Transparency in the Art World

From CounterPunch:

80% of work bought from artists and 50% of work bought at auction will fail to reach its original purchase price ever again. Less than 50% of artists featured 25 years ago in Christie’s or Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auctions are still featured in a major auction. 80% of the work brought into the leading auction houses is rejected for the evening auctions. It is not even necessary to wait for a quarter of a decade: recently a glut of Damien Hirst’s from those fallen on hard times led potential vendors being turned away.

The ADAA Guide makes a claim for its members that any art professional would also make, namely that they are “skilled at assessing the relative aesthetic merits of a given work, evaluating it both within the larger context of art history and within the specific context of the artist’s oeuvre.” Any evaluation within the larger context would have to include the caveat that many of the artists considered today to be leading exponents will be of little interest in the future, just as Edwin Long, who held the record price for a living artist in 1882 for his painting, The Babylonian Marriage Market, is now merely another Victorian also-ran, whose work fell to 10% of its previous value within 10 years of his death.

However, even the smaller context of contemporary art study is brushed aside if it proves inconvenient. There are obviously many vested interests, both financial and reputational, in maintaining the value of Damien Hirst’s work, and this, as with the value of all art, is dependent on market confidence, in his case deriving to a large extent from his status as an innovative practitioner.

More here.

So I hit on this very topic some six and a half years ago when I compared Marcel Duchamp's work to the work of contemporary art-whore Jeff Koons. Check out what I said here, but the long and short of it, from my perspective as somebody with both bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts, is that there is an over-the-top sense of bullshit in the high dollar New York avant garde art scene, where hype and reputation are, in the end, far more important than art itself. That means art work created by buddies I had years ago in the University of Texas art department is at least as cool and interesting as anything created by the uber-artistes in NYC whose paintings, sculptures, and installations sell for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

The Emperor wears no clothes. Indeed. But what I missed back in 2004, no doubt, because I was looking at the issue purely from the perspective of an angry artist, is that these high-dollar frauds of art are also investments for billionaires who see themselves as cool and hip. Consequently, you see in the serious art world a phenomenon something akin to what we saw with the subprime mortgage mess: countless investments fraudulently rated as AAA, the safest possible, that are essentially worthless, leaving investors holding the bag once the hype has diminished.

Not that I'm shedding any tears for billionaire investors who buy derivative rip-off bullshit for hundreds of thousands that any high school art student could produce, not me, no way. But this is very revealing in that it shows how all these big financial institutions, and, rest assured, the companies that deal in expensive objets d'art are definitely part of the financial sector, are totally corrupt, with organizational rules and mandates aimed at profiteering that virtually assure some kind of malfeasance will always be happening. If it's not Enron, it's WorldCom, or Lehman Brothers, or Citigroup, or Goldman Sachs, or Sotheby's.

We've had our noses rubbed in it for years now, but business continues as usual. Doesn't anybody in Washington give a shit at all?

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