As both an emerging artist and a newcomer to the profession of contemporary art sales, the division and relation between the two value systems associated with each of these activities has begun to interest me. Every piece of art, and every art based event, has a different relationship with its place in the market. As seen in the press, almost always, articles of art criticism or review pertain to either the market or to the actual work because the two subjects are often so separate that it’s illogical to talk about them together. Some artists choose to make work that deals with issues of the market in which they participate (or don’t participate) while other artists create pieces with an intention, and a value system, that does not pertain at all to the work’s life once active in the market. Many American artists’ work falls somewhere in between, discussing elements of the consumer society in which they live and work. The advent of “new media” works addresses valorization automatically, due to new issues of authentication, adaptability, and pricing that it brings forth. Art “events”, “happenings” and performances, which are by no means new to the art-world, often bypass a certain valorization, but many of these types of works directly discuss commodification of art or consumerism in the artworld in some way. The art fair is a prime spot to look at for exploring how art interacts with the hyper-commercialism it is embedded with at this point in time.
Having recently worked straight through the first annual artDC with Project 4, my examination of works, as well as my ideas, will draw largely on those that I’ve been exposed to at this event. At the very end of one of the days of the fair, a visitor was strolling past our booth. As I had done many other times throughout the weekend, I asked the young woman if she was enjoying the show, to which, unlike the other times I had asked the question, she replied emphatically, “No I’m very disappointed!” The visitor was a painter herself and had been rather disenchanted with the way painting after painting had been displayed on the thrown together walls and without the most curatorial consideration. (She had clearly never attended any of the satellite fairs in Miami during Art Basel.)
Later in the weekend I had a conversation with a local gallery owner who explained that the “shopping mall” or “flea market” (1) aesthetic of the art fair, he believed, was misguiding the way the market was to be perceived by visitors at an event such as this. Visitors were touching works and appeared to be expecting to find things more affordable. In a town not used to art fairs, the irony of having “high art” sold in a “low art” setting (which acts as a very effective marketing tool in New York and Miami) is obviously completely missed here. Reactions such as these reflect a confusion between the standards and protocol of the contemporary art market and the (perceived) standards of appreciation for art objects.
This particular art fair drew mostly the general public, instead of big time collectors due to various mutable factors such as unsatisfactory advertising and simply a lack of establishment. Even Art Basel took some time to become what it is. And so, to the general public or artists attending the fair, such as our disappointed visitor, the communicative emotion that usually is part of the intention of exploiting the hand of the artist in paintings, is lost or confused, creating a feeling of disconnect or alienation in this consumer driven setting. The viewer is alienated from the work, and therefore from the artist. In terms of mass produced and utilitarian objects in a capitalist society, alienation of individuals to each other through the process of production and consumption is nothing new. In Marx’s argument about “commodity fetishism” he explains that since, under capitalism, producers and consumers don’t take part in a direct and conscious agreement to provide and receive from each other, but rather participate in a highly mediated act through separate institutions, production and consumption become experiences between individual and commodity, not between or as social beings. (2) I feel this concept relevant to what I wish to explore between artistic creation and the art market in two ways: Firstly, the “alienation” Marx speaks of, that results in a society that prioritizes objects and money over social interests is comparable to the alienation that is visible in the art-making and art-selling relationship when artists use imitation in their work in order to fall into the system of “exchange value”. In other words, some artists make work in a certain style in order to make a certain amount of money, instead of making work to be truly communicative, due to working in a capitalist society. However the fear of this becoming the fate of the entire art practice does not scare me, seeing as how decorative art and critical or challenging art have split off to become two very separate products with different markets.(3)
However, art having an “exchange value” is not only found in decorative art. During the fair another visitor came by the booth and expressed interest in starting to collect art. She glanced at a few small drawings that we had on the wall and without critically considering the work she had sized them up as being from an emerging artist with a good resume, small in size, more modest in price and by these standards decided they might be a good place to start in buying art. In this way, treating the works as an investment, she could have found other works with the same qualifications and bought them instead. This proves that exchange value (or Benjamin’s “exhibition value”) in even works that are more conceptually based than decorative works can exist to certain buyers. (4) I still have no fear of the end of new conceptually based art, for there will always be a desire for new ideas and techniques in art.
Why I am more interested in looking at Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism” in this context, is because he discusses the two standards by which a utilitarian product is valued: “use value” and “exchange value”. (Exchange value wins of course). Similarly, any art work is measured against two sets of standards in its existence: artistic intent and salability. When a work of art enters into the realm of the art market, the original intention of the work, against which it was judged in its creation, can become completely irrelevant to the work at that point, while other factors take dominance like status, edition, and its archival quality. This is a transition of values distinctive to the business of unique goods, and can be discussed at different levels through the examination of certain works of which I have watched undergo, or deal with, this transition.
Christine Bailey recently completed a work that existed entirely through the process of selling online with Ebay, anonymously. The works that were for sale were color photographs of objects, and in the descriptions of the items she explained that the item for sale was not the actual object in the photograph. The way that she worded this description, along with the use of several representations at once, made the viewer confused as to what exactly, was for sale. The rest of the description was often fairly cryptic and seemed to be stringing together phrases and fragments of other classified ad’s or Ebay listings, to further the confusion of what one was purchasing. The photographs displayed were like contemporary takes on traditional imagery in art history such as a woman, a landscape, and a still life. The take on each of these subjects was very symptomatic of current collective American priority, and could be argued to be the most contemporary take on each of these subjects, especially when placed in an Ebay store, since the consumerist public has become more accustomed to looking and buying online than anywhere else. One item featured was a still life of an antique Dutch pipe and box, for which the description discussed the great shape that the objects were in. The photograph was a typical one you might find when looking to buy the actual objects: very objective, informative and sterile. Some of the objects started out at basically nothing ($2 - $5) and others, seemingly more for kicks or experimentation than anything else, started out at a few hundred dollars. This work is clearly a conceptual piece that’s committed to furthering the discourse on the commodification of art works, and furthering the techniques of subverting the typical protocol of the art market, both ideas introduced by the Conceptual art movement. Projects like this one don’t attempt at all to bypass the valorization and commodification of their work, but instead embrace it, and it is this embrace that completes the work of art. The artistic act is the interactive process of online shopping. Bailey’s work is to evoke questions in the shopper about representation, commodification, and alienation.
Another online based art project that bypasses the transition of a work from the artist’s set of values to the market’s by joining the values together to become the intention of the work, is Perpetual Art Machine (PAM). This “traveling video installation” (shown at artDC) features the work of many video artists via the web. When displayed at a fair or gallery, there is a booth with at least one computer screen so that the viewer can sit down at the computer and press any one of the videos, displayed as a grid on the monitor, to be projected on the wall behind the computer. When nobody is around to interact with PAM it will “auto-curate” grouping videos together by keywords and may “decide” to feature one video at full screen. When an individual walks up to the computer, PAM senses it and the screen becomes touch-sensitive. The individual can type in a keyword to display many videos in a grid at once or touch on one video to display it at full screen. When one video is done, PAM automatically selects another one, randomly, to take its place.(5) The entire viewing and submitting process of this work is free, and so it, as well, does not get subjected to a new set of standards as it enters into the art market. Both of the projects discussed, use anonymity to further separate the work from the issue of “status” present in the standards of value in the art market. They also both use (more clearly in PAM) the tool of endless reproduction and universal accessibility to further remove the work from the value system of the art market which dictates that less editions and less access equal more money.
Earlier this year, I arranged for Reuben Breslar to host an event at Project 4 that was to discuss this idea of status in the art world. Everyone on our mailing list was invited, to what the artist called a “Draw In”. Tables and chairs were set up with paper and pencils. The press release stated that all were invited to take part in a sort of “drawing party”, involving drawing, chatting, and a few drinks at the gallery. The idea was to bring together all different types of people involved in the art world at different levels of status and break down those divisions and involve all in the most fundamental level of art: drawing. The experience of having artists, collectors, gallerists and instructors together to focus on what brings all those roles together in the first place (art making), as well as take them out of their usual context in the art world was the inspiration for the artist. Like most traditional conceptual works, the work was ephemeral and was not based around an object for sale. The performance was documented on video and the drawings were collected at the end as remnants of the event.
This work did serve as an institutional critique, commenting on how, like in Marx’s argument, each individual stands as an instrument for the market in capitalism, rather than as part of a communal social network. Bringing this critique physically into the gallery was an effective way to confront this idea head on, I think. Those who came and participated were almost exclusively artists or friends of the artist who hosted the event. The people who came into the gallery, not knowing about this event (possible clients) were not interested in participating. I don’t think that this makes the work a failure but rather a telling result of the experiment. This artist’s intentions were to directly comment on the habits and systems of the art market and so I believe this event to have been a success both in this way and in being a breath of fresh air.
All of these artists are obviously interested in commenting on the economics of art, but as well have an agenda to have an impact within the historicity of art. (6) This latter intention brings forth a question in my mind of where the balance lies between the importance of continuing an art historical discourse and selecting works based on taste in the eyes of a curator or gallery director. In Micheal Brenson’s “The Curator’s Moment”, Brenson quotes Vishakha N. Desai (Director of Galleries at the Asia Society in New York) as stating that curators must “own up to taste” and must define their positions, explain where they are coming from, and what they cannot yet understand. (7) We can see here a another way of looking at the two sets of judgments a work is subjected to: the judgement of where a work exists in the discourse of art and the judgement of taste of the curator.(8) Brenson goes on to discuss how the curator has become a more and more visible player in the contemporary art world (and how as this happens more artists are concealing their egos to prove they are worthy of respect) (9). This is an interesting perspective to take of the before mentioned artists. Some artists may be straying farther away from associating themselves with any status (participating in the standards of economic value) in order to relate themselves closer to the critical discourse side of the practice. They let the curator act within the realm of economics, marketing and status while the artist works only in the realm of art, in order to keep from being accused of making art as part of the economic system or, for themselves, to simply keep their intentions pure. (10) In this way the curator acts as another distinct “instrument” (representing an economic value) of the market of art.
Maybe the existing dichotomies between economics and art, in this escalated era of consumerism in America, is what has led many artists to irony and contrast. There seems to be a theme of works that contrast manufactured or staged scenes with the sublime, organic and bountiful. Artists may be responding to their current status of acting as processors of the information of our consumer culture in a format without rules or boundaries. This relates to Adorno’s “something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom”. (11) Anthony Goicolea does photographs of equipment from photo-shoots in front of sublime landscapes and in another body of work by Christine Bailey, she paints girls from pornographic websites in front of sublime landscape paintings. Artworks like these may be reflecting the position of artists which oscillates between the unbounded world of art and the highly organized and contained practice of the market.
The art fair embodies all of these ironies and contrasts: The communal living aspect of the booths and tents juxtaposed with the highly competitive market that the space serves to and the “flea market” aesthetic used to sell Warhols and Picassos. Objects being imbued with both a monetary and an intangible value system has existed as long as production and consumption has. How viewers and artists evaluate what becomes of the actual art objects, the denial of art objects, and the representations of monetary increments is something that should be explored as long as production and consumption continues. Art will always remain a product in a capitalist society, no matter what form it takes.
1) Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002, 28.
2) Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguine
Classics, 1867, 42.
3) By “decorative” I am referring to works that are being made today purely as design elements for the home. These works usually have no other conceptual basis besides a generic visceral or emotional inspiration. The fact that these two separate realms of art (the other being critical works) exist at the same venues and often under the same classification, is a whole other ball of wax which presents issues of art’s function, which of course can be whatever the artist or viewer sees it as.
4) Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." 1936. Marxist Internet Archive. February 2005. UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. 12 May 2007, paragraph 13.
5) Perpetual Art Machine - The Video Art Portal. 22 April 2007. Perpetual Art Machine L.L.C. 29 April 2007.
6) M. Cameron Boyd: Theory Now. 26 April 2007. 30 April 2007
7) Brenson, Michael. “The Curator’s Moment.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 55 - 68.
8) Here I am defining “taste” by Immanuel Kant’s assertion that judgments of taste could never be defined by laws of a priori because taste is so subjective.
9) Ibid.
10) One could fear the curator’s taste dominating the market and resulting in an art movement or fate of art that revolves around nothing but a discursive series of a-historical, non-linear meaningless works but clearly that is not going to happen. As stated before, there will always be a desire for intellectual exploration and critical discourse.
11) Adorno, Theodor. “Is Art Lighthearted?.” The Nature of Art: An Anthology. Ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc, 2001. 182 - 189.
