Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  It’s 8:05 P.M. and we’re on Lot 36, a work by the expensive conceptual painter Gerhard Richter. Last night at Sotheby’s evening sale a major Richter didn’t sell, and it looks like this Richter may not sell either. A few years ago, particularly around the time of his MoMA retrospective, Richters were selling like hotcakes. Burge taps his gavel and mutters “Pass” under his breath. What happened? I ask Baer. “It’s been bought in because the bidding didn’t hit the seller’s reserve. The heat is off in the Richter market. The people who wanted Richters have got them.”

  The boom in the art market has been fueled by the arrival of many more art buyers. As Ségalot explains, “People want to become part of the lifestyle. Buying contemporary art is about going to the Basel and Frieze art fairs, the Venice Biennale, and, of course, the evening auctions in New York. The life of a contemporary art collector moves according to these events. To collect contemporary art is to buy a ticket into a club of passionate people who meet in extraordinary places, look at art together, and go to parties. It is extremely appealing.”

  When people are motivated to buy art for social reasons, their tastes and spending patterns are more likely to be swayed by the vagaries of fashion. Collecting art has increasingly become like buying clothes. As a Sotheby’s specialist explains, “We buy a pair of trousers and we wear them for three years and then move on. Is it right that the trousers sit in the cupboard for the next twenty-five years? Our lives are constantly changing. Different things become relevant at different times in our lives. We are motivated by our changing sensibilities. Why can that not be applied to art as well?”

  Art used to embody something meaningful enough to be relevant beyond the time in which it was made, but collectors today are attracted to art that “holds up a mirror to our times” and are too impatient to hang on to the work long enough to see if it contains any “timeless” rewards. Experts say that the art that sells most easily at auction has a “kind of immediate appeal” or “wow factor.”

  Lot 44. A Jasper Johns numbers painting from his heyday, 1960–65, gets bought in, despite the fact that Johns is the most expensive living artist.* Baer explains why it didn’t sell: “Some people think that Jasper’s signature color is gray, and that painting is black. Plus it’s so dark that it’s impossible to see the numbers.”

  This is ironic. Numbers are what auctions are about. Lot numbers, dates, bidding increments, hammer prices. On and on, Burge rattles off the figures. Auctions are unremittingly quantitative. They are a black-and-white version of the gray world of art. Artists and writers tend to revel in ambiguity. It is the gray areas that invite and challenge them to represent the world. A hammer price, by contrast, is so final and definitive. It really means, “Say no more.”

  Baer yawns. The New York Times correspondent is sitting in her chair looking wilted. The air is stale. My mind is numb. The works start to blend one into the other. People are leaving, mostly in pairs. The sale, as Burge predicted, has become boring. Then…all of a sudden the room wakes up. We’re into the bidding on Lot 47, an Ed Ruscha painting called Romance. People are sitting bolt upright and looking around. The dynamics of the auction have shifted, and the air is tense. I can’t tell what is going on. “Someone is signal bidding,” says Baer. “They don’t want it known that they’re bidding, so they’ve caught the eye of a Christie’s rep, who is relaying their bids to Burge. It’s a little choreography—a bit of a drama.”

  As I survey the small club of people through whom the energies of the market flow, I see a shaggy-haired, burly man leaving his seat. He looks a bit like Harry Potter’s friend Hagrid, and I realize it’s Keith Tyson, a British artist who won the Turner Prize in 2002. As he makes his way out of the salesroom, I slip out of the press enclosure. I find him in the hall in front of a Maurizio Cattelan. It’s Lot 34, a sculpture of a big gray elephant under a white sheet, which sold for $2.7 million. Everyone calls it “the white elephant.”

  I tell him that I didn’t expect to see an artist here.

  “Everyone from the gallery was coming. Was I going to sit in a bar on my own? I wanted to see what the phenomenon was all about. I’m interested in economics. Other artists are worried about their purity. It’s a huge social faux pas for an artist to go to an auction—so they tell me. But I don’t give a shit.”

  What do you think is going on in there? I ask.

  “The auction is the symptom of something much more complex, like a rash. It is vulgar, in the same way that pornography is vulgar,” he replies.

  I guess that is what people mean when they refer to “obscene” amounts of money. How does it feel? I press.

  “At about thirteen million on the mustard Warhol,” says Tyson, “I had a massive urge to put my hand up. But then I thought, ‘I’m sure it has been done before.’ The sale is infectious. You feel the thrill of capitalism and you get into a sort of alpha-male mentality.”

  Capitalism—it’s not a word you hear in an auction room.

  “I don’t have any problem with the market for art,” he continues. “It is an elegant Darwinian system. Some collectors are effectively buying futures options on a work’s cultural significance. The high price is right for the number of users who will ultimately appreciate it. The logic is that the people coming into my private mausoleum/museum are going to be thrilled by this painting. There are ten million people on the face of the planet that are willing to pay ten pounds to see it, so it is worth a hundred million pounds. In the long run, economic and cultural values correlate. In the short term, you get fictional markets.”

  It’s unusual to meet an artist who has such confidence in the ultimate accuracy of the market’s aesthetic judgments. Paradoxically, Tyson is also adamant that art is not reducible to a commodity. “Unlike gold and diamonds, art has this other value, and that’s what makes it fascinating. Everything else is trying to sell you something else. Art is trying to sell you yourself. That’s what is different about it. Art is what makes life worth living.”

  It’s 8:30 P.M. and the sale is almost over. A skinned bull’s head immersed in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst is up on the block. Last month in London, Sotheby’s sold off the artwork and ephemera of Hirst’s restaurant, Pharmacy. The sale raised $20 million and set new auction records for Hirst’s butterfly paintings and medicine cabinets, and because every lot sold, it was celebrated as a “white-glove sale.” It was the first time a living artist had openly consigned work directly to an auction house. Hirst got 100 percent of the hammer price—a much better split than any deal he could have carved up with his dealers. He also got front-page newspaper coverage and consolidated his position as one of the most famous living artists in the world.

  Oliver Barker, the young Sotheby’s specialist who came up with the Pharmacy auction concept, enjoyed his first experience working with an artist: “Damien is very inspirational, quick-minded, hardworking. He was completely on board helping with the design of the catalogue, approving marketing schedules, and the like. He has a keen business sense, but he’s also a risk-taker. It’s an awesome combination.”

  Many of the artists who sell well at auction are artist-entrepreneurs. It may be because collectors who’ve made their money in business like to see reflections of themselves in the artists they buy. Or as Francis Outred, another Sotheby’s expert, put it, it may be because “a lot of artists today are succeeding on sound business principles.” Here Warhol and his Factory are the model. Like Warhol, Hirst has developed production strategies to ensure that there is always enough material to keep up with collector demand; for instance, he’s made at least six hundred “unique” spot paintings.* He has also maintained a media profile that has expanded the audience and the market for his work beyond the narrow confines of the art world.

  The last couple of lots sell without a hitch. When the sale is over, it is just over. There is no grand finale, no clapping, just another rap of the hammer and a quick “Thank you” from Burge. Knots of people walk and talk their way out of the room. I hear a fe
w young dealers who work in secondary-market galleries laughing about how “insane” the market is before they get into a fractious argument about whether Richard Prince will ever trade for over a million dollars.*

  In the line for our coats, I bump into Dominique Lévy, an art consultant who once worked at Christie’s and knows how to see through the smoke and mirrors of an auction. So what is your verdict? I ask. “For works that sell below five million, the market is astonishingly deep—deeper than ever,” she says. “But I was surprised that the market for expensive works was thinner tonight,” she adds in a quieter voice. “Very often I was about to write pass in my catalogue when Christopher—it was one of his most masterful sales—was able to dig out one more bid.”

  As I walk through the revolving doors into the cold New York air, the celebratory expression “making a killing” and Burge’s gladiatorial metaphor of the “coliseum waiting for thumbs” come to mind. Even if the people here tonight were initially lured into the auction room by a love of art, they find themselves participating in a spectacle where the dollar value of the work has virtually slaughtered its other meanings.

  2

  The Crit

  On the other side of America, at the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts, as it is affectionately known, a very different part of the art world looks for multiple meanings in artworks whose financial worth is—at this moment, anyway—negligible. I’m sitting alone in F200, a windowless classroom with cement walls in which long-life fluorescent lights cast a gray glow. The CalArts building feels like an underground bunker meant to protect those within from the mindless seductions of the Southern California sun. I survey the thin brown carpet, forty chairs, four tables, two chalkboards, and lone jumbo beanbag, trying to imagine how great artists get made in this airless institutional space.

  At precisely 10 A.M., Michael Asher enters. He has a stoop and a bowlegged gait. Asher is the longtime teacher of the legendary crit class that takes place in this room. (A “crit” is a seminar in which student-artists present their work for collective critique.) Ascetic and otherworldly, Asher comes across as a monk in street clothes. He peers at me through his dark-rimmed glasses with greatly magnified eyes and neutral curiosity. He has given me permission to audit today’s class, but I’m forbidden to speak, because to do so would disturb “the chemistry.”

  The classroom reminds me of an Asher installation. At the 1976 Venice Biennale, Asher filled a corner of the Italian Pavilion with twenty-two folding chairs. He wanted the space to be a “functional” lounge where “visitors communicate with each other on a social level.” The chairs were dispersed at the end of the exhibition and the work was documented with a few obligatory black-and-white photographs.

  Until recently I had not seen an Asher piece in the flesh. In fact, most of his students have never seen his work, and Asher’s “situational interventions” (as he calls them) or “institutional critiques” (as others label them) are often invisible. One of Asher’s signature works consisted of removing the gallery wall that divided the office from the exhibition space, thereby focusing attention on the moneymaking business behind “priceless” art. That exhibition took place at Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974, but people still talk about it. In another piece, considered quintessentially Asher, the artist made a catalogue listing all the art that had been “deaccessioned” from, or removed from the permanent collection of, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although it was on view in the 1999 MoMA exhibition “The Museum as Muse,” word of mouth subsequently emphasized the fact that the catalogue was kept behind the counter of the gift shop and was available for free to those in the know.

  Asher has no dealer; his work is not generally for sale. When I asked the artist during an interview on another occasion whether he resists the art market, he said dryly, “I don’t avoid commodity forms. In 1966 I made these plastic bubbles. They were shaped like paint blisters that came an inch off the wall. I sold one of those.”

  Although Asher has a steady museum career, the real importance of his art lies in the way it has inspired a dynamic oral culture. His work lives on in anecdotes recounted from one artist to the next. The visual documentation of his ephemeral art is rarely very stimulating, and because his works have no title (they are not “Untitled” but actually have no name whatsoever), they can’t be invoked quickly and easily. They demand verbal description. Not surprisingly, Asher’s overriding artistic goal has always been, in his words, “to animate debate.”

  Asher has been running this crit class since 1974. Artists with international reputations, like Sam Durant, Dave Muller, Stephen Prina, and Christopher Williams, describe it as one of the most memorable and formative experiences of their art education. The lore around the class is such that incoming students are often desperate to have the once-in-a-lifetime-experience. As one student told me, they “arrive with pre-nostalgia.”

  The three students who will be presenting their work on this last day of the term trudge into F200, carrying grocery bags. They’re all between twenty-eight and thirty years old and in the second year of the master of fine arts (MFA) program. As Josh, wearing a beard, baseball cap, and jeans, unpacks his large black portfolio, Hobbs, a slim tomboy in a pink T-shirt and jeans, claims a seat and rearranges some chairs. Fiona, who evokes the ghost of Frida Kahlo in a long green skirt with a red hibiscus flower in her hair, starts laying out extra-large containers of Safeway’s generic cola, chocolate chip cookies and mini-muffins, and grapes. The people “being critted” provide the snacks. It’s an acknowledged peace offering to their peers.

  Since the 1960s, MFA degrees have become the first legitimator in an artist’s career, followed by awards and residencies, representation by a primary dealer, reviews and features in art magazines, inclusion in prestigious private collections, museum validation in the form of solo or group shows, international exposure at well-attended biennials, and the appreciation signaled by strong resale interest at auction. More specifically, MFA degrees from name art schools have become passports of sorts. Look over the résumés of the artists under fifty in any major international museum exhibition and you will find that most of them boast an MFA from one of a couple of dozen highly selective schools.

  Many people think that the extraordinary vibrancy of the L.A. artistic community results from the presence of so many top-ranking schools. Outstanding programs at CalArts, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Art Center, the University of Southern California, and Otis College of Art attract artists who then never leave the area. The schools, combined with relatively cheap rents, the warm climate, and the liberating distance from the dominant art market in New York, foster an environment where artists can afford to take risks. Significantly, in L.A., teaching does not stigmatize an artist’s career in the way it does elsewhere. In fact, many L.A. artists see teaching as a part of their “practice,” and a full-time contract is not just a money-earner but a credibility-enhancer.

  A number of students flood the room and a wave of greetings follows. No one arrives empty-handed. One student holds a laptop, another a sleeping bag; a third clutches a Tempur-Pedic pillow.

  People remember what they say much more than what they hear. In some MFA programs, a crit consists of five experts telling a student what they think about his or her work. In crits at the L.A. art schools, students do most of the talking while instructors bear witness. Group critiques offer a unique—some say “utopian”—situation in which everyone focuses on the student’s work with a mandate to understand it as deeply as possible. Crits can also be painful rituals that resemble cross-examinations in which artists are forced to rationalize their work and defend themselves from a flurry of half-baked opinions that leave them feeling torn apart. Either way, crits offer a striking contrast to the five-second glance and shallow dollar values ascribed to works at auctions and fairs. Indeed, crits are not normally considered art world events, but I think that the dynamics in this room are vital to understanding the way the a
rt world works.

  A black terrier trots into the classroom with his pale-faced owner in tow. He is followed by a white husky who bounds in, tail swishing, and stops for a long slobbery lick of my toes. “Dogs are allowed in crit class as long as they are quiet,” explains a student. “I have a French bulldog, but she snores, so I can’t bring her to class. Virgil—he’ll be here today—occasionally makes loud noises. He voices our frustration when the class gets tedious. Dogs are emotional sponges. They’re attuned to the mood.”

  Josh has hung two large, well-crafted pencil drawings on the wall. They’re executed in the style of Sam Durant, one of the higher-profile artists on staff at CalArts. One picture is a self-portrait next to someone who looks like an African chief or a black rabbi in a prayer shawl. Josh has inserted himself into the frame in a manner reminiscent of Woody Allen’s chameleon Zelig character, who repeatedly pops up in famous documentary footage.

  At 10:25 A.M. everyone is seated. Michael Asher, legs crossed, clipboard in hand, emits an odd grunt and nods in Josh’s direction. The student starts: “Hello, people,” he says, and then takes an almost interminable pause. “Well, I guess most of you know that I’ve had some shit goin’ on…Some family stuff happened the first week of semester and I only came out of my funk about two weeks ago. So…I’m just going to workshop some ideas that have been going through my head…”

  Asher sits motionless, with a poker face. Students stare impassively into space, swirling their coffee, their legs dangling over the arms of chairs. A guy with stained fingernails keeps looking up and down from his sketchpad. He’s using the crit as an opportunity to do a little life drawing—a subject that has never been on the Art School curriculum at CalArts. (Tellingly, they teach it over in the animation department.) Two women are knitting. One sits upright, working on a beige scarf. The other sits cross-legged on the floor, with a stack of green and yellow wool squares to her left, an eye-catching vintage suitcase to her right. “A patchwork quilt,” she explains, and then, keen to clarify, she adds, “It’s just a hobby. Not a work.”