marketing
merchandized or branded objects.
In this light, a number of different factors have led to a drastic remodeling
of the idea of artistic production in society. Besides the growing art trade and
the increasing amounts of capital being invested, various attention economics
and dynamics have had the effect of placing new challenges for the next
generation of artists, standards by which they will be judged in an ever-
expanding public arena. [...]

1 [footnote 13 in source] The German Museums Association notes on its homepage that ‘Museums
enjoy a notable popularity: each year, almost 100 million people visit the over 6 ,0 0 0 museums
in Germany. PR campaigns, new exhibition designs, use of technology and museum education
have reduced fears of the unknown and gained new audiences.’ (www.museumsbund.de)
2 (14) Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture o f Amnesia (London/New
York: Routledge, 1995) 14.
3 [15J Handelsblatt’s headline from last year states that ‘art was never more expensive than in
2010’. Susanne Schreiber and Matthias Thibaut, ‘2010 war Kunst so teuer wie nie’, Handelsblatt
(24 December 2010).
4 [ 16] George Waser, ‘Wenn Jachten zu Kunstwerken werden: Die Frieze Art Fair - Londons Messe
fur Gegenwartskunst im neunten Durchgang', NZZ, no. 241 (15 October 2011) 61.
5 [17] It should be noted that, even by sheer size, small but material-consuming projects render
themselves rather large, if you bring into the equation the effort many helpers are contributing
in the background.
6 [18] See Jam es Meyer and Tim Griffin, ‘Art and Its Markets: A Roundtable Discussion’, (Ai Weiwei,
Amy Cappellazzo, Thomas Crow, Donna de Salvo, Isabelle Graw, Oakis Joannou, Robert Pincus-
W itten), Artforum (April 2 0 0 8 ) 2 9 3 -3 0 3 .
7 [ 19] See Rosalind Krauss, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8 (Spring 1979) 3 0 -4 4 .
8 [20] Richard Serra, 'Extended Notes from Sight Point Road’ (1985), in Richard Serra: Writings/
Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 168.

130//INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS

9 [21] See also Karen van den Berg, Der leibhafte Raum: Richard Serras Terminal in Bochum
(Ostfildern: Edition Tertium, 1995).
10 [22] Richard Serra, ‘Extended Notes from Sight Point Road’, op. cit., 171.
11 [23] Jurgen Habermas and also recently Jacques Ranciere have shown that, in the media society,
this is a result that is linked to the fact that the field of arts and aesthetics qualifies as a field to
communicate distinction at the same tim e as a field where apparently anybody can take up
position, even without special knowledge. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation o f
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category o f Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge.
Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 1991); and Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator (London
and New York: Verso, 2009).
12 [24] Germano Celant, ‘Art & Project’, in Making Art Work, ed. Patsy Craig (London: Trolley Books,

20 0 3 ) 14.
13 [25] Incidentally, considerations like these go back a long way into the early stages of art in the
twentieth century. A programmatic mural at the San Francisco Art Institute shows Trotskyist
Diego Rivera, one of the co-authors of the manifesto for an independent and revolutionary art.
working on a monumental painting in the midst of a construction site, between architects and
tall building cranes.
14 [26] See John Roberts, The Intangibilities o f Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade
(London and New York: Verso, 2 007) 183.

Karen van den Berg and Ursula Pasero, extract from ‘Large-Scale Art Fabrication and the Currency
of Attention’, in Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis, eds, Contemporary A rt and Its Commercial M arkets: A
Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2012)
15 6 -6 5 .

van den Berg & Pasero//Large-Scale Fabrication and the Currency of Attention//131
 Some artists worry about
health insurance, production
costs, getting a job and paying
the rent, while others fret over\
real estate accumulations. I
certainly have no investment
in effacing the differences
that are constituted by
economics, gender and\
race, but I do think that both
extravagance and inequity are
constructed and maintained
by a pervasive global market
Barbara Kruger, Interview with Anders Stephanson. Flash A rt, Oc tober 1987

i(G3nm
CRITIQUE
Miwon Kwon
Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity
in Some Art of the 1960s and After//2003

In the face of a plethora of visual art experiments of the late 1960s - all tamed by
now into discrete categories, such as conceptual art, Land art. Happenings,
performance, process art, activist art - the influential art historian and critic Lucy
Lippard proposed the overarching concept of ‘dematerialization’ as a means to
understand their collective motivation. She predicted, in her 1968 essay ‘The
Dematerialization of Art’:

As more and more work is designed in the studio but executed elsewhere by
professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number
of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio
is again becoming a study. Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound
dematerialization of art, especially art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it
may result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete.'

Listing an eclectic array of what she called ‘post-aesthetic’ works from this period
- including Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing, Yves
Klein’s ‘empty gallery’ show in Paris, On Kawara’s daily date paintings, Joseph
Kosuth’s photostat Art as Idea as Idea, Christine Kozlov’s open film canister with
a reel of transparent film inside, Hans Haacke’s condensation and frost sculptures,
Robert Smithson’s maps and earthworks, Ed Ruscha’s books, George Brecht’s
‘events’ and Ray Johnson’s mailings, among many others - Lippard acknowledged
the moment as indicating a major art-historical shift.2 Away from art as product
to art as idea or art as action, she declared.
Reflecting back on this moment in the introduction to the 1997 reissue of her
book Six Years: The Dematerialization o f the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, in which
a wider range and a longer list of art projects and publications are inventoried,
Lippard elaborated further on the dematerialization principle, emphasizing its
political significance.3 Partly quoting herself from 1969, she wrote:

Anti-establishment fervour in the 1960s focused on the demythologization and

de-commodification of art, on the need for an independent (or ‘alternative’) art
that could not be bought and sold by the greedy sector that owned everything
that was exploiting the world and promoting the Vietnam War. The artists who
are trying to do non-object art are introducing a drastic solution to the problems
of artists being bought and sold so easily, along with their art.’4

i 34// criti€iue
Which is to say, dematerialized art, in which the ‘idea is paramount and the
material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious’,5 is
viewed as a strategic subversion of the commercialization of art and the
commodification of the art object. In 1968, Lippard had reasoned that ‘since
dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic materialism is denied along with
physical materialism’.6
Such a claim, energizing and generation-defining at the time, seems
poignantly utopian now. Clearly, dealers have figured out how to sell art-as-idea
or art-as-action. The reconstitution of art that seemed dematerialized in the late
1960s via what Lippard called its ‘epilogue’, the residual materials that physically
evidence the idea or action in the form of a proposal, instruction, ‘score’, relic,
souvenir or documentation, is a commonplace in today’s art market.7 The very
nature of the market economy has also shifted since the late 1960s, and
immaterial, invisible aspects, such as services, information and ‘experience’, are
now quantifiable units of measure to gauge economic productivity, growth and
profit.8 Ideas and actions do not debilitate or escape the market system because
they are dematerialized; they drive it precisely because so. Despite these
profoundly changed realities, however, which inevitably recast the wisdom of
certain political ambitions of 1960s and 1970s art, the presumption that
dematerialization - anti-commodity still persists in structuring contemporary
art discourse. This is not to cast the past investment in dematerialization as a
historical mistake on the grounds that it failed to escape the commodity system
or did not understand it well enough. Rather, given the conceptual impasse of the
equation (denial of physical materialism = denial of economic materialism) and
the changed historical circumstances, we might approach again the art of the
1960s and 1970s with a different set of questions or frames of reference. [...]
My working hypothesis is as follows. Much of so-called dematerialized art
may have complicated the conventional methods of buying and selling art by not
conforming to an agreeable and readily exchangeable commodity form. But the
radicality, or the intelligence, of such art does not merely lie in its non-object
status; the negation of the object form is not an automatic challenge to the
abstraction of commodity exchange. I would argue that of greater significance is
the fact that many works from the 1960s and 1970s and later - art as idea, art as
action, conceptual art, performance art, Happenings, and so on - attempt to
install alternative models of exchange that counter, complicate or parody the
dominant market- and profit-based system of exchange.9 In fact, many of them
engage the logic of the gift economy as one such alternative. By this I mean that
the artwork in such cases functions as a mechanism to instigate social exchanges
or interactions that specifically put into motion a circuit of obligation and
reciprocity, typically involved in giving, receiving or accepting, and giving in

Kwon//Exchange R ate//135
return. Furthermore, in addition to reorganizing the position and relationship of
the art maker and art audience in a general sense, such artwork, through the
process of exchange, tests each person’s sense of honour and dishonour, shame,
power, risk, fear, status, humiliation and prestige.

(The] giver’s undeclared calculation has to reckon with the receiver’s undeclared
calculation, and hence satisfy his expectations without appearing to know what
they are. (Pierre Bourdieu)

Let’s consider the following works drawn from the ‘Work Ethic’ exhibition
[curated by Helen Molesworth for the Baltimore Museum of Art, Des Moines Art
Center and Wexner Center for the Arts in 2003]. On a typewritten piece of paper,
Alison Knowles humbly suggests (or sternly demands, depending on how one
interprets the statement), ‘Make a salad.’ Piero Manzoni builds a pedestal for
viewers to stand on so that they can be transformed into works of art. Yoko Ono
instructs her audience members to cut off pieces of her dress and take the scraps
away with them. Eleanor Antin notarizes her plan to leave a group meeting
immediately if she fails to address certain persons from behind them. Valie
Export bares her breasts inside a modified cardboard box, to be touched, though
not seen, by random people on the street. Edward Kienholz proposes in writing
several different versions of a ‘concept tableau’ to suit a potential patron’s
preference and/or pocketbook. Lee Lozano demands of herself that she not
participate in any art-related events or activities starting 8 February 1969.
Claiming that artworks such as these engage the logic of the gift is not to say
that they are literally gifts. Few of them, indeed, appear to satisfy the conventional
definition of the gift as a voluntary act of generosity, even a sacrificial offering,
that harbours no expectation of a return in kind or of personal gain on the part of
the giver (i.e. Export, Ono).10 But by invoking the gift economy here, I mean to call
attention to the more complex ways in which artworks such as those mentioned
above operate like gifts, presenting explicit and implicit demands, challenges,
invitations and dares that create an obligation to reciprocate with a suitable
response. As we know from the work of Marcel Mauss, the French sociologist and
author of the hugely influential Essai surle don (The Gift, 1924) as well as subsequent
theories of the gift, there is no such thing as a free gift or entirely disinterested,
uncalculated giving.11 And, as recently summarized by anthropologist Maurice
Godelier, Mauss teaches us that ‘the interest of giving-while-appearing-
disinterested resides ultimately in one fundamental characteristic of gift-giving,
which is th at... what creates the obligation to give is that giving creates obligations.’'2
So the question remains: What kind of obligation do artworks of this kind impose
upon their audience? That is, how are we to ‘reciprocate’?

136//CRITlGtUE
 Sometimes, as in the examples of Antin, Lozano and Kienholz, the artist gives
instructions that obligate him- or herself to fulfil his or her own challenge. These
cases present a self-enclosed circuit of obligation and reciprocity that will be
beyond the scope of this essay. In other instances, as in the cases of Manzoni,
Knowles, Ono and Export, the viewer/audience is put in an ‘indebted’ position,
obligated to respond to the artistic instruction or offering via the avenues
prescribed by the works themselves - i.e. engagement, interaction, participation.
This kind of situation, in which the audience is given the opportunity to ‘complete’
the work, is usually described as resulting from an artist’s self-abnegation. The
artist ostensibly gives up to the audience, as if it were a gift, his or her authority of
creative authorship. This displacement, often loosely associated with Roland
Barthes’ well-known notion of the ‘death of the author’ (and the ‘birth of the
reader’), is commonly viewed as a critique of exclusive and elitist cultural values
upheld by the art market and mainstream art institutions. Moreover, to borrow
Lippard’s words, it is generally considered an ‘attack on the notion of originality
... an attack on the genius theory, the hitherto most cherished aspect of patriarchal,
ruling-class art’.13 But if we accept this act of relinquishing the privileged right or
ownership of artistic authorship as indeed an act of critical generosity - even as
an effort to democratize art, as some have argued - then we must also attend to
the full extent of the paradoxical condition that this act actualizes. (...)
The hierarchy of relations between the artist as creative thinker/maker and
viewer as disciplined consumer/receiver is not ultimately negated or refuted, as
is often claimed. It is rather expressed and legitimized in the very gesture of
giving away the ownership of the creative act. Giving things away is tied up with
ego-consolidation; abdication of one’s authority asserts one’s superiority. This is
a point that many critics (especially those who champion ‘interactive’ and
participatory art generally, such as museum educators, public art sponsors and
Internet enthusiasts) continue to miss.
But what of the gift that is refused or otherwise unacknowledged? A dinner
party to which no one comes? An instruction that goes ignored? As much as the
accepting of a gift puts one in debt, in an inferior position to the giver until the
debt is cleared through reciprocation, the refusal of a gift functions as a rejection
of both the giver’s superiority and his or her invitation to solidarity. Consequently,
there is always the risk of personal humiliation and of a breach in social relations
involved with gift giving. [...]
As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has noted, an ‘inaugural act that
institutes communication (by addressing words, offering a gift, issuing an
invitation or a challenge, etc.)’, like so many of the dematerialized artworks under
consideration here that propose an action or expect a response, ‘always entails a
kind of intrusion or even a calling into question ... [that] inevitably contains the

Kwon//Exchange R ate//137
potentiality of a bond, an obligation’.'4 This possibility of a bond, an ongoing
relationship of mutuality and exchange - between artist and audience, between
persons - is at the heart of the anti-commodification efforts. For if the economy
and moral code of commodity exchange is based on alienable objects and alienated
subjects, whose ties of dependence to one another are cancelled at the moment
of exchange, the economy and moral code of gift giving asserts the impossibility
of that cancellation. Just as the acceptance of a gift immediately puts one in debt
to the gift giver, a debt that must be repaid in an appropriate and timely manner
following certain cultural rules in order that one not lose face or insult the gift
giver, these artworks place upon their addressees - upon us, even many years
hence - a burden to answer their call for solidarity and communality. [...]

1 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler. T h e Dematerialization o f Art’, Artforum, vol. 6, no. 6 (1968)
31 - 6 ; reprinted in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971) 255.
2 Lippard heeds Joseph Schillinger’s evolutionary mapping o f artistic development in his 1948
book The Mathematical Basis o f the Arts, which posits the eventual ‘disintegration of art’ and the
‘abstraction and liberation of the idea'. W hile she argues for this moment as almost a historical
inevitability, Lippard claims Dada and Surrealism as precedents for the ‘post-aesthetic’
dematerialization of art that she sees around her. Marcel Duchamp is championed above all as
the forerunner, the model of the artist as thinker rather than theartist as maker (‘Dematerialization
of Art’, 258; 2 6 8 -7 0 ).
3 Lucy Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, introduction to the 1997 revised edition of Six Years: The
Dematerialization o f the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1997) vii-xxii.
4 Ibid., xiv. The quotation from 1969 concludes, ‘The people who buy a work o f art they can’t hang up
or have in their garden are less interested in possession. They are patrons rather than collectors.’
5 Ibid., xiii.
6 Lippard, ‘Dematerialization of Art’, 270.
7 See, for instance, Paul Schimmel, ed., Out o f Actions (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, 2000).
8 See my One Place AfterAnother.Site-SpecificArt and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 2002).
9 Random examples include Edward Kienholz’s watercolours depicting the object or monetary sum
to be bartered with the painting: David Hammons’ Dada-esque sale of different sizes of snowballs
on a New York street corner: and Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos’ distribution of an
NEA grant to undocumented workers in the San Diego/Tijuana area as a tax ‘rebate’.
10 For a reading of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece in relation to the gift, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Remembering
Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Oxford A rt Journal, no. 26 (Spring 20 0 3 ) 9 9 -1 2 3 .
11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason fo r Exchange in Archaic Societies (1924); trans. W.D.
Hall (New York: W.W. Norton. 1990). Recent publications on the gift include Alan D. Schrift, ed.,

138//CRITIQUE
 The Logic o f the Gift: Toward an Ethic o f Generosity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997);
Maurice Godelier. The Enigma o f the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jacques
Derrida, The Gift o f Death (Donner la mort, 1993); trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995).
12 Godelier, The Enigma o f the Gift, op. cit., 15; emphasis in the original.
13 Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, op. cit., xv.
14 [footnote 21 in source) Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Marginalia: Some Additional Notes on the Gift’, in
Schrift, ed. The Logic o f the Gift, op. cit., 238.

Miwon Kwon, extracts from ‘Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960s
and After’, in Helen Molesworth, ed.. Work Ethic (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art/University
Park, Pennsylvania: University o f Pennsylvania Press. 2003) 8 3 -5 ; 8 5 -8 ; 92; 9 3 -4 .

Sophie Cras
Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding:
Experiments in the 1960s//2013

In March 1969, in an article for New York magazine, the art critic Barbara Rose
developed what would remain for her, as well as for many subsequent authors, a
major thesis in the interpretation of conceptual art. By dematerializing art, she
claimed, conceptual artists were formulating an unprecedented critique of the
art market and the economic system in general. Indeed, who would pay for a
sheet of paper with scribbles on it? Who would readily purchase an idea that can
be appropriated just by reading it? ‘Artists today’, she wrote, ‘are virtually fleeing
the art world and the political economy on which it rests.’1
Rose’s argument, however, was grounded in a vision of economics that may
very well already have been outdated by the time she wrote it. She had in mind
a commodity-based economy, fed by the accumulation of goods through mass
production and consumption. She ignored an entire area of the economic sphere:
that of the financial markets, currency exchange and interest rates. Is there
anything more conceptual than this economy that is grounded purely in contracts,
than virtual money that passes from hand to hand without ever materializing?
What could attract a conceptual artist more than stocks or derivatives - strictly
speculative constructions, always farther and farther away from their foundations
in the real world - or price inflation, a process by which money creates money
without the intervention of human production? Just when Rose elaborated her

Cras//Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding//139

thesis, artists, it seems, made every effort to contradict her. At the very moment
that she wrote, ‘A great deal of the new art cannot be bought, sold, owned or
traded like a blue-chip investment’, artists were making investment, sale and
money the material of art itself.2
Indeed, building on Andy Warhol’s and Larry Rivers’ experiments with money
paintings in the early 1960s, the year 1969 was precisely when what was called
financial and monetary art reached its peak: from the elaborate, playful Dollar Bill
collages of Ray Johnson; through more literal works such as Abraham Lubelski’s
Sculptural Daydream, a bale of one-dollar bills worth a quarter of a million dollars,
presented at the Chelsea Gallery for the exhibition The Art of Money’; to
performances like Dennis Oppenheim’s Removal Transplant - New York Stock
Exchange, which consisted of collecting a day’s litter from the floor of the New
York Stock Exchange and transplanting it to a midtown rooftop. These are but a
few examples of this ‘creative interest in cash’, as Life magazine put it in 1969.3
This fascination with money, and above all money in its most abstract form,
the financial markets, took perhaps its most radical - although little-known -
shape in what 1 shall call ‘artistic shareholding experiments’. Lee Lozano’s
Investment Piece, started in January 1969, describes her act of investing S938.25
in highly speculative warrants. Exhibited with Lozano’s work in May 1969, Dan
Graham’s Income (Outflow) Piece is an unrealized project to place advertisements
in newspapers and magazines about a public offering for shares of Dan Graham,
Inc. In contrast to Graham’s and Lozano’s ‘language pieces’, which had limited
circulation, Les Levine’s Profit Systems I consists of press releases and
advertisements published in newspapers and magazines such as the Toronto Star
and Artforum, publicly announcing first the acquisition of five hundred common
shares of Cassette Cartridge Corporation for $2,375 in March 1969 and then, a
few months later, the sale of those same shares for $7,481.25, a net profit of 220
per cent (which shows that artists can definitely be canny investors). Finally, in
Robert Morris’s Money project, also dated March 1969, the artist offered his
services as an investor to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the final profit
of his initiatives to be shared between the museum and himself. [...]
Conceptual artists’ interest in the art-as-investment phenomenon was,
however, far from a purely formal one. When Levine, Morris, Graham and Lozano
decided to elevate investment to the status of an artwork, they were of course
attracted to the diverse forms of financial documentation and vocabulary, often
arid and dull substitutes for potentially exciting and risk-taking ventures. Yet
equally important to their enterprise was a concern for what it meant for art to
be considered a source of profit rather than enjoyment and for the way that the
monetization of cultural production affected the social and institutional
framework of the art community.

140//CRITIQUE
 Levine describes Profit Systems I as ‘an embrace of capitalism’: by investing
his money in the stock exchange and announcing in the press his acquisitions
and profits (he more than doubled his investment in eight months when he
resold his Cassette Cartridge Corporation shares), he entered a realm of financial
risk and public exposure usually reserved for businessmen and entrepreneurs.
Levine considered ‘business the contemporary artform', presenting himself as a
‘corporate with interests in all areas of management’.4
A successful and prolific artist at the end of the 1960s involved in creating
sculptures, environments and media art, Levine was ostracized from the rest of the
New York art scene. ‘Artists resent Levine’s efficiency and self-generating publicity’,
the art critic David Bourdon explained in 1969, pointing to Levine’s press releases
such as those constituting Profit Systems /. According to Bourdon, Levine’s methods
made other artists uncomfortable, as they overtly played on what most of the
artists wished to keep hidden. For the critic Jack Burnham, a strong supporter of
Levine, the artist’s work was the logical outcome of the process by which art
reflected on its own means of existence: ‘Levine is simply circumventing the
roundabout process of producing paintings and sculptures for sale and, instead,
making the message - money - become the medium’, Burnham wrote in Artforum
in 1969. Levine’s attacks on the ‘anti-bourgeois mentality’ of the artists’ community
and their reluctance to recognize ‘that all art is advertising for the individual as a
profit-making entity’, in Burnham’s words, earned him the reputation of a cynic.5
Born in Ireland, Levine emigrated to Canada before settling in New York in
the early 1960s. In many ways, his work of 1969 seems closer to that of the radical
Canadian art scene of the late 1960s, in particular the well-known conceptual
artist Iain Baxter (who changed his last name to Baxter& in 2005).6 ‘President’ of
the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., a company registered in Vancouver in 1966 and officially
incorporated in 1969, Baxter, like Levine, saw the correlation of the artist and the
businessman, and he shared Levine’s playful use of public communication. In a
January 1969 ‘Message from the President’, an announcement mimicking
corporate press releases reproduced in a Calgary Herald article by the journalist
Paul Grescoe, Baxter admitted that ‘1968 was not a good business year for NETCO
... What we need, aside from a couple of sharp guys as business managers, is new
capital investment.’ Calling for private investors ready to join the venture, he
argued, ‘Art is an investment. It’s the greatest gamble of all.’7
For his part, Levine denied being a cynic. His interest was, as a press release
for Profit Systems I states, in ‘dealing with a “real” society system’.8 Seeking to
subvert the distinction between art and life, he submitted art to the same societal
and economic constraints as other everyday professional activities, using the
same criteria for measuring success or failure. He decided to buy shares of
Cassette Cartridge Corporation, he explained retrospectively, after having

Cras//Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding//141

conducted serious research on the company’s profitability: ‘Once you chose a
system, you have to succeed within that system. If I had lost money, in a way it
would have been a failure.*9 In this way Levine linked economic and artistic success,
but instead of hoping that monetary gain would reward aesthetic value, he reversed
the factors and made profitability a condition for artistic validity. (...)
While Levine seems fully to have embraced the new status of the artist as ‘a
man of the world’, Robert Morris’s attitude was much more ambiguous. His 1969
work Money consists of sixteen documents, including correspondence and
financial records - promissory notes, certificate of deposit, receipts - tracing the
artist’s attempt to act as an investor on behalf of the Whitney Museum. This
work was to be his contribution to the collective exhibition ‘Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials’, organized by Marcia Tucker and James Monte.10 In his
proposal for the project, dated March 1969, Morris suggested:

The Museum should acquire $100,000 by obtaining a loan against its collection or
real estate holdings. The sum is to be invested for the duration of the exhibition.
An effort should be made to achieve a profit over the cost of the short term loan.
After broker’s fees, the profit would be divided between the Museum and myself.

Because of the museum’s understandable reluctance to expose itself to such a

financial risk, the project was considerably amended, as the subsequent exchange
of letters and documents shows. Following a suggestion by Tucker and Monte,
the Whitney Museum borrowed $50,000 at 5 per cent interest from the broker
and patron Howard Lipman, already a longtime supporter of Morris’s work, for
the duration of the exhibition. The money was then invested in risk-free
certificates bearing 5 per cent interest, leading to a paradoxical situation in which
the financial transaction cancelled itself out, producing documentation but no
profits. It was perhaps to defuse the frustration arising from the fact that no one’s
financial situation changed that Lipman was prompted to turn over the interest
due to him ($328.77) to the Whitney.11 The collector and patron was, therefore,
thoroughly involved in the process of creating the artwork. [...]
Morris’s initial project for Money was not just any kind of risky investment.
As he explained in a 1969 interview, he first intended to use the Whitney Museum
loan to ‘buy modern art and sell it very fast’ for a profit.12 At a time when he
claimed that conceptual activity should be a ‘resistance to art as a commodity’
and a way to defy art’s ‘capitulation to capitalism’, Morris was therefore miming
- and mocking - art as an investment.13 He was, in fact, anticipating the activity
of the first hedge funds devoted to art investment, such as the Art Fund or
Sovereign American Arts Corporation, which in 1969 were awaiting approval by
the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although they promised to encourage

142//CRITiaUE
and support contemporary art by buying works from living artists, these funds
were met with scepticism and distrust by the art community. The New York Times
journalist Grace Glueck reported these misgivings in her article 'Now There Are
Mutual Funds for Art’ - quoting, coincidentally enough, ‘a prominent collector of
contemporary sculpture and editor of the magazine Art in America’, none other
than Mrs Howard Lipman.14
The first months of 1969, when Profit Systems I and Money were being
developed, also saw the birth of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). The AWC, an
association of artists, critics and museum staff, was intended primarily for the
defence of artists’ rights, but it also promoted an openly political stance against
the Vietnam War, gender and racial discrimination, and the economy of the art
world. Rebellion against the concept of art as an investment was a central
preoccupation of the AWC. Historians have pointed out the 'paradox’ that artists’
complaints and demands regarding their remuneration and economic status
reached their peak just when the art market was experiencing an unprecedented
boom.15 When one bears in mind that throughout the 1960s art had come to be
considered an extremely profitable investment, it is not surprising that artists
felt unfairly excluded from the supposedly considerable financial gains that
others made from their production. [...]
By turning quality into quantity, subjective into objective and pleasure into
business, the promoters of art as an investment aimed to bring art into the realm
of classic economic thinking, in which money is ultimately reduced to an abstract,
homogenizing means for dehumanized exchange. This gave art a new visual,
intellectual and emotional identity: that of a supposedly ever-ascending curve
supported by ever-escalating numbers. It also structurally modified the
institutional framework of artistic activities, contributing to the redefinition of
the way artists positioned themselves in relation to museums, galleries, collectors
and the professional sphere altogether. Retracing the art-as-an-investment
phenomenon is therefore essential to understanding such political debates as
those surrounding the Art Workers’ Coalition. However, by making finance and
investment the very material of their art, artists were not only challenging
economists’ appropriation of their work. They were also using finance to critique
art as a confined and self-regulated discipline. [...]

1 Barbara Rose, ‘Why Read Art Criticism?’, New York magazine (3 March 1969) 45.
2 Ibid., 44.
3 See Ray Johnson: Dollar Bill Show (Chicago: Richard Feigen Gallery, 1970). 'The Art of Money’, at the
Chelsea Gallery in New York in the spring of 1969, received a considerable amount of attention. See
Jean Lipman, ‘Money for Money’s Sake’, Art in America, vol. 58, no. 1 (January/February 1970) 7 6 -
83; and ‘A Creative Interest in Cash: Art You Can Bank On’, Life (19 September 1969) 51-61. The

Cras//Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding//143

 exhibition poster can be found in the Lucy R. Lippard Papers, 1940s-2006, Bulk 1968-1990,
Archives o f American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box OV 50. For Oppenheim’s Removal Transplant,
see Jack Burnham, ‘Real Time Systems’, Artforum, vol. 8, no. 1 (September 1969) 52.
4 [footnote 21 in source] Les Levine, interview by the author (New York, 28 September 2010); and
Jack Burnham, ‘Les Levine, Business as Usual’, Artforum, vol. 8, no. 8 (April 1970) 41.
5 [22] David Bourdon, ‘Les Levine Bursts with Elusive Ideas - and Ego’, Life (22 August 1969) 65;
Jack Burnham, ’Real Time Systems’, Artforum, vol. 8 ,3 3 no. 1 (Septem ber 1969) 55; and Burnham,
‘Les Levine, Business as Usual’, op. cit., 41.
6 [23J This association was convincingly proposed by Ken Allan, ‘Business Interests, 1 9 6 9 -7 2 : N.E.
Thing Co. Ltd., Les Levine, Bernar Venet and John Latham’, Parachute, no. 106 (April-June 2002)
1 06-2 2 .
7 [24] Paul Grescoe, ‘Steady, Now: Is This Art?’, Calgary Herald, Canadian Magazine (25 January
1969) 15.
8 [25] Press release for Profit Systems I, Les Levine Archives, New York.
9 [26] Levine, telephone interview by the author (16 Septem ber 2010).

10 [30] Seven documents were added to the original nine after the end o f the exhibition. The
com plete piece was exhibited again in 1973 in ‘Some Recent American Art’, National Gallery of
Victoria. Melbourne. It is still in the collection of the W hitney Museum of American Art.
11 [31 ] Howard Lipman to Robert Morris (21 May 1969); part of the documentation for Money. The
Whitney Museum still owes Morris his share ($164.38). See The Price o f Everything: Perspectives
on the A rt Market (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. 2007) 5.
12 [35] Patricia Norvell, ‘Robert Morris’, (16 May 1969), in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews
with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson Weiner, ed.
Alexander Alberro and Norvell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001) 63.
13 [36] Ibid., 6 1 ,6 4 ; Morris interview (2 7 -2 9 March 2011). In this interview, Morris confirmed that
Money was in part a reaction to the ‘art investment funds’ that appeared at the time.
14 [37] Quoted by Grace Glueck, ‘Now There Are Mutual Funds for Art’, New York Times (7 November
1969) 3 6 : '“To me. the concept of art investment is as bad as air pollution”, Lipman said. “It’s
dealing with art as a commodity, a total confusion of values.”’
15 [38] Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2 0 0 9 ) 37.

Sophie Cras, extracts from ‘Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding: Experiments in the 1960s’,
American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum), vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013) 3 - 5 ;
1 0 - 1 2 ;1 2 - 1 3 ; 14-15; 20.

144//CRITIQ.UE
Michael Asher
September 21-October 12,1974
Claire Copley Gallery, Inc.
Los Angeles, California//1983

A year after the exhibition of my work at the Franco Toselli Gallery in Milan, I did
an installation for the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. It was my first
individual exhibition in a commercial gallery in North America.
The gallery was located on La Cienega Boulevard, one of the city’s major
north-south thoroughfares, where most of the other commercial art galleries in
Los Angeles were located at that time, and where there was a constant flow of
pedestrian traffic. The gallery space, which originally had been a multipurpose
storefront, was entered directly at street level. A storefront window facing the
street measured 6 feet 8 inches by 5 feet 4 inches. The gallery from front wall to
back wall measured 53 feet 7 V* inches; its width was 14 feet 4 x/i inches and
height 11 feet 2 3A inches.
A partition wall separating an office area from the front exhibition space
extended floor-to-ceiling 10 feet 8 H inches across the width of the gallery
at a point 16 feet 5 lA inches from the back wall. The partition ended 4 feet 2 Vs
inches short of the opposite wall, forming a passage connecting both areas. The
office area contained office furniture and equipment, artworks in storage, and a
separate utility area. The white wall surfaces of the larger front area were
maintained as a backdrop for exhibition purposes.
The work I proposed was the dismantling of the partition wall for the
duration of the exhibition. The idea was to integrate the two areas, so that the
office area and its activities could be viewed from the exhibition area, and the
exhibition area opened to the gallery directors’ view.
Once the proposal had been accepted, the entire partition was removed. Its
drywall surfaces were stripped from its frame, which was then disassembled and
stored until reinstallation after the exhibition. Remnants of the partition’s
original construction, such as seam compound, were removed, and a small piece
of rug, cut out to make way for the partition, had to be replaced.
Since the work also meant to restore the display surfaces of the gallery to
presentation standards, it was necessary to fill in cracks and cover over any
features that might have become objects of perception, so that the entire interior
would appear to be an integrated and continuous flawless container. In the north
wall large cracks marked by water stains had to be caulked from the outside and
filled with cement on the inside. In the south wall cracks caused by the joining of
plywood against plaster also had to be filled in. All cracks were finished with

Asher//September 21-October 12,1974. Claire Copley Gallery//145

drywall compound before the walls were painted. Wall and ceiling surfaces were
then treated to the usual gallery white with an airless sprayer, and they were
finished by being ‘fogged’ out. The office and storage area was painted in the
same way as the exhibition space, but was otherwise left untouched. Once the
wall surfaces were finished and everything was in place, the exhibition area
walls seemed to vignette the office area and its activities and turn them into the
content of the exhibition.
A sign over the storefront window identified the gallery by narr^ and served
to frame the gallery’s operation for passers-by. Once inside, theA/iewer could
hear as well as assimilate more readily the various private and business activities
with museum staff, collectors, artists and friends usually screened from view.
Also, artworks could be clearly seen in storage in the exhibition/gallery, as
opposed to being placed on the gallery walls for exhibition.
1 left instructions with the gallery dealer to inform viewers who requested
information about the work that I had produced it, and that by removing the
partition wall the day-to-day activities of the gallery were disclosed to the viewer
in the unified office/exhibition space. In the same way that gallery personnel
seemed to become increasingly aware of their activities, viewers also became
more aware of themselves as viewers.
The viewers were confronted with the way in which they had been
traditionally lulled into viewing works of art and, simultaneously, the unfolding
of the gallery structure and its operational procedures. Works had been perceived
from a safe cultural distance which generally prevented the viewer from
questioning the issues involved. Without that questioning, a work of art could
remain enclosed in its abstracted aesthetic context, creating a situation where
the viewer could mystify its actual and historical meaning. As a commentary, this
work laid bare the contradictions inherent within the gallery structure and its
constituent elements.
The gallery dealer is - in the viewer’s understanding - the knowledgeable,
responsible mediator of the work in the many steps of its abstraction from its
context. The dealer’s prime function is to commodify the work of art, to transform
the work’s aesthetic use-value into exchange-value.
To accomplish this aim the works are generally isolated on the white walls of
the gallery, clearly separated from the area of business activity. Once they are
returned to the storage area, that is, the area of business operation, they have
been reduced to their essential commodity-function.
Because the gallery dealer must give the work an economic value, the dealer
is often unable to reveal its actual function. Paradoxically, the reality of the work
can be viewed only through this conduit in which it undergoes the initial
abstraction in the accrual of exchange-value.

146//CRITCQUE
 The function of the work at the Claire Copley Gallery was didactic: to represent
materially the visible aspects of this process of abstraction. For this reason, the
work’s structure was circular in order to reveal its affiliation with the production,
the mediation, and the reception of culture. In one sense this could be viewed as
a concomitant of economic interest, while other cultural aspects could come
under scrutiny as well, from the handling of money to the selection of exhibitions.
Works in storage - those preserved in cabinets and those leaning against the wall
- were now also visibly accessible. The material reality of the gallery operations
surfaced as questionable and problematic even though the author and viewer
might find the gallery to be the most efficient way for the public reception of
works of art. If the viewer saw the Toselli Gallery display surfaces perhaps as a
definition of the architectural structure and, further, what that structure implies,
then the work at the Claire Copley Gallery could be defined as an analytical
model of the actual operations of a gallery behind those display surfaces.
The removal of the paint at the Toselli Gallery was in part a reference to the
traditional concern in painting of the processes of adding and subtracting
materials to a two-dimensional plane. The two-dimensional plane was generally
determined by its contour and its support structure, which in turn implied
further architectural support structures as well as covertly operational support
systems. From a similar point of view but in a different way, the volume of the
partition determined the actual space and its functional operations; its removal
from that space disclosed the office volume and juxtaposed it to the exhibition
volume which was necessary for the exhibition to take place. The Claire Copley
work was rejecting the conventional functions of the space it occupied to make
the space function as an exhibition/presentation.
A critical analysis of the gallery structure was developed by a small number
of artists in the late sixties and early seventies, at a time when they viewed their
role as artists as that of individual producers with the right to control totally not
only the production but also the distribution of their work. They believed that
artists of previous generations had accepted uncritically and without qualification
a distribution system (the gallery/market) which had often dictated the content
and context of their work. These artists found themselves in a paradoxical
situation; they either had to suppress the intentions of their work when it
intersected with the gallery/market or they had to forgo the conventional
distribution system altogether and give up their role as individual producers; or
they could exhibit outside the traditional exhibition context, with the hope that
a new production and distribution system could be developed. When their work
conflicted with the commodity status required by the gallery system, these
artists had no choice but to develop a new cultural context for their work before
they could expect to function within the gallery nexus.

Asher//September 21-October 12, 1974. Claire Copley Gallery//147

 Interestingly enough these works were often seen as ‘non-material’ since
they seemed to function outside of the traditional context of the marketplace.
Instead of deriving their cultural meaning from the conventional exhibition
support, they functioned in a variety of locations. Ultimately, in the late seventies,
it was shown that these works had at least an economic materiality of their own
and did not in fact operate outside of the cultural context. Some younger
generation artists considered this discrepancy of theory and practice sufficient
proof that once again the interdependence between production and distribution
in the work of art could be totally ignored. The work as object reinstated the
dealer and the distribution system to its original status. Some artists of this
younger generation, possibly seeking a way out of object-production and gallery/
museum distribution similar to that of artists of the late sixties and early
seventies formed production collectives, which attempted to keep their non-
object-oriented production outside of the confines of the cultural industry.
Another phenomenon of the early seventies, deriving from artists’ anti­
commercialism and concern with the problem of commodification was the
development of the alternative space system for exhibition although not necessarily
for distribution. The alternative space relied for its funding on outside sources
rather than the market for which the work was primarily produced. Alternative
spaces made more works more frequently accessible than the commercial galleries,
yet they falsified the work’s commodity status, assuming that visibility alone
would complete the reception process and that exchange value was not one of the
work’s features. The alternative space system provided visibility for the work
regardless of specific interest, but it did not necessarily stand behind the work,
with the full support necessary for reception within the culture. Paradoxically, the
only way for a work to be fully received is through its initial abstraction for
exchange value. To resolve these contradictions between the artist’s interests and
the functions and capacities of the alternative space, these institutions finally had
to assume the role of being either a commercial gallery or a museum.
I felt at the time and still feel that the gallery is one essential context for the
cultural reception of my work. What came under scrutiny in the Claire Copley
work was the question of whether a work of art whose discourse disclosed the
system of economic reproduction could possibly, at the same time, engender that
economic reproduction for itself. Just as the work served as a model of how the
gallery operated, it also served as a model for its own economic reproduction.

Michael Asher, ‘September 21-O ctober 12,1974. Claire Copley Gallery, Inc.. Los Angeles, California', in
Michael Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979, written in collaboration with and edited by
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/
Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983) 9 5 -1 0 0 .

148//CRITIQUE
Ian Bum
The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation//1975

Impending economic crisis has forced many deeply lurking problems into the
open.1 Art sales are declining and there is an air of pessimism. The sense of
opulence of the 1960s has gone to dust. As artists, we have tended to understand
the art market only in its reward capacity, preferring to ignore the ‘dismal science’
of economics. But no longer, it seems. While it may once have seemed an
exaggeration of economic determinism to regard works of art as ‘merely’
commodities in an economic exchange, it is now pretty plain that our entire lives
have become so extensively constituted in these terms that we cannot any longer
pretend otherwise. Not only do works of art end up as commodities, but there is
also an overwhelming sense in which works of art start o ff as commodities.
Faced with this impasse, we need alternate historical perspectives in order to
throw light on some of the most basic of social relations, to perceive the lacuna
between what we think we do and what we actually do in the world. The
historical relations of up-to-date modern art are the market relations of a
capitalist society. That much I believe is obvious to everyone. What we have seen
more recently is the power of market values to distort all other values, so even
the concept of what is and is not acceptable as ‘work’ is defined first and
fundamentally by the market and only secondly by ‘creative urges’ (etc.). This has
been the price of internalizing an intensely capitalistic mode of production.
Given this, shouldn’t we be scrutinizing certain historically unique aspects of
our market relations? How have these wrought fundamental changes in the ‘art’
produced? 1know many of us are grateful beneficiaries of this market. Nonetheless,
we have all ended up victims of its capriciousness, the ‘principles’ of modern art
having trapped us in a panoptical prison of our own making. Simply, this is the
realization that if the arts were really democratized, we as producers of an elite art
would no longer have any means of functioning - wanting to abolish elitism in
modem art is tantamount to wanting to abolish modem art itself. [...]
Looking at my situation today, I am obviously faced with functionally different
circumstances from those of the early 1950s. In that period, in order to create a
privileged art, it was necessary to produce something markedly different from
what Europe was producing - this was reminiscent of the old competitive spirit:
to succeed, it had to be different. But the bureaucratization and new corporate
marketing techniques (involving art criticism, the trade journals, galleries and
museums, art schools and all) changed that, so today we see the idea of
‘international high culture’ demanding a uniformity dominated by New York art.

Bum//The Art M arket//149

To create a successful (that is, privileged) art, I must now affirm and perpetuate
at least one of the dominant styles. It is hard for me to be blind to the fact that
what has happened to recent art closely parallels the entrenchment of the giant
multinational corporations. But, I want to restate, this has been achieved
primarily on tacit agreements and not on the typically overt bureaucratic
techniques - proving once more how little surveillance a system like this requires
once the principles have been internalized and everyone has ‘like-minded’
interests. This allows imperialism to operate in its most despicable state - where
the specific character and subjectivity of any one place is disregarded and the
‘universality’ of New York corporate uniformity is proclaimed.
In my mind, one depressing result o f ‘incorporating’ modern art has been the
proportionately greater increase in the numbers of drab ‘non-production
workers’ (middle-people) compared with the increase in (sometimes equally
drab) ‘production workers’. This is just part of the marketing structure’s expansion.
But the consequences are pervasive: by bureaucratizing, the market has
developed a bureaucratic or corporate ‘taste’, essentially rendering personal or
individual taste impossible. I can best illustrate this by pointing to the network
of modern art museums which have sprung up like automobile sales-rooms
throughout the Western world, all spouting the same rhetoric of ‘freely
developing, democratic, cultural, educational enterprises’. This has lost all
relation to me as an artist. The museums, run by the new culturecrats, have
become overlording institutions utilizing all the packaging techniques of the
greatest consumer society in order to sell ‘culture’ (at a price); they openly serve
as showcases propagandizing the global ambitions of our selling ‘successes’. The
old ‘gunboat diplomacy’ has been replaced by the new ‘modern art diplomacy’
(for example, the Museum of Modern Art’s International Program).
In case it appears I am overstating the role of United States capitalism in all
this, let me emphasize the obvious, that the history of modern art from its
beginnings was nurtured within a number of industrialized societies, not just
America. Looking closer at that history, with its unrelenting emphasis on an ‘art-
for-art’s-sake’ ideology, we become conscious of the ever-increasing role played
by a neutered formalism - at the expense of our possibility of content. The stress
on exclusively formal innovation had the aftermath of content in its last gasp
being reduced to such vacua as ‘colour’, ‘edge’, ‘process’, ‘ideas’, ‘image’, etc. plus
a lot of fatuous jargon about qualities symbolized through these (c.f. especially
Greenberg’s account of modernism, but also most issues of Artforum and other
magazines). This is formalism taken to its ultimate empty conclusions: it is what
we have lauded as pure a r t ... the impossibility of content, of saying anything
whatsoever. The tradition of formalism has left me largely incapable of expressing
through ‘my art’ those very things about which I have the greatest misgivings -

150//CRITIQUE
and so incapable of changing anything through ‘my art’. These ideological fetters
have conclusively eradicated every possibility of a social practice in relation to
art, even the thought of it - the expression of modern art has become the
rejection of society and of our social beings. Now, obviously the United States
isn’t to blame for all of this, but it certainly deserves a lot of the credit for bringing
it to a remarkable and unprecedented pitch. No longer just producing an art for a
privileged middle class, it has burgeoned into a spectacularly elitist art, remote
even from its own producers’ actual lives and problems.
What can you expect to challenge in the real world with ‘colour’, ‘edge’,
‘process’, systems, modules, etc. as your arguments? Can you be any more than a
manipulated puppet if these are your ‘professional’ arguments? Moreover, when
you add to this picture thousands upon thousands of artists in all corners of the
modern art empire tackling American formalism in the belief that it is the one
‘true art’ - that’s when it is possible to see how preposterous and finally downright
degrading it has become!2
Needless to say, it is easy for me to identify with some points of the classic
nineteenth-century theses about alienation. There it was argued that alienation
is the process whereby human values are projected outside of us and achieve an
existence independent of us, and over us, and this is an essential condition for
the functioning of capitalism. We are all familiar with the romanticized notions
about the work of art ‘embodying the soul of the artist’. Well, perhaps historically
this has taken on mythic proportions, but there is a very real sense in which
everything produced ought to bear some personal relation to who makes it.
However, once my work of art enters the art market, it takes on a power
independent of me and this strikes me as a form of estrangement from what I
have produced, an alienation from my own experiences; and the more I produce
the more I deprive myself of my ‘means of life’. Yet I find I can only maintain
myself by continuing in the same fashion. So, while I may retain economic
ownership over my labour and means of production (thus giving me a sense of
‘freedom’), I am still psychologically and socially alienated from what I produce.
Once entering the market, it becomes an object foreign to me - but without the
market I don’t recognize it, because it is defined via the market which I have
internalized. Don’t we all experience this to greater or lesser degrees? As a result,
myself-as-an-artist has become a stranger to me, a figure over whom I have little
power or control. This is today’s blunt reality of alienation. No longer merely
having lost the product of our labour, our ability to create is profoundly impaired
... and this is also expressed in my relation to you, and burgeons in the relation
you can have to what I produce.
Often-heard remarks implying that it is not enough to be ‘just an artist’ are
merely public admissions that, as a role in society, ‘artist’ is a sterile one. More

Bum//The Art M arket//151

pointedly, this sheds light on the prevailing concept o f ‘artist’: it has become an
integral part of the meaning of the concept ‘artist’ that it is politically
conservative (or, at its more adventuristic, reactionary), and that remains its
sole possible political role - hence its continuing great value as propaganda for
an imperious culture. This is clearly reflected in the desperation of more and
more artists to escape their political impotence, in their attempts to reconcile
the paradoxicality of their lives wrought by being hopefully ‘radical’ in politics
but necessarily ‘conservative’ in art.3
The inside story of this is that there is no ‘radical theory’ in the arts today, and
there can be none while the present state of affairs prevails. That also explains
something about the extreme poverty of ‘critical theory’, since a critical theory
which sets itself the task of revealing the various forms of conflict and exploitation
needs to be informed by some (prospect of) radical theory, something which
denies the current ideology and economic class values embodied in modern art.
Current and recent art criticism has become at best a means of policing and
regulating, at worst a sheer celebration of the impotence of the status quo. (...)
Whatever we are able to accomplish now, my point is that transforming our
reality is no longer a question of just making more art - it is a matter of realizing
the enormous social vectoring of the problem and opportunistically taking
advantage of what social tools we have. Of one thing I am certain: anything we
might call radical theory in the arts will have to be solidly constructed in all its
social dimensions. But even then it may not be a question of how much we might
accomplish, since it might take something as catastrophic as a collapse in the
economic structure of this society to have any substantial effect on the careening
superstructure of modern American art.

1 This article owes much to conversations within the Art & Language community in New York (and
particularly with Mel Ramsden).
2 [footnote 8 in source] See, for example, Terry Smith, ‘American Painting and British Painting:
Some Issues’, Studio International (December 1974).
3 [9] This point can also be made concerning the contradictions apparent in looking at art produced
by feminist artists, black artists and various underprivileged groups: while their social thinking
is radical, fertile and engaging, what we see o f the art produced is too often as embarrassingly
dull, uniform and bureaucratic as everyone else’s.

Ian Burn, extracts from ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’, Artforum, vol. 13, no. 8 (April
1975) 3 4 -7 .

152//CRITiaUE
Carl Andre
Answers in My Disorder//1976

(...] It is the genius of the bourgeoisie to be able to buy anything. That is, by
offering money the capitalist ruling class creates exchange value where none
existed before. There is the wonderfully true story of the advanced collector who
bought the goldfish out of the artist’s studio and then insisted on leaving the
goldfish behind and obliging the artist to care for them as the collector’s property.
The most farcical claim of the conceptualizing inkpissers is that their works are
somehow anti-bourgeois because they do away with objects. In fact, doing away
with objects and replacing them with such reifications of abstract relations to
production as stockshares, contracts, liens, options and paper money itself
(which is nothing but the fetishization of the idea of exchange value severed
from even the dream of production) is exactly the final triumphant form of the
bourgeois revolution. [...]

Carl Andre, statem ent from Carl Andre and Jeremy Cilbert-Rolfe, ‘Commodity and Contradiction, or,
Contradiction as Commodity’, October, vol. 2 (Summer 1976) 100-104.

Joseph Beuys
What is Money?//1984

[... ] I worked on an art concept which does not wish to have some niche existence
at one remove from society, as written about in the ‘culture’ pages of newspapers
- the so-called art world active in museums, galleries, fine art academies, the art
market, the diverse viewpoints of traditional art historians. I was aware I did not
live in a culture where spirit was paramount to people, as it was during the
cultural periods of antiquity, such as in Egypt or ancient Greece. Instead I was
conscious of living in a period when people are dependent - 1 say dependent! -
on an activity in the whole context of civilization that we must call the economic
life. So, as a creator of forms, I worked on a social concept of art, an extended
concept o f art, and in doing so tried to develop a consistently creative principle in
such a way that it might enable people to grasp the core of society, the position
of capital in this society. I developed this so everybody might see, eventually,

Beuys//What is Money?//153
that in order to escape this dead-end of private capitalism in the West, and
centralized state communism in the East, the only way out is by starting from
human creativity and from a real capacity for work.
If one does this, and reflects fully on such things, deepening one’s thoughts to
produce imaginative concepts of humanity’s future, one finds that there is really
nowhere else to start: we have to begin with the human capacity for work, with
the famous concept of creativity - already bastardized by fashion of course - to
understand that this is a concept of art in which all can participate, whereby
every human being must be an artist. If we want to achieve a different society
where the principle of money operates equitably, if we want to abolish the power
money has developed over people historically, and position money in relationship
to freedom, equality and fraternity - in other words develop a functional view of
the interaction between the three great strata or spheres of social forces: the
spiritual life, the rights life and the economic life - then we must elaborate a
concept of culture and a concept of art where every person must be an artist in
this realm of social sculpture or social art or social architecture - never mind what
terms you use. Once people have developed these imaginative concepts - which
may come into focus a bit more this evening [29 November 1984] - having drawn
them from their own thinking forces, their recognition and knowledge, but also
their feelings and willpower - from the moment they have them, people will also
understand that they really are the sovereigns of a state-like whole, and that it is
they who formulate the economic laws which will allow money to be freed from
its present characteristics, from the power it exerts because - and by saying this
I’m already making a statement about money - it has evolved in the economic
context as part of the economic life and is now a commodity. They will recognize
then that they can free money from being a commodity and that it must become
a regulating factor in the rights domain. People will increasingly see that money
today is a commodity, in other words an economic value - I’m trying to say
something tangible about money here - that it is an economic value and that we
have to reach a stage where it must become a necessary potential, must act as a
rights document for all the creative processes of human work (...)

Joseph Beuys, statem ent from ‘W hat is Money?’, debate held on 29 November 1984 at the Meeting
House in Ulm, Germany, between Joseph Beuys, Johann Philipp von Bethmann, Hans Binswanger,
W erner Ehrlicher and Rainer W illert; reprinted in What is Money? A Discussion (Forest Row, East
Sussex: Clairview, 2010) 15-17.

154// CRITIQUE
Thierry de Duve
Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians//1988

[...] Beuys, the sculptor, knew how, with pain and humour alike, to work out the
contradictions that Beuys, the charlatan economist, pretended with utter
seriousness to dissolve. The talented artist didn’t do the same thing as the prophet
of creativity. When it is convincing, his work avows, it promises nothing. Until
further notice capital, not creativity, is money; everyone has not become an artist;
the art market continues to treat as commodities the productions exuded by the
‘creativity’ of those it recognizes as professional artists. In this regard Beuys was
coddled: alienated, perhaps, but not exploited. Raum 90.000 DM, which is the title
of an environment produced in 1981, states its own price. Strewn over the room,
five old, rusted drums, once having contained various industrial chemical
products, warn of the ecological damages and wrongs wrought by industry (one
of them had contained fluorocarbon, the pollutant responsible for destroying the
ozone layer), and testify to the consumption of use-value. Useless and used-up,
the drums will be treated nonetheless as precious objects by the commercial
gallery that shows them, wholly aware of their exchange-value. But by arranging
them as unaesthetically as possible (they don’t even make an interesting formal
configuration), Beuys succeeds in making their presence incongruous and
frustrating. They are different sizes and filled to different levels with scraps of
aluminum slag that have been fused together. One of them overflows, and a ladle
is attached to the mound of debris. The staging is allegorical and the allegory is
pessimistic: under the conditions of industrial capitalism (the containers), artists’
creativity (the contents) can only congeal into commodities and become alienated
in their exchange-value. The artist is supposed to draw from the well of his labour
power, but the alchemy that turns it into gold for the dealer leaves him nothing
but slag (‘coagulated labour-time’, Marx would say).
In a comer of the room, facing this arrangement, is crammed a large copper
bathtub filled to the brim with a solution of sulphuric acid. This is another
allegory of the artist, and this time the well is alive. Under the conditions of a
renewal (the container: the theme of the bathtub has autobiographical resonances
of baptism and rebirth in Beuys’ work), the creativity of artists (the contents: as
corrosive as the original contents of the drums was polluting) preserves its
subversive potential. But the container is itself contained, the bathtub is not bare
but enveloped by a thick layer of terracotta that seems to protect it and to hide in
the depths of its material some strange pouches that the sculptor has modelled
as if they were the pockets of a beggar’s wallet, or of the artist’s famous vest. The

de Duve//Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians//155

dialectic of contained containers (of conditioning conditions) does not stop
there, and, even overflowing with corrosive labour power, the bathtub does not
escape exchange-value. Getting the jump on the dealer, Beuys gouged the price
of the work into the still-damp clay: 90.000 DM. Illusion has no foothold. Time
gets the last word. Beuys, who understood materials like no one else, knew that,
in drying, the clay would contract and would end up cracking. Whether by chance
or by design, it happened that one of the fissures has neatly sliced through the
price and separated the nine from the zeros, symbolically cancelling the monetary
value of the work. The bathtub of creativity breaks out of its sheath of reification
and the artist strips off his old-man’s cloak, ready to bear the novices of the
Beuysian utopia to the baptismal font. The ensemble is more ridiculous than
sublime and, formally, only semi-convincing. To the left of the bathtub, negligently
pinned to the wall, a collage of notes and sketches mounted between two sheets
of glass pretends to explain the work and explains nothing, as should be.
Time always has the last word indeed, and time cracks statues and corrodes
utopias more surely than sulphuric acid. Creativity has nothing subversive left;
that myth is dated. Raum 90.000 DM subscribes to it, but also exposes its extreme
vulnerability, testifying to the hope of the proletarian but attesting as well the
comic aspect of this character. With Beuys gone, and the concretions of his talent
(and not of his creativity) more than ever fetishized by a necrophilic art market,
time will decide if his sculpture should survive the ruin of social sculpture, this
modern Kunstwollen that he ignited one last time.

Thierry de Duve, extract from ‘Joseph Beuys, or The Last o f the Proletarians’, October, no. 45 (Summer
1988) 5 8 -6 2 ; reprinted in Sewn in the Sweatshops o f M arx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 2012).

Kate Linker
Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara
Kruger//1990

In a work Kruger made in 1987, a small hand holds up a placard emblazoned

with the words, ‘I shop therefore I am.’ Defining consumption as the hallmark
of identity, the gesture radicalizes Descartes’ famous proposition, which
installed consciousness as knowledge and, with it, instituted our modern sense
of self. But in Kruger’s hands this action does more than parody Descartes’

156//CRITI&UE
cogito, which inscribed the human subject’s predominance over surrounding
objects through a propensity for thought. For here the individual is displaced
from this central position by the object, which now establishes its priority, and
sovereignty, over the subject: the consumer world, as Kruger remarks of ‘Pee-
wee’s Playhouse’, is a place where things reign supreme.1 Moreover, the body is
depleted, eviscerated, its vulnerability ‘a liability compared to the promise of
the smooth hum and unyielding surfaces of appliances’.2 The body’s impurity
and imperfection stand against the pristine wholeness of things that glisten
and corruscate, announcing the luxury of their wares. Kruger’s card, then,
announces the body’s incorporation into the systems that contain it. But
mention must be made here of the shimmer of another object: art.
Much of the acclaimed art of the past decade has been produced within a
sphere in which art’s transformation into commodity has reduced its critical
value, eroding the artist’s adversarial stance. Today we know that Benjamin was
historically limited: the conversion of art from cult value to exhibition value has
not led the way to its political involvement, but rather to a transmutation of the
major sites of aesthetic change into arenas for mercantile display. The increasing
value of art as a tangible investment has resulted in the control of cultural
representations by a moneyed class. True to Baudrillard, art’s appearance as a
highly marketable commodity has been accompanied by its manipulation as an
item of power, publicity, prestige.
Kruger does not contest this; instead, her work is a comment on the process,
an exposition of the fact that there are few alternatives to the market’s relentless
appropriations. Art appears within her work as the object of a controlled
choreography of acquisition, one that is literalized in the shifting questions
displayed on lenticular screens [...]. But Kruger also indicates the futility of
evasion through the fantasies of freedom promoted by idealist ideology. In fact,
she indicates the way in which market value is developed precisely through
time-worn romantic myths.
Her critique aims to intercept the codes that confer aesthetic value - the
notions of creativity, originality and the ‘mastery’ of the masterpiece that supply
a sales pitch for aesthetic products. Kruger has repeatedly voiced her wish to
‘deconstruct the notion of the great artist’ within its characteristic haunt, the
gallery. She has also performed this sabotage in the museum, as in the exhibition
‘Picturing Greatness’, which she curated for The Museum of Modern Art in 1987.
In the accompanying wall labels Kruger parodied the ‘languages of “greatness”’
as ‘concocted with a slice of visual pleasure, a pinch of connoisseurship, a
mention of myth and a dollop of money’. Which is to say that artworks are often
constructions designed to conceal the social nature of artistic activity [...].
When Kruger collages the remark ‘You produce an infinite sequence of

Linker//Love for Sale//157

originals’ over the image of a woman drawing, she is referring to the way in
which our concepts of representation depend on the regulation of scarcity.
Although the valorization of the unique or singular over the debased copy is
inherited from Romantic ideology, the contemporary market has employed it to
its own ends to produce the illusion of rarity. Technically, the original is temporally
located close to the origin, that is, to the moment of ‘creation’ of the work - and
its guarantee of authenticity is the stamp of the artist’s hand. As Baudrillard
observed in an article entitled ‘Gesture and Signature’ the signature acts as the
‘sign among signs’ to retain ‘the legendary values’ of artistic creation;3 similarly,
it marks the work as private property, a commodity that the artist is legally
entitled to exchange. Tellingly, Baudrillard links the signature to the French term
for vintage, appellation controllee, emphasizing the notion of the propriety of
property that resides within the proper name. Like others of her generation,
Kruger rejects the notion of authenticity by appropriating images, which, being
‘anonymous’, have no author and, hence, little authority. Similarly, her use of
mechanical reproduction contrasts the serial, or multiple, with the uniqueness
associated with products of the hand. For Kruger refuses the mystique of the
unique object; the hand in her work is never singular, always social.
In You invest in the divinity o f the masterpiece [...], Kruger appropriated the
image from the Sistine Ceiling in which God reaches out to touch the hand of
Adam, bestowing on him the gift of creation. The work is at once an indictment
of art’s commodity status, a comment on the aesthetic metaphor of the hand,
and an exposition of the (masculine) ethos of artistic production as a transaction
between fathers and sons. These themes are also implicit in a piece from 1984 in
which the words ‘Your creation is divine/Our reproduction is human’ appear over
an Old Master drawing, exposing artistic value as a domain of masculine privilege
and prestige. Here Kruger foregrounds the sexual hierarchy of artistic practice,
just as she contraposes the serial, inherently social, nature of mechanical
reproduction with the uniqueness connected to hand-crafted objects. [...]

1 [footnote 36 in source] Barbara Kruger, ‘Remote Control’, Artforum (March 1987) 10.
2 [37] Barbara Kruger, 'Came Show’, Real Life (October 1979) 5.
3 [38] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Gesture and Signature’, in For a Critique o f the Political Economy o f the Sign
(1972); trans. Charles Levin (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981) 105.

Kate Linker, extract from Love fo r Sale: The Words and Pictures o f Barbara Kruger (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1990) 7 8 -9 .

158//CRITiaUE
Dietmar Eiger
Behind the Art Scene with Louise Lawler//1994

[...] Louise Lawler is not interested primarily in the pictorial content, aesthetic
expression or art-historical value of the paintings she photographs. Frequently,
the illustrated works are in fact only visible on a small scale in the background,
together with numerous other exhibits and surrounded by various items of
furniture. Other paintings are radically bled off the edge, so that all that remains
is a narrow section of colour reducing the picture shown, say, to a monochrome
Blue Line - thus the title of a work produced in 1990.
Lawler always looks for the distance point of her object of contemplation,
and this not merely in an optical sense. Her view does not concentrate on a motif
enclosed by a frame; rather, she investigates the objectivity of the work as a thing
embedded in a context. Lawler is interested in its larger institutional frame,
showing the work inserted into different locations and neighbourhoods and
performing different functions. Her photos accompany art on its journey from
the studio to the gallery, through travelling exhibitions and depots, right up to its
presentation in the museum, in private or corporate collections. The context in
which the work of art may appear already pre-empts its interpretation. Once an
object has left its place of origin, the studio, it inevitably enters a cyclical process
which places further demands on it beyond pure aesthetic quality and art-
historical value. It is not only differently interpreted and evaluated but within
each new frame of presentation enters into different functional relations. It will
be co-opted, in the process, by interests alien to art. Under these conditions,
Lawler’s photographs make one thing particularly clear: that there is neither a
value-free interpretation nor a value-free presentation of art. [...]
[T]he photos of the private collection of Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine, which
Lawler had the opportunity of examining intensively with her camera in 1984,
investigate the work of art as an element of decoration in a domestic setting.
Important paintings from this private collection, such as Jasper Johns’ White Flag
or Jackson Pollock’s Frieze have been exhibited and reproduced many times. In
such instances, the works of art are presented and discussed within the context
of an artistic oeuvre and an art-historical era; in these photographs however,
they are more immediately referenced to the interior decor, for example, the
decorative soup tureen.
Other photos by Lawler show semi-public rooms such as the lobby of the
investment company Paine Webber, where contemporary art is assigned the role
of image-cultivating status symbol. In the last few years, many companies have

Elger//Behind the Art Scene with Louise Lawler//159

started compiling extensive collections of art which they hope will lend them a
certain ‘cultural prestige’ and produce a positive advertising effect. The cigarette
manufacturers Philip Morris advocate quite frankly and self-assuredly the selfish
commercial objectives of their sponsoring of cultural activities: ‘It takes art to
make a company great.’
In the 1980s, however, not only financially powerful corporations but also
numerous self-employed and private individuals began to discover art as a new,
coolly calculated investment and speculative object. The art market enjoyed a
boom, and the processing time between acquisition and lucrative resale became
ever shorter. Frequently, it was difficult to distinguish between dealers, collectors
and speculators. A series of articles on ‘Art as Commodity’, which appeared in the
news magazine Der Spiegel in 1988, laconically concluded: ‘Art has become
money. The only difference is that art is slightly more attractive to look at,
although even that is a matter of taste. Paintings assert themselves alongside
shopping centres, shares in the chemical industry, and gold bars.’ (...)
Lawler has observed this phenomenon of a speculatively expanding art
market with ironic empathy, yet from a critical distance. In 1990 in the Parisian
gallery of Yvon Lambert, and in the following year at Metro Pictures in New York,
she exhibited her works under the motto ‘AVendre’, or ‘For Sale’. At both
exhibitions, Lawler presented photographs taken during previews of auctions
where modern and contemporary art was being sold. Her exhibits deal, on
various levels of reception, with the knowledge that art is part of an economic
system yet has to assert its aesthetic value throughout. Our difficulty with
accepting both aspects side by side and with keeping them apart when evaluating
the work of art is taken as Lawler’s explicit theme.
This is illustrated in a two-part photographic composition where visual motifs
are accompanied by linguistic termini. Two identical colour photos show Andy
Warhol’s Round Marilyn of 1962, taken during the preview of the sale of the
Tremaine collection in November 1988 in New York. The description of the work
on the auction house label appears adjacent to the picture. Lawler, in turn, has
attached a printed plastic sign next to her photographs which directly addresses
the viewer: ‘Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?’ and ‘Does Andy Warhol Make
You Cry?’ Both the model and her painter were surrounded by a star cult which
wide sections of the general public participated in with great emotional interest
Louise Lawler, however, asks what affective qualities a work of art can maintain
within such a constellation, in simultaneously confronting it with its clearly legible
estimate: US $300,000-400,000 or the rather small-scale silk-screen picture.
The pictorial motifs of Warhol appear more frequently than any other in
Lawler’s photographs, which is not merely a reflection of her personal preference.
Warhol was the ideal representative of an artform which consistently submitted

160//CRITIQUE
itself to the conditions of a capitalist market and the modern media world.
Warhol took the mechanisms of industrial mass production and the strategies of
commercial advertising as a model for the organization of his own artistic
activities. With the foundation of the so-called ‘Factory’, the studio was
transformed into a bustling business with several employees and a constant flow
of visitors. Warhol referred to himself as a ‘Business Artist’ and defined his
creativity under the motto: ‘Business art is the step that comes after Art.’
1962 saw the production of the first representations, arranged in serial
sequences, of Dollar Bills and S & H Green Stamps. Louise Lawler photographed
examples from both groups of work in different constellations and presented
them in varying contexts. Precisely these motifs of American bank notes and
trading stamps illustrate - albeit from a view that has been radically reduced to
the economic aspect - that every art production also creates a financial surplus
value. In 1989, for example, one private collector was willing to pay no less than
$240,000 for Warhol’s 18 One-Dollar Bills. In two groups of drawings he began to
produce in the early 1970s, Edward Keinholz emphasized even more directly the
character of the work of art as a medium of exchange within a capitalist system.
The watercolours consist of short texts which similar to a receipt, describe
precisely for how much the artist sold the respective work to his new owner: 'For
$385’, or in exchange ‘For a Big Cheese from Parma’.
On the occasion of a group exhibition held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1983,
Lawler offered a variation on this idea by designing gift certificates for the gallery
(Gift Certificates Are Available) similar to those usually offered in chain stores and
bookshops. These certificates, which could be issued for any desired amount, were
‘designed’ to reflect the graphic style of the gallery. At the same time, Castelli
guaranteed that they would trade in the certificates for the full amount if a work
of art were purchased. In ironic exaggeration, Lawler shows here that art can in fact
be used as substitute for many things, especially cash. (...)

Dietmar Eiger, extract from ‘Behind the Art Scene with Louise Lawler’, in Dietmar Eiger and Thomas
Weski, eds, Louise Lawler: For Sale (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1994) 97-101.

Elger//Behind the Art Scene with Louise Lawler//161

Zhou Tiehai
New Listing, Zhou Tiehai, Rises on Debut before
Reaching Fair Value//1997

Shanghai: When first listed on 12 July on the Shanghai Stock exchange, Zhou
Tiehai appeared undervalued, rising only slightly in the first few hours of trade.
But Class B shares1 in the issue appreciated steadily over the next two weeks,
as foreign buyers learned more about the enterprise’s fundamentals. One
European buyer even was rumoured to be accumulating large blocks of the stock
in a bid to obtain a majority stake, traders said.
The gradually appreciating European buyer discovered previously undisclosed
assets in Zhou Tiehai. The stock closed out the month just below a psychological
high. Traders then said they doubted the stock would rise much further.
‘If the Zhou climbs much higher it will find itself very vulnerable to market
fluctuations and exposed to the whims of profit-takers’, said a market analyst
with a Shanghai-based securities firm.
Yet an injection of new funds on 6 August caused the stock to soar on strong
buying again rumoured to originate from Europe. The initial surge was followed
by three to fours days of consolidation in the value of the stock. Traders said it
was a technical correction, ending on 10 August.
The Zhou fell slowly over the next few sessions, as the European buyer,
realizing its investment had become overvalued, took some profits. By 13 August
the Zhou had fallen to a more sustainable level, before its shares were suspended
from trading, ahead of a shareholder meeting.
When trading resumed on 26 August, the Zhou took a slight knock,
consolidating on 27 August to a level just below its pre-suspension price.
According to market participants, the stock is now valued fairly in the eyes of
the big houses and seems likely to remain stable in the foreseeable future.
Its fundamentals remain sound, and bullish traders expect renewed interest
by overseas buyers to bring the Zhou Tiehai higher in the long term. Indeed,
some traders said they have seen indications in recent sessions that foreign
houses are accumulating the Zhou again.

1 Shanghai has two stock markets. Class B shares are denominated in US dollars and tradable only
by overseas investors. Class A shares, denominated in yuan, are available only to domestic
Chinese buyers.

Zhou Tiehai, ‘New Listing, Zhou Tiehai. Rises on Debut before Reaching Fair Value’ (1997); transcript
of press conference. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

162//CRITIQUE
Marc Spiegler
Museum-Quality Leftovers: Nedko Solakov//2005

Denizens of the art world recently received an oversized invitation, printed on

the sort of thick cardboard stock usually reserved for Hauser & Wirth openings.
Hyping a Richard Meier luxury building in New York, the card touted ‘museum
quality’ apartments. Granted, the notion of shoehorning a $5.5 million apartment
onto a museum may be nonsensical, but the usage was telling. Because in an art
world where the term ‘masterpiece’ reeks too much of Rembrandt and the
Renaissance, ‘museum quality’ is the phrase dealers frequently use to denote an
artist’s premier pieces. At the same time the artist’s long-unsold works are
generally judged inferior, as if brushed aside by the art world’s invisible hand. Yet
if you put such art-market leftovers into a major institution, does that make
them ‘museum quality’?
One day earlier this year, while the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov was on
holiday by the Black Sea, he was struck by that curious question. He called up
Mirjam Varadinis, curator for a scheduled Kunsthaus Zurich show of his drawings,
proposing that she instead visit all his dealers and select the entire exhibition’s
content from their unsold stock across all mediums.
The concept is vintage Solakov: at first it seems whimsical, but in the
execution it touches on fundamental issues. Duchamp put a pissoir in the Society
of Independent Artists exhibition, making it ‘art’; Solakov proposed to put unsold
art, generally disdained as ‘crap’, in the Kunsthaus Zurich, transubstantiating it
into ‘museum-quality’ work. ‘This show could not work in any less respectable
institution’, Solakov says. ‘It needed a really serious museum that never wants to
show any visible connection with private galleries. That was an additional
motivation for me - to do the exactly inappropriate thing.’
Among artists with healthy markets, Solakov is an anomaly. Long stuck
behind the Iron Curtain, he had his first commercial gallery show in 1996, at the
age of 39, by which point his CV teemed with group and solo exhibitions. He had
already been selected for the biennials of Venice, Istanbul and Sao Paulo. He had
also learned to sell work directly to collectors (as he still does), giving him an
insider’s take on deal-making that complemented the outsider’s perspective
borne of years spent excluded from the market.
‘Nedko is very aware of the structures and the mechanisms of markets. He
knows how to use them and play with them’, says Varadinis, herself a former
gallery director. She loved Solakov’s proposal. ‘He was focusing attention on
something very important in the art world: the strong influence of the art market

Splegler//Museum-€luality Leftovers: Nedko Solakov//163

on museum shows’, she explains. ‘Especially here in Zurich, because you have a
lot of very important collectors, and before an opening they come wanting to buy
all the stuff; it’s like a bazaar.’
The notion of inverting how one assembles a Kunsthaus Zurich show also
intrigued Varadinis. ‘Normally, you try to get the best works out of very famous
collections as loans’, she explains. ‘And here we wanted works that nobody even
bought.’ Solakov’s galleries were surprisingly willing to play along, recalls the
curator, who expected them to flinch from exposing their commercial failures.
Then again, the autumn show, ‘Leftovers: A Selection of My Unsold Pieces from
the Private Galleries I Work With’, injected the works into one of the world’s
strongest markets. Even before the vernissage, one drawing and an installation
sold and had to be withdrawn, since they no longer met the show’s criteria.
Varadinis and Solakov played up the concept in other ways. ‘We chose to have
exactly 99 works - due to the illusion that if a price ends in 99, it’s easier to sell’,
explains Solakov. His works sat on shelves configured for use in a storeroom, and
were organized in sections alphabetized by dealer name. The back wall featured
a lump-sum price to buy the whole show: 2,830,650 Swiss Francs (£1.25 million),
while the show’s visitor guide, configured like an auction-house catalogue,
features the price of each piece. ‘I suggested doing that because it plays with the
normal etiquette of the art world’, says Varadinis. ‘It also raises the question of
how much a Kunsthaus exhibition is worth in the marketplace. Maybe the prices
will rise over the next ten years. Maybe not.’ Finally, buyers of the 25-book special
edition catalogue will receive a sheet of red dots destined to cover the prices as
works are sold. (When Art Review went to press, six additional pieces had been
sold and several more deals were in the offing.)
Solakov solicited statements from the dealers who opened up their
storerooms. Georges-Philippe Vallois of Paris proposed that to create a leftover
artwork one should simply invite Solakov to a major fair and have him stand on
the booth. ‘You should imagine our beloved Bulgarian artist a bit stressed out’,
Vallois wrote. ‘He is trying to whisper while you are speaking with the collector.
“Georrrges-Philippe, show the other worrrks! Have you explained it’s in
perrrmanent ink?! Did you show him the catalogues?! ” And last but not least, he
can’t help speaking to the collector, who gets frightened and leaves.’ (Solakov
contests the notion, naturally, saying his presence usually boosts sales.)
Brussels dealer Erna Hecey pointed to the often random nature of the art
market, offering a list of reasons for works going unsold: ‘The works are too
expensive. The works are not expensive enough. The world is not ready for this
work. This work comes a bit late. The works have not been presented enough.
The work has been shown too often and everywhere. Mars was conjuncting in
Pluto at the time of the show ...’ Despite terms such as ‘museum quality’ or

164//CRITIQUE
‘leftover’, the art market remains a far less rational economic milieu than most
acknowledge. Once the show opened and visitors saw that some of his signature
works were included, Solakov even found himself certifying their authenticity.
‘People didn’t believe these famous works could be unsold', he says. ‘They thought
we had faked that.’

Marc Spiegler, ‘Museum-Quality Leftovers’, Art Review (December 2005) 3 7 -8.

Nick Stillman
Reena Spaulings: An Art Brand//2006

Since the ‘founding’ of Reena Spaulings sometime in 2004 a cloud of mystery has
hung over the phenomenon. Who - or what - is Reena Spaulings? Painter of legal
tender, rendered in the washy style of Michael Krebber? Sovereign nation/
shadowy corporation? Fictional performer of are-you-a-genius-or-are-you-an-
idiot dialectic of youth culture? A New York gallery? Yes ... to all.
For the record: Reena Spaulings is a New York-based fictional artist whose
primary catalysts are John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad, though a fluctuating cast of
collaborators - Jutta Koether and Ei Arakawa are two of them - often participates
in the collective’s projects. Reena Spaulings Fine Art is a tiny, shoddy gallery in
Manhattan’s Chinatown that Sundblad and Kelsey opened in 2004, one of a small
crop of galleries in the neighbourhood that eschew codified presentational
strategies of its Chelsea peers. With its perpetually drawn gate and sign saying
nothing very legible. Reena Spaulings never really looks open. Finally, Reena
Spaulings is the title and protagonist of a novel written by international collective
Bernadette Corporation, a group of artists, writers and filmmakers of which Kelsey
is a member. In other words Reena Spaulings is an art world brand.
Such manufactured mystery isn’t uncommon in contemporary art; no less
mainstream a publication than the New York Times recently profiled Reena
Spaulings and other collectives participating in this year’s Whitney Biennial, and
the author Holland Cotter gently critiqued the Spaulings enterprise in relation to
‘matters of self-promotion’. The allusion was likely to Spaulings’ recent exhibition
of a suite of Merlin Carpenter’s paintings. The pieces, all on the ground and
leaning in stacks against the wall, could be handled and leafed through by any
visitor, like a casual flip through a magazine. The paintings were clumsily realistic
depictions of actual pages from recent art publications (including Flash Art) with

Stillman//Reena Spaulings: An Art Brand//165

articles about Reena Spaulings Fine Art and its exhibitions. Self-referential, sure,
but the gesture neatly inverted concrete art world relationships; critics whose
opinions ostensibly determine an artist’s reception found an uncomfortable
spotlight on their own labour. And a second relationship was flipped: Reena
Spaulings herself. Carpenter’s dealer in this case, was instructed by the artist to
paint washy backgrounds that would serve as a background for the articles
Carpenter later painted. The dealer-as-pimp, taking a 50 per cent share of the
artist’s labour for cutting a deal, was transformed by Carpenter into a labourer
and a collaborator - forced to earn her 50 per cent - restructuring the hierarchical
dynamic that locates ‘dealer’ a rung above ‘artist’ on the art world food chain.
Spaulings works in the same ambiguously washy painting style for her series
of ‘Money Paintings’, sloppily painted banknotes, most of which are somehow
defamed. Money Painting (Purple Dollar) looks like an unfinished American dollar.
Conspicuous blank spaces pepper the abject note, as if the printer suddenly
realized his shift was over and slipped into the 5 p.m. sunlight before finishing
his work. Money Painting (Dirty Euro) is soiled with cigarette ashes. Defamation,
in fact, pervades Spaulings’ artistic oeuvre. In her 2005 show at Haswellediger,
Spaulings showed a legion of flags, as if proclaiming herself a sovereign queen
with this regal showcase of what she dubbed in an enigmatic press release
‘hardcore art’. Flags - normally symbols of allegiance and pride - became objects
of abjection in Spaulings’ hands. Many were caked in cruddy black paint, several
were painted with a brick pattern, and one flowed into a basin, which included a
photocopy from a porn magazine.
Spaulings’ two pieces in this year’s Whitney Biennial are both awnings
manufactured by the Chinatown signage company Eastern Color Sign. No 2, a blank
vinyl facade of a shit-brown hue sliced in two, presides dumbly in a comer like a
discarded mistake or a rough draft. When the curators conveyed that the awning
would have to fit in a tight spot, Spaulings requested that the staff ‘do what they
had to do to make it fit, for example with a saw’. Emily Fisher Lan is a white awning
mounted above the Whitney’s fourth floor elevator entrance, partially obscuring
mounted text that brands the museum’s fourth floor its Emily Fisher Landau
Galleries, a declaration of official sponsorship by the vice-chairwoman of the
museum’s board. Spaulings’ awning obediently replaces the text it shields, but also
includes various unrelated nonsense brands: images of crustaceans, a cell phone, a
diamond, a watch - readymade logos for Chinatown’s many businesses of
questionable legality, black holes of capitalism in New York’s 10002 zip code.
Each of these pieces take exalted objects/concepts - flags, museum patronage,
money - and totally deflate them. Each exposes and implicitly attacks an example
of capitalist structuring that, as Reena thinks to herself in Reena Spaulings, ‘... not
only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the

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time, there is no situation’. Reena Spaulings may be the best way to come to terms
with the Reena Spaulings project as a machine of situation-creation. Written by
a lengthy cast of Bernadette Corporation members and shifting exhilaratingly in
narrative structure, the novel is a Pierrot le Fou-like manifesto about ridding one’s
self of bourgeois values and achieving mastery over one’s thoughts, using Reena’s
twenty-something body and brain as its vehicle. Its denouement is hardcore art
epitomized, a violent city-wide spectacle of violence and anarchy, all made
possible by the ultimate hardcore art: a hurricane that devastates New York.
‘Self-promotional’ quibbles aside, the most valid criticism of Reena Spaulings
may be that it’s scenester stuff, that its fabricated downtown persona is a
snobbish and escapist defection from the ‘real world’, or at least the real art
world. This is legitimate but perhaps irrelevant to Reena Spaulings’ concerns,
which seem to be to vacate a space (literally and figuratively) somewhere in the
dizzying halls of 21st-century capitalism that accommodates poetic dissent and
wilful defection from real world and art world economic systems that blunt
creativity (and criticism) by enveloping, branding and incorporating it. Bernadette
Corporation began to blaze this path in the 1990s and continues to today with its
chameleon presence: as a fashion label, publishers of the confusing magazine
Made in USA, and as filmmakers. Will Reena fall prey to vultures? Maybe. After
all, she did become a thong model in Reena Spaulings. But then she strategically
blew the cash on nothing much at all, forcing a total refashioning of the self and
making creative complacence untenable. ‘Is there a dream of ongoing creativity
directly connected to, inclusive of all of your activities?’ Reena wistfully asks
fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in Reena Spaulings. The potential of this dream is
the essence of Reena Spaulings.

Nick Stillman, ‘Reena Spaulings: An Art Brand’, Flash Art (May/June 2 0 0 6 ) 96.

Stillman//Reena Spaulings: An Art Brand//167

Jens Hoffmann
When Attitudes Become Commodities
(Become Attitudes)//2007

It is nothing unusual these days for a commercial gallery to invite a curator to

organize a group exhibition. The objectives behind these initiatives can be quite
varied but are most often rooted in the desire for more artistic credibility and
prestige, within what is by and large perceived as a for-profit venture with little
intellectual aspiration. Consequently, it would seem necessary for every curator
undertaking such an endeavour and agreeing to participate so openly in the
creation and exchange of commodities to examine carefully the current ideologies
of the art market, and in fact employ such an examination for the creation of an
exhibition within the setting of a commercial gallery.
Self-reflexivity in the visual arts is not a novelty, and artists throughout the
centuries have contemplated their position and the role of their work within the
larger structure of society. Yet it was not until the twentieth century that artists
proposed a more analytic engagement with the context of art and began radically
to question the socio-political and economic structures of the art system. While
1960s conceptualism focused on dismantling the traditional fixation on the art
object, and with that questioned the commodity character of art, it was first and
foremost the practice of institutional critique that would begin to interrogate
and criticize the mechanisms of art institutions and the art market, particularly
in regards to their modes of distribution and display.
While the language and the strategies of institutional critique were originally
developed by artists during the late 1960s and are closely connected to the
politicized history of that time, they were swiftly adopted by writers, then
utilized by curators and finally appropriated by museums and commercial
galleries. These days art institutions are only too happy to embrace art that offers
commentary on their structures, and through that elevates their importance and
further guarantees their credibility, resulting in a loss of impact in regard to the
subversive potential of critical artistic practices.
So why, one might wonder, return to the idioms of institutional critique today
and specifically in the context of a commercial gallery, a place that seems entirely
antithetical to these ideas? While early practitioners of institutional critique
hoped for a democratic transformation of museums, much of the later ideology
of this practice focused on demonizing the art market, and - in often dogmatic,
hence frequently unproductive and alienating forms - tried to take down
institutional structures. Yet, many of its strategies, thoughts and forms of
interrogation as well as their aspirations are of value if one is to have a critical

168//CRITiaUE
approach towards working in the world of museums or galleries, specifically
when dealing with contemporary art and its relationship to the public.
Although [the exhibition] ‘For Sale’ presents the work of a number of key
protagonists of the practice of institutional critique, alongside a group of younger
artists, many of who have been informed by this particular legacy, the exhibition
is not a revival of institutional critical traditions but rather a look at the intellectual
and critical potential that this practice holds in the light of today’s accelerated art
market. It is a multilayered dialogue of practices and histories, investigating the
question whether a commercial gallery can be an agent for a critical engagement
with art and its system of distribution, and more importantly, if artistic as well as
curatorial work can at this point still provide an adequate commentary on some
aspects of the art world.
Tor Sale’ exhibits the work of over two dozen international artists who in
their practice address the role of the art object in the marketplace, who question
the object character of art and its modes of production, examine the change of
status of an artwork when transported from the studio into the gallery space,
question display strategies of exhibitions, interrogate the relationship between
artist and art dealer, or that between artist and art collector, analyse the role of
the artist in society, speculate on questions of authorship, reflect on the politics
of perceptions, address the specific architecture of gallery spaces, dismantle or
ridicule common forms of interpretations within galleries, and take apart the
mechanisms of gallery publicity.
Crucially, all works in this exhibition have to be sold together, rather than as
individual pieces and the many parts of ‘For Sale’ have to remain one after the
sale. None of the works can be sold individually by a collector or be shown
independently. The pieces can only be exhibited collectively and only in the
original configuration of the installation in the gallery. When buying the show
the collector has to agree to these terms. To complicate things further, the works
are displayed in a model of the gallery that is 20 per cent smaller than the actual
space, and which sits inside the original gallery space. This model (or rather a set
of instructions on how to build it) will also be sold to the collector, who needs to
set it up if she or he wants to present the works again. The price of the exhibition
is the total sum of all the prices of the individual artworks in ‘For Sale’.
While seemingly embracing the commercial aspect of the gallery, ‘For Sale’ is
turning the table. It sets out to block routine business, yet it does not want to
make an eventual sale of the exhibition impossible. The gesture of selling ‘For
Sale’ only as a whole is intended as an exaggeration of the main principle of a
commercial gallery, and simultaneously functions as an obstruction of an
eventual sale of the artworks, since it is clearly more complex to acquire a whole
show than to buy an individual work, and it is far more expensive.

Hoffmann//When Attitudes Become Commodities (Become Attitudes)//169

 As much as the market has been able to be inventive and create strategies
that have allowed it to adapt to all sorts of attempts that tried to obstruct or
circumvent it, ‘For Sale’ finds a loophole in this system that promises the artists
and the organizers a ‘win-win’ situation. Should the exhibition remain unsold,
the market has been shown its limits and the exhibition will have foiled the
principle goal of a gallery, the selling of artworks. Should the show in fact sell, it
will not only be an instructive commentary on current market dynamics, but
more importantly, it will be the first time a group exhibition has been sold in its
entirety, destined to stay together indefinitely.

Jens Hoffmann, 'W hen Attitudes Become Commodities (Become Attitudes)’, in For Sale (Lisbon:
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, 2 0 0 7 ) n.p.

Ruth Diehl
Christian Jankowski and the Art Business:
Motif and Strategy//2008

[... ] [Christian Jankowski’s] Spiel mitSponserengled (Playing with Sponsor Money,

1996) focuses, in an ironic, subversive undertone, on the mechanisms of private
art patronage. Full of hope, the artist bets the entire amount of money received
from sponsors at a gambling casino ... and loses everything. Consequently, he is
compelled to print the sponsors’ logos with a potato stamp, a laborious and
rather unprofessional method. In this early work, Jankowski made use of the
game as both a metaphor and a method to which the artist succumbs and which
makes him the victim of market strategies.
The video Mein Leben als Taube (My Life as a Dove) was realized in the same
year. Before the eyes of his audience, the artist had himself transformed into a
dove and - this was his contribution to the exhibition - sat in a cage for the
duration of the three-week exhibition, dependent on visitors to feed and release
him occasionally from his cage for a short flight to freedom. With this poetic
metaphor for his profession, he alluded to the romantic myth of the artist’s
freedom and captivity, while demonstrating at the same time the dependence of
the freedom-loving genius on his audience.
The basic parameters of Jankowski’s strategy and his concept of the work of
art are already evident in this work. The work of art is a response to a specific
invitation to take part in an exhibition or a project; the idea for the work is

170//CRITIGLUE
developed in consultation with the client and culminates in a basic concept.
Relationships are reversed through transformation and the process of exchanging
roles or contexts. The task of carrying out the action or performance is delegated
to the audience or to other players in the art business. The course and outcome
of the action are determined largely by the other players and are foreseeable only
to a limited extent. Chance and surprise are calculated into the mix as productive
elements and underscore the open-ended character of the work. The action is
staged during or within the context of normal operations, which consequently
comment on themselves. Truth and illusion, reality and fiction are blended to
achieve moments of surprise and irritation. The performance is recorded on
video tape or film and marketed as a special edition.
The role of the artist is the dominant and persistent motif, although Jankowski
also increasingly focuses on the other factors involved in the operating system. In
Direktor Pudel (Director Poodle, 1998), for example, a poodle sits at the desk of
the Director of the Kunstverein, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen. While the ‘magical’
transformation is effected in this case with the real director’s blessing, the guests
at an exhibition opening in Sheffield who appear in the last part of the video
entitled Flock (2002) are transformed by a magician into sheep, one by one, until
all of them end up wandering aimlessly and passively in a herd through the
exhibition room, bleating and leaving their droppings behind. The joke, the
ridiculous character of the sequence, is clearly achieved at the expense of the
people involved. How is that possible? Jankowski’s strategy always works. The
business and its players always ‘expose’ themselves or, expressed somewhat
differently, ‘Jankowski creates situations in which the players dupe themselves.’1
The auratic effect of art still has its appeal, and lures the participants into playing
along. Through the offered prospect of contact with the artist, and the suggestion
of participation in a work of art, they are transformed into obedient puppets in
accordance with his script. How else would a work like Flock have been possible?
The fact that illusion and reality are blended together heightens the appeal of the
game. Who is the real prize winner when four different presenters sing songs of
praise to four different artists at an award ceremony (Herzlichen Gluckwunsch/
Congratulations, 2000)? And what really happens at the Art Cologne show when
an auctioneer offers highly speculative art in the style of a teleshopping
programme {KunstmarktTVIArt Market TV, 2008)? The market within the market,
the interplay of the sublime and the trivial, exhibits the features of comedy and
absurdity in one, yet the uncanny duplication bears the seeds of enlightenment.
But how does one explain the seemingly so very different work groups
realized during the past two years? Three sculptures, a group of paintings and a
set of readymades were completed in parallel with video pieces based on the
some conceptual approach, and based no less on the principle of the exchange of

Diehl//Christian Jankowski and the Art Business//171

roles and contexts. The bronze statues Living Sculptures (2007) depict lifesized
real actors, so that they become ‘art-sculpture’ in their own right as living replicas
of popular statues. In Chino Pointers (2007), decorative commission work made
by copiers in Dafen [‘painting village’, China) for Western buyers is combined
with strange excrescences of Chinese cultural policy. Thus the ‘beautiful’ pictures
ordered by Jankowski become motifs in paintings of the unfinished shell of the
Dafen Art Museum, thereby acquiring the status of art for the Western market. In
the same way, the plastic kitsch ‘made in Hong Kong’ mutates via an exchange of
roles - factory workers become guitarists for a short audio recording - into
veritable high art and celebrated gallery goods (And Your Bird Can Sing, 2008).
Jankowski causes the carousel of original and copy, fine art and commodity,
to revolve until they become indistinguishable in the ebb and flow of buying and
selling in the global market - and thus in the art business. [...]

1 [footnote 5 in source] Harald Falckenberg, ‘Danke, Gott. Danke’, Parkett (December 2007) 71.

Ruth Diehl, extract from ‘Christian Jankowski and the Art Business: Motif and Strategy’, in Christian
Jankowski: Dienstbesprechung/Briefing, ed. Marion Ackermann (Stuttgart: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart/
Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2 0 0 8 ) 2 5 4 -9 .

Tino Sehgal and Maurizio Cattelan

Economics of Progress//2009

Maurizio Cattelan So what is important to you?

Tino Sehgal Well, I guess one of my main questions is: ‘Can there be progress that
is not technological progress?’ Or to phrase it a little bit longer: ‘Can there be
progress that is not technological progress, but which takes the economical
function of technological progress?’ To understand why this question is important
to me, should I maybe clarify what function technological progress has in our
current economic formation?

Cattelan Yes, that would be helpful.

Sehgal On the one hand it is inevitable: we are humans and we tend to do

things repeatedly. Because we repeat doing things, whether we want to or not

172//CRITIQ.UE
we tend to get better at doing them and become more effective. We can do
things with less effort or less time. Applied to a societal level, that means that
fewer people can do what was done before by more people. This is something
we all know - the substitution of jobs by machines - and it has been widely
discussed, in every area we can imagine. In consequence, today we are so
productive that a small part of the population can produce what the entire
population requires to satisfy its basic needs. So we are much more effective
than all previous generations with these things. But technological progress also
has the contrary effect, and that is to conquer new areas of activity. It opens up
new fields of occupation, in the widest sense of the word occupation. Like
having something to do, but also opportunities for jobs and generating income.
That I would see as the economical function of progress.

Cattelan But isn’t progress an idea that is no longer relevant today?

Sehgal I am not concerned with such philosophical or historical discussions on the

concept of progress. I am interested in the economical function, because that is
where I think it still has relevance. The well known problem related to this whole
process of progress is when it gets out of balance, that is, if it does not innovate
strongly enough on this conquering level, but is too effective on the efficiency
level. If such an imbalance occurs, then obviously an increasing number of people
are without an occupation, and without possibilities for generating an income.

Cattelan So what is your problem with technological progress?

Sehgal I think there are two problems: one is, to put it a bit bluntly, boredom. To
put it very formally, it is the decrease in the marginal utility of technological
progress with respect to quality of life. To put it in between the very blunt and
the very formal, it means that today a technological innovation has a very, very
small impact on our quality of life. If you think of the invention of electricity, the
quality of life changed. But today if we have the newest chip or an iPod versus a
Walkman the change of quality of life that it induces is quite small. So one
problem we have with technological progress today is that when we invest in
such progress, one would think, it actually has an effect on our quality of life.
But we realize it doesn’t.
The second and major problem - so not this issue of boredom or of inefficiency
- is the problem of counter-productiveness: we obviously invest in technological
progress because we want things to get better and not to get worse. Since the
1950s and 60s, in Western civilizations, we have started to encounter this
problem to a degree, as has started to be discussed, namely that the side-effects,

Sehgal and Cattelan//Economlcs of Progress//173

or the negative effects, of technological progress are quite massive. Now these
are all well known things. In this situation one would think that we could easily
say: if on the one hand technological progress does not really bring us a lot any
more, and on the other it is even quite problematic, it thus loses its logical
foundation, there is no need to do it, and we can just enter a kind of equilibrium
state and just not invest in this process any more.
The question would be - why is this not possible? Why is it not possible to
escape investing in such a process? I think this has something to do with the
market and that none of us in our society is factually interested in getting outside
of the market. What does that precisely mean? It simply means that hardly anybody
is interested in being self-subsistent. That means none, or at least very few of us,
have cultural values in the direction of giving up a certain specialization in what
we do. The moment we are interested in being specialized in what we do, we are
necessarily in the market. We will have to exchange what we do, make it a product
and then exchange it with our peers for something we need, most importantly our
basic needs. So we have to produce ever new things that are so relevant to some
people that we can exchange them with those persons for an income, which we
can then exchange with the decreasing percentage of people that produce what
we require to satisfy our basic needs, like housing, food, heating, etc.
This is the constellation in which my question, ‘Can there be progress that is
not technological progress?’ takes place. Which means: can we imagine a social
or cultural process which takes up this function of technological progress on the
innovation side; which opens up new fields of occupation or new fields of activity,
which we are interested in, which we can participate in, and also, most
importantly, make an income from? So, this is a question that I have been thinking
about for a long time. It is of course very difficult to imagine an answer.

Cattelan How does this relate to your work?

Sehgal With my work I am trying to propose an answer, which would be a

product, the creation of a product, which is a constructed situation, or which is a
transformation of a situation, or which is a kind of transformation of actions. As
you know, still today most products we sell, buy or exchange are transformations
of material, like a table, a transformation of wood, or a microphone, a
transformation of a whole lot of materials, including oil. Then we obviously have
services, and most services are transformations of actions and transformations
of material. What I am interested in is what one could call a pure service, a service
product that is just a transformation of actions, whose site of action is no longer
a material thing - like the site of the car mechanic is the car he is repairing - but
our bodies, our bodies in the widest conception of our bodies. So also this space

174//CRITIQ,UE
in between us. But this is obviously frightening to some people. As long as 1 talk
about situations and constructed situations everything is fine. And there is
obviously a whole lot of history around this, especially in art, related to the
Situationists (although I think they constructed very few situations). But the scary
thing arises in the moment when I say this should be sold - this space between us,
this transformed space or these transformed actions or these constructed
situations - they have to be sold and bought otherwise they don’t fulfil their
function. I think that an affluent society like ours has to answer this question. As
people have to make an income they are constantly trying to think - consciously
or not - what do other people have a demand for and how can we produce
something for this demand? So I do think that we are on the way to producing
such constructed situations. Because what we have demand for, as an affluent
society or as the rich peoples that we are in the West, is a differentiation of our
personality or a demand for differentiation of our subjectivity. Almost everybody
is secure about the fact that they will live tomorrow and that they will have
enough to eat. Which other generations probably were not - they were worried
about that. In contrast we are very much concerned about our personalities, how
we differ from other people and the shaping of our individuality. This is a demand
that I think is being met at the moment, in the way of our period. Which is a
period of historical transition from, let’s say, an age of production of things to an
age of production of subjectivity. It is basically common knowledge that today if
you buy a pair of sneakers you buy, on the one hand, like four hundred years ago,
the protection for your feet. But today you also buy subjectivity, you buy a
differentiation of who you are. These things are always linked today. So I am trying
to hint that there are more direct, more sustainable and interesting ways to
respond to this demand for a differentiation of our subjectivity. [...]

Tino Sehgal and Maurizio Cattelan, extract from "Economics of Progress', Flash Art Qanuary/February
2009) 90-91.

Sehgal and Cattelan//Economics of Progress//175

Ahmet 6gut
In Conversation with Murat Alat//2010

Murat Alat Within the context of institutional critique, I see Black Diamond1 as
research performed on structures engendering the value of works of art, as a
self-reflexive endeavour, and an inquiry into the media used in your own
production. [For the work Black Diamond (2010) the artist filled an entire space
at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, with twelve tonnes of coal, burying a small
fragment of the museum in the mounds. This fragment had been removed from
a wall of the museum and was replaced by a valuable diamond. Visitors were
encouraged to seek out the diamond.] Moreover, this project draws attention to
the discrepancy in value between a diamond and coal, which have the same
chemical composition. Do you think the visitor’s attention is held by a market
predicated value and its allure or, rather, some intrinsic value?

Ahmet Ogiit What we mean when we say ‘value’ is crucial. First, my intent is to
investigate the means through which a work of art could be emancipated from
its speculative value. Put simply and succinctly, my question, derived from Marx,
is this: What are the use and exchange values of a work of art? Let me begin with
exchange value. According to Marx, in order for a product to be considered a
commodity, it must be ‘exchangeable’ within the economy.2 Similarly, Adorno
says that ‘no object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it
can be exchanged’.3 Quite naturally, when we look at a work of art today, its
‘exchange value’ is not only maintained but that value may rise exorbitantly. I
recently enjoyed watching a parody of this in the 2006 documentary Who the
Fuck is Jackson PollockT4 The documentary tells the story of Teri Horton, a truck
driver who buys a painting from a second-hand shop for $5 and who later realizes
that it’s a Jackson Pollock. While important museum and gallery experts reject
the authenticity of the painting, Teri calls in Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art expert,
to authenticate the piece. Working like a crime scene investigator, Peter Paul Biro
establishes that a fingerprint lifted from Pollock’s studio and one on the back of
Teri’s painting are the same. However, art experts are still not convinced of the
authenticity of the painting. Despite this, Teri receives offers of up to $9 million,
which she rejects since she does not want to sell the piece for less than other
Pollock paintings. The naked truth here is not whether or not the painting is a
genuine Jackson Pollock. As long as it isn’t ‘exchanged’ on the market, which is
controlled by powerful hands, it will have no value. One of the first to make this
critique was Hans Haacke. In 1975, Haacke followed the trail of Les Poseuses, a

176//CRITIQUE
painting by Seurat, from 1888, when it first exchanged hands, to 1971, when it
was acquired by Heinz Berggruen. Haacke presents the circulation and the
transformation of the economic worth of the work chronologically through
documents and leaves interpretation up to the observer. We, too, as observers,
see how profitable this work of art, which exchanged hands 11 times, was to the
companies and legal entities who owned it at various times.
Let’s continue with the question, ‘What is the use value of a work of art?’ I
went to the Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture to see original Picassos
that had been recovered from an art smuggling operation. I looked at four Picasso
paintings that still had crease marks down the middle. A short time after 1 saw
them, I heard that they had been removed. In fact, we learned, they were forgeries.
Which do we prefer: genuine paintings that, for a variety of reasons, are stored in
museum depots, or replicas that give viewers a chance to see them up close? 1
believe that the use value of a work of art is realized only through a process
whereby it is actively experienced (mentally or physically) by a viewer.

Alat When I attempt a parallel reading of Punch This Painting (2010) and Black
Diamond, it seems they are similar structurally as they are both works programmed
to self-destruct. It seems as if they are quietly and unobtrusively erasing
themselves from the institutional structure in which they are included, leaving
only a few archival documents surrounding this emptiness. Can we characterize
these works that self-destruct as your resistance to art institutions? And, further,
where do you see yourself or ‘the artist’ within this institutional structure?

Ogtit Yes, there is a similar construct in both projects. I have to explain this
correctly: I am not resisting institutions as such but rather the control mechanisms
in the institutionalization of a work. These control mechanisms transcend
institutions. I believe the viewer can engage in a real experimental process vis-a-
vis the work and not in a mere metaphorical exchange. Rather than abandoning
this process to particular centres of power, I prefer to leave it to the viewer. Prior
to taking action, basic questions need to be asked: When is a work of art finished?
Is it when the artist puts the finishing touches on it, or when it is displayed to the
public or after it has formed a relational experience with the people who come
to see it? Actually, this process extends beyond these stages. Black Diamond is
completely recyclable in nature. Both the diamond and the coal are part of this
recycling process. While the diamond has a particular market exchange value,
the coal has a clear use value. Punch This Painting is in a slightly different position.
I set up Punch This Painting so that it would continually strike at its own
commodity value and exchange value. Contrary to other works, it is a work that
is constantly renewed through potential blows. It is a work that will never be

Ogiit//In Conversation with Ahmet A lat//177

renovated. I call this process ‘reverse renovation’. In order for the work to self-
actualize, there are conditions such as its continually being worn away and the
person or institution owning the work consenting to this. As you know, this work
was sold at a private auction held last summer in collaboration with Christie’s.
The precondition was that the buyer consent to the work being hit by anyone
who wanted to do so and that it be exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in
Amsterdam. I want to mention two other works that criticized the internal logic
of auctions. Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths performed a work entitled
Paradoxical Economies at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2007. At this
performance, designed as an auction, what was up for auction was money itself.
In other words, regardless of how high the bidding went, that amount of money
would be chewed, swallowed and then excreted by Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul
Griffiths, and then, after being exhibited, would be delivered to the buyer. I also
have to mention Christian Jankowski’s Strip the Auctioneer project, which was
held in 2009 at Christie’s auction house. The auctioneer conducting the auction
took off almost everything he was wearing - jacket, shirt, shoes and socks, etc.
- and presented them for sale. Finally, the auction gavel he used was put up for
sale. As in the examples I have given, the collaboration between the artists and
institutions certainly is a natural process. To raise this collaboration to a genuinely
critical level, artists must cleverly conceive their works. If art institutions or the
art market want to internalize a work in one way or another, the artist should
make the process of categorizing as complicated as possible.

Alat I’m puzzled about what it is that compels visitors to Black Diamond to enter
a coal-filled room and search for a tiny piece of stone until they drop from
exhaustion. I don’t know if what motivates the visitors is the market value of the
diamond, being part of a work of art, or the allure of shovelling coal for an hour
and impersonating a coal miner. The piece that you removed from the institution’s
wall leaves behind a space and what the visitor does is try to find the section to
fill this space. It must be remembered, too, that the space has been filled with a
diamond by the institution to motivate the viewer. In your opinion, what kind of
empty spaces does Black Diamond leave to its participants?

Ogiit While there are many factors contributing to motivation, what we do know
is this; going into the room behind a panel of glass and shovelling coal for an
hour is not something everyone can do. The viewers outside may see shovelling
coal in a room behind a panel of glass as humiliating, but those voluntarily
participating in the experience pay no attention to this and confidently enter the
room. In a country like Turkey, where 20 per cent of society makes 50 per cent of
the total income, it is inevitable that most of the rest should place its fate in

178//CRITICLUE
games of chance. Therefore, that the Black Diamond has been jam packed since it
opened is as we expected. As Can Yiicel said, ‘The lower we sink the better’, ‘The
more atrociously we smell, the better.’ The truth of the matter is that artists use
‘humiliation’, in which they themselves play the leading role, as a kind of strategy.
There are many projects, such as David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983) in
which he sold snowballs he had carefully lined up, or Mladen Stilinovic’s Potatoes
(2001), where he tries selling pieces of cake in a secluded place frequented by no
one. These types of projects come from a practice that approaches the commodity
value of works of art critically. These are actually modest examples of the
transformation of ‘humiliation’ into a strategy of resistance. In Black Diamond, I
devolved this role to the viewers. The viewers voluntarily become a part of this
performance. In fact, the piece was found in five days. Genuinely effective
institutional criticism is only possible by allowing ourselves to be exposed to
contempt together and by getting ourselves completely dirty.

1 The artist and curator jointly decided to donate the diamond at Van Abbemuseum to the young
artists Sarah Gerats, Isabela Grosseova, Noor Nuyten and Lauren von Gogh in support of a project
in South Africa called Black Diamond.
2 Karl Marx. Capital (1867), vol. I, chapter II: Exchange.
3 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, T h e Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception’ (1 9 4 2 -4 4 ).
4 Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?, Director: Harry Moses (2006).

Ahmet Ogiit and Murat Alat, extract from interview, in Ilkay Balig, ed., Second Exhibition Book 2/2
(Istanbul: ARTER, 2010) 2 3 8 -4 7 .

6gut//In Conversation with Ahmet A lat//179

Liu Ding
Liu Ding’s Store//2012

Liu Ding’s Store employs a utilitarian economic model - a shop - to establish a

platform for thinking about the creation of value, in relation to both artworks
and the human networks of the art world. So far, Liu Ding’s Store has developed
four product lines: Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart; The
Utopian Future o f Art, Our Reality; Conversations; and Friendship.
The first product line, Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart,
came about through an invitation to participate in ‘Far West’, a 2008 exhibition at
Arnolfini, Bristol, that examined how artists use economic mechanisms to address
issues within the art system. I returned to Dafen, a famous village in south China
that mass-produces handmade reproductions of paintings and sculpture. 1 had
worked with manufacturers there on a previous project and for this work I
commissioned them to create unfinished paintings based on motifs 1 designed. I
signed each of the unfinished paintings and sold them at the exhibition. The price
was a modest amount set between the gallery price of an artwork and the
formulaic factory price of a reproduction. In subsequent years, I’ve released
different series of paintings with new motifs just like how fashion houses launch
their seasonal lines. In exchanging these works, what is really being traded is
something intangible - the possibility that the artist could become a legend. Thus
the buyer and the seller are tied by a common interest. The made-to-order
paintings are simply markers of this shared interest, as well as symbols of how
the artist turns himself into a public figure. In this sense, the stylistic quality of the
paintings is merely an added value to this particular commodity.
The second series, The Utopian Future o f Art, Our Reality, unites everyday
products and unique artworks based on themes such as ‘gold’ or ‘a perfect
sphere’. All items within each theme are priced equally, regardless of the
differences in their functional, commercial, cultural and social values. The lack of
hierarchical or pecuniary differentiation is the manifestation of an interdependent
relationship: objects have gained new value by being included in a special
context, while the meaning of this context is based on the objects’ collective
presence. Contexts determine value such that we are both the components of a
context and our value is derived from being part of that context. Every element
of a context frames another.
Conversations is a series of irregular conversations I conduct with other artistic
and cultural practitioners, but also a line of products. The products take the form
of photographic documentation and sound recordings. The conversations occur

180//CRITIQUE
without a public, eliminating the necessity for any performance or didactic speech.
Neither interview nor debate, each conversation is an autonomous form of cultural
production and a free exchange of thoughts and emotion. It’s not a negotiation in
which an agreement or goal needs to be reached, but an opportunity to be together
and to communicate face to face. What carries value in this series is the actual
experience of intellectual exchange, mutual inspiration, and the clashing of ideas,
and therefore I claim these experiences to be of value and assign prices to them.
Friendship, the fourth product line of Liu Ding’s Store, arose naturally from
Conversations. I created autonomous stations at which people can gather,
converse and connect using specially-designed low tables, lamps, plants and
marble rocks that are placed around the tables as seats. Friendship offers for sale
an abstract psychological space and a platform for establishing contacts. It’s a
realization of the potential influence a physical space and atmospheric
surroundings can have on people’s bodies, minds and behavioural patterns. By
creating a functional space, the work turns the formation of friendship into a
definite outcome and a necessity. It also symbolizes the value of being together.
This space addresses the need for a connectivity based on intellectual and artistic
synergy, not on any practical benefits or immediate returns. But it is manifested
through the most accessible currency of our society, the economy.

Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store (2012).

Liu//Liu Ding’s Store//181

BUSINESS AST
Andy Warhol
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back
Again//1975

(...) Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist,
and I want to finish as a business artist After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever
it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a
Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During
the hippie era people put down the idea of business - they’d say, ‘Money is bad’,
and ‘Working is bad’, but making money is art and working is art and good
business is the best art.
In the beginning not everything in Andy Warhol Enterprises was organized
too well. We went from art right into business when we made an agreement to
provide a certain theatre with one movie a week. This made our movie-making
commercial, and led us from short movies into long movies into feature movies.
We learned a little bit about distribution and soon we started trying to distribute
the movies ourselves, but we found out that that was just too hard. I didn’t expect
the movies we were doing to be commercial. It was enough that the art had gone
into the stream of commerce, out into the real world. It was very heady to be able
to look and see our movie out there in the real world on a marquee instead of in
there in the art world. Business art. Art business. The Business Art Business. (...)

Andy Warhol, extract from The Philosophy o f Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975) (London:
Penguin Books, 20 0 7 ) 88.

Lii Peng
Heading towards the Market//1992

The focus on the development of art according to a metaphysical framework is

rapidly coming to an end. That is to say that 1990s Chinese art is in the process of
heading full-force towards the market.
There is no doubt that the basis of art’s orientation towards the market is a
search for financial support. This kind of argument inevitably encounters
intense moral reproach. Even so, money itself has no a priori moral quality.
Since its very beginning, its moral definition has fluctuated according to varying

184//BUSINESS ART
social strata. Today, this view of money as evil should yield to a recognition of
it as the basic premise for contemporary cultural development. The financially
fuelled market is not a corrupting environment for arts and culture. Instead, it
is an apparatus for determining cultural production. In contemporary society,
the ‘success’ of a work of art is inconceivable without the direct or indirect
support of the following: gallery management, the practices and operations of
agents and middlemen, the pounding gavel of the auction house, the interrelated
functions of the financial banking system, not to mention publishing houses,
legal structures, insurance mechanisms and tax administration for industry
and commerce. People once believed that the independence of a work was
based on the ‘thing-in-itself. But for an artwork situated within society - which
needs its position to be confirmed by society - this abstract ‘thing-in-itself has
never existed. A work of art can only emerge when it ‘becomes effective’, that
is, when it has passed through the different fixed regulations of various social
organs. Moreover, the oil lubricating the apparatus of the market is the money
generated through wealth.
The essential meaning of heading towards the market is this: art ought to be
produced for the purpose of sale. The immediate critique against this view is that
to do so invariably leads to a deluge of bad art of unbearable shoddiness and
vulgarity. The problem of such a critique, fully exposed in its narrow moralistic
presentation, lies in its ignorance of humankind’s mainstream pursuit of a lofty
and healthy culture. In other words, it disregards the existence in society itself of
an irresistible pursuit towards creating a high-class market in order to supply
refined tastes. This critique also overlooks the fact that this kind of ‘creating’ and
‘supplying’ relies on monetary assistance. The transformation of market tastes
and the criteria of commodity evaluation are eventually influenced and
determined by intellect, but the production of intellect cannot be separated from
material and monetary conditions. In short, an artist’s work can only be truly and
effectively sustained when sales are made.
The basic requirement for art to head towards the market is to realize
investment instead of sponsorship. In contemporary society, to seek sponsorship
is a vestige of classicism. It is a practice established on a psychology of begging
and searching for alms, while market exchange has become the prerequisite for
contemporary cultural production. ‘Investment’, therefore, is a practice that
conforms to contemporary moral standards, because ‘investment’ signifies an
up-front affirmation and commitment towards the value of another person’s
labour. Precisely because investors express their respect for artwork and its
production in monetary terms, it is very reasonable for them to again exchange
artists’ work for money, thereby submitting their respect for value to an empirical
examination. If a person seeks to obtain others’ money without delivering his

Lu//Heading towards the Market//185

own product of labour, he is negating the value of his own labour and positioning
himself as a parasite.
Art heading towards the market also means heading towards order. An artistic
environment without a market is a primitive wilderness that is actually harmful
to the development of art, where art can be ‘disfigured’ at any time by boorish
administrative opinions or orders via an impromptu phone call. The market, in
contrast, is a safe operational mechanism that abides by laws. The production
and ‘success’ of an artwork according to the market are affirmed and protected
by factors in those market regulations. We know very well that a regulated and
orderly art market has yet to be established in China, but this is no excuse for us
to relinquish our responsibility, to drift along or even to despair, or harbour ‘a
resigned attitude.’ On the contrary, in order to facilitate the truly healthy
development of contemporary art, it is necessary and significant that we make
every effort to construct an art market.
Ultimately, art heads towards the market sufficiently and effectively to unseal
and unfold an inner, spiritual world. We have heard about the age-old Van Gogh
myth, making even clearer to us now the significance of the astronomical prices
that Van Gogh’s art fetches in the contemporary market. Admittedly, a soul need
never be valued in terms of money, but in a commercial society monetary pricing
is the most effective means. With no God to provide a decree over endless academic
debates, money becomes the most effective referee. Artists use their art to disclose
the secrets in their souls, while society uses money to affirm the value of these
‘secrets.’ If someone says that the value of an artwork is still independent of the
market, a retort to such a soul-oriented supremacy is this: without the market, the
value of artwork has no choice but to remain contained in the soul of the artist, and
then society will never have a chance to know those secrets within.

Lii Peng, ‘HeadingToward the Market’Jiangsu huakan [Jiangsu Pictorial] vol. 142, no. 10 (1992); trans.
Mia Liu, in Wu Hung, ed.. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 2010) 290-91.

186//BUSINESS AST
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
The New Spirit of Capitalism//1999

(...) It is true that because the new spirit of capitalism incorporated much of the
artistic critique that flourished at the end of the 1960s, the accusations formerly
levelled at capitalism out of a desire for liberation, autonomy and authenticity no
longer seemed to be soundly based. In its historical forms, the artistic critique
subordinated the demand for authenticity to the demand for liberation: the
manifestation of human beings in their full authenticity was regarded as difficult
to achieve unless they were emancipated from the constraints, limitations, even
mutilations inflicted on them by capitalist accumulation in particular. In this
context, we might wonder if the gains liberation secured following May 1968
have not given many people the opportunity to attain to the kind of authentic life
that characterized the artistic condition, precisely in so far as it was defined by
the rejection of all forms of regulation, especially those associated with the
pursuit of profit. Liberation and especially sexual liberation; autonomy in
personal and emotional life, but also in work; creativity; unbridled self-fulfilment;
the authenticity of a personal life as against hypocritical, old-fashioned social
conventions - these might seem, if not definitively established, at least widely
acknowledged as essential values of modernity. (...)
The commodification of the authentic first of all presupposes exploring
sources of authenticity that are potential sources of profit, such as human beings,
scenery, cafes where people feel comfortable, tastes, rhythms, ways of being and
doing, and so on, which have not yet been introduced into the sphere of
commodity circulation. This logic initially developed in what was for a long time
the economically rather marginal domain of cultural enterprises - publishing,
record production, orchestras, art galleries, and so on - where economic
performance is basically a matter of the entrepreneur’s ability in a personal
relationship to sense creative potential and anticipate a public’s tastes and
desires. It has expanded considerably over the last thirty years with the growing
importance of cultural and technological investments, and also with the
development of services - in particular, tourism, the hotel business and catering,
fashion and ready-to-wear clothes, interior decoration and design. It is a matter
for ‘managers’, whose skills approximate to those of the artist, the organizer and
the businessman. Seeking to exploit as yet unidentified sources, these people
with a talent for sniffing things out cannot rely on existing standards, and must
demonstrate what management literature calls ‘intuition’. The chances of hitting
the bull’s-eye increase depending on how ‘spontaneous’ or ‘natural’ the intuition

Boltanski and Chiapello//The New Spirit of Capitalism //187

is - that is to say, the more it is rooted, not in a reflexivity developed in the course
of professional activity, but in their own desire, which presupposes that they
have shared tastes, interests and activities with the potential public whose
demands they anticipate or, rather, elicit.
A second series of operations consists in analysing the good in question to
control its circulation and make it a source of profit. In effect, with the exception
of the borderline case of objects of Antiquity or artworks that circulate in a market
without losing their substantial uniqueness,1entities - objects or persons - must,
if they are to be incorporated into the accumulation process, be handled in such a
way as to transform them into ‘multiples’, as art language puts it with reference to
lithographs or photographs. The product or service intended for commodification
is subject to an operation selecting the distinctive features to be preserved (in
contrast to secondary features, which can be discarded or are too costly to
reproduce) - that is to say, to ‘codification’, which is equally necessary for assessing
the financial cost of the commodification of the authentic product and for serving
as a device for marketing operations designed to enhance its prestige.
Codification is distinct from standardization, which was a prerequisite of
mass production, in the sense that it permits greater flexibility. Whereas
standardization consisted in conceiving a product from the outset, and
reproducing it identically in as many copies as the market could absorb,
codification, element by element, makes it possible to operate on a combinatory,
and introduce variations in such a way as to obtain products that are relatively
different, but of the same style. In this sense, codification allows for a
commodification of difference that was not possible in the case of standardized
production. That is why it is suitable for the commodification of the authentic,
since it makes it possible to preserve something of the uniqueness that accounted
for the value of the original. Take the example of the small cafe, which is fitted
out any old how, intuitively, at random, but works. It works very well. It is always
full. One is tempted to expand it. One could buy the adjoining house next door,
but that would not go very far. To expand it, it must be reproduced elsewhere - in
another district, another town. It needs to be transposed. But because it is not
clear what accounts for its success, it is not clear what to take from it. The odd
tables? The peasant dishes? The informal service? The friendly clientele that
frequents it? The reasonable prices? (But wouldn’t different customers elsewhere
be willing to pay more?) To find out, it is necessary to analyse the cafe, see what
gives it the truly authentic character that accounts for its value, select certain of
its qualities - the most significant or the most transposable (for example, the
clientele is the most difficult thing to transpose) - and ignore others, deemed
secondary. This process is a process of coding. [...]
Thus the possibility of commodifying differences ushers in a new era of

188//BUSINESS ART
suspicion. For if it was relatively straightforward to distinguish between an
artisanal object and a mass product, between a ‘massified’ worker and a ‘free’
artist, how can we know if some particular thing, event or feeling is the expression
of the spontaneity of existence, or the result of a premeditated process aimed at
transforming an ‘authentic’ good into a commodity? [...]

1 [footnote 64 in source] This is so even though the value of artworks and objects of Antiquity
depends upon their being connected in a symbolic series by art historians, whether amateurs or
experts, who construct categories on which the identification and evaluation of the works is
based, identify 'schools’, institute a hierarchy among the artists, establish catalogues, and so on.

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, extracts from Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris, Gallimard,
1999); trans. Gregory Elliott, The New Spirit o f Capitalism (London and New York; Verso, 20 0 7 ) 4 4 3 ;
4 4 4 - 5 ; 446.

Thomas Seelig
The Photographic Experience of Commodities//2002

For about ten years now the theme of Andreas Gursky’s photographic images has
been the catchphrases ‘consumption’ and ‘world of merchandising’. His efforts to
render a thesis in visual terms have often proved more strenuous and time-
consuming than actually taking the pictures. In 1992 he stated in an interview that
he had been planning to translate the term ‘department store’ into images. Looking
back on the past ten years, one can say with hindsight that he has approached this
goal in several steps, achieving it more precisely with each attempt.
In the early 1990s Gursky began to articulate picture space in clearly
demarcated planes. Thanks to several travel grants and study awards, he
succeeded in familiarizing himself with commercial centres and places of
production worldwide. He photographed more than seventy industrial plants
which are articulated as architecture on lines that match the conditions of
production in them. Gursky applies this principle of a ‘higher’ order to the way
he handles photography. He does not give priority to the reproducibility of what
he finds; instead, he accentuates the articulation of the composition to underscore
the picture space. By 1995 he had produced photographs of stock exchanges, car
shows and horse racing on a comparative basis. They are notable for the extremely
abstract treatment accorded to individuals as well as groups of people. Viewing

Seelig//The Photographic Experience of Commodities//189

his subject matter with detachment, Gursky deliberately eschews focusing on
visual highlights. On the contrary, his ‘democratic’ idea of what an image is has
permitted him to make universally valid statements - couched in formulaic
terms - about contemporary life on the threshold of the new millennium.
Gursky’s exploration of the visual aesthetics of the consumer society begins
with Prada I (1996) and Prada II (1997). By skilfully duplicating almost identical
architectural situations, he catapults corporate culture, which would otherwise
be on a subliminal level, to the status of reception focus. As with his photographs
of factories, Gursky has here rendered in visual terms an inherent ordering
principle which transcends the subject. It is not objects (as fetishes) which
embody the spirit of the luxury brands so much as the invasive stringency of an
omnipresent marketing conception. In an interview with the Siiddeutsche Zeitung
of 3 April 2001, Miuccia Prada views the status of her brand with a critical eye
when she says that every sale diminishes the aura (the brand) and enhances (at
the same) its familiarity. Subject to a rapid seasonal cycle, fashion profits from
being lent brand continuity, which is cultivated at great expense. Andreas Gursky
published o.T.V. (1997) in the same year as Prada II. In this panel photo, more than
two hundred NIKE trainers are assembled in a composition which gives each one
equal status. The same care is lavished on each shoe to ensure that size, lighting
and presentation are similar in each case. The number of different models and,
concomitantly, the potential individuality of those who might wear them,
contrasts with the reduced image of the brand and the heightened grammar of
the display shelves. In staging its products as it does, NIKE is trying to bring off the
almost impossible feat of doing justice to both aspects. The American sportswear
giant is not operating in a static or linear manner with its aggressive worldwide
‘branding’. Instead it is trying to apply brand identity(-ies) in an elastic and flexible
manner to contexts which are of necessity different. Gursky’s panels in large
formats lead on a comparable plane to a similar recognition value. Although each
photograph is individual in subject matter and execution, the genealogy of their
creation consists in the pursuit of minimalizing reduction. Thus they reveal clear
parallels between themselves and the world of merchandising. [...]

Thomas Seelig, extract from T h e Photographic Experience of Commodities’, in Zdenek Felix, Beate
Hentschel and Dirk Luckow, eds. Art & Economy (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2 0 0 2 ) 277.

190//BUSINESS ART
Jack Bankowsky
Tent Community//2005

[...] Art fairs may not be new, but these days they are certainly more: more
frequent, more crowded, more lucrative. With Miami and London joining Basel
and New York as obligatory circuit stops, with artists decrying the constant
pressure from dealers for fresh work, and with dealers bemoaning the drain on
quality stock (never mind the toll of constant caravanning on the flagship
operations back home), bristling under the big top has become an art-world way
of life. Last season, indefatigable Chelsea cheerleader Jerry Saltz professed to
sitting out the Miami and Frieze fairs ‘because these events make me feel
existentially adrift’. A bit, in this particular case, like the head Heather boycotting
her prom because the whole thing gives her a bad feeling, but, suspicions of
disingenuousness aside, one knows what he means.
Maybe artists are simply made of sterner stuff than newspaper critics. I can’t
say for sure, but while our sidelined scribe was nursing his battered sensibilities,
artists - artists of a certain sort, anyway - were not only making the scene, they
were literally commandeering the booths. I’ll stop short of heralding the great
age of ‘Art Fair Art’ (a toxic proposition, by most lights), but if you braved any of
the recent fairs, you’ve guessed where this is going.
At Art Basel this past summer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a newcomer to the new
genre (if not to its contextualist spirit), bricked up the entrance to the otherwise-
empty booth of Berlin dealer Neugerriemschneider, inscribing one cobble with a
flourish of non-compliance: NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS. Adapted for Basel from a
2001 gallery exhibition, Tiravanija’s theatrical work stoppage was but one of a
fresh crop of responses to the concentrated context of the fair. Eight months
earlier, at the second installment of London’s Frieze Art Fair, the Wrong Gallery
(that near-simulacral organization whose home base consists of two glass doors
in Chelsea and very little else) joined forces with Noritoshi Hirakawa to serve up
an even more cold-blooded take on the art fair’s ecology: In plain view of the
exposition’s dining concession, a hired model, hefty tome in hand, sat guard
beside a recently minted bowel movement, ready to field questions regarding
the dietary habits that yielded her mercifully tidy production. Call it the severe
strain of Art Fair Art. I’m starting, after all, with the sensational over the
substantial, but the double point I mean to make holds generally: While such
manoeuvres have nothing to do with the manageably marketable object, neither
can Art Fair Artists be said to be squeamish when it comes to the touchy co­
dependency of art and commerce, or the PR game they play like a hand of cards.

Bankowsky//Tent Community//191
 Artists, of course, have a way of pressuring the protocols that constrain - and
sustain - their vocation, and so, at a moment when the art fair has achieved an
unprecedented centrality in the marketing of contemporary art, it is not so
surprising to find the ‘talent’ nipping at the hand that feeds it. In this respect, Art
Fair Art owes a good deal to a century of contextual experiment - from the
readymade right through to the dematerial feints of conceptualism and its
offshoots in the present (namely institutional critique). Yet if in the context of
this studious lineage Art Fair Art comes on a bit like a bull in a china shop, it is
because the dominant gene in its artistic DNA comes courtesy of more mercurial
parentage: I am talking, of course, about that great enabler/disabler of art today,
Andy Warhol, but also about such dark-horse publicity whores as Yves Klein and
Salvador Dali. From AFA forerunner works like Guillame Bilj’s 1994 booth-as-
lighting-fixture-emporium to John Armleder’s long-running, self-manned mini­
stall at Art Basel, Art Fair Art has always been at least as enthralled with the shop
window as it is skeptical of its tyranny. This, before my reader gives up on me, is
the place for an apology: no shortage of lame art (and worse criticism) has been
propped up on the overburdened pillars of the Warholian academy. The sublime
Warholian sell-out is easy to grasp but tougher to master (just ask Mark Kostabi!).
The fact of the matter is that while it’s an after-Andy truism that the art system
(of which the fair is simply the moment’s rawest, rudest manifestation) can be
‘performed’ - as opposed to passively exploited (e.g. ‘regular’ art) or actively
analysed (e.g. ‘institutional critique’) - there are inspired ‘performances’ and
there are rote and merely one-dimensional ones.
Compare, for instance, Tiravanija’s too-tidy tour de force with the mad and
massive sleeper Anthony Burdin staged in Michele Maccarone’s booth at Frieze
last year. To Tiravanija’s credit, there is something pure and brave (and expensive!)
about closing up shop or, at any rate, turning an entire booth over to one elegant
act of refusal. Yet to the Burdin camp, the stunt could only have appeared a slicker
rehash of the LA artist’s earlier effort. Shut down by fair authorities when the
volume of Burdin’s master mixing proved unpalatable to neighbouring merchants,
Maccarone’s padlocked pen served as a bunkered base for the ‘recording artist’
throughout the exposition’s duration, a coil of razor wire strung atop the
enclosure’s temporary walls in a fuck-you flourish. Both refusals count, of course,
as much as coy come-ons as rebuffs. But where Tiravanija’s more absolute (but
ultimately more familiar) move left his customers to circulate and schmooze - or
simply move on - Burdin’s ‘Keep Out!’ clubhouse was a ruse to make us want in.
And inside is where he redeemed the AFA genre from the hovering charge of
superficiality. If Burdin’s parrying with the collecting class - and the art-fair
public more generally - stands apart, it is because his attention-grabbing ploy
remained first and foremost a portal onto a broader culture (he would say

192//BUS1NESS ART
‘industry’ - recording industry) in which his investment is anything but glib.
Far from ending where it began - in a line of frustrated shoppers banging at
the makeshift gate - Burdin’s ‘performance’ triangulated the proceedings,
engaging the fairgoer on three related fronts: first, there was the circumstance of
the barricaded booth (and the buzz it generated); second, the last-minute live
show of Burdin’s signature ‘recording art’, which fair administrators added to the
special events docket as reparations for shutting him down (more buzz); and last
but certainly not least, there were the intimate acts of seduction that the artist/
dealer duo performed during private audiences with newly won fans like me.
The Burdin ‘trap’ was as much a master-stroke of managed publicity as Tiravanija’s
tomb, but one with a wildfire improvisatory edge. If Burdin’s signature plea that
all is ‘performed’ and everything a ‘performance’ (including my own managed
tete-a-tete in the darkened booth) is, on the one hand, no more than a
commonplace of life as much as of art, when adopted in earnest it suggests an
impossible wager - and an ethical imperative - with ramifications in practice
both dangerous and exhilarating. Once inside the booth (and PR loop), the cat-
and-mouse game that began in front of the boarded-up stall took on an urgency
and intricacy that laid to rest any initial suspicions that the gesture was merely
smug. One by one, the artist collared his captive fans and forced them down the
rabbit hole into a strange new wonderland that begins with his covers of his own
covers of rock anthems and then spirals out in a viral rhythm of sampling and
rebranding that re-enchants the contracts and conventions by which artists
produce and ply their wares. It is a spiral that includes the fair (as any art that
makes its way through the machine of culture these days in some way must) but
- and this is key - is not limited to it.
The news (and bad news, I suppose, for the apologists of solipsistic pen-and-
ink fantasies and School of Tuymans oils, or whatever other back-to-art-basics
merchandise fills the stalls these days) is that Art Fair Art (and, more important,
the post-Pop performative efforts of which it is a subset) evinces, contra the bad-
boy bum rap, a measure of complexity and contradiction. If one protests too
much, it is because this complexity, where it does occur, is all too readily discarded
with the bad-boy bathwater. And yet one wants it both ways. One wants, that is,
to make a case for the conceptual traction of this art and for the tonic scumminess
of the bathwater, itself the very lifeblood that courses through Art Fair Art’s veins.
What I respect about Art Fair Art and what may finally set it off from so-called
institutional critique (of which it is a subset, near neighbour, or antagonist,
depending how you parse things) is that it is predicated on the realization that
art, particularly art that presumes to stand in some critical - or better, simply
revealing - relationship to the institutions to which it is bound, cannot exist at a
supposedly purifying distance from the point-of-purchase universe. Where

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critical hand-wringing over the evils of the fair has done little more than serve
up a few crowd-pleasing indictments of that old bogeyman ‘the market’, the Art
Fair Artist penetrates commerce’s inner sanctum, ‘performs’ the fair by donning
the guise of the carnival shill, and in so doing defamiliarizes the fair by making
the usual mercantile, critical and social exchanges strange and even (who would
have thunk it!) magical. Poor choice of words perhaps: Capital (AFA’s greatest
subject, as it was Warhol’s) is nothing if not bewitching, though, it must be said,
some artists make the chimeras dance.
‘As we are only documenting these works, we have not even tried to install
this work here at the fair’, chanted a pair of perfectly enchanting children as I
entered the booth belonging to the Wrong Gallery at the inaugural Frieze fair
back in 2003. Titled This is Right, the demonstration was the work of AFA old
master Tino Sehgal, who trained as a dancer and economist, his apologists love
to remind us - as if it were a badge of integrity in the flimsy world of art. The
baby dealers bounced about the booth, fulfilling their unlikely charge by helpfully
offering dimensions, edition size, price, etc., for five different works available for
sale. But as one reached for a camera to capture this refreshing version of the art
of the deal, the youthful merchants collapsed to the floor yelling, ‘We don’t think
it is appropriate to take pictures of our work!’ Conceptual art, perhaps, but, in its
crisp theatrics and surplus charm, somehow unlike any I’d ever seen before.
Sehgal loves a fair. Well, he never said that, but, as early champion Jens
Hoffmann noted, he is at least as fascinated by the fair’s mercantile machinations
as he is repulsed by its commercial imperative. Thus it’s telling that Sehgal bristles
against his critique-minded apologists who, in a more purposive version of knee-
jerk anti-market sentimentalism, carry on as if the market were indeed an evil
from which one could simply exempt oneself. If, for instance, Sehgal uses a word
such as ‘deproduces’ (with all its Marxian flavour) to characterize the ephemeral
enunciations that constitute his practice (he leaves behind no objects, permits no
documentation, and only sells his work by verbal contract in the presence of a
notary), he nonetheless chafes under the pressure of efforts to bring his art in line
with the anti-market idealism of historical conceptualism. In fact, he is ever
careful to pair the term ‘deproduces’ with something like its dialectical counter
‘produces’, his placeholder for the new spaces his gestures may - and often do -
open up. The point for Sehgal, as for Burdin, is to work the market, not to disappear
it. But if for Burdin all is ‘performance’, Sehgal refuses the term as a designation
for his scripted interventions, wary as he is of the necessarily domesticating
undertow that attends an art-historical tag like ‘performance art’. If surface
differences between the artists abound - if Sehgal, for instance, is more
conventionally bookish than Burdin, his art more tidily in line with the conceptual
pedigree - a closer look at the pair reveals a shared purpose.

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 My point is not to polemicize against the institutional critique to which
Sehgal’s debt is obvious and real (the ‘them’ to my AFA ‘us’ has to do not with the
‘critique’ but rather the ‘institution’ it has itself become). Rather, I mean to claim
for Art Fair Art (and the broader post-Pop performative impulse of which it is a
part) a more incisive purchase on what it entails to play the game - in this case,
the fair, with its concentrated audience and PR particulars - as opposed to
retreating to the sanctity and safety of the ivory tower. Sehgal, like any Art Fair
Artist worth the price of a VIP preview ticket, goes for the rudest wound. It’s
telling that rather than setting his sights on those sitting ducks, the gallery and
the museum, he has tackled not just the fair but that newer ‘institution’, the
peripatetic freelance curator. In this respect, he is, it seems plain, a step ahead of
the well-meaning ICacademy. Here Sehgal is improbably allied with institutional-
critique spokesperson Andrea Fraser. Another strong artist who’s not afraid to get
down and dirty with her context, she makes her best work precisely when testing
the polite protocols of the critical clique over which she presides. A recent piece
in which the artist copulates with a collector has occasioned all manner of hand-
wringing among her apologists, many of whom undoubtedly feel she’s gone and
spoiled everything with her ‘tacky’ stunt.
When I told one longtime Sehgal supporter of my article’s conceit, he quickly
retorted that, for Sehgal, ‘Art Fair Art was finished’, a sentiment that the artist
later refused to endorse as a general truth, though he did concede it had run its
course as far as his own work is concerned. Oh for the high-period of Art Fair Art!
There was Sehgal, of course, and Burdin’s bunkered recording rituals, and Piotr
Uklanski’s ballsy tag BOLTANSKl/ POLANSKI/ UKLANSKI graffitied across the back
wall of Gavin Brown’s booth (did the flowering of the Leipzig School precede or
follow the Warsaw Renaissance? this ethnic triumvirate seemed to tease).
Through the murky lens of our current belatedness, even relatively tepid
examples of the genre come with a patina of priority, whether Roman Ondak’s
artificially created queues in London last year; Pawel Althamer’s personal pup
tent attached to the Frieze big top in Regent’s Park; or Vanessa Beecroft’s mise-
en-scene featuring a cast of a nude woman made ‘to be placed on the desk of a
powerful man’, in this case a booth-bound hired model.
Can it be that the glory days of this still-youthful genre are really already
behind us? This month, the third instalment of Frieze, mother fair of the AFA
movement, will offer a fresh opportunity to assess the state of the art. The Wrong
Gallery (aka Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick) will once
again bring their three-ring schtick to London at the behest of the fair’s organizers.
As officially appointed commissioning agents instrumental in nurturing the AFA
renaissance, the trio has orchestrated a multi-year meta-Art Fair Art ‘performance’,
which, when taken in toto, may well constitute the Rokeby Venus of the genre. If

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their presentation of Hirakawa’s exalted dump was a tad too - yuck! - easy, the
tale of their invented family as creative cell and ubiquitous behind-the-scenes
puppeteers is the real mirror of our tent community.
Cattelan, as his ubiquity and reach suggest, has learned Warhol’s lessons
well. The Andy I have in mind is not the painter of icons, but the Andy of the
extra-white-cube prestidigitations, or, more to the point, the Andy who
managed the delicate ecology that enabled him to accommodate both the
paintings and the business art machinations under one indelible brand,
claiming in the process his whole world for his capacious art. By fair time this
month, the second edition of the Wrong Times, a self-published broadsheet,
will be circulating in the aisles of the Regent’s Park tent, but Cattelan’s branding
triumph does not end at the fair turnstiles: A concern that goes by the bad pun
Cerealart will shortly offer a mini Wrong Gallery for home use via the web
(whoever purchases the ‘toy’, explains gallery principal Subotnick, ‘becomes a
Wrong dealer’). And, in a business-art coup that should secure Cattelan’s status
as the Richard Branson of the Passer-by set, London’s Tate Modern is letting the
opportunistic virus loose among its esteemed holdings. Early in the coming
year, the museum plans to transplant the Wrong Gallery’s original glass door
from Chelsea to a wall on the third floor where it will reopen for business (art)
with an exhibition programme involving invited artists and, perhaps, work
from the Tate collection. In a testament to Cattelan’s Svengali-like might, the
museum’s in-house coordinator Ann Coxton has sportingly assumed the title of
Gallery Janitor, ceding curatorial control to Cattelan and crew.
The ABCs of art in the post-Warholian, post-performative present are
simple: the success of Cattelan’s one-in-every-home routine depends on a
reciprocity (I almost said ‘dialectic’) between the broad proliferation of extra-
art activities and the museum-ready icons that provide the freewheeling brand
a graphic and institutional identity. Like Andy, Cattelan never forgets a simple,
structural truth (and I mean this without cynicism): the whole viral apparatus
hangs on a picture hook - on a couple of wooden bars stretched up with canvas
and stamped with a soup can - or, in his own case, on a stack of taxidermied
beasts or an army of waxwork Mini-Men. The much-discussed spike in his
auction prices was only the extravagant payoff of this well-managed system,
and, as such, the best joke on the need for an object to hang the art on, for an
‘oeuvre’, in short, to hold the whole evil empire in poise. Lame art (and worse
criticism)? Except when it works: Cattelan has clones (like Warhol’s Factory
minions, cuter than he); Cattelan has a magazine - or two or three (Permanent
Food and, with Gioni and Subotnick, the Wrong Times and Charley); Cattelan is
friends with the enemy (the art fair!); and Cattelan even has his own gallery
(Wrong), which, it would seem to follow, makes him a dealer, or rather, in

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keeping with his admittedly unorthodox operation, an anti-, non-, or meta-
dealer. Here one arrives at another AFA lesson: Once art is business and business
art, the dealer as silent partner becomes - contra the taboo - an active
collaborator, as, for instance, Jeffrey Deitch’s persistent AFA instigations make
plain, and Maccarone’s full-dress burlesque of the Kelly-bag class makes poetry.
(You have glimpsed her, I trust, working the aisles: archetypal telephone
screamer, glued to her cell, she sports, yes, a Kelly bag.) Artist John Armleder’s
self-manned mini-booth at Art Basel claims precedence here as a slow-burn
masterpiece of AFA’s Janus-faced artist/dealer symbiosis. For as long as anyone
can remember, he has set up camp in a tiny stall on an outer ring of booths.
There, year after year, the courtly figure with the single braid pours champagne
to celebrate the work of decidedly unblue-chip talents in this decidedly blue-
chip context, holding up a low-budget mirror to the big-budget market.
In true business-art high style, today’s artist/dealers and dealer/artists are
fully complicit with the entrepreneurs who operate the fair, providing a
validating service in the form of a new breed of ‘special’ projects available only
at the fair, thus ensuring the attendance of not just shoppers but that market-
wary middleman, the critic. Such projects have their roots in the booth-specific
presentations that began to proliferate back at the Gramercy Art Fair (the
Deitch-curated ‘Florine Stettheimer Collapsed Time Salon’, for example, or
Thomas Hirschhorn’s foil-tentacled Swiss army knife), though I would stop
short of classifying these earlier efforts as Art Fair Art, which, if true to form,
must do more than simply use the fair as a stage. It must make the fair - its
mechanisms and machinations - the subtext, if not the central plotline, of its
play. Taking this value-adding strategy to new heights, Sam Keller, director of
the fair of fairs, Art Basel, is nudging his Art Unlimited section even further in
the fair-exclusive direction. Formerly a graveyard for objects too cumbersome
for cash-and-carry sales, Unlimited’s application-only, top-dollar floor space is
now allocated and organized by a (real!) curator, turning a once-dead museum
attached to the live fair into a living museum, a museum that shows, you
guessed it, Art Fair Art. Last summer’s Unlimited announcement card even
featured a dour (read black-and-white) photographic teaser for Marina
Abramovic’s vanitas burlesque - a performance in which the prone, naked artist
spent three hours embracing a human skeleton on a raised platform at the
entrance to the champagne-addled vernissage, all within earshot of uniformed
percussionists strumming a giant Doug Aitken sculpture-cum-xylophone. A
humanized version of the Hirakawa potty project, Abramovic’s stunt remains,
to my mind, a billboard one-liner sans the complexity I have been militating
for. It may have been compelling as theatre, but it lacked the viral connections
that emerged, for instance, from Burdin’s staging of both his passage through

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the fair and the rhythm of sampling and rebranding that motors his larger
project, just as it missed the depth of infiltration (of the fair and art system
more generally) reflected in Cattelan’s hall of mirrors.
Either all art today is Art Fair Art, as a colleague recently teased, or there is no
such thing as Art Fair Art in the first place. Both are true, I will gladly own, as my
purpose has never been, beyond the fun of striking a movement-making posture,
to suggest that Art Fair Art is more than a local hiccup in the larger tendency of
performing the present, which 1do believe to be among the most serious currents
in contemporary art. My investment in this new non-movement, in short, runs
no deeper than the unsentimental exploits of those artists who engage the fair as
an inevitable part of their world. They pass through the fair and make art out of
both it and - in a Mobius twist - its place in their own ascension into brand
namedom. This is a passage that, in unusual cases, and on account of the depth
and truth of what these artists perform, accrues a ritual urgency, recharming and
remythifying our relationship to the world - including harsh climes like the fair
- which is to say, they make it real.

Jack Bankowsky, extracts from Tent Community: Jack Bankowsky on Art Fair Art’, Artforum (October
2 0 0 5 )2 2 8 -3 2 .

Hal Foster
The Medium is the Market//2008

In 1975, Andy Warhol peered into the future and saw ... Damien Hirst? ‘Business
Art is the step that comes after Art’, Warhol wrote in The Philosophy o f Andy
Warhol. Not only was it OK for artists to make as much money as possible, but
‘making money is art’ and ‘good business is the best art.’ At the time Warhol was
the master of Business Art - he established Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1957, and
films, Interview magazine, books and TV programmes were to follow - but his
operation was small beer by contemporary standards. Today, artists like Hirst set
the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September [2008] he bypassed his two
major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work
directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial
margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single­
artist auction, set by Picasso with 88 works in 1993.
During those same two days Wall Street melted down. Over the previous

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weekend Merrill Lynch was bought in a fire sale by Bank of America and Lehman
Brothers vanished into thin air, both victims of the metastatic crisis in mortgage
securities. The Dow Jones plunged five hundred points on 15 September, its worst
day since 9/11, and nearly another five hundred two days later, even though the
US government had bailed out the insurance giant AIG the day before in yet
another act of socialized capitalism whereby gains are privatized and losses
shared by all. (The government had bailed out Bear Stearns in March, and took
over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in early September; as I write, more massive
infusions of taxpayers’ money into the financial system are on the way.)
The coincidence of the mega-successful auction in London with the meta-
financial disaster in New York is striking, and it makes a couple of things clear.
First, while the markets burn the art world plays on, and London is now its
undisputed capital. Second, even as titans fall, there are still lots of high rollers
with money to burn on art, at least outside the US (American buyers were
scarce at the Hirst auction). At £10.3 million, the top seller at Sotheby’s was The
Golden Calf, a white bullock in formaldehyde, with crown, horns and hoofs
made of 18-carat gold: dance on, idolaters! Yet how singular is the Hirst
phenomenon, by which I mean not only the recent auction, but an entire career
strung together by shock and scandal and a body of work whose medium is a
compound of media and market events?
Production for the marketplace has been a fundamental condition of art since
the Renaissance. However, the art market as we know it now is a far more recent
thing, an effect of the growth of an international bourgeoisie that emerged in the
boom years of the 1960s with surplus capital to expend, some of it on art,
particularly American Pop, that brand which, as the art historian Thomas Crow
recently put it in Artforum, ‘looked like products being sold like products’. The
network of commercial galleries expanded greatly at that time, as did the
influence of dealers and collectors. That contemporary art might be seen in the
first instance as an investment was soon made evident by the rise of high-return
auctions, the most infamous being the 1973 sale of the Robert and Ethel Scull
collection, which centred on Pop. Enraged artists saw none of the profits (with
Hirst, in this respect, there has been a complete turnabout).
After the recessionary 1970s, the anti-regulatory policies of Reagan and
Thatcher promoted a new class of the super-rich, some of whom became very
visible collectors. Naturally, they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture
over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of
Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of contemporary art but
also to the publicity value of its more notorious players. The art market fell
dramatically in 1990, three years after the stock market crash of 1987 (art and
financial markets might be connected, but they aren’t synchronized). Later in the

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decade, however, a fully neoliberal economy produced personal fortunes in
excess of those of the 1980s, and what would, in Alan Greenspan’s famous phrase,
be described as an ‘irrationally exuberant’ art market soon roared to life.
Saatchi, the standard-bearer of the 1980s boom, was an advertising executive;
his counterpart in the latest upswing in the art market is a hedge-fund manager,
Steven Cohen, who has used his enormous profits as founder of SAC Capital to
build an extensive collection of post-war art in just a few years. (Cohen bought the
first Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility o f Death in the Mind o f Someone Living, for
$8 million; it is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum.) According to Amy
Cappellazzo, international co-head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s,
writing in Artforum, the new type of collector understands contemporary art as ‘an
asset one can borrow against, or trade on and defer capital gains taxes on’, and
regards the art market essentially as a branch of the securities market. An added
attraction is that insider trading and price-fixing, technically illegal in other areas
of investment, are standard practices in the art world. In language that has become
common in art circles, Cappellazzo sums up the situation as follows:

Art’s recent financial appeal stems from the idea that high-quality works of art
were undervalued, and that as the market became more truly global in the past
five years, their worth would increase in value as a result of (a) heightened demand
for scarce objects; (b) an enormous roll up of private wealth that remains
unprecedented; and (c) the market necessity for a new asset class that could trade
among individuals globally.

These conditions might soon change, but for now the extent of the activity is
impressive: as primary players in the art market, ad executives and financiers
from Western Europe and North America are joined by petrodollar plutocrats
from Russia and the Middle East, as well as new moguls from India, South-East
Asia and elsewhere. The intensity of the activity is also remarkable: the turnover
at contemporary art auctions more than quadrupled between 2002 and 2006,
with sales at each of the two major houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, approaching
$1.5 billion in 2007 alone. Christie’s is controlled by Francois Pinault, who
operates his own museum in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and his own gallery,
the Haunch of Venison, in London, Zurich, Berlin and New York; for Pinault, who
also owns Gucci among other brands, buying, validating and selling art can all
be done in-house, as it were.
However, even in bubbly times contemporary art is not a sure-fire investment,
and in any case, investment alone cannot fully explain its allure. ‘These buyers
have a tremendous surplus of economic capital and an equally large deficit of
social and cultural capital’, Olav Velthuis, an expert on the art market, writes in

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 the same issue of Artforum. ‘By buying contemporary art, they buy access to a
social world.’ In this account the motive of the new collectors remains the old
one of prestige, position and ‘pleasure of participation’, as Crow puts it: ‘luxury
travel on the art-fair circuit, the opening dinners, the right parties, deference
from lesser players, access to the artists etc’.
What makes all this of more than sociological interest is that it bears directly
on the production as well as the reception of much art today. The desire for
display, for instance, brings a demand for scale, indeed for spectacle, with
dramatic effects on the cost of both making and exhibiting, whether the works
in question are the massive sculptures of Richard Serra, the lavish performances,
films and installations of Matthew Barney, or the light-and-space extravaganzas
of Olafur Eliasson. As a result, however international the clientele of high-end
art m ight be, it remains highly exclusive: a tight system of grand patronage has
returned, with the most coveted work often bespoken before it is produced and
w hisked away soon after. The public now sees contemporary art, more than
ever before, as a private affair, regardless of its content or its mode of address;
and th e profusion of private museums in the United States, Europe and elsewhere
has reinforced this suspicion.
O f course, there is a long history of collections becoming museums, but the
cu rre n t phenomenon amounts to a privatizing of public culture as much as the
rev erse. A case in point is the ‘venture philanthropy’ of the real-estate billionaire
Eli Broad, who has effectively established his own collection, indeed his own
m u seu m , within the tax-supported complex of the Los Angeles County Museum
A r t, with no certain commitment for the future. It is hardly unique for a trustee
° f a n institution to act in his own interest, but it tells of a situation in which many
m u s e u m directors and curators behave as servants of a patron class first and
c u s to d ia n s of collective patrimony second.
T h e commingling of much contemporary art with the media and the market
h a s affected it in other ways as well. The critic Julian Stallabrass highlights the
P a r a lle ls with corporate mass culture in his book Art Incorporated (2004): ‘an
e r n P h a s is on the image of youth, the prevalence of work that reproduces well on
r n a S a z in e pages, and the rise of the celebrity artist; work that cosies up to
c ° r n m o d it y culture and the fashion industry, and serves as accessible honey pots
t o s P o n so rs; and a lack of critique, except in defined and controlled circumstances’.
connections are significant, but others are more structural. For example,
° n c e seen as a bohemian outsider, the artist is now regarded as a model of the
i n v e n t i v e worker in a post-Fordist economy. According to the sociologists Luc
, *-a n ski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit o f Capitalism (2005), managerial
S c r ° u r s e over the last two decades has promoted attitudes and attributes once
° c J^ ted with the artistic personality: ‘autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous

Foster//The Medium is the Market//201

capacity, multi-tasking (in contrast to the narrow specialization of the old
division of labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability,
creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived
experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experience, being attracted to
informality and the search for interpersonal contacts’ .
Just as managerial discourse has assimilated artistic qualities in this manner,
so some artists have embraced business models with a rigour that puts Warhol
to shame. Hirst multi-tasks like mad: he has his own publishing house, clothing
line, restaurants past and present, and a ‘Murderme’ collection of art and
curiosities that will eventually be put on view in his Gothic revival manor in the
Cotswolds. He also has an army of assistants, as do his peers in Business Art, Jeff
Koons and Takashi Murakami. Koons oversees a studio factory with some ninety
employees in Manhattan, while Murakami runs a corporation with seventy
employees based in Tokyo and Queens. Work signed ‘Koons’ or ‘Murakami’ is
largely designed on computers by assistants and then executed by fabricators. At
times underscoring the collapse of the differences between museum art and
mass culture, at other times reinscribing them to their own advantage, all three
artists work in such a way as to make the market the medium of the art.
In the 1980s Koons played ambiguously on the convergence of art exhibition
and commodity display: he stacked immaculate vacuum cleaners in well-lit
Plexiglas cases, or submerged brand-new basketballs in water-filled glass
tanks. In subsequent series, just as foreign to art-world taste, he refashioned
tokens of suburban leisure (bar accessories, for example, in stainless steel), and
figurines of small-town hominess - cute pets and farmyard animals - in
polychrome wood. Objects in stainless steel and porcelain ranging from a bust
of Louis XIV to a statuette of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a
travelling pedlar in mediaeval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp
Bubbles, showed a canny sense of the capaciousness of kitsch. But the social
unease produced by a conscious display of bad taste wasn’t at all the point for
Koons, who, in Warholian fashion, insisted on the sincerity of his message. ‘I
don’t see a Hummel figurine as tasteless’, he would say. ‘I see it as beautiful. I
see it and respond to the sentimentality of the work.’ The avant-garde once
defined itself in opposition to kitsch, so its embrace of it might be expected to
carry a modicum of surprise, but Koons didn’t intend to be part of a vanguard.
On the contrary: ‘I have always tried to create work which does not alienate any
part of my audience’, Koons states. ‘Through my work, I tell people to embrace
their past, to embrace who they are.’ This past, this identity, is constituted by
the symbols of ‘mass cultural history’, according to Koons, and we are
encouraged to deem it ‘perfect just the way it was’.
Koons’ ‘Celebration’ series (1994-2008), includes 20 large sculptures of

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balloon figures, Valentine hearts, diamond rings and cracked-open eggs, cast in
higbi-chromium stainless steel, coated with transparent colour and polished to a
brilliant shine in the manner of luxury gift packaging. At first, production
difficulties led to cost over-runs that pushed Koons to the point of bankruptcy.
But when his auction prices rose sharply, one of his dealers, Jeffrey Deitch, was
able to assemble a consortium of gallery owners and patrons to buy some of the
pieces in advance, sight unseen. (It turned out to be a smart investment: in 2007,
one such work, Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), sold at Sotheby’s for $23.6 million.)
What makes these objects so attractive to patron and public alike? Consider
Balloon Dog (1994-2000), which comes in luscious yellow, orange or red: it offers
the frisson of a small, fragile and ephemeral toy made monumental, hard and
permanent, produced at great cost and sold at an even greater price; it also
presents a seductive mix of populism, at the level of the image, and exclusivity of
ownership. This, some critics say, makes a Koons sculpture the ideal public
artwork; one of his advocates has spoken of the ‘panorama of society’ addressed
in his work. Peter Schjeldahl captures what this ‘panorama’ consists in: Koons
‘apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money
in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste’. His recent work is on view at
Versailles. [September 2008-January 2009.]
Murakami exploits the convergence of art, media and market more thoroughly
even than Koons. Where Koons operates with smart selections from the repertoire
of Western kitsch, Murakami works with figures of his own branding inspired by
the Japanese subcultures of otaku (often translated as ‘geek’) and kawaii
(‘cuteness’). Otaku fans tend to be male adolescents obsessed with particular
characters in manga (comic books) and anime (television programmes and films),
some of which are action figures to identify with and others submissive girls to
fantasize about. An early attempt by Murakami in the otaku vein was Miss ko2
(1997), a six-foot tall hybrid of a pixie blonde girl with her hair in a ribbon and a
buxom porn star in a skimpy waitress outfit. Miss ko2 was not a hit among otaku
fans - apparently she didn’t appear submissive enough - but Murakami has
found more success with motifs that play on the female-oriented subculture of
kawaii: zesty mushrooms, smiley flowers, toddlers called ‘Kaikai’ and ‘Kiki’ (his
corporation is named after them), and, above all, ‘Mr DOB’. Named after a manga
character, DOB resembles a Mickey Mouse whose head (that is all he is) spells
out his name (D and B appear on his ears, and his face is an O). Toothy and sinister
in his first incarnation, DOB was quickly refashioned as infantile and cute; as it
happens, Mickey evolved in a similar way.
Japan does not hold to the separation of high and low culture that once
marked the modem West, but still, Murakami’s reach across socio-economic
registers might be unprecedented. Bright mutants like DOB appear both in the

Foster//The Medium is the Market//203

costliest paintings and sculptures and in the cheapest merchandise (stickers,
badges, key chains, dolls etc); they can be found in major museums as well as in
convenience stores. Keith Haring’s signature figures o f‘the radiant baby’ and ‘the
barking dog’ also extended from T-shirts to artworks. Yet his ‘Pop Shop’ was a
small store compared to Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., which offers no fewer than 18
services, including advertising, packaging, animation, exhibition development
and website production. With his helpers Murakami also manages the careers of
seven young Japanese artists, runs an art fair, hosts a radio show, writes a
newspaper column, acts as a brand consultant for a television station as well as
for the real-estate tycoon Minoru Mori, and is planning to produce his own
animated films. His biggest splash in the West came in 2002 when Marc Jacobs
commissioned him to design a version of the Louis Vuitton monogram; sales of
handbags with the rebranded symbol exceeded $300 million in their first year of
production. That Murakami considers such activities fully in line with his art
practice is made clear by the presence of a Vuitton boutique smack in the middle
of his current retrospective - another sale space among the others.1
With Warhol, arguably, there was a moment of disruption in this confusion
of positions and values: of artistic and commercial, high and low, rare and
mass, expensive and cheap, and so on. There is little tension, and not much
insight, now that these pairs have imploded: just a giddy delight, a weary
despair, or a manic depressive cocktail of the two. ‘Anytime we do the honest
thing’, Murakami has said in an instructive turn of language, ‘we get the win.
People find it very difficult to find their honest desire. Andy Warhol did that.’
Yet beyond Murakami’s apparent straight talk or Koons’ quasi-medicated
cheeriness, one can sometimes catch a sinister or perverse note (it’s there in
Warhol, too). However innocent it appears at first glance, Balloon Dog also
intimates a polymorphous sexuality, with the bulbous parts of the poodle
morphing into weaponized breasts or penises; and the initial DOB bears more
than a trace of the sado-masochistic nastiness sometimes sensed in Mickey
Mouse or Donald Duck. Walter Benjamin once speculated that the early Disney
films were so popular because ‘the public recognizes its own life’ in the trials
Mickey and Donald are made to endure, and that their primary lesson is to
teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric. There is an element of
this odd appeal, too, in the cute degradation that Koons and Murakami figures
embody. Certainly Murakami understands the infantile aspects of otaku and
kawaii subcultures in this way: he has related them to the traumatic effects of
nuclear holocaust and post-war subjection in Japan.
This dark side is perhaps clearest in the work of Hirst, who, in his courting of
controversy, is the champion of converting public attention into financial reward.
Yet even before Hirst floated his first shark in a tank of formaldehyde or left his first

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cow’s head to rot in a vitrine, he saw that ‘being sensational isn’t sensational
anymore’, that anaesthesia was the flip side of shock, and that deadness was his
true theme. In this respect, he produced his piece de resistance last year when he
exhibited a human skull cast in platinum and studded with 8,601 diamonds. Many
interpreted this pirate treasure cum crown jewel as a vanitas, but, if this is so, it is
a very glamorous one and a jackpot, too: it came into the world valued at £50
million, and the rumour is that Hirst was part of the consortium that bought it.
‘It was left to the bourgeoisie of the twentieth century to incorporate
nihilism into its apparatus of domination’, Benjamin remarked during the
Depression of the 1930s, with an eye on the embittered realisms and bankrupt
surrealisms of the time. To reflect on this nihilism, but also to have updated it
and pushed it further, is the ambiguous achievement of the Warholian line of
Koons, Murakami and Hirst.

1 The retrospective spent three months at LA MoCA, three months at the Brooklyn Museum o f Art, is
now at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and will be in Bilbao in the new year [2009].

Hal Foster, ‘The Medium is the Market’, London Review o f Books (9 October 2008) 2 3 -4 .

Scott Rothkopf
Takashi Murakami: Company Man//2007

(...) Welcome to Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. Upstairs, an immaculate white office space
houses rows of desks at which trendy kids, mostly of Japanese descent, work
silently behind computer terminals. They are attending to contracts and
licensing agreements and merchandise orders related to Takashi Murakami’s
work or to that of the seven other artists represented under Kaikai Kiki’s
corporate umbrella. At one end of the space, a milky screen slides aside to reveal
three more employees in the accounting department, where a sign taped to the
wall provides current exchange rates in dollars, euros, yen and pounds. In an
adjacent office, I am shown the twin-size pine bed on which Murakami sleeps
when he’s in town. (Ordinarily, he prefers a sleeping bag on the floor, but the
heat in the new space isn’t working yet, so somebody borrowed an old mattress
from somebody over in Brooklyn.) Downstairs is the studio, where a Japanese
assistant in a blue camo parka is completing painting orders for the American

Rothkopf//Takashi Murakami: Company M an//205

market, with the strains of Barry White’s ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe’
filling the air. When asked how this satellite studio works, I’m told that an exact
template of each painting is transmitted electronically from the design office at
the Tokyo headquarters, and that none of the finished canvases are released
before the visiting master has given them his final seal of approval. With this
description in mind, the outpost atelier can seem something of a corporate
redundancy, but it apparently saves on shipping and import/export taxes, and,
perhaps more important, it serves as a kind of demo Santa’s workshop to edify
and impress Western curators, dealers, and critics like me.
Taking a closer look at the paintings nearing completion, I’m surprised to
discover that they sport Murakami’s candy-coloured riff on Louis Vuitton’s iconic
monogram - surprised, that is, not because it seems an inappropriate subject,
but because he notoriously exhibited similar canvases more than three years ago,
when his collaboration with the venerable luxury house created something of a
succes de scandale. The story is by now well known. In 2002, Marc Jacobs, the
brand’s art-savvy American mastermind, invited Murakami to offer his take on
the classic LV monogram. The resulting handbags - which bore brightly hued
logos as well as the artist’s own signature ‘jellyfish eyes’ and smiling cherry
blossoms and fruit - wound up creating an overnight media sensation, appearing
everywhere from the luxury glossies to 0, The Oprah Magazine and People, and
grossing more than 300 million dollars in their first full year of production alone.
At the height of the feeding frenzy, while on assignment to review the 2003
Venice Biennale for Artforum, I was struck that the ubiquity of the bags - real and
fake, on arms and street corners - allowed Murakami handily to steal the show’s
spotlight. Comparing his unintentional ambush to those official entries that
posed accepted if futile challenges to the dominion of world capital, I wrote: ‘If
Murakami’s satchels seemed at all subversive in Venice, it was certainly not
because they demonstrated the obviously critical - or, at the very least, ironic -
relationship to the global culture industry that was de rigeur at the Biennale ...
This was clearly not a case of market infiltration, but rather penetration, w hich...
was perfectly suited to an omnivorous oeuvre that engages questions of copyright
and consumption with ruthless glee’ (Artforum, September 2003). Little could I
conceive, however, just how ruthless, gleeful, and, finally, penetrating his broader
practice would turn out to be.
Indeed, during my visit to Kaikai Kiki’s New York branch office - with its
accountants and copyright and merchandising specialists - it became clear that
Murakami’s LV collaboration was only the most conspicuous (and, no doubt,
lucrative) point in a constellation of activities that dwarfs his gallery-bound
paintings and sculpture in administrative scope and market reach. In addition to
churning out finely crafted artworks, he is busy producing related merchandise;

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running an art fair; managing the careers of seven youngjapanese artists; planning
exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues; hosting a radio show and penning
a newspaper column; pursuing commercial ‘collaborations’ in the form of product
tie-ins, advertising commissions and corporate branding projects; and establishing
an independent animation studio with an eye towards the eventual release of a
feature-length film - all under the auspices of Kaikai Kiki, a business venture that
may well constitute a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk for the new millennium. If Andy
Warhol provided the model, Murakami has broken the mould. [...]

Catalogue Copies
Almost immediately after Murakami made a self-conscious decision in the early
1990s to forsake his training in traditional nihonga painting and pursue a career in
what he endearingly calls ‘contemporary art’, his work began to absorb the style
and even the literal stuff of Japan’s pop-cultural universe, and it was not long
thereafter that he started spitting products of his own right back into the
commercial muddle. It is thus by now a critical commonplace to say that he ‘blurs
the line’ between ‘art’ and ‘mass culture’ by establishing a bidirectional network
between them. To begin, he has performed an acute reading of Japanese otaku
culture (characterized by its obsession with the worlds of manga and anime),
arriving at a potent distillate of their forms and subtexts, which then provides the
basic design DNA for his work. This process has spawned motifs and characters
such as the Mickey Mouse-like Mr DOB and the leggy Miss ko, along with bands of
mysterious mushrooms and rictus-faced daisies, all rendered in dazzling costume-
jewel-tone colours. These beguiling creations serve as the basic subjects of
Murakami’s paintings and sculpture, while at the same time appearing on a range
of merchandise, including key chains, plush dolls, stickers, mugs, file folders,
cellphone straps, buttons and T-shirts that return them to the world of mass-
market bibelots from whence their inspiration came. It is a brilliant strategy - one
that borrows from Western Pop art’s groundbreaking mass-cultural appropriations,
but differs significantly in that Murakami gets to play both Walt Disney and Roy
Lichtenstein, creating his own Mickey Muse that crosses the wires between
boutiques and galleries far and wide. It is also a strategy far more complicated than
its now-standard two-way modelling suggests, particularly as evidenced in the
chef d'oeuvre of his mass-market wares, the Superflat Museum.
Indeed, of all of Murakami’s prodigious forays into the world of merchandising,
none better exemplifies his Mobius-like marriage of high and low than the aptly
named ‘museum’, a kind of botte-en-valise for the Cracker Jack set. Here he adopts
the form and distribution mechanisms of popular Japanese shokugan (literally
‘snack toy’) figures, which are ordinarily found ‘free’ inside packages of kid-
friendly snacks and sweets. Each museum consists of a colourful cardboard box,

Rothkopf//Takashi Murakami: Company Man//207

emblazoned with the artist’s signature ‘jellyfish eyes’, containing a minutely
painted figurine, no more than a few inches tall, of one of his well known artistic
creations - DOB, Miss ko, or Flower Ball, for example - along with two pink
pellets of fruit-flavoured chewing gum. Released in late 2003 and early 2004,
many of these could be purchased at Japanese 7-Eleven and Lawson convenience
stores, among other retail outlets, for the price of only V350 (about $3.50), though
amassing the complete collection hardly came cheap. That’s because Murakami
created five separate series (in limited editions of up to 30,000, as indicated on
the accompanying serial-numbered ‘certificates of authenticity’), each comprising
as many as ten different figures whose identities remained sealed in every box.
According to the enclosed promotional literature, this blind marketing scheme
was a ‘violation’ of the usual shokugan ‘rules’, since it ‘was considered unnecessarily
to provoke the consumer’s purchase incentive and there was a tendency of
voluntary restraint in the industry’. One wonders what could possibly be meant
by ‘unnecessarily’ spurring sales in the case of a marketing gimick intended to do
precisely that, but perhaps the ‘collect-em-all’ advertising tactics of Happy Meals
and chocolate Kinder Eggs have yet to colonize certain non-Western markets as
efficiently as one might otherwise have thought. In any case, the fact that
Murakami would co-opt (and then claim to outstrip) one of the food industry’s
most exploitative marketing tools is but one of the most glaring signs that he is
flouting the rules of art’s doctrinaire critical game.
Like any respectable museum, Murakami’s comes with informational
brochures elucidating the collection. Each tells in detail (in Japanese and English)
the story of the figure it accompanies, explaining both who the character is (a
narrative supplement common in the marketing of collectible dolls and figurines)
and, more atypically, the history of its artistic genesis. We find in the DOB leaflet,
for example, an early ‘rough sketch’ from 1993, a biography of the model-maker,
Tomohide Enoki, with whom Murakami collaborated on this and other figures; an
image of the first plush DOB doll (‘no longer available’); an image of DOB stickers
priced at ¥300 (presumably still available); even a note offering that DOB was
‘created with an analysis of the “survival secret” and “universality” of various
popular figures as its theme’ - hardly the type of meta-disclosure that the culture
industry’s mythmakers would append to the very figures in question. In other
brochures, art-historical terms like tondo and a view of Murakami’s Flower Ball in
a prestigious museum jostle with images of Kaikai Kiki hand towels sporting the
same motif. This catch-all compendium grows ever more mind-boggling when
we turn to the adjacent suggestions for further reading (prices conveniently
provided in yen, ‘tax excluded’), where a serious catalogue on the artist gets a plug
alongside a comic book whose protagonist’s signature phrase, ‘dobozite dobozite’
(why, why?), lent DOB his name. It’s as if these little brochures were instruction

208//BUSINESS ART
manuals for how to view Murakami’s Superflat project as a whole: while we’re
not likely to encounter a DOB painting and keychain in the same physical space
(the wall between a museum’s gift shop and galleries still being stubbornly
opaque), here we can observe Murakami’s slippery alter ego trafficking among his
various incarnations - mass and scarce, prior and post, cheap and dear.
For the artist, this delirium is precisely the point. While Bazooka Joe gave you a
comic to ponder while chewing your sugary cud, Murakami bets the kids today are
hungrier for an art-market primer. On the back of each leaflet, beneath the heading
‘Intention of the Project’, he notes that the lifesize version of Miss ko (whose
diminutive likeness you may have just acquired ‘free’ with the purchase of two
gumballs) was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2003 for half a million dollars. He
opines, ‘When comparing a half million dollars to ‘free’, there’s an overwhelmingly
different set of values, almost a confusion of values. This confusion is the purpose
of creating the shokugan figures.’ But what really is the nature of this confusion,
and is it of a different order than the relationship between a painting of DOB and
all those key chains, and mouse pads, and plush dolls plastered with his shit-eating
grin? The answer would seem to be yes, given that those products, no matter how
ubiquitous or cheap, refuse the status of ‘replicas’, that crassest of equivalences
between an art object and its collectible copy. While we’re now well familiar with
images of contemporary artworks appearing on a postcard, T-shirt or tote bag, the
reproduction of the thing itself is usually reserved for the plastic Venus de Milos
and facsimile Rembrandts on canvas that only the most vulgar - or dead - artist
would condone. Here, fresh from the success of his Louis Vuitton project, Murakami
beats so many licensing-happy foundations and heirs to the museum shop’s
posthumous punch. But in order to ensure his merchandise’s ‘artistic merits’ (his
phrase, not mine), he boasts of collaborating on his figurines with Kaiyodo, the
very same, highly esteemed otaku modelling company that produced his ‘original’
lifesize sculptures. So while the shokugan may differ in scale, finish and edition
size from their gallery-dwelling counterparts, they share with them not only the
same basic forms and amorphous context (as elaborated in the leaflets), but also
analogous design processes and quality standards. The (unintended) ironies here
are rich, since Murakami is essentially invoking the name of a major commercial
modelling concern to confer ‘fine art’ status on ‘free’ trinkets that would ordinarily
be beneath even that corporation’s lowly market purview.
With the artistic merits of his figurines intact, Murakami would have them
pave the way for his next generation of collectors in Japan,, where, his brochures
contend, ‘it is not common to purchase and live with a work of art’. ‘I hope’, the
artist writes, ‘that the shokugan figure, which customers may purchase at a
convenience store, will become a “starter kit” for an art collection.’ To that end,
he helpfully provides three large photographs showing his mini minions arrayed

Rothkopf//Takashl Murakami: Company M an//209

in modish Design Within Reach-style interiors, where they nestle among the
translucent rooks and pawns of a Plexiglas chess set or stand beside a white
ceramic objetd’art stamped upside down with Karim Rashid’s copyright insignia.
A ‘starter kit’ for art-collecting, then, but one strangely indistinguishable from
the other accoutrements of the well-designed life.
The purposeful confusions, clearly, are many. If, as Murakami has stated time
and again, the Japanese aesthetic tradition makes little distinction between high
art and mass culture, why claim for the shokugan artistic merits to separate them
from the garden variety figurines they ape? And, if such a distinction is to be
made, why picture the ‘starter kit’ of this artistic insurrection amidst so many
hackneyed markers of no-brow good taste? Internal contradictions abound (and
Murakami readily acknowledges them, pointing to Warhol’s interviews as his
model), but to hold him to the letter of the law would be to betray the vestiges of
a worldview ill-equipped to deal with his unencumbered - and, more frighteningly,
unironic - cultural gymnastics. What we are talking about here is a little plastic
artwork in the guise of a tchotchke in the guise of an artwork in the guise of a
tchotchke. Warhol may have accomplished that transmutation to the first degree,
and Keith Haring to the second, but Murakami pulls off a kind of death-defying
triple lutz. His true aim, it seems, is not to have it both ways but to have it every
way - to confound the categories of high and low to such an extent that we are no
longer mired between them but launched into some outer headspace from which
we look with amazement on his freewheeling play of signifiers. [...]

Yen and Cents

It is tempting - comforting, even - for an art critic or historian to discuss
Murakami’s high/low trafficking in terms of his symbolic manipulations alone.
We have already seen how fluently his branded personae slip from sculptures to
figurines, paintings to handbags, galleries to convenience stores - all within a
wildly permissive intellectual framework of the artist’s own device. This would
surely be enough to earn him a place near the head of Warhol’s table, but it must
be noted that such semiotic brinkmanship unfolds within a complicated economic
system, braiding together a number of key precedents. Money, of course, has been
a subject in art for centuries, and throughout the post-war period, figures as
diverse as Yves Klein, Michael Asher and Santiago Sierra have at times made
financial transactions the raw materials of their art. Few, however, have openly
adopted capitalist business models themselves as the very core and structure of
their practice, and none has done so more vociferously than Murakami. This, after
all, is an artist who unabashedly advertises his auction records in his own
promotional literature (‘a half million dollars’) and who endlessly talks about
artistic and financial success as if they were one and the same.

210//BUSINESS AST
 A lone forerunner in this department, one must concede, is Mark Kostabi, who
has had the gall - or just bad taste - to advertise his sales figures for decades,
trumpeting his trumped-up statistics not to gum-chewing teens but to an art-
world audience dubious of his work’s intrinsic merits. His (mostly losing) strategy
has been to try and force the cultural higher-ups to accept the validity of his
practice by virtue of its supposed popularity among certain market segments. Yet
nobody at New York’s Museum of Modern Art seems to be listening, and Kostabi,
for his part, pretends not to care, today subsisting in a kind of alternative art
universe with few points of tangency to the one at which he scoffs. Murakami, by
contrast, reverses the flow of information, conveying his record prices at Christie’s
- an arena where Kostabi’s paintings are unlikely to change hands - to a broad
(and, importantly, young) audience of brand-conscious consumers who may be
duly impressed. On a more subtle level, increasing numbers of artists have made
public their financial attainments in photo pictorials of lavish studios and
townhouses. This bid to claim socio-economic parity with their patrons may also
serve to reflect an understated halo of success back on their work. Yet if Julian
Schnabel famously spends his days in Sulka silk pajamas, Murakami professes to
spending his nights in a cheap sleeping bag. This may be a matter of personal taste,
but it’s also a mode of self-presentation perfectly in sync with a changing global
corporate culture, one whose new-economy titans the artist would no doubt like
to impress. So, while Henry Kravis may look rich in a bespoke suit, Murakami
knows his hero Bill Gates looks even richer in a pair of Dockers. Such sartorial
analogies are hardly beside the point, for if we are to take seriously the full gamut
of Murakami’s professional engagements, we should no doubt be concerned with
the up-to-the-minute image of the company president he projects.
So too, of course, should we be concerned with the bottom line. While
Murakami’s merchandise is only the tip of an ever-expanding corporate iceberg,
the economic implications of his shokugan might serve as an instructive point of
entry, a node on his practice where his ‘confusion of values’ takes on a decidedly
pecuniary inflection. He claims (again in his leaflets) that the close kinship of his
figurines and sculpture proper is a ‘dangerous gamble’, one ‘with the potential to
decrease the monetary value of my artworks’. Here Murakami gets points for
bravado, but his protests can come off as a bit coy. After all, he better than anyone
understands that while critics and theorists may be ‘confused’ by his wild juggling
of signs, the market certainly has no trouble distinguishing between a plastic
figurine in an edition of 30,000 and its big buxom sister in an edition of three - a
power of discrimination to which the artist’s ever-rising retail and resale prices
attest. But this discrepancy does not undermine or annul his high/low manipulations
so much as it confirms the masterful orchestration of his system as a whole.
Indeed, I would argue that no artist before him has been able to generate as

Rothkopf//Takashi Murakami: Company Man//211

great a price differential between such ostensibly similar stuff - all while
maintaining audience credibility at equally far ends of the viewing spectrum
(here, think the kids at 7-Eleven and the curators clamouring for his work).
Koons, with whom Murakami is often compared, has succeeded in winning over
an equally broad audience with icons such as his topiary puppies and glistening
balloon dogs. Yet although he shares with Murakami a love of publicity,
analogous modes of studio fabrication, and, above all, a magpie infatuation with
the culture industry’s effluence, Koons has shown almost no interest in moving
beyond (or below) the production of objects that circulate in the most rarefied
market climes. For all the talk of how he and his contemporaries like Haim
Steinbach in the 1980s ‘played on the collapse of the dialectic of art and
commodity, but in the form of the art-commodity’, as Hal Foster successfully
put it [in ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’, The Return o f the Real, 1996], there’s never
any mistaking that art is the privileged term in this hyphenated equation. Even
Warhol, for all his extra-art-world dabblings, never moved as much merch; the
licensing of his images of images on everything from, well, handbags to last
year’s Barney’s Christmas catalogue (‘Happy Andy Warhol-idays’) came only
after his death. Nevertheless, Murakami would have a hard-to-beat edge on this
front: the brilliance of his brand is that his characters, like Disney’s, are entirely
and unmistakably his own, yet their vernacular essence makes them supple
surrogates in a world of pre-existing product lines. [...]
It is this aggressively unrepentant posture that makes Murakami the
consummate figure for our artistic present, one whose ‘compromised’ status,
particularly in relation to today’s hypertrophied market, seems less like a
compromise than a supremely canny form of realism in an age of rapidly
multiplying art fairs and ‘special art issues’ published by the likes of W and
Vanity Fair. Murakami’s claim to experiencing a certain ‘embarrassment’ for
James Turrell on encountering the elder artist’s installation-cum-decor in Louis
Vuitton’s new Champs Elysees boutique is an unexpected yet apt intuition on
the part of the Japanese handbag maven: we may have known for ages that
‘advanced’ art can be co-opted as nothing more than good design, but it’s still
hard to reconcile ourselves to the thought that an artist like Turrell might
willingly deploy his supposedly sublime visual vacuums in the midst of so
much commercial clutter. (Where, one wonders, is the Dia Foundation when
you need it?) Olafur Eliasson’s 2006 holiday window designs for the same
luxury house betrayed a similarly conflicted idealism. Although Eliasson
stipulated that no products be shown alongside his freestanding sculptural
lamps in order to preserve their integrity as ‘a serious work of art’, for all their
formal and conceptual interest, the gesture ended up looking less like a radical
refusal than another tactic from the annals of cutting-edge advertising, which

212//BUSINESS ART
 has long experimented with substituting an aura of chic mystery for the product
being pushed. The point is not to blame Turrell, Eliasson, or countless others for
wanting to share in commerce’s attention-grabbing spotlight (while
simultaneously wanting to preserve the appearance of standing just outside it),
but rather to suggest that Murakami is far more unselfconscious - and thus,
ironically, far more conscious - about his role in this system. His work anticipates
and directly responds to the burgeoning market within which all art (no matter
its price tag) is now to a greater or lesser extent necessarily implicated, and he
goes one step further by directly demonstrating how that commercial network
itself participates in much larger economic structures. We could call this stance
complicit or collusive, or we could simply call it honest. Indeed, if anything is
more morally suspect than ‘selling out’ (a term which itself seems almost
hopelessly quaint today), it’s the false hope that appearing not to have done so
might serve as some form of expiation. Murakami clearly knows better, and his
project helps us to as well.
The surprise in all this is that just when we think Murakami has reconciled
himself more unequivocally and seamlessly than any of his predecessors to the
flows of mass production and consumption, strange chinks open up in his
business model. Returning to the shokugan, for example, we realize that at the
moment it appears he has leveraged his brand to the fullest - the snack toys,
remember, are selling on the strength of his name, not Swatch’s or Louis Vuitton’s
- Murakami may actually be pushing something of a high-volume loss leader.
For even if he claims to have adopted a sales strategy more manipulative than
Japanese big business allows itself, this is likely something of a hollow boast.
After all, the profit margin on a few hundred thousand units - no matter how
inexpensively hand-painted in China - would scarcely amount to the artist’s take
on the sale of a single large painting. (And this is not even to account for the
tremendous in- and out-of-house staff hours and design fees invariably associated
with such a complicated project.) The point, however, is not to hold up slim
margins as a sign of anti-capitalist valour (a la Haring), the secret sacrifice that
commutes ‘business art’, to borrow Warhol’s sobriquet, back into plain old art.
Rather, it is to suggest that Murakami’s ‘confusion of values’ plays itself out on
both symbolic and real economic registers, and that the most glaring signs of the
artist’s submission to the interests of mass culture may ironically point the way
to his greatest conceptual gambit.

Model Business
With the stakes ever-rising, Murakami’s real gamble may be the ongoing
growth and maintenance of his own multinational corporation, Kaikai Kiki Co.,
Ltd., whose multiple suffixes he brandishes with the same pride that others

Pothkopf//Takashi Muralcami: Company Man//213

might flaunt ‘Esq.’ or ‘Ph.D.’ The venture started humbly enough as the Hiropon
Factory, which Murakami established outside Tokyo in 1996 and named in
obvious homage to Warhol. There, he assembled a motley band of assistants
who helped produce his paintings and sculpture while also attending to related
efforts like T-shirt design and the publication of Hiropon, a house organ in the
form of a free newspaper. (...)
In 1998, Murakami opened the tiny New York outpost that served as a
necessary toehold in the capital of the international art market, and in 2001 he
reincorporated the Hiropon Factory as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. This move recalls
Warhol’s own eventual rechristening of the Factory as Andy Warhol Enterprises,
and, more important, it mimics recent shifts among affluent nations from goods-
to service-based economies. For although Murakami still attends to the
production of an ever-expanding universe of ‘artworks’ and ‘merchandise’ (a
distinction maintained in his corporate structure if not in his Superflat ideology),
he has increasingly focused on consulting and managerial projects. With roughly
one hundred employees stationed between three branch offices in Tokyo and
New York, the company pursues, according to its official website, some eighteen
interrelated business functions, which merit enumeration in full:

1 Exhibitions in Japan and overseas, event coordination, contemporary art

course-planning and production.
2 Artworks: planning, production, sales and imports/exports.
3 Books: planning, cover and binding design, editing, publishing, sales and
imports/exports.
4 Art textbooks: planning, production, sales and imports/exports.
5 Clothing: planning, design, production, sales and imports/exports.
6 Consumer goods: planning, design, production, sales and imports/exports.
7 Packaging: product design, production, sales and imports/exports.
8 Advertising: planning and production.
9 Websites: planning and production.
10 Antique sales.
11 Copyright and translation: rights, management and trading.
12 Artists’ and celebrities’ performance, illustration and manuscript management.
13 Characters: planning, development and design sales.
14 Film and video: planning, production, sales and loans for promoting sales of
broadcast programmes and character products.
15 Art lecturer despatch and introduction.
16 Animation: planning, production, sales and imports/exports.
17 Animal- and plant-handling and sales.
18 All tasks accompanying all of the above.

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The list is dizzying. Purposefully so, one imagines, with its slight hint of Enron-
style puffery. (When asked about the ‘animal- and plant-handling and sales’,
Kaikai Kiki’s executive director explained that Murakami has occasionally sold
killiefish at GEISAI, the semi-annual Tokyo-based art fair the artist founded five
years ago and continues to oversee under Kaikai Kiki’s auspices.) Although it
would be impossible in a short essay to describe comprehensively the full scope
of his various ventures, a few bear elaborating here. For example, Murakami’s
involvement with advertising (item number eight) draws on a long, if seamy,
undercurrent of twentieth-century art. Dali, to take only the most problematic
case, infamously licensed images of his art and himself to almost anyone with
the cash to pay for them, and he also produced new commercial work in the form
of print ads for Bryans hosiery, posters for the French national railways, packaging
designs for Coup de Feu perfume and Osborne brandy, and even an unsuccessful
television spot for Alka Seltzer, which showed the septuagenarian artist painting
on a female model to simulate the medicine’s salubrious effects. Late in life
Warhol, too, returned to the world of advertising that he had left behind to
become a ‘real’ artist, though his most notable command performances in the
field took the form of celebrity endorsements - for Diet Coke, Braniff airlines (in
a campaign also starring Dali), and the investment banking firm Drexel Burnham
- rather than design work for hire.
Taking permission from these debased precedents, Murakami has significantly
upped the ante by acting as a full-service brand consultant for a Japanese
television station and for billionnaire Minoru Mori’s mammoth Tokyo real-estate
development Roppongi Hills. Mori, Japan’s largest commercial landlord, called
on Murakami to replace a major Japanese ad agency just four months before his
centre’s 2003 opening, and the artist devised a family of smiley creatures from
‘Planet 66’ to serve as mascots for the complex. Presided over by a not-so-veiled
portrait of Mori himself in the form of a cuddly salamander whose name, Shacho,
means ‘president’ in Japanese, the characters were turned into sculptures to
adorn Roppongi Hills’ main entrance and appear in the centre’s promotional
literature and signage, in addition to starring in animated television
advertisements and decorating a line of briskly selling souvenirs. Importantly,
they share a design vocabulary indistinguishable from Murakami’s proprietary
creations like DOB, and he has retained permission to use them in his painting
and sculpture as he wishes. The fact that Shacho and a few of his friends from
Planet 66 wound up in the Superflat Museum collection, along with miniatures
of Murakami’s most iconic sculptures, only indicates the utter futility of
attempting to differentiate clearly between his art and commercial work - a
border that in the case of Warhol or Dali has been far easier to police.
If Murakami’s advertising projects take to new extremes the relatively modest

Rothkopf//Takashi Murakami: Company Man//215

practices of these predecessors, it is more difficult to find any touchstones for
many of Kaikai Kiki’s other business activities. For example, several of those
delineated in the list above pertain to the production and marketing (and licensing
and shipping etc.) of not only Murakami’s art but that of several Japanese artists
promoted under Kaikai Kiki’s umbrella. Many of these artists - Chiho Aoshima,
Chinatsu Ban, Akane Koide, Mahomi Kunikata, Mr, Rei Sato and Aya Takano -
began their careers as studio assistants of Murakami’s or under the employ of
Kaikai Kiki and have lately begun to garner attention in their own right. Rather
than entrusting their own professional development to far-flung Western galleries
that may not have a full grasp of the specifics of their work or a single-minded
interest in their advancement, these artists allow Kaikai Kiki to manage their
careers in exchange, of course, for a cut of their sales. To this end, Murakami
advises them on the direction of their studio practices, on where to show their
work (brokering deals with overseas galleries, some of which may represent him
as well), and on potential marketing tie-ins, collaborations and merchandising
opportunities. Kaikai Kiki then provides crucial administrative support by assisting
with complicated tax and billing details, translation services, press contacts, and
all of the other myriad issues that attend the nurturing of a career in what remains
- despite the Western world’s self-congratulatory affirmation of its recent
‘globalization’ - a somewhat alien cultural and commercial arena. (...)

The World’s a Stage

(...) Warhol would be proud - or maybe jealous. After all, it is he - the first master
of the diversified portfolio - who casts his long pale shadow over Kaikai Kiki’s
corporate sprawl. And it is with him that we must end. By the time he died,
Warhol’s brand had at one point or another included a magazine, a television
studio (producing videos for the Cars and a show of his own for MTV), a rock band,
books (an arena which Murakami has also lately entered), and a passel of films
destined for release not in art houses but in honest-to-goodness movie theatres.
‘Business art is the step that comes after Art’, he famously wrote, ‘Being good in
business is the most fascinating kind of a r t... making money is art and working is
art and good business is the best art.’ [The Philosophy o f Andy Warhol: From A to B
and Back Again, 1975.) The remark has an aphoristic ring, but in retrospect, Andy
Warhol Enterprises may actually look less like a proper commercial endeavour
than a glamorous house of cards buttressed by the sale of its figurehead’s paintings
(the designation seems an apt one for Warhol here, given that the majority of his
ventures, unlike Murakami’s, were not overseen by him but by acolyte entrepreneurs
such as Paul Morrissey, Vincent Fremont and Bob Colacello). (...)
Warhol may have managed to hatch a brood o f ‘Superstars’, but none of them
could sustain their status outside the Factory’s make-believe hothouse, their

216//BUSINESS ART
celebrity always stuck like gaudy barnacles on the cult of his. Murakami, by
contrast, is intent on establishing independent careers for his chosen sevensome,
and he may have been wise to put the name Kaikai Kiki on the door rather than
his own. After all, Andy Warhol Enterprises died with its namesake, but Murakami
- perhaps taking a page out of Christian Dior’s or Martha Stewart’s playbooks -
knows that a truly successful brand today must be able to survive its founder, and
he claims that he may be one day step down as president to become just another
artist in Kaikai Kiki’s fold. It’s hard to believe the famous micromanager on this
score, but whatever the case, he has succeeded in masterminding a kind of self-
sustaining organism totally unlike any before it. [...]

Scott Rothkopf, extracts from ‘Takashi Murakami: Company Man’, in Paul Schimmel, ed., © Murakami
(Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/New York: Rizzoli, 20 0 7 ) 1 2 8 -3 2 ; 1 3 3 -9 ; 1 4 0 -4 6 ; 148-
52; 157; 158 (footnotes not included].

Dorothea von Hantelmann

Why Koons?//2009

Jeff Koons is an artist who is equally as established as he remains controversial.

He was the most successful artist of the 1980s, and after a laborious and financially
difficult decade during the 1990s, he is back again today. With a respectable
number of high-profile, large-scale exhibitions, Koons is reclaiming his role as a
pivotal figure in the contemporary art world. Strikingly, however, he is doing so
from a stance that doesn’t seem at all contemporary. With audacious statements
- that he ‘operates on the level of the church’,1 for example - and peculiar
demands - that art should reconnect with mythology, or even better, with
popular belief - his position seems decidedly anachronistic in terms of our
present understanding of art. After a century that instilled doubt and the
questioning of the notion of art, he claims that art should create trust in the viewer.
After a long modern tradition of self-analysis and self-questioning in both art and
philosophy, he wants art to have an empowering effect on the public. Delivered
with his famous winner’s smile, such statements suggest that Koons cannot
possibly mean what he says. Even though both critics and the general art public
might sense a kind of energetic power in this attitude, perhaps even a subversive
force, many of them tend to consider Koons as cynical, at best as ironic.
Given that Koons has repeatedly insisted he is interested neither in irony nor

von Hantelmann//Why Koons?//217

in cynicism, why is it so hard to believe that he means what he says? The answer,
1 think, lies in his explicit rejection of any idea of criticality. Asked to realize a
photographic project for Artforum in 1987, Koons reacted with a programmatic
statement. He depicted himself as a ceramic statuette of Don Quixote standing
alongside baroque angels, rococo decors and opulent, sentimental church
interiors, accompanied by the following text: To be forever free in the power,
glory, spirituality and romance, liberated in the mainstream, criticality gone/2
These last words, ‘criticality gone’, were laid over an image of a hand smashing a
ceramic vase of flowers with a hammer. Yet it would not be enough simply to say
that Koons is affirmative, for he is clearly driven by an agenda, even by a political
agenda - it just isn’t articulated in a critical mode. This places him in a kind of
discursive no man’s land, since there simply is no significant contemporary
discourse, no progressive or significant political, social or artistic agenda, that is
not rooted in an idea of criticality.3 The paradigm of critique is ubiquitous, to the
extent that we quite naturally identify the idea of a political project or ambition
in art with a critical perspective. Criticism, as the Danish political theoretician
Jens Bartelson says, marks the spirit of modernity: ‘It is to modernity what
theology was to the Middle Ages: a concrete universality, without centre or
boundaries.’4This is why someone who places himself outside the ‘cultural limit’
of criticism really places himself off limits, outside of what dominates a
contemporary discourse and its predominant order of thought, perception,
speech and understanding. Yet does a position outside criticality necessarily
mean a step behind, or could it also be a step beyond? And what does Koons set
against critique? What actually is his agenda?
Koons’ ambition is not an entirely new one; in fact, he is revitalizing an idea
propounded by the avant-gardes. What connects him to the avant-gardes is the
aim to redefine the function of art in society, to renew what one could call the
social contract between art and society by opening art up to a differently
structured and more widely conceived public. The crucial difference, however, is
that the avant-gardes were driven by anti-bourgeois critique that sought to
disrupt the association of art with the middle classes, while Koons wants to
rehabilitate the idea of art as an instrument for the self-empowerment of the
(bourgeois) viewer. Yet this is no conservative impulse; his approach is historically
informed and connects to what one could call the utopian and revolutionary
dimensions of the bourgeois project, above all to its core idea of establishing a
social order that is open in any direction, that is essentially inclusive and
integrative. In his principal affirmation of these values, Koons cannot partake in
the anti-bourgeois critical tradition. Instead, he tries to find an aesthetic way of
actually producing these effects of inclusion by making artworks that are not
seductive and do not segregate. While a Warhol soup can might connote the idea

218//BUSINESS ART
of mass culture, it still requires an art education to decipher it as art. Koons’
works, however, do not function on the level of sign or discourse, but shift art to
a mode of doing. They do not constitute a critique of alienation; they simply try
not to alienate their viewers. A work like Puppy (1992), the monumental flower
sculpture in the shape of a dog, gives people what they expect from high art
(which produces the ‘trust’ or confidence that Koons speaks about): it is beautiful,
it is perfectly crafted, it connects to an elevating tradition of sculpture, but at the
same time it reverses this tradition because what it elevates is something ‘low’.
It makes the viewer look up to something small, so to speak.
The idea of empowering the viewer - any viewer, independent of his or her
origin, culture or education - is central to Koons’ work. This is why he so often uses
shiny surfaces and mirrors in his work: they literally make it impossible to see the
artwork without seeing oneself, and in consequence place (potentially segregating)
questions of interpretation and understanding behind one’s own involvement
with the work. Koons tries to counteract the separating and excluding effects of
the museum and to reconnect to its original vision of constituting a place that
brings together members of all classes. Therefore he uses a visual language to
which anybody can relate: hearts, flowers, rings, toys, etc. He calls these motifs
‘secular archetypes’, i.e. primordial images that are stored in the collective
unconsciousness and that stabilize or unite cultures. He turns an anthropologist’s
or cultural scientist’s gaze on these archetypes of Western contemporary societies,
on the way in which they materialize ritualized forms of everyday culture, and on
their power to produce individual or collective identities.
With the Popeye series (2002-9), Koons returns to the readymade and with it
to a reflection on consumer culture that had already informed his earlier work.
And interestingly, he introduces a certain view of the socio-economic order of
contemporary Western societies that in my opinion formulates something like
the material base of his own artistic agenda. The Popeye sculptures are composite
works. They create unlikely encounters between an inflatable toy - turtles and
dolphins, monkeys and lobsters - and a simple, utilitarian object, such as a chair,
a ladder, a chain or a trashcan. In some works we see the cheerful toys in a dance­
like interaction with their profane counterpart, like the three monkeys hanging
from the ceiling and balancing a chair in Monkeys (Chair). But in others the
creatures are caught and constrained, like the colourful caterpillar that is
squeezed in between the two sides of a ladder. Inflatables have been amongst
Koons’ favourite motifs since the early Inflatables series of the late 1970s. These
‘breathing objects’ function as metaphors for the human body, and as such they
seem to put life into the pragmatic, matter-of-fact objects with which they
interact. If Marcel Duchamp’s intention with the readymade was to expose an
object that is bereft of any aesthetic quality, and therefore to remove art from the

von Hantelmann//Why Koons?//219

realm of the subjective, Koons brings this subjective dimension back in. On the
one hand this takes place through motifs like the lobster or the moustache that
have a recurring presence in the Popeye works and reference Salvador Dali (who
was famous for his carefully twisted moustache and who used the lobster in a
sculpture) and Marcel Duchamp (who pencilled a moustache on the Mona Lisa in
his work LH.O.O.Q). As both are artists to whom Koons feels particularly attached,
these references must be seen as part of his personal iconography and therefore
as ultimately relating to Koons himself. On the other hand, the viewer attributes
the subjective dimension of these works to the toys, since, in contrast to a ladder
or a chair, they have an affective quality. We might attach childhood memories to
them - or feel sorry for the cute caterpillar whose many legs are so hopelessly
caught. They invite projection, animation and fetishization.
Koons combines two different classes of objects here, whose difference is not
merely aesthetic. They belong to - or stand for - two different economic and
social orders. The one is merely utilitarian and determined by its function; it is
what Heidegger would have termed Zeug.5 As such, it forms part of what one
could call a primary economic order of production whose activity is focused on
the production of things that cover basic needs. The other object, however, is a
leisure item that only exists in post-industrialist, consumer societies. It belongs to
a secondary economic order of things that are not there because we need them
but exist because we want them. In this sense, one could say that these Popeye
sculptures have a socio-diagnostic dimension.6They show the interconnectedness
of the two different economic modalities upon which modem Western societies
are based. While many of these sculptures play on this relationship, Dolphin
represents it in an iconic way: the hanging dolphin carrying a set of pots and pans
hints at a complete reversal of the very socio-economic order that characterized
modern industrial societies up to the first half of the twentieth century. What had
hitherto seemed superfluous and unnecessary, namely the leisure object, has
now, in a post-industrial consumer society, advanced to become an important,
even sustaining, factor. From John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s to Gerhard
Schulze today, economists and sociologists have repeatedly highlighted the
significance of this reversal for contemporary societies. At the historical moment
when material requirements are satisfied and immaterial-, status- and subject-
related demands come to the force - when, as John Maynard Keynes said, the
satisfaction of ‘wants’ becomes a larger focus of economic activity than the
satisfaction of 'needs’ - the production of these secondary things obtains a new
significance. Only their manufacture can provide an income for a large part of
society, and thus ensure that the basic needs of that group are covered. ‘The point
of these products’, as the German sociologist Gerhard Schulze puts it, ‘lies in their
production’.7 Koons’ Dolphin finds an iconic metaphor for this economic situation:

220//BUSINESS ART
the leisure object that stands for the so-called secondary realm of objects to a
large degree carries the weight of the primary realm of fundamental needs - what
used to be the base now depends on the superstructure.
Koons’ works can generally be seen as a reflection of the changed socio­
economic premises of Western affluent societies as they have existed in North
America since the 1950s and in Western Europe since the 1960s. An explicit
example is provided by the advertisements in the series The New (1980-87) that
demonstrate the affective qualities of consumer items; their capacity to shape
and evoke human desire and to impact on the production of subjectivity. Most
notably, however, Koons’ entire agenda - to empower the subject - and the
emphasis he places on the affective qualities of his works, seems to be related to,
and draws its conclusions from, the socio-economic process mentioned above. If
in post-industrial consumer societies status- and subject-related demands
become more and more significant, one might say that the artwork attains a new
position, because in an almost exemplary way it embodies the idea of a product
that is high in subjectivity production. Koons is clearly aware of this turn towards
the subject, and makes the ethics and aesthetics of one’s relationship with oneself
the focus of his work. He has equipped entire rooms with mirrors; for example,
as part of the series Easyfun, one can observe oneself and others reflected in a
gigantic pink cartoon elephant. The object becomes a kind of tool to engender a
specific relationship with the self, or as Koons put it: ‘Art is about something you
carry around inside yourself; it’s not about the objects - they’re just carriers of
the ability to stimulate and activate the viewer’s mental and physical state.’8 In
this context, it is noticeable that Koons has dedicated his two recent series Popeye
and Hulk to self-transforming figures. Whether it’s spinach or radioactivity, an
outside input gives both figures the potential to surpass themselves, and they
allegorically point to the self-transformative power of the subject.
In his influential book The Experience Society (1995), Gerhard Schulze has
shown that the increase of income and leisure time has produced a change in the
way individuals structure their lives. More and more people can (and need to)
shape their lives according to their own tendencies and preferences (as opposed
to a fixed set of moral codes, social conventions or economic necessities). To a
greater extent than ever before, people can relate to their living context in a
selective mode, and their criteria are no longer primarily purpose-oriented or
guided by necessity but also, and increasingly, aesthetic. This, according to
Schulze, is the decisive characteristic of contemporary Western societies: what
was historically an upper-class phenomenon, namely the cultivation of an
aesthetic of the self, is today a mass phenomenon - more people than ever orient
their lives towards subjective, experience-related and therefore essentially
aesthetic qualities. The fact that art has become a mass phenomenon in the past

von Hantelmann//Why Koons?//221

decades - as demonstrated by the social and global expansion of the art world,
the increasing number of museums and exhibitions and the crowds that come to
visit them - can to a certain extent also be regarded as an effect of this general
aestheticization of the social and cultural lifeworld.
This situation raises an issue that Koons addresses more explicitly than any
other artist: what can, what should, a ‘bourgeois art’ be today - in the complex
historical and present senses of this term, as a progressive political project and in
view of today’s mass culture? I’m not sure if Koons has an answer to this question,
but he certainly makes two very important points in his works. Firstly, he shows
that this is not necessarily a conservative issue, but a matter of reconsidering the
tradition of anti-bourgeois critique and recognizing where it falls short of
noticing the interesting and relevant aspects of the bourgeois project. And
secondly, he is not afraid of accepting what the critical tradition cannot accept:
namely, the mass status of art today and the fact that not only does this make art
more significant and powerful, but that there is also, as Koons says, ‘a moral
responsibility that comes with it’. The responsibility is to transform the idea of
art into something that it in fact has already become: a ritual of ethical and
aesthetic refinement for the masses.

1 Robert Rosenblum, ‘About Jeff Koons’, in The Je ff Koons Handbook/Das Je ff Koons Handbuch,
(London: Anthony d’Offay/Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 1992) 23.
2 Je ff Koons, ‘Baptism: A Project for Artforum', Artforum (November 1987) 101 -7.
3 See Bruno Latour, Das Elend der Kritik. Vom Krieg urn Fakten zu Dingen von Belong ( Why has
Critique Run out o f Steam? From Matters o f Fact to Matters o f Concern) (Berlin and Zurich:
Diaphanes, 2007).
4 Jens Bartelson, T h e Conditions of Criticism’, in / Promise It’s Political, ed. Dorothea von
Hantelmann, Marjorie Jongbloed (Cologne: Museum Ludwig/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther
Konig, 2002).
5 Usually translated as ‘equipment’.
6 In a related manner, Koons’ recent painting Monkey Train (2007) brings a horse and a steam
engine together as an encounter between different past technologies of transport.
7 Gerhard Schulze, Die Beste aller Welten. Wohin beweglsich die Gesellschaft in 21 Jahrhundert?.
(Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 200 3 ) 75.
8 From an unpublished interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Dorothea von Hantelmann, ‘Why Koons?’, in Arthur Danto, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Frederick
Tuten.JeJf Koons: Popeye Series, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Serpentine Gallery/Cologne: Verlag
der Buchhandlung W alther Konig, 2009) 4 9 -5 3 .

222//BUSINESS ART
Michel Houellebecq
The Map and the Territory//2011

Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out
in front of him. Sitting opposite him, on a white leather sofa partly draped with
silks and slightly hunched up, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an
objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits
- Koons’ had fine pinstripes - white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the
coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to.
Hirst was drinking a Budweiser Light.
Behind them, a bay window opened onto a landscape of tall buildings that
formed a Babylonian tangle of gigantic polygons reaching the horizon. The night
was bright, the air absolutely clear. They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the
decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph,
taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
Koons’ forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it off with his brush and stepped
back three paces. There was certainly a problem with Koons. Hirst was basically
easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an ‘I shit on you from the top
of my pile of dosh’ kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all
the same) pursuing an anguished work on death; finally, there was in his face
something ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him look like a rank-
and-file Arsenal supporter. In short, there were various aspects, but all of them
could be combined in the coherent, representable portrait of a British artist typical
of his generation. Koons, on the other hand, seemed to carry in him something
dual, like an insurmountable contradiction between the basic cunning of the
technical sales rep and the exaltation of the ascetic. It was already three weeks
now that Jed had been retouching Koons’ expression as he stood up from his chair,
throwing his arms out in front of him as if he was trying to convince Hirst about
something. It was as difficult as painting a Mormon pomographer. [...]
A little despite himself, he approached Damien Hirst and Je ff Koons Dividing
Up the Art Market, which was standing on his easel in the middle of the studio,
and dissatisfaction seized him again, still more bitterly. He realized he was
hungry, which wasn’t normal after the complete Christmas dinner he’d had with
his father - starter, main course, cheese and dessert, nothing had been left out -
but he felt hungry and so hot he could no longer breathe. He returned to the
kitchen, opened a tin of cannelloni in sauce and ate them one by one, while
looking morosely at his failed painting. Koons was undoubtedly not light enough,
not ethereal enough - it would perhaps have been necessary to give him wings,

Houellebecq//The Map and the Territory//223

 like the god Mercury, he thought stupidly; there, with his pinstriped suit and
salesman’s smile, he reminded you a bit of Silvio Berlusconi.
On the ArtPrice ranking of the richest artists, Koons was world number 2; for
a few years now, Hirst, ten years his junior, had taken his place at number 1. As
for Jed, he had reached 593 ten years ago - but 17 in France. He had then, as the
Tour de France commentators say, ‘dropped to the bottom of the classement’,
before disappearing from it altogether. He finished the tin of cannelloni and
opened an almost empty bottle of cognac. Lighting his ramp of halogen lamps to
the maximum, he trained them on the centre of the canvas. On closer inspection,
the night itself wasn’t right: it didn’t have that sumptuousness, that mystery we
associate with nights on the Arabian peninsula; he should have used a deep blue,
not ultramarine. He was making a truly shit painting. He seized a palette knife,
cut open Damien Hirst’s eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight
linen fibres, and therefore very tough. Catching the sticky canvas with one hand,
he tore it in one blow, tipping the easel over onto the floor. Slightly calmed, he
stopped, looked at his hands, sticky with paint, and finished the cognac before
jumping feet first onto his painting, stamping on it and rubbing it against the
floor until it became slippery. He ended up losing his balance and fell, the back of
his head hitting the frame of the easel violently. He belched and vomited, and
suddenly felt better, the fresh night air circulating freely on his face, and he
closed his eyes contentedly: he had visibly reached the end of a cycle. (...)
‘I was at a dead end when I gave up on Damien Hirst and Je ff Koons Dividing Up
the Art Market.’
‘Yes, I know; that’s what made me organize the exhibition. Besides, I’m happy
you didn’t finish that painting. However, I liked the idea, the project had a
historical relevance, it was quite an accurate reflection of the art world at a given
time. There was, indeed, a sort of dividing up; on the one hand, fun, sex, kitsch
and innocence; on the other, trash, death and cynicism. But, in your situation,
that would inevitably have been interpreted as the work of a minor artist, jealous
of the success of his richer counterparts; anyway, we’re at a point where success
in market terms justifies and validates anything, replacing all the theories. No
one is capable of seeing further, absolutely no one. Now you could indulge in this
painting, because you’ve become the best-paid French artist of the moment; but
I know you won’t paint it, you’ll move on to something else.’ (...)

Michel Houellebecq, extracts from La Carte et le territoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2010); trans. Gavin
Boyd. The Map and the Territory (London: William Heinemann, 2011) 1 -2 ; 1 4-15; 129.

224//BUSINESS ART
He was making a truly shit painting.

He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst’s eye,

and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen
fibres, and therefore very tough. Catching the sticky
canvas with one hand, he tore it in one blow, tipping
the easel over onto the floor.

Slightly calmed, he stopped, looked at his hands, sticky

with paint, and finished the cognac before jumping
feet first onto his painting, stamping on it and rubbing
it against the floor until it became slippery.

He ended up losing his balance and fell, the back of his

head hitting the frame of the easel violently.

He belched and vomited, and suddenly felt better, the

fresh night air circulating freely on his face, and he
closed his eyes contentedly: he had visibly reached the
end of a cycle.

M ichel H ouellebecq, The M a p and the Territory, 2 0 1 0

Biographical Notes

Theodor Adorno (1 9 0 3 -6 9 ) was a German critical theorist of society and culture.

Carl Andre is an American artist based in New York.
Michael Asher (1 9 4 3 -2 0 1 2 ) was a Californian conceptual artist.
Jack Bankowsky is a freelance critic and curator and Editor-at-Large of Artforum.
Jean Baudrillard (1 9 2 9 -2 0 0 7 ) was a French philosopher and cultural theorist.
Joseph Beuys (1921 -8 6 ) was a German artist who lived and taught in Diisseldorf.
Luc Boltansld is a professor at the £cole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris.
Pierre Bourdieu (1 9 3 0 -2 0 0 2 ) was an ethnographer, sociologist and philosopher.
Martin Braathen is a curator and theorist of architecture based in Norway.
Malcolm Bull is University Lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford University.
Ian Burn (1 9 3 9 -9 3 ) was an Australian artist and member of the Art & Language group.
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York.
JJ Chartesworth is an art and cultural critic and associate editor of ArtReview.
Eve Chiapello is a professor at HEC (Hautes etudes commerciales) in Paris.
Sophie Cras is a doctoral candidate at the Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.
Anthony Davies is a London based writer, organizer and independent researcher.
Thierry de Duve is Professor Emeritus of art history at the university of Lille.
Ruth Diehl is Curator at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart.
Dietmar Eiger is an art historian and Director o f the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden.
Marvin ElkofT( 1 9 2 6 -2 0 0 8 ) was a freelance writer who wrote for Esquire in the 1960s.
Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset) are an artist duo working in Berlin.
Simon Ford is a London-based writer who has published extensively on the Situationists.
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin ’17 Professor o f Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
Andrea Flraser is a New York based performance artist.
Peter Fuller (1 9 4 7 -9 0 ) was a British art critic and magazine editor.
Melanie Gilligan is a Canadian-born artist based in London and New York.
William Grampp is Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Josh Greenfeld is an American novelist, dramatist and screenwriter.
Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of artists and feminists, founded in New York in 1985.
Hans Haacke is a German-born artist based in New York.
Jens Hoffmann is a writer and curator and Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum, New York.
Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet and filmmaker.
Miwon Kwon is Professor o f Art History at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Kate linker is an art critic and writer based in New York.
Uu Ding is a Chinese artist based in Beijing.
L& Peng is an art historian, critic and curator based in Beijing.
Werner Muensterberger (1913-2011) was a German-born American art historian and author.
Ahmet OgQt is a Turkish-born artist based in Amsterdam.

226//BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Ursula Pasero is Director o f the Gender Research Group at the University o f Kiel.
Scott RoChkopf is Curator and Associate Director of Programs at the W hitney Museum of American
Art, New York.
Charles Saatchi is an art collector and co-founder o f Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency.
Peter Sctyeldahl is an art critic, writer and poet based in New York.
Thomas Seelig is Curator at the Fotomuseum, Winterthur.
Tino Sehgal is a British-born German artist based in Berlin.
Richard Serra is an American artist based in Tribeca, New York, and Nova Scotia.
Marc Shell is Irving Babbitt Professor o f Comparative Literature and Professor o f English and
American Literature and Language at Harvard University.
Georg Simmel (1 8 5 8 -1 9 1 8 ) was a German sociologist, philosopher and critic.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke
University.
Marc Spiegler is a Director o f Art Basel and a former art critic and journalist.
Nick Stillman is a writer and critic who is a regular contributor to Bomb and Artforum.
Wolfgang Ullrich is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung,
Karlsruhe.
Karen van den Berg is Chair o f Art Theory and Curating at the Zeppelin Universitat, Friedrichshafen.
Thorstein Veblen (1 8 5 7 -1 9 2 9 ) was an American sociologist and economist.
Olav Velthuis is Associate Professor at the Department o f Sociology and Anthropology, University of
Amsterdam.
Dorothea von Hantelmann is an art historian and critic who teaches at the Freie Universitat, Berlin.
Andy Warhol (1 9 2 8 -8 7 ) was an American artist who lived and worked in New York.
Harrison ft Cynthia White Harrison White is emeritus Giddings Professor o f Sociology at Columbia
University. His first wife, art historian Cynthia A. Johnson, collaborated on several join t volumes.
Fred Wilson is an American artist based in New York.
Tom Wolfe is an American writer and journalist based in New York.
Thomas Zaunsdiirm is an art historian based in Vienna.
Zhou Tiehai is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES//227
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This section comprises further reading and does not repeat the bibliographic references fo r writings
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------Globalization and the Art M arket: Emerging Economies and the A rt Trade in 2008 (Helvoirt: The
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------The International Art Market, 2007-2009: Trends in the Art Trade during Global Recession (Helvoirt:
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------The Global Art Market in 2010: Crisis and Recovery (Helvoirt: The European Fine Art Foundation,
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------The Role o f Art and Antique Dealers: An Added Value (London: C1NOA, 2011)
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T h e Political Economy of Art’, International Journal o f Political Economy, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995)
‘Art Markets and Economics’, Journal o f Cultural Economics, vol. 21, issue 3 (Septem ber 1997)
‘Kunstmarkt’, Textezur Kunst, no. 4 4 (December 2001)
‘The Chinese Contemporary Art Market’, Yishu: Journal o f Contemporary Chinese Art. vol. 6, no. 4
(December 20 0 7 )
‘Art and Its Markets’, Artforum (April 2 0 0 8 )
‘The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon’, Open. no. 16 (2 0 0 9 )
‘Art and Economy’, Kunstforum International, vol. 2 0 0 (2010)
‘The Collectors’, Texte zur Kunst. no. 83 (Septem ber 2011)
‘Market’ Issue, TAKE on art, vol. 2, issue 6 (November 2011)
‘Die Wertfrage - The Question of Value’, Texte zur Kunst, no. 88 (December 2012)

BIBUOGRAPHY//233
Index Banksy 45
Barney, Matthew 16,127,201
Abramovic, Marina 197 Barr, Alfred 5 3 ,5 4
Abramovich. Roman 76 Barrett, David 112
Adam. Georgina 20n2, 70, 72 Bartelson, Jens 2 1 8 ,222n 4
Adam, Thomas R. 31 Barthes, Roland 137
Adorno, Theodor 1 3 ,2 7 -8 , 3 8 n 5 ,1 7 6 ,179n3 Bas, Hernan 66
Ahlemeier, Melanie 8 2 n l4 Bataille. Georges 58n l, 7 0 .7 3 ,7 4 ,7 5 n l, n7
Ahmed, Azam 81 n 4 ,8 2 n 6 , n l2 Baudrillard, Jean 1 4 ,1 5 ,3 0 n 3 ,5 7 -8 ,1 5 7 -8 ,
AIG (American International Group Inc.) 7 6 .1 9 9 158n3
Ai Weiwei 16,127 Baumol, William J. 77
Aitken, Doug 197 Baxter. Iain 141
Alat, Murat 176-9 Bear Stearns Inc. 199
Alexander, Brooke 120 Beautiful Asset Advisors 78
Allan, Ken 144n6 Becker, Gary S. 30n3
Allora & Calzadilla 122 Becker, Herman 86
Althamer, Pawel 195 Bell, Larry 106
Andre, Carl 1 6 ,2 0 n l 2 ,153 Bellamy, Richard 93
Antin, Eleanor 136,137 Benjamin, Walter 1 1 3 ,11 8 n 2 ,1 5 7 ,2 0 4 ,2 0 5
Antonioni. Michelangelo 92 Berggruen, Heinz 177
Aquinas, Thomas 3 8 n l2 Berman, Eugene 100
Armaly, Fareed 117 Bernadette Corporation 2 l n 1 4 ,165,167
Armleder.John 193,197 Beuys, Joseph 17,2 0 n 1 3 ,153-6
Arnault, Bernard 76 Bilj, Guillaume 192
Arnold. John 76 Birnbaum, Daniel 121
Art+Auction 79 Bliss, Anthony; Cornelius; Lillie 53
Art Basel 1 6 .1 9 1 -2 .1 9 7 Bogart, Humphrey 93
Art Basel Miami 119-20 Bohan, Marc 91
Artfacts 1 4 ,4 2 -6 Boltanski, Luc 1 9 ,1 8 7-9,201
Art 8t Language 152nl Bongard, Willi 34
Artprice 1 4 ,4 2 -6 ,2 2 4 Bontecou, Lee 94
Art Prices Current 33 Bourdieu, Pierre 1 2 ,1 5 ,6 1 - 3 ,8 2 n 2 6 ,122,136,
ArtTactic 1 4 ,7 0 1 3 7 ,139n l4
Asher, Michael 1 4 5 -8 ,2 1 0 Bourdon, David 1 41,144n5
Avalos, David 138n9 Bourgeois, Louise 45
Avicenna (Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) 3 8 n l2 Braathen, Martin 16,113-18
Backstrom, Fia 115,116 Branson. Richard 110,196
Bagli, Charles V. 8 2 n l3 Brecht, Bertolt 118n7
Bakker, Conrad 114 Brecht, George 134
Bankowsky, Jack 1 8 ,2 1 n l7 ,191-8 Brett, Guy 38n15

234//INDEX
Broad, Eli 76.201 de Kooning. W illem 6 9 ,8 8 ,8 9 ,9 0 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 2 ,1 3 4
Broodthaers, Marcel 3 7 ,3 8 n l6 Derrida, Jacques 13 9 n ll
Bryan-Wilson, Julia 1 3 8 n l0 ,1 4 4 n l5 Descartes, Rene 156
Bull, Malcolm 1 4 ,4 2 -7 Diehl. Ruth 170-72
Burdin, Anthony 1 9 2 -3 ,1 9 7 Dine. Jim 5 6 .9 2 , 93
Burn. Ian 1 8 ,2 0 n l 0 ,149-52 Dior, Christian 217
Burnham, Jack 1 4 1 ,144n3-5 Disney. Walt 1 9 ,2 0 7
Bush. George H.W. 8 0 ,82n22 Doig, Peter 7 0 .1 2 0
Capellazzo, Amy 6 9 ,1 2 0 ,2 0 0 Douglas, Mary 1 6 ,20n8
CapGemini 79 Dow Jones index 199
Carpenter, Merlin 165-6 Drouin, Ren6 100
Cartier, Societe 62 du Bost. Antionette 100
Castelli, Leo 1 5 ,5 4 ,9 2 ,9 3 -1 0 2 ,1 6 1 Duchamp, Marcel 1 0 5 ,1 0 7 ,1 2 9 ,1 3 8 n 2 ,163,
Cattelan, Maurizio 1 7 2 -5 ,1 9 5 ,1 9 6 ,1 9 8 219-20
Celant, Germano 128-9,131 n !2 Dugdale, Jam es 104
Cezanne. Paul 5 5 ,9 8 Durand-Ruel, Paul 8 6 ,8 7
Chandler, John 2 0 n ll, 138nl Duveen, Joseph 5 5 ,9 7
Charlesworth.U 1 5 .7 0 -7 5 Dzubas, Friedl 101,102
Chiapello, Eve 1 9 .1 8 7 -9 ,2 0 1 Egan, Charles 88
Christie’s 6 9 ,7 7 ,2 0 0 ,2 0 9 ,2 1 1 Eiger, Dietmar 159-61
Citadel Group 69 Eliasson, Olafur 1 6 ,1 2 7 ,2 0 1 ,2 1 2 -1 3
Citigroup 77 Elkoff, Marvin 8 8 -9 3
Clifford, Stephanie 81 n2 Elmgreen 8i Dragset 1 4 ,66-7,117
Cohen, Steven A. 7 6 ,2 0 0 Ernst, Max 1 0 0 ,1 2 8
Copley, Claire 145-8 Export, Valie 136,137
Cotter, Holland 165 Falckenberg, Harald I72n1
Crane, Diana 20n5 Fertitta, Frank J. and Lorenzo 76
Cras, Sophie 139-44 Fineman, Mia 20n 5
Crow, Thomas 199,201 Fischer, Urs 120
Curiger, Bice 1 2 3 ,1 2 6 Fisher, Mark 110
Currin.John 73 Forbes 77
Dali, Salvador 1 0 0 ,1 9 2 .2 1 5 ,2 2 0 Ford, Simon 108-12
Daskalopoulos, Dimitris 76.81 n5 Foster, Hal 198-205
Davies, Anthony 108-12 Franck, Georg 4 2 , 46n2
Dayan, Moishe 55 Fraser, Andrea 1 5 ,7 6 -8 2 ,1 9 5
DeCambre, Mark 82n9 Fraser, Joseph T. 9 9
De Carlo, Massimo 66 Freedman, Carl 112
de Duve, Thierry 17,2 0 n l 3 ,155-6 Fremont, Vincent 2 1 n l9 ,216
Degen, Natasha 12-21 Frick, Henry Clay 55
Deitch, Jeffrey 197, 203 Frieze Art Fair 1 2 7,191,192-4

INDE3//235
Fuller. Peter 15,103-7
Gagosian, Larry 1 2 2 ,1 9 8
Galbraith, John Kenneth 220
Ganek, David 76
Gates, Bill 211
Geldzahler, Henry 54, 90
Gelink, Annet 122
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 20n12
Gillick, Liam 7 1 ,75n3
Gilligan, Melanie 1 5 ,6 8 -9
Gini Index 78
Gioni, Massimiliano 1 9 5 ,1 9 6
Glueck, Grace 1 4 3 ,144n14
Godelier, Maurice 1 3 6 ,139n1l, n l2
Goetzmann, William N. 78
Goodman, Marian 120
Gottesman, Noam 76
Gottlieb, Adolph 8 8 ,8 9 .9 0
Graham. Dan 140
Gramercy Art Fair 197
Grampp, William 1 4 ,3 1 -4
Granek, Rudolf 93
Greenberg, Clement 1 0 0 ,1 1 0 ,1 5 0
Greenfeld, Josh 9 3 -102
Greenspan, Alan 2 0 0
Grescoe, Paul 1 41,144n7
Griffin, Ken 69
Griffin. Tim 130n6
Griffiths, Paul 178
Gropp, Rose-Marie 8 2 n l5
Guerrilla Girls 1 6 ,2 0 n 9 ,107-8
Guo-Qiang, Cai 124
Gursky, Andreas 1 8 .1 9 .4 5 .1 8 9 -9 0
Haacke. Hans 1 5 .6 1 -3 .1 3 4 .1 7 6
Habermas. Jurgen 131 n il
Haden-Guest, Anthony 119
Hammons, David 1 3 8 n 9 ,179
Handforth, Mark 127
Haring. Keith 2 0 4 ,2 1 0 ,2 1 3
Harrison, Andrew 30n2
236//INDEX
Haughney, Christine 8 2 n l3
Hauser & Wirth 122,163
Hecey, Erna 164
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 28
Heidegger, Martin 37, 38n12
Heier, Marianne 115
Hess, Moses 37n2
Hess. Thomas 99
Higgins. Charlotte 82n25
Hill, Andrew 76
Hill.J.Tomilson 77
Hirakawa, Noritoshi 191,196,197
Hirschhorn. Thomas 197
Hirst. Damien 1 6 .1 8 .1 9 .4 5 ,7 7 ,1 2 7 ,1 3 0 ,1 9 8 ,
1 9 9 ,2 0 0 ,2 0 4 -5 ,2 2 3 -4
Hitler. Adolf 77
Hock. Louis 138n9
Hockney, David 4 5 ,6 6 ,1 0 4
Hoffmann, Jens 1 7 ,1 6 8 -7 0 ,1 9 4
Holbein, Hans (the younger) 77
Horkheimer, Max 38n 5,179n 3
Horowitz, Noah 20n 1,47n 5
Houellebecq, Michel 19,21 n 2 4 ,2 23-4
Hunt, Jerem y 81
Hunter, Sam 96
Huyghe, Pierre 122
Huyssen, Andreas 1 2 6 ,130n2
Israeli, Isaac 3 8 n l2
Jackson. Martha 89
Jacobs, Marc 2 0 4 ,2 0 6
Janis, Sidney 8 9 ,9 3 ,1 0 1
Jankowski. Christian 116,178
Johns, Jasper 5 3 ,5 6 ,6 9 .9 2 .9 4 ,1 0 2 ,1 5 9
Johnson, Lyndon B. 89
Johnson, Ray 1 3 4 ,1 4 0 ,143n3
Jospe, Alfred 38n5
Kant, Immanuel 25
Karp. Ivan 5 4 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 2
Kasmin.John 107
Keller, Samuel 119,197
Kelsey, John 165 Lawler, Louise 17,159-61
Kennedy, Dominic 81 n l Lawson, Ted 126
Kennedy, Jacqueline 89 Lehman Brothers 2 1 n 2 1 ,199
Keynes, John Maynard 220 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 3 6 .38n9
Kienholz, Edward 1 3 6 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 n 9 ,161 Levine. Les 1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -2 ,144n4-5, n9
Kiesler, Frederick 1 1 3 ,1 1 8 ,118nl, n9 Lichtenstein, Roy 1 9 ,5 6 ,9 3 ,9 4 ,9 7 ,1 0 1 ,2 0 7
Kirwan, Emily-Jane 123 Liden, Klara 67
Klein, Yves 1 0 5 ,1 3 4 ,2 1 0 Linker, Kate 156-8
Kline, Franz 8 9 ,9 0 ,1 0 1 Lipman, Howard 1 4 2 ,1 4 4 n ll
Knowles, Alison 136,137 Lipman, Jean 1 4 3 ,1 4 3 n 3 ,1 4 4 n l4
Koether.Jutta 165 Lippard, Lucy R. 2 0 n l1 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 5 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8n l-6,
Koh, Terence 67 n13
Kohn, Gabe 99 Lisson Gallery 122
Koide, Akane 216 List, Albert A. and Vera 91
Koolhaas, Rem 117,118n8 Liu Ding 17,2 1 n 1 6 ,180-81
Koons, Je ff 1 6 ,1 9 ,4 5 ,1 2 6 ,1 2 7 ,1 3 0 ,2 0 2 -3 ,2 0 5 , Liu Xiaodong 21n15
2 1 7 -2 2 ,2 2 3 -4 Loeb, Daniel S. 77
Korzybski, Alfred 19 Lozano, Lee 1 3 6 ,1 3 7 ,1 4 0
Kostabi, Mark 192,211 Lubelski, Abraham 140
Kosuth, Joseph 134 Lu Peng 1 9 ,2 1 n 2 2 ,184-6
Kozlov, Christine 134 McAndrew, Clare 20n2
Kraeussl, Roman 82n21 Maccarone, Michele 116,192,197
Krauss, Peter 77 McCarthy Paul 16,127
Krauss, Rosalind 1 2 8 ,130n7 Madeln Company 2 ln 1 4
Kravis. Henry 77,82n11,211 Manzoni, Piero 136,137
Kravis, Marie-Josee 77 Martin, Edward J. 38n7
Krebber, Michael 165 Marx, Karl 1 5 5 ,1 7 6 ,179n2
Kruger, Barbara 17,156-8 Mauss, Marcel 1 3 6 ,138n11
Krugman, Paul 78 Mavrommatis, Dimitri 77
Kunstkompass 14 M ei.Jiangping 77
Kunstlinger, George 116 Mei Moses Art Index 78
Kwon, Miwon 1 6 ,1 7 ,1 3 4 -9 Meireles, Cildo 37
Lagerfeld, Karl 167 Mendelssohn, Moses 38n5
Lagrange, Pierre 76 Merrill Lynch 7 9 ,1 9 9
Lambert. Yvon 160 Merton, Robert 123
Lanham, 46n2 Metro Pictures 160
Lassaw, Ibram 89 Metzger, Gustav 106
Latham, John 106 Meyer. Jam es 130n6
Latour, Bruno 222n3 Meyer, Tobias 71, 7 3 ,7 4 ,75n2, n6
Law, John 38n4 Mignonneau, Laurent 21 n l6

INDEX//237
Minton. Robert 38n4 Reagan, Ronald 199
Molesworth, Helen 136 Rehberger, Tobias 16,127
Monte, James 142 Rembrandt van Rijn 3 2 ,6 9 , 8 6 ,1 0 4 ,1 6 3
Moore, Heidi N. 8 2 n l0 Renneboog, Luc 78
Mori, Mariko 126 Reyle, Anselm 16,127
Mori, Minoru 204, 215 Richter. Gerhard 45
Morris, Philip (International Inc.) 119,160 Rivera. Diego 13ln13
Morris, Robert 1 4 0 ,1 4 2 ,144nl 1-13 Rivers, Larry 9 5 ,1 4 0
Mullan, Phil 7 2 .7 3 ,75n4 Roberts, John 131 n 14
Muller, Christian Philipp 117 Rockefeller, John D. 55
Muensterberger, W erner 1 5 ,5 9 -6 0 Roelof, Louw 106
Murakami, Takashi 1 6 ,1 8 ,1 9 ,21n19, 127,130, Rose, Barbara 20n l1, 3 8 n l1 ,1 3 9 ,143n1-2
202, 203, 204, 205-17 Rosenblum, Robert 22 2 n l
National Bureau of Economic Research (USA) 31 Rosenquist, Jam es 9 3 ,9 4
Neugerriemschneider gallery 191 Rosenthal, Norman 108
Newman, Barnett 8 9 ,9 0 Rothko, Mark 8 9 ,9 0 ,1 0 1
NIKE 190 Rothkopf. Scott 1 8 .1 9 .21 n l9 , n 2 3 .205-17
Ogiit, Ahmet 176-9 Ruscha, Ed 4 5 ,1 3 4
Olesen, Henrik 66 Saatchi, Charles 7 7 ,8 3 ,1 2 2 ,1 9 9 ,2 0 0
Ondak, Roman 195 SAC Capital 6 9 ,7 6 ,2 0 0
Ono, Yoko 1 3 6 ,1 3 7 ,1 38n l0 Saint Laurent. Yves 91
Oppenheim, Dennis 140 Salama, Eric 110
Oursler.Tony 120 Saltz, Jerry 191
Paine W ebber 8i Co. 159 Sander, Ludwig 89
Parkinson, Liza 5 3 ,5 4 Saraceno, Tomas 16,127
Pasero, Ursula 16,126-31 Schillinger, Joseph 138n2
Perrin, Alain-Dominique 6 2 ,6 3 n l Schjeldahl, Peter 119-20,203
Picasso. Pablo 5 5 .7 7 .1 0 4 ,1 7 7 Schmidt-Wulfen, Stephan 171
Pietroiusti, Cesare 178 Schnabel, Julian 211
Pinault, Francois 1 2 1 ,1 2 2 .2 0 0 Schreiber, Susanne 130n3
Polke, Sigmar 45,121 Schulze, Gerhard 2 2 0 -2 1 ,222n7
Pollock. Jackson 8 8 .8 9 .9 0 .1 0 1 ,1 5 9 ,1 7 6 Schwarzman, Stephen 77
Poons, Larry 5 6 .9 4 Scull, Robert and Ethel 1 4 ,5 3 -6 ,9 1 ,1 9 9
Prada, Miuccia 190 Seelig, Thomas 1 8 ,1 8 9 -9 0
Presenhuber, Eva 122 Sehgal. Tino 17,1 7 2 -5 ,1 9 4 -5
Prince, Richard 4 5 ,6 9 ,7 3 Seitz, William 99
Ramsden, Mel 152n1 Serra, Richard 1 5 ,6 3 - 4 ,1 2 8 ,1 3 0 n 8 .131 nlO, 201
Rashid, Karim 210 Shell, Marc 1 4 ,3 0 n l, 35-8
Rauschenberg, Robert 5 6 ,9 4 ,9 6 ,9 7 ,1 0 1 -2, Sierra, Santiago 210
12 2 ,1 3 4 Simmel, Georg 1 3 ,2 0 n 6 ,24-7

238//INDEX
Simon, Peter 77 Tucker, Marcia 142
Sisco, Elizabeth 138n9 Turrell. Jam es 123.212-13
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 13-14,29-31 Uklanski, Piotr 195
Smith, David 3 7 ,3 8 n ll, 99 Ullrich, Wolfgang 14,40-41
Smith, Richard 104 Unruh. Allison 2 ln 1 9
Smith, Terry 152n2 Vallois, Georges-Philippe 164
Smithson, Robert 134 van den Berg, Karen 16,126-31
Socarides, Charles 92 van Gogh, Vincent 8 8 ,1 8 6
Solakov, Nedko 17 Varadinis, Mirjam 163-4
Solomon, Alan 96 Veblen, Thorstein 1 4 ,2 0 n 7 ,50-52
Sommerer, Christa 2 1 n l6 Velthuis, Olav 1 6 ,1 2 1 -6 ,2 0 0
Sonnabend, Ileana 100 Venice Biennale 1 6 ,6 6 -7 .1 2 1 -6 ,2 0 6
Sotheby’s 1 5 ,1 9 .7 0 ,7 1 ,1 0 3 ,1 0 4 ,1 9 8 ,1 9 9 ,2 0 0 Visser, Barbara 122
Spiegler, Marc 163-5 von Hantelmann, Dorothea 19,217-22
Solakov, Nedko 163-5 Vuitton. Louis 1 9 .2 0 4 .2 1 2 -1 3
Southern. Terry 92 Wacquant, Loi'c 82n 26
Spaulings, Reena (artist collective and gallery) Wang Sishun 2 ln 1 6
17,165-7 Warhol. Andy 1 8 .2 1 n l8 .9 3 .1 0 5 .1 0 6 ,1 1 3 ,
Speyer, Jerry 77 I1 8 n 3 ,1 3 0 .1 4 0 ,1 6 0 ,1 6 1 .1 8 4 ,1 9 2 ,1 9 4 ,
Spruth Magers Gallery 122 1 9 6 .1 9 8 ,2 0 2 .2 0 3 ,2 0 7 .2 1 0 ,2 1 3 ,2 1 5 ,2 1 6 ,

Stallabrass, Julian 201 217,218

Stankowski, Anton 37 Warwicker.John 112
Stella, Frank 4 5 ,5 6 ,6 7 ,9 4 Waser, George 1 2 7 .130n4
Stewart, Martha 6 5 ,2 1 7 W hite Cube gallery 198
Stigler, George J. 30n3 White, Harrison and Cynthia 1 5 ,8 6 -7
Stiglitz, Joseph 78 Wilson, Fred 1 5 .6 4 -5
Stilinovic, Mladen 179 Wilson, Peter 15
Stillman, Nick 165-7 W ittgenstein, Ludwig 63
Sturtevant, Elaine 6 7 ,1 2 3 Wolfe. Tom 1 4 .5 3 -6 ,6 8
Subotnik, Ali 1 9 5 ,1 9 6 Wright, Richard 21n14
Sundblad, Emily 165 Wrong Gallery 191,194-6
Thatcher, Margaret 7 7 ,1 9 9 Wurth, Reinhold 77
Thibaut, Matthias 130n3 Yucel, Can 179
Thompson, Don 21 n20 Yuskavage, Lisa 73
Thornton, Sarah 1 2 ,20n4 Zaunschirm, Thomas 1 4 .3 9
Tillmans, Wolfgang 6 6 ,6 7 Zeri, Federico 33
Times-Sotheby Index 14,103 Zernike, Kate 82 n7
Tiravanija, Rirkrit 191-3 Zhou Tiehai 162
Toselli, Franco 145,147
Tremaine, Burton and Emily 9 1 .1 5 9 ,1 6 0

INDE3V/239
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editor’s acknowledgements
With sincere thanks to Sarah Auld, Iwona Blazwick, Derrick Chong, Ian Farr,
Giovanni Gasparini, Carol Yinghua Lu and Chinami Sakai.

Publisher’s acknowledgements
Whitechapel Gallery is grateful to all those who gave their generous permission to
reproduce the listed material. Every effort has been made to secure all permissions
and we apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions. If notified, we will
endeavour to correct these at the earliest opportunity. We would like to express
our thanks to all those who contributed to the making of this volume, especially:
Murat Alat, Malik Al-Mahrouky, Carl Andre, Jack Bankowsky, Karen van den Berg,
Luc Boltanski, Martin Braathen, Malcolm Bull, Maurizio Cattelan, JJ Charlesworth,
Eve Chiapello, Sophie Cras, Anthony Davies, Ruth Diehl, Liu Ding, Thierry de Duve,
Dietmar Eiger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Simon Ford, Hal Foster, Andrea Fraser, Melanie
Gilligan, William D. Grampp, Josh Greenfeld, Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Dorothea
von Hantlemann, Barbara Hermstein Smith, Jens Hoffmann, Michel Houellebecq,
Miwon Kwon, Kate Linker, Louise Liwanag, Ahmet Ogut, Ursula Pasero, Lu Peng,
Scott Rothkopf, Charles Saatchi, Peter Schjeldahl, Thomas Seelig, Tino Sehgal,
Richard Serra, Marc Shell, Marc Spiegler, Nick Stillman, Zhou Tiehai, Wolfgang
Ullrich, Olav Velthuis, Fred Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Zaunschirm. We also
gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of: Abrams & Chronicle Books, Artforum,
Art Monthly, Artists Rights Society, Asher Trust, Clairview Books, Conde Nast, Duke
University Press, Editions du Seuil, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Flammarion, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, ICM Partners, Independent Curators International, Marian
Goodman Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Pace Gallery, Paula Cooper
Gallery, Penguin Books, Perseus Books Group, The Peter Fuller Memorial
Foundation, Polity Books, Princeton University Press, The Random House Group,
Routledge, Saatchi Gallery, ShanghARTGallery, Stanford University Press, Suhrkamp
Verlag, Telos Press, University of Chicago Press, Visual Arts and Galleries Association,
Verso Books, VG Bild-Kunst, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Whitney Museum, The Wylie Agency.

Whitechapel Gallery is supported by

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