Art Basel Miami Beach 2009

Like a casino, with no natural light or sense of time and about the same odds of beating the house, so goes another iteration of the Basel Art Fair, this time in Miami.  Fittingly, gaming impresario Steve Wynn made the rounds towed by a towering blonde, presumably as much for his eyesight issues. But perhaps a high-end trading floor is a better analogy, peopled by the Prada clad rich, famous, infamous and in between, rather than stock exchange jobbers in their lab coats. With more art coursing through the system than ever before, even still at these diminished volumes, it’s a wonder so much content can be absorbed into the system fair after fair, exhibit after exhibit. And so it goes.

Some early drama unfolded an hour before the exclusive VIP preview when tricky financer cum tricky art dealer Asher Edelman effectuated a seizure of works by uniformed marshals to satisfy an outstanding judgment against another gallery. The works confiscated far exceeded the dispute value but all is fair game in the wild world of the art market, the last unregulated bastion of billion dollar business. Not that anyone’s hands were probably particularly clean in this instance, but what an unnecessarily heavy-handed (very) public show of force.

The world of art fairs wasn’t always such a moneyed, glamorous arena to see and be seen in, they are known as trade shows after all. I can even remember the time before nine-figure painting deals and prior to the evolution of Sylvester Stallone’s mature painting style, examples of which were well represented at the fair. There was John McEnroe dropping big dollars on works, Val Kilmer, as noted for his weight as his pink cowboy hat, Naomi and the usual gaggles of Steve Cohen hedge fund cronies. But unlike the Swiss version of the fair, Miami is as much (if not more) about the plethora of parties than high-end art transactions. Sitting with a bunch of collectors before the official opening we compared the hierarchy of admission times on our VIP cards (earlier the better) and invites to parties--a practice known as status Miami style. I am not above subscribing to the self-invite. But compared to the last year, Miami 09 was a rousing success as art proved to be a credible place to park money in light of the uncertainties still pervading worldwide financial markets. Incredibly, Stallone sold more than one of his expressionistic abortions (for $50,000 and up) as he triumphantly made his way around the fair in oversized black sunglasses; an ideal means to appreciate the works of his peers. God bless him though, it’s no easy feat to match Damien Hirst’s painting prowess.

The first rule of law in the art world is never to believe the word of the gallery when it comes to reflecting upon levels of business, especially at a fair and more so to the press. However, the one empirical barometer of sales is the physical turnover on the walls when art is replaced during a fair. In this case, after hour upon hour of rounds, like a single person at a nightclub, I witnessed such biggies as a $6m 1960’s Warhol being removed at Gagosian. And this was far from an isolated case—moving something from one wall to another only counts as indecision. The upside to visiting as a guest as opposed to participating is that aside from hotel rates all else: booze, food and transport, are free. Which is no inconsequential amount. Why can't London be like that upon my return?

What I never understood was what a truly competitive machismo sport art collecting is. Inevitably at the fair, reference is made to the male organ in art and the conversations surrounding it, especially with the exploits of Tiger and his tales circulating madly. When I thought I recognized someone in the bathroom who was engaged with both hands on two phones, I realized I didn’t know him but couldn’t help noticing he was packing something that might have been his own personal cell phone tower dangling from below. And it dawned on me that much of the swagger of the mostly male hoard of collectors is akin to feral animals swinging their assets around in an effort to prove who has the largest, most important…collection. It's no longer the family jewels that count.

Even I was engaged in a shoot out when I attempted to buy a painting on behalf of a client. As I negotiated via text message with the proprietor of the gallery to settle on a satisfactory purchase price, a friend informed me that someone was in the booth simultaneously trying to wrestle it away from me. Normally when a dealer states further interest in the very work you are after it gives rise to nothing more than disbelief, but in this case it was perfectly so. Off I scurried to the scene, which with 260+ galleries unsystematically installed throughout endless halls of a massive convention center, is no easy feat. An acquaintance sat in one corner of the both, his back turned to me, unaware he was in midst of a chess battle with an unknown-known opponent. As a famous artist said to me ages ago when we were in a minor spate (hard to believe): “the world is small and the art world is miniscule”. Actually the art world today is worlds bigger than it was then, but the adage still holds true. Though my bid was more than 10% less the collector wanted a 24-hour holding period to make a determination; I was willing to pull the trigger then and there. Notes were exchanged out of the sightline of the seated client illustrating past auction history, a must with secondary market goods. Based on my relationship with the dealer and willingness to commit, I ended up with the work. Welcome to the land of anything goes.

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.

Alternative Investment Evening, Unlimited International LLP, London, September 28, 2009

Imagine going to a grocery store, negoting down the price of a litre of milk, not paying for it for a year or so, then returning it after a glass, saying it was past the sellby date. Or going to a fashion designer and being told you were not suitable enough to be seen wearing the dress? In the art world of the past 20 years or so, these were typical scenarios every art professional is familiar with. The nuances and pecularities of the art world are numerours and legendary. But the landscape is quickly shifting.

For instance, even selling art vs the car auction market is entirely different. This is best illustraed by a recent sale of a shelby daytona coupe by mecum in the us. It was slated to be the most expensive us car ever sold publicly but failed to meet the $10m expectation with a high bid of $6.8m. The auction house responded by simply rolling the car into the very next sale where it sold for $7.5m which was indeed a record for a us car.

In art, that wouldn’t happen. When an art work publicy fails to sell at auction it is considered burnt and needs to be off the market for what in the past would be years. The gap between these two scenerios is closing under present market hardships, but the arts are a minefield for those not fully informed and initiated in it’s unusal ways.

Which is why good advice is of paramount importantance more now than ever. If you are not sure of the unwritten rules of how the ever shifting art game is being played you can be exposed to some pretty unscrupulous dealings or simply spend too much. Not that one is any worse than the other.

From private negotiation tactics to what you are entitled to when dealing with auction houses, advice is more important than ever. There are issues such as conservation of works, logistics—like packing/shipping, insurance, and more than ever the customs ramifications of moving art around from country to country. If you are not careful, in zero tolerance countries like switzerland, you can end up deep in litigation if works are not properly and fully valued.

The art and collectible markets have slowed but are far from morbid. Rather things are still more active today than in boom years past. Though value and volume of sales at auction are down dramatically from the recent past, it is still volumes ahead of the last recession in the early 90s. And though there is less being offered publicly, private treaty sales are now exceeding public auctions—this only goes to show clients are not willing to risk poor auction performance at lower estimates when they can attain higher prices with less downside risk privately. There is an article in bloomberg.Com today on the subject.

In any event, the balance of power has shifted from the auction houses and dealers to the collector in a manner not seen for years, even decades. Today, there is more room for negotiation for top tier works than i can ever remember.

Gloabalization has finally reached the levels where there is a measurable impact on the art market. There are fine art charts and graphs of artists and market segments, and art funds announced practailly every day. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another story. Bloomberg is in fact today’s new art magazine. Even weath management companies are specifically getting involved in the arts due to the inherent and growing demand of their client base; i know as i am speaking to one about a position as advisor.

And its not just art. In the design market, which is the market for furniture produced in limited numbered editions: the seminal work that all others are measureed against is a chaise lounge by the 45 year old australian marc newson who exhibits his limited editon industrial designs at the gagosian gallery. By leaps and bounds he is the world’s most commercially successful designer. The metal riveted lockheed lounge chair in an edition of 10 + 4 proofs, so 14, traded at $1.5m at the very height of the art boom in 2007 and only a few months ago in april of 09 (well into the height of recession) another piece from the edition went for over $1.6m. From 2000 to 2006 the same work went from $100k to $1m! This is an area of the market that will grow and should not be overlooked. But buyer beware, one table went from $300k and a year later failed to find a buyer at $200k. Hail the return to connoisseurship.

In the end, the internatinal art market is now a fully fledged recognized asset class, and even beyond that it’s a barometer of wealth and liquidity in the global markets. Every balanced portfolio should have some, with the added benefit that it can look good too.

On the Occasion of the Exhibition: Brrrrain, by Antonio Olaio at Culturgest, Lisbon, curated by Miguel Wandschneider, Fall 09

The formal component of Antion Olaio’s art imbues painting with another dimension altogether for there are figurative paintings with overlaid text, accompanied by a music video sing-along. These multi-media constructions function as story telling devices with built-in soundtracks, revealing visual tales from deep in the artist’s subconscious. To look further into the work, it is helpful to speak about the person behind the making, as he is inserted, literally and/or figuratively into each and every piece by way of his starring role in a bespoke musical accompaniment for your added visual and aural satisfaction. Olaio’s songs are reductive affairs with usually no more than a simple, monotonous tune, while his paintings are like graphic, single-frame films, despite the artist’s protestations to the contrary.

Physically, Antonio Olaio is a cross between Kevin Spacey, Elvis Costello, and a dollop of Pee Wee Herman. The Pee Wee bit is manifested in his absurdist, Dadaist musings on everything, nothing and the plain weird. He’s twee and sometimes the effect is creepy, but at the same time affecting, touching and charming. The monotone singing can be a distraction, but also it hooks you and remains stuck in your mind’s eye. For Olaio, painting is not enough; perhaps he needed more DNA in the work than pigment on canvas alone could satisfy. The result is Antonio himself as the quirky pop performer, injected into each short film. It could be said to be rather exhibitionist and self-aggrandizing, but in the hands of the artist, it is equally pathetic and comic. Unlike Cindy Sherman constantly gazing into her own navel as her performative fantasies run amok, Olaio’s explorations are inextricably tied to his sense of self-identity.

In his art, Antonio Olaio is confident yet with low self-esteem, cartoonish and somber, haunting and goofy all simultaneously. He doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, as reflected in this quote describing one of his works: “This song sounds quite serious, almost pompous, but fortunately it's quite silly in its pretentiousness.” The sense of insecurity is palpable as the self-deprecating nature of the person that lies beneath the work is evident, but Olaio fearlessly faces failure by positing himself front and center in his compositions time and again.

As much as the significance of the images, both moving and still, the bizarre word groupings always arrest us. Maybe the language is as confusing to him as it is to me, maybe it’s lost in translation; scarily maybe it’s not and this world of societal absurd-ism is completely normal, knowable and understandable to Antonio. But I don't really care about Olaio’s intended meanings, his verbal cocktails are so rich and flavorful they elicit all manner of existential associations. "Brrrrrain" the title of the exhibition brings to mind a brain freeze, also known as an ice-cream headache, a momentary seizure-like ache due to excessive cold or god knows what. The wonderful works of Antonio Olaio, consumed too fast like a child attacking a delectable treat, will bring on joy and confusion, pain and pleasure! The artist calls it punk, which is not something I admit to seeing, unless of a variety so sublime it is beyond me. What I see is cute, harmless, a tad annoying, with flourishes of slapstick, though most definitely eerily unsettling.

The paintings are of a school I call Good Bad Painting, not a photorealist variety of figuration, but colorful, alluring, gripping and graphic, in the vein of the Chicago
Imagists, a group of surreal representational painters like Jim Nutt, Roger Brown and Ed Paschke. The genre of this painting style grabs you by the throat with acidic colors and completes the assault with grotesque imagery.

Olaio adds to this mix by incorporating word play and songs into his art: it’s music and lyrics as sculpture, turning a tune into an object as weighty as bronze. Sound and vibration take on the characteristics of paint and brush. In the videos, there is not much happening visually but there is always the distinctive, frog-y moan to catch and hold your attention. The videos have crude production values, as the funerary, atmospheric melodies fill the background. And the songs…often they have the droll drone of Serge Gainsborough, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed with some of the kooky-ness of John Cage. Yes, it can be Irritating but then it sticks in your craw like all good music and art. Ultimately, though, the music works; it stands out as an accomplishment in and of itself.

Only Antonio Olaio can find the “nasty” side of butterflies, and here are some reflections on his titles and wordplay…

“My dreams are small and sad.” Sad maybe, but the work of Olaio is far from tragic. Melancholic and filled with a sense of longing and dejection, the art carries with it a component of built-in failure. Is Olaio a misfit? I’d say most definitely not, rather in the manner of both the writer Samuel Beckett, and the singer Beck, he’s an existential troubadour, a combination of the two. Antonio seems to say: I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.

“My hand is a readymade.” It’s as if the act of making art for Olaio is independent of his will, an action beyond volition. There is a sense of pre-determinism, of nature having the upper hand in the perennial nature vs. nurture debate in sociology. This notion of an art practice operating outside of personal choice is also evident in the title: “If I wasn’t an artist what would I be.” For Olaio, art making is preordained and outside the realm and luxury of choice.

“I think differently now that I can paint.” Though for Olaio the capacity for art is something you are inextricably born with, nevertheless, honing those skills is akin to a blue-collar job and entails a diligent, puritanical work ethic. It takes tenacity, perseverance and doggedness, and even then success is not assured, far from it, especially in trying times. The process of art, in whatever form it takes, often involves (despite perceptions otherwise) routine, task making and administration that does not exactly live up to the romantic idea of an artist in the throes of the act of creation. Art making for Olaio also equals intellectual enlightenment.

“Broadcasting my songs.” Here we have signs of another vain, megalomaniac artist insisting on speaking to the world at large, yet in the same-titled painting, besides the declarative text beneath the image of a microphone, there is also the depiction of knotted and impossible to function wiring. So there is self-love, but it is coupled with a vanity that is at times also self-negating.

“Pictures are not movies.” Hah! I hate to be the one to break the news to Mr. Olaio, but if ever a picture was indeed a movie, it is here. These are one film-cell films. Anyway, regardless of what Olaio insists, often; as is the case here, artists are sometimes the least capable of analyzing their own work. So please forgive me for taking the liberty of looking elsewhere for interpretations and meanings in this art.

“Bambi is in jail.” A stranger juxtaposition of words does not exist: an unpredictable statement that is equal measure demonic and whimsical but simultaneously deliciously cruel.

“Sit on my soul.” In this painting, we are faced with a pinup, nude and voluptuous, striking a provocative pose. The title expresses the yearning not for a quick sexual fix but rather a solicitation to quench Olaio’s intellectual and spiritual curiosity. This work has also got a taste of Olaio looking inside some impenetrable room at others having more love, fun and success then he will seemingly ever enjoy. This is as close as Olio will get to frontal sex in his paintings and videos, but it is a distracted and abstract longing rather than any consummation. Love, but more likely lost love, a denial of love. “Three pounds of wine and she loves you.” If that doesn’t say it all I don’t know what does.


“Potatoes are sweaty.” With such disjointed evocations, sometimes Olaio can be plain gross and disgusting, like a certain genre of teenage movies. I guess that is where Antonio wants to take us, on a journey as absurd and surreal as Willy Wonka (the original version) with as much perverted, misguided fun. In any event, it is hard to look at potatoes the same again.

“Wicked teachers.” This is Olaio’s questioning of authority both in art and otherwise, but always with the perspective of an insatiable, curious, though naughty child. That for me is the essence of the work: it is the product of a jaded, twisted but always humorous existentialist take on life, and you can feel the sense of joy and release he seems to enjoy in the process.

The videos, songs and paintings of Antonio Olaio taken as a whole seem a poor excuse to stand on a soapbox shouting at all who will listen to convey an utterly unique voice that is nothing less than enchanting and fantastical. It’s an all-encompassing philosophy of life seen through a multi-faceted language of whimsical imaginings. In the end, Olaio has sung, written and painted his way deep into our heads, hearts and souls.

BBC One: Art in Troubled Times

In times like these, what is art worth? And what is art for?

The big moment for publicly funded art in Britain was the Second World War. "Something absolutely remarkable happened during the war", says actor Simon Callow. "The theatre suddenly was right at the heart of society."

After the war, the idea of "art for all" led to the founding of the Arts Council - "very much a response to the distress, the fear, the uncertainty of war." Alan Yentob asks if culture can play that role again today.
Dealer Kenny Schachter explains how, in a perverse way, he feels this recession is the best thing that has happened to the art world in ten years.

Aired on Tuesday, 28 July at 22:35 on BBC One.
Click here to watch Art in Troubled Times Part 1 "A New Deal for Art"
Click here to watch Art in Troubled Times Part 2 "The Home Front"

Written for The Daily Mail's Mail on Sunday, July 09

London art dealer Kenny Schachter has traded in millions as the art market has boomed in recent years. But now the recession is here, he couldn't be happier - because the most lauded works might actually be ones the rest of us like . . .

By Kenny Schachter

I have published books on art and design, lectured at universities from Columbia in New York to Manchester, sold a painting last year for £15 million and have even exhibited my own art internationally. Not bad for someone with no formal art education.
But that puts me in good company, as many people in the art world look at very little art, and read even less about it.

That's because, over the past ten years, the art world has been taken over by economics. The business of art grew more in the past ten years than the previous 100. The art world became truly interconnected, with Russia, the Middle East, China, India and Africa all playing increasingly important roles.

When I started out in the art world in the 1980s, no one dreamt of a single art piece selling for more than £100 million (more than a few have), and the people at private views resembled a law school class. Now they look resemble an Academy Awards party.

Though there has always been an element of status associated with a particularly desired work of art, these days such works have been been transformed into nothing more than bags of money pretentiously nailed to the walls of hedge funders.

During the 'noughties', a financial tsunami built in the art world, the crescendo of which exploded in the creation of the obscene diamond skull by Damien Hirst, which finally exalted money above all else in art, including taste. The diamond dog certainly spoke of its own time, which you can’t take away from it, and only just before the violent death of the consumer revolution.

And the bond between art and wealth has meant that pieces have been traded like commodities rather than works of beauty. Recently, when art has been bought and sold, it has often been done by images transmitted over the Internet (that end up spreading like swine flu virus). And art has been traded like corn, moving in unopened crates between storage facilities, on its way to auction houses.

That's why, strange as it may sound, as an art lover I actually welcome the recession. At least because it could spell the end of economics-ism, the movement in which new art costs a fortune and has fortune as its subject. So what will happen?

I think that this economic climate will bring us back into the arms of appreciation for traditional ideals of craft and beauty at the high end of the market. I predict we'll be in touch with a more humanistic level of art that will be about life, not just an excuse for a new Bentley in the garage of certain collectors and artists. Art will become more relevant to our lives in that it will reflect the times we live in and how we relate to each other in trying times.

And this won't just apply to the most expensive pieces. In some ways, art is like fashion in that what you see in a fashion show eventually trickles down to the high street. Artists latch on to trends happening at the top of the market. For example, Banksy is currently still fairly holding up in the market (although he started at the bottom as a graffiti artist) and so there are now an unhealthy number of wannabe Banksies.

But what people will see more and more in the galleries that manage to survive is more conservative, safe and cautious fare. Nowadays, it’s going be more bowls of fruit and flowers rather than schlock meant to shock. Which is why I say a depression is not so depressing in the art world.

As art becomes more relevant, so the limited edition prints and drawings by artists that are more in the price range of those on modest incomes will become morre attractive to purchasers.

We are entering a golden age of cheap(er) art due to a backlash, a resentment to the hyper-inflated contemporary art prices of the recent past. What the big boys of art are going to be forced to copy from the up-and-coming kids is that there is an overwhelming price sensitivity today never before seen in the market. The main thing that will transform the market of expensive art is that there are fewer and fewer people today that actually want to own it. So if formerly successful artists still feel like selling art and eating they damn well better lower their prices!

So I welcome the collapse of the art market with open arms, even if it means an 85 per cent reduction in my turnover from last year. I admit that sounds a bit Mother Teresa-ish, but so be it!

Recently, for the first time in years, I have been motivated to see art again. Seeing, learning and connoisseurship are again valued after being absent for years. Recession art is more engaging than art made during a time of easy money. A down market is the great societal equaliser - the democracy of a depression.

I spell out some of these thoughts in a two-part Imagine special on BBC ONE. The reason I participated in it is that so few people in the art world are prepared to shed light on the least transparent world there is. I hope that I can show the top end of the art market for what it had become - a world obsessed by money and status.

At the moment I am trading in another love of mine - classic cars - nearly as much as art. The two fields share a lot in common: they are both easy places for the unsuspecting to be duped; and the snake pit of art dealers resemble used-car salesmen more than they care to admit.

Only a short time ago you needed to be considered 'important' (the most misused art-world word), and in good graces with art dealers, to buy the work of hot young artists. Imagine Dolce & Gabbana restricting the sale of their dresses to women they thought pretty enough.

In other instances you would have to buy art from other artists in a dealer’s stable to be offered the stuff you actually wanted.What a difference a bad economy makes - nowadays gallery owners will sell to the homeless.

Unscrupulous art dealers, and they are legion, usually operate without contracts with artists, take 50 per cent of the cut from sales, and rarely pay in a timely fashion. Not me of course. Evidence of the hard times that have befallen the art world is the fact I don't know a single dealer today not selling expensive inventory at losses to keep above water.

The £15 million sale I had last year was followed by a succession of collapsed deals, including an $80 million transaction that was a day away from closing. Thankfully, cost is now not the most over-riding thing in the art world. Art used to be about beauty and rising above the everyday.
Maybe, with the recession, works of quality will be once again exalted.

Kenny Schachter will be featured in BBC ONE's Imagine . . . Art In Troubled Times Part 2, on Tuesday at 10:35pm

PUSS 'N BOOTS, DICK 'N HAND (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Summer 09)

At the most glamorous of the many fab parties leading up to the 2009 Basel Art Fair, the granddaddy of them all, a museum director related the story of a day trip to Venice to see the Biennial after which she went for a massage and was awoken by the sensation of something odd in her hand which ended up to be the penis of the masseuse. The only reaction it elicited was laughter. But afterwards, she passed a famous dealer friend in the hallway with more adventurous sexual proclivities that was unknowingly on the way to the surprise of her art season. A day later at the opening of the fair a design dealer recounted how when a famous industrial designer took delivery of a classic 60’s Aston Martin, he took his penis into hand and rubbed it across the length of the automobile. These separate but related art world incidents are illustrative of the childishness, sleaze and dicking around so prevalent in the art world of today. Overheard at the same party by the lake in Zurich was the comment: “if you wiped out the crowd here, there’d be no art world left”. Which goes to prove that there is nothing like art world’s strong sense of self-satisfied smugness.

First in from Zurich to Basel I was confronted with a Cameroonian taxi driver in who tried to sell me an African mask, “a replica of which was currently on view at the Beyeler Museum” and then offered to scout young talent for me in Africa. There is no mistaking when it is art fair time of year. For a change I was able to enjoy not having participated in one of ancillary fairs, as the main fairs are usually far too political for someone of my ilk to be admitted; I felt a newfound freedom to roam, to see and enjoy the peripatetic existence, living outside the Willy Lowman-esque ball and shackle of gallery-dom. In the process, I ended up with more business cards and less beholden.

Within the very fair itself, there is more of a social hierarchy than at the outside parties and restaurants. Within the buzzing VIP Lounge, there are VIP-VIP lounges, the most exclusive of which was fittingly sponsored by private jet company Netjets. After managing to get smuggled in like so much excess baggage, it was so hot and uncomfortable inside that it was like being stuck on an airless plane. But still, they stayed; content in the knowledge of how many flight hours it took to be invited. Throughout, art is being consumed this way and that, right under your nose, and after getting caught in the whirlwind, sometimes by you. It’s an elating experience to behold. Sure it’s rather gross in a depression, but art excites, and someone told me, has a measurable neurological effect that prolongs your life. Viva la credit crunch, the hiatus is over, I’m starting to collect again—though I must admit, after my return to reality and the collapse of my past 5 deals, I hope it didn’t amount to premature ejaculation.

A participant in the fair was quoted on Bloomberg confessing to a dirty little secret those in the art business are nowadays all too familiar with: the practice of dealer selling at substantial losses to maintain liquidity in order to keep things moving. It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. Though many dealers seemed to be selling, I heard stories of just as many who were not. But it’s the age-old lie, the art world’s version of original sin—to publicly state that they sold like hotcakes when in reality they lost a fortune. Are my peers becoming the model of a new aphorism of the YUPPIE variety, namely MUDs: Middle-aged, Urban and Downwardly mobile? Spending money used to be a profession; now finding any is a chore.

As I was actually sitting with a client, a specialist from a major auction house called him to tell how I had burnt the works in the collection by shopping them around too aggressively. Art is the only field where you are contacted to try and sell something only to be accused of diluting its value and ostracized for doing the very thing you were asked to undertake in the first instance. As my client hung up from the auction house, my phone rang with the very same auction house expert asking me to lunch the following week, knowing only I had full access to the work. Talk about a zero sum mentality, for which the art world is famous. One dealer sells, it is perceived, only at the expense of another. A few days later another gallerist (who might be from Canada) called my client to state he had seen the very paintings we were offering for sale on the Internet that would be the death knell to a discrete transference. Nothing could be further from the truth but that was beside the point; the front and backstabbing in the art world defies belief.

Emblematic of the degree of gossip, innuendo, and disinformation swirling around the art world in the attempt to undermine business are the following: one dealer “friend” called to relay he heard a painting I was selling through a dealer participating at the fair was being sold for more than I was let on to believe to a Russian with a famous girlfriend. Although the pricing story turned out to be false, the identity of the collector was entirely correct. The reconnaissance of the art world is worthy of the CIA and MI5 combined. In the end the show of public consumption for the sake of the girlfriend was followed by a swift cancellation only after the fair and invoice were complete. A few deals later I was contacted by the same deep throat dealer who again knew the precise details of a multi million dollar deal I was in the midst of. The only upside is that I was relived to know I wasn’t suffering from extreme paranoia due the accuracy of the third party information I am constantly bombarded with. Can someone explain why art world insiders have such big mouths?

Museums and auction houses are cutting more and more positions after Spring/Summer 2009 sales declined by three-quarters to 80%; while Sotheby’s debt is in the process of getting downgraded from junk that would make it…really junky. Last year at Christie’s in London, a Monet Water Lilly painting sold for more than $80 million, only a year later the entire Impressionist and Modern sale was estimated at $62 million to $84.7 million and achieved $61m. Two major Picasso’s both recently bought in 2005 for £2.7m and in 2000 for £4m sold for £5.75m, and £7m respectively. Which translates into the fact you can sell Picassos in a post-nuclear apocalypse. All in all contemporary sales are down nearly 80% in volume from only a year ago and Modern and Impressionist didn’t fare much better at a level 75% less than last year. On the contemporary side, a Richard Prince Nurse painting was valued at $3m and sold for just shy of that versus last year’s result of $8m for the same size nurse; though Prince inflation is still nothing to sneeze at considering they initially sold only 5 years ago for less than $100k, after depreciation like that you’ll need a nurse. But amazingly that was the only work in the sale with a third-party guarantee. For the most part though, the favorite artists in today’s market are dead ones. Mine too—they are a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Even so, just when it appeared the auctions stopped making records like the music industry, 18 were set at Phillips for primarily younger artists.

Only a short time ago, in my London neighborhood, I witnessed two Ferrari test-drives in one morning, if that’s not a ray of hope what is? And, I only just heard reference to the present state of the economy as: a “post crisis environment”. That's enough of a reason in itself to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Even more evidence of good times ahead, there is a group of hip, young New York artists I avoided assiduously until one became a recent auction highflier at a tender young age. I decided if you can’t beat them, join them so I bought one and was able to resell it for twice what I paid before I paid for it, which was still only fair market value, thus the glory of the inefficiencies of the market—probably the last largely unregulated multi-billion dollar one at that. Fittingly the subject matter of the work was an abstract depiction of animal shit.

PRICE-LESS (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Late Spring 09)

A Banksy graffiti was recently sprayed with graffiti itself: the tagline was: Price-Less. And true it is as the graffiti genre has been swiftly and broadly hit by the onset of recession. Yet, even something priceless has a price less today than a year ago. We have seen the pace of globalization subside as people travel less, spend less and nest more. Such are ideal times to forge closer familial relations. We are experiencing a widespread realignment after a tectonic shift in world economic and social systems. And the massive aftershocks from this earthquake/tsunami have far from subsided. For the time being, we are becoming more provincial in outlook regardless of how far afield we hail from. In the condition of entropy things have a tendency to resort to a state of disorder and disarray, falling to bits and pieces like the peeling paint and decomposition of an old house—not unlike the international economy.

A major auction house recently sold an artwork for under £50,000—when the bidder evaporated as payment was due, they went as far as physically paying a visit to the residence to demand payment. I suppose it wasn’t Bill Ruprecht or Pinault doing the bidding in this instance, but in light of today’s stunning setbacks in every sector of the art and auction market, it well could have been. That’s proactive debt collection. From Sotheby’s dramatic stock slide to the 75% Tiffany & Co. is down (unless people have soured to marriage), everyone is desperately solicitous for business. Formerly aloof restaurant staff the world over are now mimicking the lyrics of the theme song from Cheers: “where everyone knows your name”. It’s as though we are all acting without a script, working harder than ever and never making less. One possible upside is that there seem to be more people losing weight, maybe because its cheaper to be thin, and there is more time to spend (if not money) on fitness. On top of everything, it may appear too indulgent to be overweight these days.

Charles Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities with the line: “It was the best of times it was the worst of times”, a fitting description of the present predicament. People say how can anyone contemplate buying art in such historic trying times, but if you really like art, try trying not to. The urge to collect art is as primal as the facility to make it. From the first cave drawing came the first ravenous collector. Even in the recession-corrected times we are in, yes, things are less, but not all reassessments are created equal. Talk about an about face—but if you can’t contradict yourself, who can you? There were pockets of surging performances in the Spring 2009 auctions, and many records set in the process, though the trend is substantially lower volume and much the same with values. Overall, that collectors are still confident enough to continue to plow millions into pigment on canvas proves the notion that art really is an acknowledged asset class in the best sense of the term, despite the dire and relentless prognostications of the media. This only goes to prove we will get through this malaise with the market if not thriving as it once was, nevertheless intact. And a note to all the persistent naysayers, you can’t take away the sun (unless you are an avowed Gore-ian, global warm-ist).

A well known hedge funder expressed the opinion that art would come to have no value; funny how the art market continues to trudge along at quite an astonishing rate all things considered, while his fund, down 75% last year, will continue to drown deep under his high water mark. In art and design, signs of hope are beginning to abound. There was a recent strong Asian art sale, nearly all sold and more importantly, to all Chinese buyers (albeit more traditional works than speculative contemporary). A lucrative design sale where 45 year-old Australian designer Marc Newson’s dresser/bureau more than doubled the low estimate to sell at $517,000 was followed a few weeks later by $1,613,000 achieved for his Lockhead lounge, the highest price ever fetched for a living designer. Take note it’s an edition of 10 (Ten!) with 5 (Five!) “artist’s proofs”. It is now indisputable that design has reached parity with contemporary art as a recognized and established collecting category. The Yves St Laruent sale of the Eileen Gray $30m chair phenomenon was apparently no fluke: there’s a new benchmark for…the bench.

In the latest spate of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in New York there were nasty casualties such as an over estimated Picasso and Giacometti—no one and nothing is sacred from improbably high estimates. The art business today is characterized by the equation less art for less money equals more (solid results). Weak were recent high flyers like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, but there was still plenty of support even for such over-inflated artists by the likes of Larry Gagosian and other market preservers, and protectors. These players have vested interests too all-encompassing to permit collapse, or even the appearance of failure. In the past dealers colluded to keep prices artificially low to steal things on the cheap versus today where dealers and mega professional collectors frequently step in to provide a temporary fix to maintain and support the illusion of health and wealth in the system. Whether this propping will last is anyone’s guess.

Modern and Impressionism and Contemporary sales are two wildly different animals when it comes to market performance but hand it to Christies where the Contemporary results nearly mirrored the levels of Mod and Impressionist. When collectors are now flocking in droves to safer, historically established works, that’s as bullish an indicator as can be for recent art in particular and the market in general. As an addendum to the story of wealth barometers in the recessionary economy, a classic Ferrari just made over $12m, a record for a public sale, which was considered by the media a disappointment (the house was hoping for $15m it was stated). It’s enough to make tears well up when you consider the shortfall in expectations—could things really be so dismal that a car can’t achieve the price of a plane? I remember the days when a nice car could be had for a cool million.

Another Tale of Two Cities was the latest tale in the ongoing war of Sotheby’s vs. Christies. Sotheby’s held their May sales for Impressionist/Modern and Contemporary on consecutive Mondays while Christies followed on successive Tuesdays. This scheduling bifurcation of sales dates ended in very divergent results. In both Sotheby’s Monday auctions the buyers seemed to be only interested in testing the waters, looking for assurances that there was to be no Chicken Little moment, while such hesitations nearly caused the sky to fall on the market. The anemic and tepid bidding was disastrous, only to be followed on both occasions by firm and decidedly successful performances at Christies. That both early sales by Sotheby’s failed the first day of the week was no coincidence. In the bigger picture, what a difference a year makes for Contemporary as both houses are down in volume about 85% from a year ago.

I’d like to share a poem I wrote on the way to the bank to deposit the proceeds from the sale of two watches (hard times demand tough actions):

A Bad Date

A bad date it was for Sotheby’s!
A lucky date, a hot date
A date with fate
Better late
For Christies

TIME ISN'T MONEY (ANYMORE), Canvas Magazine, Art and Culture from the Middle East and Arab World, Spring 2009

I have made art for years for little or no audience—what better activity could there be in the face of such economic uncertainty? If ever there was an occasion for the mantra: Just Do It (Yourself), its now. Remember how time used to equal money; guess what? It no longer does. Procrastination may be an excuse but lack of time surely no longer is. Today is for taking stock; examining and considering what preceded the economic crisis and summing up how to positively move forward. In the midst of it all there will be a return to art about life in all its unadorned rawness, as content will revert to the social, political and spiritual, rather than the exclusively economic.

This is a propitious moment to establish new paradigms in how to patronize art. Not only should one negotiate with pomp and certitude but also try creative collecting, be as industrious as the artists you covet rather than strictly haggling. You can now have cake and pie: good art that is relatively cheap. Forget the last days of Christ, the last days of the art fair, or exhibit, or fill in the blank, is (a bargain hunters) paradise. But also, conjure new structures, new relationships with art and artists, what an ideal time for collaborations. Better still, shun art fairs altogether in protest, enough is enough, draw a line in the sand! Get into or back to the practice of visiting art galleries, local or remote, and ask to speak to the proprietor. Gone are the days when beyond the impossibly high reception desks gallery owners were harder to find than major CEO’s, only settle for an audience with the boss.

The British Arts Council has created a program of subsidized loans of up to £2,000 to purchase individual artworks (there is no limit to how many pieces a collector can accumulate) from a list of participating galleries and fairs. The Swiss government has started supporting local galleries to participate in fairs as well. So now your favorite gallery and art will be as government propped as your bank and car.

Or work directly with artists or galleries to find ways to help foster the production of art, take an interest in a particular artist or body of work or find ways to help disseminate artworks. A new era is upon us, akin to the American WPA (Work Projects Administration) that was the massive government aid effort to create jobs and foster arts during the Great Depression (will ours be the Greater Depression?). We are at the point where in some instances certain staples may soon be free, like food and shelter, as the alternative to families that can’t be fed or housed is not pretty. The newspapers report of plans being drawn to train British police to combat civil unrest. We have to go back to (get to) the future, but life will go on.

Contrary to popular belief, cash is not king, to be replaced by knowledge and experience. Old is the new new, the new young. We must reassess and value established but underappreciated and undervalued artists with a track record. No more historic prices for artists with no history. Why buy now what you can buy cheaper 6 months from now which mentality is paralyzing business. And there is no bottom in sight—at this point, even a plateau would be a blessing. Forget leapfrogging over one another in the scramble to buy art and other nonessentials. Some people are still searching for the next big thing, a home run when they should be concentrating on baby steps, relearning how to walk. The entire art experience had turned into a giant premature ejaculation, an encounter without much forethought or enjoyment. Those days are gone.

There is a new caveat emptor, so speculators beware, art is no longer for roulette spinners and dice rollers, for the odds have just gotten considerably worse. There is still possibly gold in the hills, but it’s closer to coal that might grow into diamonds over the long, long term (the diamond market is another recently decimated). We are at a new turtle’s pace, and not the one that beat the hare. Art will return to being viewed with deliberation and contemplation.

This is a post-economy economy in which losses replaced earnings. I don’t know a dealer that wouldn’t sell something at a loss to keep the continuity of cash flow. Banks have suffered total defeat, as the only solution to the near demise of the financial system has been to pour money on it like water on a raging fire. Sooner or later there will be accountability, expressed as inflation, mega bankruptcies or both and more. At which time a nicely rounded collection could be a boon. Stoking the art depression is the dying breed of collectors fighting the bonus onus: the burden of trying to get away with a seven-figure bonus (once earmarked for art) borne of taxpayer bailout money. For better not worse, buying stuff is no longer an acknowledged world pastime. The impulsive point of purchase transaction is finished as every penny is now measured with newfound urgency.

A Martian may as well have landed things have changed so radically from the recent past, namely, the demise of world’s economy and consumerism as we knew it. Is the economic calamity a coordinated Al Qaeda attack? Or have they been wiped out in bank stocks too? I am prepared to work for nothing today. Trying to make money is like flogging a dead horse, unless you are John Paulson shorting every bank across the land on a daily basis and single-handedly taking home a large portion of the world’s money supply in the process. Nowadays, three minutes can stretch into an eternity, thank god for the Internet to partially fill the void. Physiological manifestations like rashes and bodily pains are emerging among the population like weeds on a fertile field. Where every day is Friday the 13th, when the market goes up for an hour it’s considered a significant rally.

Stocks and other investments are beginning to sell at or below their net asset value. Citicorp has been trading for less than a dollar a share, about the price of a pack of chewing gum. That is unless things are sold in the context of the estate of some deceased fashionista’s over-decorated, lavish apartment, from Saint Laurent to Versace. Forget the Saint Laurent sale’s $11 million appropriated bottle of Marcel Duchamp perfume—a $30m chair is what was truly exciting (the amount fetched by an Eileen Gray unique piece from 1917-19—I hope it took her that long to make for that price). Imagine giving new meaning to kids, dogs and crumbs. As good as the Yves Saint Laurnent auction extravaganza was, it was no saint. These are still dark times getting darker, with the economy resembling a silent war being waged by a mysterious, unknown enemy that only makes it more perplexing and depressing. It feels like boot camp in preparation for an unforeseeable time when there will be a return to remuneration for one’s efforts. I have never worked harder for less.

We are faced with a mass mood of ascetics, where the creed has changed from How to Spend It (the weekend supplement of the Financial Times) to How to Keep It. in the article, How Art Killed Our Culture, by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian: “…art has become the enemy of truth, the murderer of decency. The modern world has screwed itself and art led the way.” Art has become the new boogey man, a scapegoat for the deep problems at hand. Through it all, when businesses are dropping like flies, if you are not gossiped about as being overexposed, bordering on insolvent, or even better, threatened by the Russian mafia or the target of a large lawsuit, you are nobody. Crating and shipping for international art exhibitions and fairs is as expensive as large designer handbags and now being doled out as carefully as caviar. What was formerly de rigueur is viewed as an indulgence. But even at today’s reduced valuations, there are inherent levels at which people will still pay.

We have to muster the strength to collectively will healthier times. For better or worse, people are like cockroaches, it will take far more than economic mayhem to bring us down.

CARS AND COUTURE (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Spring 09)

There is a new meaning of art appreciation today that has nothing to do with rising investment value. Consider it a reversion to a quaint time in the recent past, say, pre-2004. The era of big, flashy, overproduced art is a thing of the past. Now I understand the etymology of an economic depression: it’s damn depressing, but at the same time perversely exciting. The new economic order we collectively reside in is emasculating, but reading the business pages reveals I am in good company. In days when government money is the only way the Dow can get it up, the art market is as dead as Detroit. GM and Ford have been forced to sell their private planes, will the same fate befall artists’ Damien Hirst and Richard Prince? The only status symbol left, surely not art, is to lose more money than your peers.

We didn’t save when interest rates were measured in real numbers, now they are .01%, not quite foam-at-the-mouth inducements. Nobody seems to know, pundits and armchair quarterbacks alike, which way the market will go—from recovery in 6-9 months or a deep, dark depression for all of eternity, everyone’s got a theory. A year, two years, ten years, twenty, will somebody please tell me…something? The variance of the prognosis is dizzying. We are paying the piper for recent past hyperinflation, a sour medicine that brings little joy or satisfaction. But maybe shopping or collecting was never really the panacea the world bought into. Printing money cannot be the solution either: Hirst’s painting tactics, the art world equivalent, overfed demand by way of flooding the (spot) market with dot paintings.

The backlash has been immediate and widespread from art to design. Recent London Impressionist and Modern auctions were down substantially by volume and value and Contemporary sales fared even worse. Moribund. One upside is that insurance expenditures will drop substantially reflecting the overall decrease in the value of art collections for purposes of premium calculation. Just call in the feds for another insurance company bailout. Nevertheless, there was some very strong sales activity taking into consideration the goalposts have been moved. Ok, so the posts are now practically together. Areas where there has been white-hot, rampant speculation, i.e. Indian and Chinese art, with a tenfold increase in fewer years, were obvious targets for decimation, and the market did not disappoint.

It’s a novel phenomenon when the shift in currencies, the dollar’s surge at the expense of the pound over the past few months, accounted for a proportionate increase in USA based activity in the London auctions. In the truly global marketplace that art has become, the financial markets serve as automatic leveler where countries step in to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities when they arise, smoothing out currency fluctuations and steadying things in the process. At today’s rates, maybe US should do a reverse takeover of the UK.

Phillips De Pury Auction house was taken over by a Russian luxury goods conglomerate and subsequently moved to appoint a former East German Stasi agent to its top corporate position. And an ex-KGB agent has bought The Evening Standard newspaper in London. Spies running auction houses and newspapers—could these be plants, a twisted plot in a cold war revival to win the minds and eyes of the West in some kind of newfangled economic warfare involving the press and contemporary art? Or is that just a symptom of fiscal paranoia on my part?

Bentley has fully stopped production in the UK, and a three-day workweek has been instituted at Aston Martin. I have a shorter workweek, but that is due more to collectors’ disdain rather than forced attrition. There are a few economic anomalies and bright spots in the marketplace though, namely collectible cars and couture. January 2009 car sales at RM Auctions and Gooding and Co. were more than 80% and 90% sold respectively and at Gooding, at a level of value a third greater than in 2008. And couture sales at some of the major houses have reported record earnings increases of late. Perhaps the rare and classic car market never escalated too far ahead of itself as it did during the last cyclical (cynical) uptick and now cars are considered a covetable, tangible asset and safe haven; as for clothes, what better time to look uniquely your best when others are on the floor, down and out?

The present state of the world economy has breathed new life into the word depression. Its depressing knowing the chance of consummating another giant deal in my lifetime is so slim. There is relief in the notion that splitting a dinner bill is now an acceptable method of settling restaurant tabs. But what is the economic answer to antidepressants? Shall I go out on a radical limb: will this economic climate bring us back into the arms of appreciation for traditional ideals of craft and beauty?

I went to galleries on my own accord for the first time in five years after being largely priced out and the experience has again become interesting, even in it’s reductive, redacted new form. Welcome back seeing, learning and connoisseurship. There has never been a better time to start buying art than today; in fact, this could be a once in a life opportunity. Never has art been so broadly based and global in reach: the array of available works from Africa to the Middle East to every corner of the planet is enormous and of better quality that at any previous point in history. Even more alluring than the art itself is the fact that galleries are hobbled by the recent economic slowdown so much so that collectors, for the first time in nearly 20 years, can call the shots with regard to prices, demanding discounts, substantially greater than in the past, to a degree not seen if ever. And to top it all off, recession art is frequently more engaging than art made during a time of complacency to feed a voracious market. Maybe a depression is not so depressing after all.

I LOVE SAATCHI (Artnet)

First there was the austere, New York-quoting Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road, akin to big museum halls, large and imposing with London artist Richard Wilson’s unforgettable oil-filled room, 20:50, tucked into a corner. Wilson’s work looked even more terrifying in Saatchi’s next space, County Hall, which had served as the headquarters for the Greater London Council for years. With a great sense of the absurd, Saatchi left the paneled rooms largely untouched.
During his reign at County Hall, Saatchi carried on about the virtue of exhibiting in unorthodox spaces, meaning no white walls, only to revert to white walls at his current Kings Road gallery, after he was ordered out of County Hall by a judge as a result of a dispute with his landlord.

During this protracted in-between time, Saatchi launched his Saatchi Gallery website, generating something like 600 million hits a day. Seemingly by default, and without even trying once, he again touched a nerve (this time of a mass audience).

Accompanying the new gallery is a publication called Art & Music, which seems like a cross between a zine and a culture version of a giveaway homeless publication, with that sense of irreverence and disposable immediacy. In a word, it’s good.

Saatchi is not a collector in the classical sense, as everyone in the art world knows. He’s more of a trader, or perhaps he should be called a new form of public collector with a short attention span. Yet, we have all benefitted from his obsessions, however brief their appearance has been.

A quirky impresario who used to hide from the press and still hides from his own openings, Saatchi nevertheless remains a consummate showman, adman and huckster. He was part and parcel of the marketing and funding phenomenon that helped to create Brit Art, and without Charles there would be no Damien as we know him, for better or worse.

Since the 1970s Saatchi has been crafting clever deals and partnerships that have continued unabated to this very day. He’s still very much on the look-out. Arriving one morning for a student art critique, I encountered on the scene, before finding even a single teacher or student, Charles Saatchi.

The signature Saatchi collecting method, as many call it, is the lump and dump: buy things cheaply en masse, the good, bad and ugly, then sell in the same fashion at auction, usually after a brief holding period. Some spaghetti could usually be expected to stick to the wall. His earliest use of the tactic, involving Chia, Clemente and Cucchi, was seen to have irreparably damaged careers, which from hindsight seems a prescient instance of de-accessioning.

The addition of chef Nigella to the stew only complements his appeal.

In the early ’00s, prior to opening his latest incarnation of a gallery, Saatchi seemed to become less relevant in a world of exploding hedge funds and artists wielding private planes rather than brushes. Hirst traded in art for economics and seemed to want to best Charles at his own game (hunting).

But Hirst the collector was more callow, acquiring art by stars and studio assistants rather than truly ferreting out talent. Whereas Saatchi prowled the world over with perseverance and tenacity, Hirst piled on Bacons and the like at public auction, and for a brief time his extravagance trickled down, affecting the rest of the marketplace, in a small way in relation to Saatchi historically.

You make money selling art and create wealth keeping it: if Charles Saatchi had held on to more, he might have found himself in the same tax bracket as Hirst. But in the end, that doesn’t seem to be what drives Saatchi. Rather, his aggrandizement seems to be a modern version of a classical patron, or enabler for art, artists and the public to engage.

Whatever his true motivations -- and without a doubt a passionate love of all things art is at the forefront -- we are all the beneficiaries.

The new Saatchi Gallery housed in the grand Palladian-style Duke of York HQ, is a sublime group of rooms with real generosity of spirit and freedom, offering the liberty to touch (even though you are not supposed to), smell and see art works up close and from afar, as they were made to be seen, with little interference from the architecture, ungainly barricades or multitude of imposing guards.

The place has 13 galleries, which in this instance is a lucky number, as the spaces are plentiful, well proportioned and full of light; at the same time, the layout is fractured and deceiving. That is the real continuing revolution, Saatchi’s hybridization of space, his manner of collecting and public presentation of works, which accounts for a meaningful shift in the experience of art.

The Duke of York HQ was formerly the Royal Military Asylum for the Children of the Soldiers of the Regular Army. How chaotic it must have been with 1,000 orphans -- 300 girls and 700 boys -- living in an atmosphere probably not unlike that of the inaugural exhibit, filled with wildly inconsistent and oftentimes juvenile Chinese art from the Saatchi collection.

Presumably the title of the first show, "The Revolution Continues: New Art from China," Oct. 7, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009, refers to an extension of the rebellion engendered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which gave rise to the pro-democracy movement. However, the title could just as easily refer to the Cultural Revolution, when China was expunged of liberal tendencies in society, like good art.

Saatchi’s Chinese collection resembles nothing so much as a potpourri of flotsam and jetsam readymade for the consumerist West. A new sculpture by Zhang Huan (b. 1965), the celebrated "East Village" performance artist who now splits his time between Shanghai and New York, features a stuffed donkey having intercourse with a model of the (formerly) tallest building in China, with a huge pipe representing the ass’ phallus. This "kinetic" sculpture was thankfully not functioning at the time of my visit, which was fairly late into the course of the exhibition. Aren’t we well past the stage of such boorish antics? Apparently not.

Also on hand are several multimillion-dollar "Bloodline" paintings by Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958). Seeing such a grouping of these large-scale works was enlightening: no matter how you draw it, the bloodline paintings are homogeneous and, after a very short while, dull. And the pile of faux shit by the Beijing artist Liu Wei (b. 1972), entitled Indigestion II (we are thankfully spared the first iteration), referred to in the exhibition pamphlet as "a monumental poo," was comprised of detritus including toy soldiers, which can be taken as a protest against rising militarism. All that was missing was some steam.

The formulaic and (allegedly) anti-consumerist paintings by the Beijing-based painter Wang Guangyi (b. 1956 or ’57), carry slogans reading "Porsche NO" and "Materialist’s Art," among other sentiments. Being a go-carting enthusiast, one wonders if Saatchi was attracted to the Porsche work simply as a statement about his automotive tastes. To the average sensibility, these comments on contemporary materialism are heavy-handed and obvious. How tedious it must be to have to experience these pieces for longer than a cursory glance.

One of the more successful works was Old Persons Home by the collaborative, Peking-based team of Sun Yuan (b. 1972) and Peng Yu (b. 1974). Not for the silly reason stated in the booklet: "these controversial artists work in extreme materials such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death and the human condition." Yawn.

Rather, the somewhat obvious work comprised of lifelike figures of decrepit, old political leaders cast in latex, randomly rolling around in self-propelled wheelchairs colliding into each other, was so enticing because gallery visitors are allowed unimpeded entrance to the free-for-all crash-up. After seeing the piece, you will never look at an aged person in a wheelchair the same.

(And for some wholly inexplicable reason, the Chinese wheelchair derby was still up and running during the subsequent Middle East show, kind of like a stand-in for Saatchi himself.)

The sprawling installation by Liu Wei (b. 1972), titled Love It! Bite It!, was a labyrinthine model city in a state of deshabile (and including a model of the White House and the Guggenheim Museum), all built out of edible dog chews, beige in color. Similarly, in the many Ron Mueck-esque hyper-realist sculptures of both Cang Xin (b. 1967) and Xiang Jing (b. 1968), the art was bad but all of it could be seen up close and unhindered by typical museum rules.

Overall, "New Art from China" suggests that Chinese artists certainly like the notion of the gallery-as-circus. As does Saatchi himself.

Saatchi isn’t thinking too hard when it comes to exhibition concepts, what with this fairly dim curatorial notion of shows whose roster is set by nothing more than common geography: China first, then the Middle East and India and Pakistan. This "It’s a Small World After All" approach to international relations may not be very realistic, but it works, at least as far as the art market is concerned.

Then there is the partnership with the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co., which provides for free admission to the Saatchi Gallery. Prior incarnations all came with a high entry fee attached, but now Phillips has stepped in to subsidize access. Though happy as the next person to pocket the pounds, by the time I reached the top floor "Phillips de Pury " Company Gallery," I was less certain this was quite such a deal.

The "Untitled (Chinese Paintings)" of Julian Schnabel were billed as "a serendipitous coincidence that the ground of this image" -- a faint image of a seated Chinese Buddhist figurine of some sort -- "happens to come from a Chinese mirror that Julian found 20 years ago for his then wife." Yes, how serendipitous, to plunk these works in the middle of a show of Chinese art.

Just when we thought he couldn’t get worse, we get a glimpse of Schnabel the Orientalist. On some level, I’d rather pay admission than view such crap. Because without Phillips, we probably wouldn’t have it, since Charles bailed out of Schnabel some time ago.

"Perspectives: Arab and Iranian Modern Masters," which followed Schnabel’s "Chinese Paintings" in the Phillips gallery, is organized by Sheikha Lulu al-Sabah, Phillips’ Middle East specialist, and is a much more cohesive and informative undertaking. While Saatchi was a bit slow with his embrace of all things Chinese, his embrace of Middle Eastern art is timelier, and helps to cast a net of coherence over an area that has seemed rather too busy with other things to join the international avant-garde.

Thus the Saatchi Gallery’s second show, "Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East," Jan. 30-May 9, 2009, presents works by more than 20 young artists, and turns out to be a breath of fresh air, albeit a politically charged one. Here we see Saatchi the good Iraqi Jew with a mind as open as his wallet. Nevertheless, the exhibition presents a beautifully installed esthetic of horror, chock-a-block with Guernicas and Screams. In "Unveiled," Saatchi masterfully manages to commodify war and strife but does so with eloquence and elegance.

One impressive installation, by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970), presents a phalanx of hollow, tinfoil apparitions in the form of burka-clad kneeling women, in what could be a pose of prayer. The large, long room is filled with 24 rows of 11 figures, totaling 264 ghost-like figures in a massive grid. Instead of faces, there are empty black holes. Though impressive, with a sense of mourning and dread, the work was also a little bit ridiculous, suggesting an elaborate field of Jiffy Pop or perhaps baked potatoes ready to explode.

The sculpture was made on site by wrapping scores of women with foil. Female guards from the gallery were asked to serve as models for free, while additional women from off the street were hired at £80 per head. This involvement of spot labor was reminiscent of the annoying antics of Santiago Sierra, and nearly ruined the work. But then again, at least it employs women in a public capacity, bringing however indirectly some sexual liberation to the notoriously sexist Middle East.

The paintings of the Iranian-American painter Tala Madani (b. 1981), whose candy-colored parodies of male domination in her native Iran are currently on view at Pilar Corrias in London, would do better in a show of more assorted nationalities, which I strongly suggest Saatchi contemplate next. She favors a cartoonish but painterly style, rendering men praying in pink maillots or massed in groups, holding their hands over their ears. In this instance I recommend bypassing the corny capsules in the Picture by Picture Guide, which can be had for £1.50, a new staple of the Saatchi program, lest it soil an immediate attraction to these works.

Wafa Hourani (b. 1979), a Palestinian artist who lives and works in Ramallah, has constructed a model-sized cinderblock refugee camp, complete with electric lights inside the shacks and twisted wire antennae above them. Watchful Israelis peer over impossibly high cement walls, replete with mirrors so inhabitants can wallow in their own despair. An Israeli water park lies on other side of the grim wasteland. This work is a hammer-over-the-head metaphor for oppression and subjugation but at the same time it strongly brings to mind a kind of political entropy.

As the art world is thoroughly global, Saatchi can be forgiven for seeking, as was seen in his China show and as is the case here, new artworks that may resemble foreign pastiches of his previous favorites from the U.K. Thus, the Iranian artist Shirin Fakhim, who shows with something called the Ministry of Nomads in London, is like a Middle Eastern Sarah Lucas. Her sculptures consist of figures made from stuffed stockings wearing loads of lingerie, replete with bulbous fruits for breasts, called Tehran Prostitutes. Surely one such maker of stuffed female mannequins is enough -- though perhaps these sculptures actually mean something in the Islamic Republic.

Similarly, Saatchi’s affection for art with a certain shock factor -- or is that schlock factor? -- is supplied by the cheesy photoshopped expressions of transgendered sexuality by Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975), whose works have been displayed at Art Dubai and sold at auction (though not for more than $10,000). Haerizadeh’s color photographs of distorted, tattooed hairy fat men in seraglio are an all-too-obvious statement in the face of regional repression.

As if to prove that he is never still, Saatchi has released an all-points bulletin: he plans to front a new TV show searching for the next art star -- don’t we have enough of those already? -- ingeniously titled "Saatchi’s Best of British." Though he won’t speak directly to the camera, he will be depicted in each episode surveying the lay of the land. After all this time, the "notoriously shy" mogul is finally, I suppose, admitting to his own Paris Hiltonitis. The Wizard of Oz is coming out from behind the curtain, as is shown as well by the fact that his name is plastered all over Duke of York Square in banner after banner. How difficult it must have been to keep up the ruse of diffidence all those years.

From dog shit and donkey to tranny and tyranny, Saatchi loves the tasteless avant-garde gesture. But in tandem there is always a glimmer of awe and a sense of risk-taking that something could go terribly wrong. One hopes that the initial two shows at the new gallery do not represent Saatchi’s sole take on art today, as something so easily pigeonholed. But Saatchi’s constant restlessness should at least keep things lively.

First Hirst, then the museums, the website, magazine, TV show (!) and the culmination of it all in Duke of York Square: together we are left with a residue of a vision, an illumination, albeit an inconsistent one, of the temperature of contemporary art today. The rest is for you to decide.


KENNY SCHACHTER operates Kenny Schachter / Rove on Hoxton Square in London.

FAIR FATIGUE (Art & Auction January 2009)

ART FAIR RETREAT AND NONE TOO SOON

Art Basel and Frieze have been bailed out, nationalized and are presently under federal administration. Not so far fetched in a world that was up in arms when Hugo Chavez nationalized a country club, yet embraced the governmental rescue of Goldman Sachs. In real life, the Swiss government subsidized the participation of eight galleries at Frieze this year. Welcome to the post-economy economy, worse than the end of history and direr than the death of painting. Despite some denial, today’s art marketplace is in a recession. Thankfully this could spell the end of economics-ism, the movement in which new art cost a fortune and which has fortune as its subject.

The booming times brought us many art fairs, which only seemed to breed more fairs. Was this a good thing? For a dealer it’s no different from spreading one’s wares on a blanket on St. Marks Place, which is what all of us may be reduced to shortly. The rough times we are in (this fact no longer up for debate), which is sure to be a long wade, will herald a vastly changing dynamic in fairs with many unfolding stories yet to come. In my circumstances the tales started well before the onset of recession.

My relationship with Frieze, to single out one prominent fair, has been contentious: I have written unflattering articles about the too-cool-for-school attitude they display, evidenced by a quote from one of its directors saying that the hardest work was deciding whom not to invite. My never getting in over the past 5 years since moving to the UK did nothing to endear us to each other. Fatefully, one night I was seated next to the wife of the director and proceeded to launch a wine-fueled tirade that Frieze is not the Tate and its principal far from Nicholas Serota, despite his beliefs that the fair is akin to an institution. My therapist suggested an apology letter; I guess truth is no defense.

My history with fairs includes being thrown out of the Armory and Basel for various indiscretions, some deserved and others less so. One year at Basel Miami I was asked to participate with an architectural intervention, so I commissioned Vito Acconci to create a crisscross framework upon which to hang Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Ed Ruscha, and Acconci himself (his photos, that is). Vito fabricated igloo-shaped armatures to serve as lattice and maze to wend around. Word spread that we were trying to sabotage the traffic flow and disrupt the fair (an absurd notion, as I was after sales as much as anyone) until a Viennese dealer on the selection committee came running round, arms flailing, screaming disapproval. The following year Basel Miami went on without me.

A few years ago at the Armory show—which was meant to be strictly for primary market material, but no longer—I installed a booth with historic Mary Heilmanns, Ross Bleckner’s birds and killer Karen Kilminiks. Though sold out, I was also forced out. Was it a long-time-ago brief fling with one of the committee members or the fact that I forgot to bring my primary pieces last time around?

A few years after Acconci-gate, I was allowed back to Basel Miami, but only in the shipping container section (low on the totem pole in fair hierarchy). I elected to forego the allotted container and build my own, designed by Zaha Hadid. The problem was the piece entailed the installation of 50,000 LED lights and was nowhere near completion at the fair’s opening; the jumpsuit-clad electricians might have been mistaken for performance art, but the booth could not be entered. Not a wise approach for selling the Hadid sculptures within.
At the last Design Art Basel fair in Switzerland I suffered a bad reaction to blood pressure medication while spieling to collectors and nearly fainted. The fleeting thought was the last thing I’d see prior to sudden death would be a series of overpriced design objects—which I had commissioned. After the brief trip to the Basel Emergency Room and the normal EKG I returned to the fair to tend to my objects.

During Design Art Basel (fair names are another topic for discussion at a later date) dealers and collectors were tripping over each other trying to ingratiate themselves to Brad and Roman. Is that what we have been reduced to? It sounds like a porn-producing team rather than the saviors of the art market.

Is the faltering economy the conclusion to the endless appetite for fairs? The need to find fairs that need you will become a much easier process due to the full-court financial press we are all now squeezed in. And with that the exorbitant participation fees and artificially inflated hotel rates will come under pressure—something I recently experienced by stalling to commit to a fair until just prior to the opening, resulting in lower rates. Who said procrastination is a bad habit?

As the stock market approaches zero and the discussion has shifted from recession to depression the laptops at frieze were frequently tuned into finance sites monitoring the DOW and the FTSE rather than ARTINFO.COM Beuys famously said “Everyone is an artist”; today, everyone is an economist. After the usual lies were told to the press about the extent of sales at the latest spate of fairs (the art world’s equivalent of original sin) the lights went out for the last hour of Design Art London, don’t ask, but one of the only one’s that will still have me, a fitting end. One upside to the bloodbath: the flop of the flipper.

Epilogue (Questions by Carol Kino for an upcoming Art in America article:

How galleries are retooling the way they are doing business at art fairs? I think the main thing galleries are bringing to fairs nowadays are lower expectations.

The type of booths they install? Galleries are bringing smaller, more portable works to cut on shipping which one cannot imagine the costs of, and how expenses mount for installation help. Just to add a socket or an extra lighting fixture is outrageously overpriced, with the fair management's false pretext of the multiplicity of unions involved.

The type of work they bring? The works are more conservative, sell-able, and sometimes more happy and colorful.

Whether they do a curated show, a solo show, etc.? Solo shows will increase markedly as galleries attempt to focus, simplify and bring concise groupings of affordable works together.

Or how they are not retooling but just sticking with the same thing--it could go either way? Sticking to the same thing is no longer an option for anyone, as the recent past in the art market and world of fairs will in all probability not repeat itself for close to a decade, if ever; these are fundamentally and drastically shifting times when unbridled speculation and hyper price inflation that spurred absurd jostling for art is practically as dead as Detroit.

And comments about your gallery? We are giving very serious consideration to taking a year's sabbatical from fairs altogether as much as for the down business prospects as for a personal protest against the ever increasing absurd fees attached that have been bordering on greedy. From the booths and associative costs to shipping, and hotels. Enough is enough.