Ban New Art From the Big Auctions?
Private dealer Richard Polsky has just written one of the more clear-headed discourses on the state of the current contemporary art market that I have read in a long while.
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/polsky/polsky04-02-07.asp
I, like Polsky, scratch my head at the crazy auction prices for artists like Marlene Dumas and Peter Doig. These are painters I look at and wonder: What am I missing? What is new or compelling about their voice? And….am I the only one who thinks they’re not exactly that facile with the paint?
And I completely support his suggestion to ban all artworks made in the last five years from the major auctions. Especially with the really new artists. It’s kind of like getting the NBA to refrain from drafting teenagers. This stuff ain’t ready for primetime—and bringing it to “the show” will probably do more harm than good to these young artists’ career in the long run.
First, I have to say, the whole flipping thing has hit obscene levels. And think it’s just the greedy collector-speculators at work? I hear regularly about artists and dealers in the new, Wild West art markets of China and India putting works with the paint still wet in auctions as their primary market. The scam? Get everyone they know to drive up the bids, and they can establish a name and price levels beyond what a first or second gallery show ever could.
Not that that kind of manipulation is limited to over there….
Then there’s the teenage-boys-in-the-NBA factor. The vulturous American market is swooping down into the MFA programs, plucking out new artist-prospects to drop into the wide open mouths of so many naive baby-bird collectors. How many of those artists will survive critically past their second show? How many will thrive in ten years? Especially when the pressure to produce, produce, produce for the next 5 art fairs this month leaves yesterday’s phenom precious little time to reflect and nurture new ideas, to make mistakes and work through them to the next breakout series.
How many collectors, when pursuing a name artist, know the difference between those breakout works and the dreck galleries offer them, especially when the waiting list they’ve rushed to stand in has swelled to three figures? And what happens when that dreck work by hyped-up artists starts flooding the auction market? Or, even more likely, when collectors are told by the auction experts that the name piece they waited in line for (that they don’t even like, but hey–they got one) isn’t as good as the ten others that were offered for that season’s catalog?
This is how flavor-of-the-month flashes in the pan are born. Too much exposure, too much hype, too fast.
As Gagosian director Bob Monk once told me, when comparing the current bubble (his word) to the boom and bust of the 1980s art market, “It’s like a game of hot potato, and you don’t want to be the schnook holding the damn thing when the game is over.”
April 7th, 2007 16:11
I fully agree with you but you are thinking like an art critic, collector, dealer or journalist; not like a stock market speculator. A young artist who seems like an up-and-comer is like an initial public offering (IPO). If the artist looks as if he/she has a good future, you want to buy in the early stages of his/her careet. Later new works will sell at obscenely high prices and your initial investment will have sky-rocketed. Of course many IPOs don’t thrive, they bomb and the same thing will happen with art from six-day-wonder artists. In 10 or 20 years, the original buyers will find they are stuck with expensive works by artists considered to be second rate and whose works aren’t even worthy of wall space.
On the other hand, we may be observing the development of a new tier in the art market; one populated by celebrities and investment speculators with more money than they know what to do with. They will form an incestuous community that will buy works from untested artists at ridiculous prices and entertain themselves by buying and selling them from one another. Its all innocent fun but unfortunately there is potential that their activities will hyperinflate art prices generally and make it impossible for ordinary people to enrich their lives with good art at sensible prices.
Ron Ratney
April 8th, 2007 13:24
Precisely the problem, as I see it….too many folks involved in the art world today are thinking like speculators, a situation that directly caused the last big art market crash. Values are being determined less by rational (and lasting) criteria of quality, condition, rarity, provenance, etc–and far too often by hype and hubris instead.
Most artists don’t mind being treated like the next big growth stock as long as the money keeps coming. But if they get pumped and dumped at auction enough, their long-term viability will be eroded. Art is not a commodity. So many of these hedge funders think they have the art game all figured out, but very few of them lived through the last crash and I suspect that many of them lack the connoisseurship skills to survive the next one.