ArtTactic Podcast (Oct 20th, 2009)

Click to listen to the podcast: http://www.rovetv.net/ArtTactic-podcast.html

In this episode of the ArtTactic Podcast, Kenny Schachter, writer, independent curator and owner of Kenny Schachter Rove dissects the results of Sotheby's and Christie's first Major Contemporary auctions of the season, which were held last week in London.  Further, he provides his overall impressions of the entire week and how he thinks the market looks going forward.  Also, Kenny elaborates on an article he wrote in July in the Daily Mail, in which he stated "as an art lover I actually welcome the recession."  Finally, Kenny gives us his initial reaction to the inaugural Art & Design Fair, held in London last week, in addition to how the economy has affected the Design industry.

Frieze

When the Daily Telegraph titled an article “Frieze Has Lost their Cool” it signaled more than anything an era of change in the contemporary art market. The subject of the piece was that 40 dealers less than the previous year had been accepted. After the article went to press the fair tried to have it retracted disputing the number and threatening the journalist. Five years ago the same writer chronicled the exploding success of the fair by quoting the owners to the effect the hardest work they had remaining at that stage was to decide whom not to invite.

Frieze prided itself on who wouldn’t be let in to what amounted to yet another exclusive, private London club and in the process seemed to become quite self-satisfied. But they managed to alienate more than a few in the process.  Such heavy-handed schoolyard politics have gone a long way to contributing to boost FIAC in Paris as the next up and coming fair.

The fair speaks of new initiatives to showcase younger art, mostly from fading Zoo, but it’s more like the dearth of booth takers instigated the initiatives.

It’s the democratic forces of a deep recession transforming despots into benevolent dictators. Besides reaching out to new emerging art structures at Frieze, perhaps they should take heed of the fact that the Tate is free and so should Frieze.

The glamour is still there though, and many jostled for invites-I am sure the total number of viewers will hold steady or even increase this year. It is still a wonderful way to see the vitality of a cross-section of recent art under a single roof. This is especially so in London where it so complicated and time consuming traveling between galleries. However, rather than buyers tripping over themselves to consume art like there is no tomorrow; nowadays will see caution, restraint and lots more tire kickers.

For sure the volume and values of Frieze and the upcoming auctions will be down, but there is no better place for a quick fix to take the temperature of the art world. It’s also a good opportunity to see what the kids are up to these days. Recent strong results of Chinese art and design art auctions have found their footing at lower levels and are holding their own and even slightly improving. With unprecedented uncertainly in markets art is a rational place to park some assets. Like Hirst always says, there are a lot more collectors than people think, they’ll just be buying a lot this time around at Frieze.  But the point is that even with diminished sales, the art world is bigger and more global than ever.

In the financial markets money makes money but then art morphed into another way to arbitrage cash into more cash. Art divorced from aesthetics is never a good thing and thankfully no longer a viable approach to collecting. There is, by default, a return to appreciation and connoisseurship rather than trading art like corn. In world terms, the enthusiasm is stronger and broader than ever. Also, there is a sense of community in the art world, evident in fairs like Frieze, among artists, collectors, art world professionals and the public that will far outlast 75% of the art on view.

When I first moved to London I used to intercept the Frieze preview invitation addressed to the former occupant of the house. Today it seems more people clamor for them than ever, and for the first time, I was sent one. With my past of not publicly seeing eye to eye with fairs, it shows just how serious the recession really is.

Scrap Scrappage

As the modern car industry has ground to a halt and valuable older cars are being wastefully crushed to stimulate new car buying, we must seek out the undervalued and underappreciated designs of years past that are well-worth preserving and investing in, rather than destroying. The quick fix to the economy and harm to the atmosphere hardly justifies a pack of brand new Prius' with lead batteries that in fact will prove much less easily disposed of. And in fact, beneficial environmental conditions, not to mention the improved aesthetics of the streets, will be the result.

Appetites...

Two recent articles on Mauizio Cattelan and Damien Hirst made note of their formidable art collections. According to Hegel, when a child finds opposition in the form of the other, the first inclination is to eat it. Could that account for the voracious art collecting appetites of Koons, Cattelan, Prince and Hirst.

Rethinking the Shape of Everyday Life, By Alice Rawsthorn, NY Times, Oct 4, 2009

Chris Bangle, former head of design at BMW, expects future car owners to be less concerned about the exterior of vehicles and more focused simply on the interiors. That’s why the resale values of BMW’s are so and he’s no longer designing them.

More on Pop Life at the Tate...

It’s not enough for Murakami to spin his own gold but he had to make a literal tie-in with the inclusion of all manner of doodads fabricated from precious metals and gems by the likes of Kanye and Pharrell. In the case of Pharrell, he bedazzled a few of his favorite things on the tongue of a Murakami including diamond studded miniatures of a sneaker, ketchup jar, can of soda, cupcake and jar of baby oil. Baby oil? Pardon me, but that’s a tad too much information (see previous comments about prudes). But this only goes to show the age-old cliché that the grass is always greener as its no longer enough for artists to make art or musicians to make music (and headlines); but as artists, these musicians happen to make crappy art.

Pop Life at the Tate, Oct 2009

The Song Remains the Same

With three of my kids in tow (13,12,10) we visited the Tate’s Pop Life show and were repeatedly admonished not to enter various rooms with frontal nudity. Undeterred, we waltzed into the very closed and guarded doors of the Jeff Koons and Cicciolina porno room. After I told the apprehensive woman stationed beyond the sealed-off entranceway my kids were fine with it, they'd seen it all before, she panicked and went on red alert: “I have a code 4, I have a code 4”, she blurted into her walkie-talkie. You would think the World Trade Center was being bombed again. When I reassured her it was ok she demanded an audience with the security manager saying she didn't have authority to admit us, even with parental permission. In an adjoining gallery was an empty space where Richard Prince's purloined image of a naked ten year-old Brooke Shields once hung, before being removed by the police/self-censors at the Tate. Maybe instead of art's cozy relationship with money, sex and celebrity worship, the show is a better illustration of what a bunch of puritanical prudes we still are.

A response to Damien Hirst in The Sunday Times Magazine, UK

I for one don’t particularly like Warhol and find some of the work disingenuous, but mainly it leaves me cold. Hirst said a Warhol painting is a sculpture, that it’s not a painting but rather all about the image. However, it’s not a painting or a sculpture but a conceptual, intellectual idea of a painting constructed (rather than made in the traditional sense) using existing, extrapolated media imagery and mechanical means. Hirst himself is now constructing paintings, but rather by actually making them, whereas he used to fabricate his works using assistants as human silkscreens. For Hirst, a real artist needs to be someone who can paint. For self-legitimacy he is willing himself into fitting this romantic conception of an artist as a lone practitioner with brush, oils and thinner in hand toiling away in a garret.

Some thoughts on the art market, Sept/Oct 2009

In no way is the worst over in the art economy or the wider global financial world. Beware that next year should be at least as equally excruciating as the past 12 months. The stock market, gold and oil will test their lows in the coming year, the same with Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

In a sense, its not surprising that so few art galleries have gone out of business or worse, declared (or been declared) bankrupt. Part of the reason is that many gallery buildings are owned by the proprietors and don't face ongoing rent obligations and more so, dealers are as resilient as cockroaches and certainly not (solely) in it for the money as there are far easier routes to take for that task. Believe me. But, as sure as another spot painting will be dated 2010, there will be a fresh slate of gallery closings throughout the upcoming season.

Will we be faced with better art as a result of all the present upheaval? What is certain is that there is better value across the board; I had no interest in paying historic prices for artists with no history. Nowadays, 30-40% discount is the new 10%. For the first time in nearly two decades the balance of power has shifted to the collector in a way not seen since the market nearly evaporated during the early to mid-90's. I also think better art will result simply due to the fact that the diamond skull was nothing more than a glittering mirror held up to our times, and personally I'd rather non-economics based art content; so if it takes a mega-recession to bring about art based on something other than it's costs, so be it. The world feels fresher seen through eyes not clouded by rampant consumer fetishism, as we all seemed to suffer from when caught with our pants down at the onset of the crisis.

We have all had a cleansing by default, a baptism not of our own choosing. The violent economic whiplash was a slap in the face and a stern reminder that there are repercussions from excessive and obsessive pursuits, and accountability can be sobering. But there is a resulting democratizing in the fact that proportionately, almost everyone has lost something (except for a few hedge funders). And now that time is no longer money, there seems to be a lot more of it for soul searching.

Will galleries be as global as multinationals? The fact that you can add a few more Go Go’s to Gogosian's ever-expanding international base of operations is primarily a phenomenon of one. There really is no one in his rear view mirror…yet. But this is mainly a reflection of how swiftly people get around to track down the art they are after, which in turn is part of the process collectors have grown to love—trotting off to biennials and fairs (though fairs less so of late). So in effect, it truly is a global art market. After so many years of lip service as to how interconnected the world was becoming, well, it has finally happened.

Wonderful art activities do seem to emanate from adversity when people appear to come out of the woodwork to industriously present exhibits and make work, so there rarely are any real lulls or stoppages. Slowdowns yes, but the tops, middles and bottoms are largely as before it’s just that now all involved are selling less for less. Artists don’t really fix anything, they are more like sieves, filtering nuggets out of the vastness of our endlessly expanding and ever changing (info) universe and then rubbing our faces in it.

In the coming years there should be a lot fewer art fairs that will result in a realignment and retrenchment of the surviving events; in the process, some will go by the wayside. Which is a good thing. A medium sized booth (a must for displaying sculpture and design) ends up costing upwards of $100,000, including crating, shipping, travel, installation technicians, hotel and assistants. At this stage of the game, with little or no business to be done, people are growing tired of spending $100,000 to make new friends.

Which all makes it quite difficult for the status quo to remain intact. Advertising is an obvious area for cutbacks and artists and designers are beginning to express some malcontent about the somewhat dire situation. “What can you do for me next? If its not you, surely someone else will step in with the means and inclination”. Adverts though are seen more as a bonbon, a nice treat but not a meal or effective sales tool. Artists always complain about participating in fairs until you stop doing them. Then they really complain.