Seven Days in the Art World Read online

  SEVEN DAYS IN THE

  Art World

  ALSO BY SARAH THORNTON

  Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

  SEVEN DAYS IN THE Art World

  SARAH THORNTON

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Thorton

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Devon Zahn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thornton, Sarah.

  Seven days in the art world / Sarah Thornton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07105-4

  1. Art—Marketing. 2. Art—Exhibitions.

  3. Art—Competitions. 4. Art criticism. I. Title.

  N8600.T485 2008

  709.05—dc22

  2008035056

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Glenda and Monte

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Auction

  2 The Crit

  3 The Fair

  4 The Prize

  5 The Magazine

  6 The Studio Visit

  7 The Biennale

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Introduction

  Seven Days in the Art World is a time capsule of a remarkable period in the history of art. During the past eight years, the contemporary art market has boomed, museum attendance has surged, and more people than ever were able to abandon their day jobs and call themselves artists. The art world both expanded and started to spin faster; it became hotter, hipper, and more expensive.

  The contemporary art world is a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art. They span the globe but cluster in art capitals such as New York, London, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Vibrant art communities can be found in places like Glasgow, Vancouver, and Milan, but they are hinterlands to the extent that the artists working in them have often made an active choice to stay there. Still, the art world is more polycentric than it was in the twentieth century, when Paris, then New York held sway.

  Art world insiders tend to play one of six distinct roles: artist, dealer, curator, critic, collector, or auction-house expert. One encounters artist-critics and dealer-collectors, but they admit that it isn’t always easy to juggle their jobs and that one of their identities tends to dominate other people’s perceptions of what they do. Being a credible or successful artist is the toughest position, but it’s the dealers who, channeling and deflecting the power of all the other players, occupy the most pivotal role. As Jeff Poe, a dealer who appears in several chapters of this book, sees it, “The art world isn’t about power but control. Power can be vulgar. Control is smarter, more pinpointed. It starts with the artists, because their work determines how things get played out, but they need an honest dialogue with a conspirator. Quiet control—mediated by trust—is what the art world is really about.”

  It’s important to bear in mind that the art world is much broader than the art market. The market refers to the people who buy and sell works (that is, dealers, collectors, auction houses), but many art world players (the critics, curators, and artists themselves) are not directly involved in this commercial activity on a regular basis. The art world is a sphere where many people don’t just work but reside full-time. It’s a “symbolic economy” where people swap thoughts and where cultural worth is debated rather than determined by brute wealth.

  Although the art world is frequently characterized as a classless scene where artists from lower-middle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers, and other “creatives,” you’d be mistaken if you thought this world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting and ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it’s an intoxicating combination.

  The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a “statusphere.” It’s structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection. As I’ve roamed the art world, I’ve been habitually amused by the status anxieties of all the players. Dealers who are concerned about the location of their booth at an art fair or collectors keen to be first in line for a new “masterpiece” are perhaps the most obvious instances, but no one is exempt. As John Baldessari, a Los Angeles–based artist who speaks wisely and wittily in these pages, told me, “Artists have huge egos, but how that manifests itself changes with the times. I find it tedious when I bump into people who insist on giving me their CV highlights. I’ve always thought that wearing badges or ribbons would solve it. If you’re showing in the Whitney Biennial or at the Tate, you could announce it on your jacket. Artists could wear stripes like generals, so everyone would know their rank.”

  If the art world shared one principle, it would probably be that nothing is more important than the art itself. Some people really believe this; others know it’s de rigueur. Either way, the social world surrounding art is often disdained as an irrelevant, dirty contaminant.

  When I studied art history, I was lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of recently made work, but I never had a clear sense of how it circulated, how it came to be considered worthy of critical attention or gained exposure, how it was marketed, sold, or collected. Now more than ever, when work by living artists accounts for a larger part of the curriculum, it is worth understanding art’s first contexts and the valuation processes it undergoes between the studio and its arrival in the permanent collection of a museum (or the dumpster, or any one of a vast range of intermediate locations). As curator Robert Storr, who plays a key role in the Biennale chapter, told me, “The function of museums is to make art worthless again. They take the work out of the market and put it in a place where it becomes part of the common wealth.” My research suggests that great works do not just arise; they are made—not just by artists and their assistants but also by the dealers, curators, critics, and collectors who “support” the work. This is not to say that art isn’t great or that the art that makes it into the museum doesn’t deserve to be there. Not at all. It’s just that collective belief is neither as simple nor as mysterious as one might imagine.

  One theme that runs through the narratives of Seven Days in the Art World is that contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. The artist Francis Bacon once said that when “Man” realizes that he is just an accident in the greater scheme of things, he can only “beguile himself for a time.” He then added: “Painting, or all art, has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself…and the artist must really deepen the game to be any good at all.” For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existential channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests. Eric Banks, a writer-editor who appears in Chapter 5, argues that the fervent sociality of the ar
t world has unexpected benefits. “People really do talk about the art they see,” he said. “If I’m reading something by, say, Roberto Bolaño, I’ll find very few people to discuss it with. Reading takes a long time and it’s solitary, whereas art fosters quick-forming imagined communities.”

  Despite its self-regard, and much like a society of devout followers, the art world relies on consensus as heavily as it depends on individual analysis or critical thinking. Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that “looks like art” and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to “get it right.” Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d’être to the rest.

  The art market boom is a backdrop to this book. In asking why the market has soared in the past decade, we might start with the different but related question: Why has art become so popular? The narratives in this book repeatedly allude to answers, but here are some bald, interrelated hypotheses. First, we are more educated than ever before, and we’ve developed appetites for more culturally complex goods. (The percentage of the U.S. and U.K. populations with university degrees has increased dramatically over the past twenty years.) Ideally, art is thought-provoking in a way that requires an active, enjoyable effort. As certain sectors of the cultural landscape seem to “dumb down,” so a sizable viewing audience is attracted to a domain that attempts to challenge tired, conventional ways. Second, although we are better educated, we read less. Our culture is now thoroughly televisualized or YouTubed. Although some lament this “secondary orality,” others might point to an increase in visual literacy and, with it, more widespread intellectual pleasure in the life of the eye. Third, in an increasingly global world, art crosses borders. It can be a lingua franca and a shared interest in a way that cultural forms anchored to words cannot.

  Ironically, another reason why art has become popular is that it is so expensive. High prices command media headlines, and they have in turn popularized the notion of art as a luxury good and status symbol. During the past ten years, the most affluent slice of the global population has become even wealthier and we’ve seen the rise of the billionaire. In the words of Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s, “After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there? Art is extremely enriching. Why shouldn’t people want to be exposed to ideas?” Certainly the number of people who don’t just collect but stockpile art has grown from the hundreds to the thousands. In 2007, Christie’s sold 793 artworks for over $1 million each. In a digital world of cloneable cultural goods, unique art objects are compared to real estate. They are positioned as solid assets that won’t melt into air. Auction houses have also courted people who might previously have felt excluded from buying art. And their visible promise of resale has engendered the relatively new idea that contemporary art is a good investment and brought “greater liquidity” to the market.

  The effects of a strong market have spread well beyond collectors’ complaints of skyrocketed prices and the dramatic expansion of many galleries’ square footage. The wealth trickles down. More artists are making a better living; a few are as rich as pop stars. Critics are busy churning out words to fill expanded editorial pages. Curators are leaving the museum sector for higher-paying jobs in the gallery world. But the market also affects perception. Many worry that the validation of a market price has come to overshadow other forms of reaction, like positive criticism, art prizes, and museum shows. They point to certain artists whose work has been knocked off course by an uninhibited desire for sales. Even the most businesslike dealers will tell you that making money should be a byproduct of art, not an artist’s main goal. Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to maintain its difference from—and position above—other cultural forms.

  As the art world is so diverse, opaque, and downright secretive, it is difficult to generalize about it and impossible to be truly comprehensive. What is more, access is rarely easy. I have sought to address these problems by presenting seven narratives set in six cities in five countries. Each chapter is a day-in-the-life account, which I hope will give the reader a sense of being inside the distinct institutions integral to the art world. Each story is based on an average of thirty to forty in-depth interviews and many hours of behind-the-scenes “participant observation.” Although usually described as “fly on the wall,” a more accurate metaphor for this kind of research is “cat on the prowl,” for a good participant observer is more like a stray cat. She is curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, but easily ignored.

  The first two chapters mark out antithetical extremes. “The Auction” is a blow-by-blow account of a Christie’s evening sale at Rockefeller Center in New York. Auctions tend to be artist-free zones, which act as an end point—some say a morgue—for works of art. By contrast, “The Crit” explores life in a legendary seminar at the California Institute of the Arts—an incubator of sorts, where students transform themselves into artists and learn the vocabulary of their trade. The speed and wealth of the auction room couldn’t be further away from the thoughtful, low-budget life of the art school, but they are both crucial to understanding how this world works.

  Similarly, “The Fair” and “The Studio Visit” have an oppositional rapport; one is about consumption, the other production. Whereas the studio is an optimal place for understanding the work of a single artist, an art fair is a swanky trade show where the crowds and the congested display of works make it difficult to concentrate on any particular work. “The Fair” is set in Switzerland on the opening day of Art Basel, an event that has contributed to the internationalization and seasonality of the art world. Artist Takashi Murakami, who makes a cameo appearance in Basel, is the protagonist of “The Studio Visit,” which takes place in his three workspaces and a foundry in Japan. With an enterprise that outdoes Andy Warhol’s Factory, Murakami’s studios are not simply buildings where the artist makes art but stages for dramatizing his artistic intentions and platforms for negotiations with visiting curators and dealers.

  Chapters 4 and 5, “The Prize” and “The Magazine,” tell stories that revolve around debate, judgment, and public exposure. “The Prize” investigates Britain’s Turner Prize on the day that its jury, overseen by Tate director Nicholas Serota, decides which of the four shortlisted artists will ascend the podium to accept a check for £25,000 in a televised awards ceremony. The chapter examines the nature of competition between artists, the function of accolades in their careers, and the relationship between the media and the museum.

  In “The Magazine,” I explore different perspectives on the function and integrity of art criticism. I start by observing those who edit Artforum International, the glossy trade magazine of the art world, then move on to conversations with influential critics such as Roberta Smith of the New York Times, then crash a convention of art historians to investigate their views. Among other things, this chapter considers how magazine front covers and newspaper reviews contribute to the way art and artists enter the annals of art history.

  The final chapter, “The Biennale,” is set in Venice amid the mayhem of the oldest international exhibition of its kind. A confounding experience, the Venice Biennale feels like it should be a holiday opportunity, but it’s actually an intense professional event that is so strongly social that it is hard to keep one’s eye on the art. As a result, this chapter pays homage to the curators who do. It also reflects on the essential role of memory in making sense of the contemporary and of hindsight in determining what’s great.

  Although Seven Days in the Art World offers a whirlwind week of narratives, it has been a long, slow undertaking for me. In the past, for other ethnographic projects, I’ve immersed myself in the nocturnal world of London dance clubs an
d worked undercover as a “brand planner” in an advertising agency. Though I took a fervent interest in the minutiae of these milieus, I eventually became weary of them. Despite exhaustive research, however, I still find the art world fascinating. One reason is no doubt that it is tremendously complex. Another relates to the way this sphere blurs the lines between work and play, local and international, the cultural and the economic. As such, I suspect it indicates the shape of social worlds to come. And even though many insiders love to loathe the art world, I have to agree with Artforum publisher Charles Guarino: “It’s the place where I found the most kindred spirits—enough oddball, overeducated, anachronistic, anarchic people to make me happy.” Finally, it must be said that when the talk dies down and the crowds go home, it’s bliss to stand in a room full of good art.

  SEVEN DAYS IN THE

  Art World

  1

  The Auction

  It’s 4:45 on a November afternoon in New York. Christopher Burge, Christie’s chief auctioneer, is doing a sound check. Five workmen kneel on the floor, using rulers to calculate the distance between chairs in order to pack the room with as many well-heeled clients as possible. Paintings by blue-chip artists such as Cy Twombly and Ed Ruscha hang on the beige fabric walls. Detractors describe the interior as a “high-class funeral home,” but others like its 1950s retro-modernist feel.

  Burge leans on the dark wood rostrum, calling out prices into the void in a relaxed English accent. “One million one. One million two. One million three. It is with Amy’s bidder on the phone. It is not with you, sir. Nor with you, madam.” He smiles. “One million, four hundred thousand dollars, to the lady at the back…One million five. Thank you, sir.” He looks to the imaginary bank of telephones that will be manned by Christie’s staff in two hours’ time, wondering whether to expect another bid. He waits patiently, nods to affirm that the phone bidder will go no higher, and turns his attention back to the room to get a final psychological reading of his two other fantasy buyers. “All done?” he inquires in an affectionate tone. “I am selling…One million, five hundred thousand dollars, to the gentleman on the aisle,” and he raps his gavel with such short, sharp violence that it makes me jump.