On the Rules of the Game

Damien Hirst's The Golden Calf courtesy of The Art Newspaper.

Today I add another favourite art website to my Links section (see righthand column), The Art Newspaper. It joins the first set of links: View on Canadian Art, the Tate Museums, and of course a certain gallery in downtown eastside Toronto located at 95 Berkeley Street.

The Art Newspaper tends toward news on the high-end art world, whether 'elite' artists and dealers, major public museums, and news being made in courts and legislatures, but it has a very good style of writing that mixes the neutral-journalistic with an edge of commentary by the way critical questions are posed as part of some of the articles.

In that vein, of several interesting pieces in the Saturday, August 2, 2008, issue, the second of a two-part series on Damien Hirst's latest rule-shaping behaviour is well worth a look: Damien Hirst is rewriting the rules of the market (2). You can also start with the first instalment and then click on to the one just published today: Damien Hirst is rewriting the rules of the market (1). The subject of the two articles is, specifically, on how Hirst and Sotheby's auction house are collaborating to produce a solo auction of Hirst works in September in London and, generally, what this says about the cutthroat business of meglomaniacal (my editorializing) art dealing. On the specific theme, be clear that is the use of auction as a primary mechanism of sale, outflanking the standard 'rule' that artworks from gallery-represented artists first enter the world of art collecting through gallery sales and only later (ideally, much later) become available (if ever) through auctions as a key player in the secondary art market. While this may be taking its lead from how art-market 'rules' have already been bent out of shape in China and somewhat in India by the offering of new works at auction for some artists (because of how market-oriented much art collecting in China is: see in the same issue of The Art Newspaper, Meet China's Top Collector of Contemporary Art), the Hirst stunt is bound to have a more profound impact on the Western art market simply because of who Hirst is, but, more importantly, because of a somewhat juvenile tendency of many in the art world (artists included) to look on the high-end art market as somehow a governing reference point for how the whole art world either is (a truly naive thought) or should be (a thought borne more from high envy than any sense of proportion). [Boy, that was one long frenzy of a sentence...]

There are already signs of artists and auction houses moving towards a primary market alliance, or of galleries and auction houses discussing such collaborations on behalf of represented artists. As a sign of artist independence and initiative, it is fine as far as it goes, but we may well come to see such phenomena as self-defeating acts of cutting of our noses despite our face. This development may indeed be a logical next step in the pressures that are making the the model of regular-hours, regular-exhibitions, open-to-the-public-as-free-cultural-space commercial/private gallery more and more of a tenuous proposition. Those existing pressures include: the Internet and direct selling by artists using the Internet as platform; the great global mall that we call art fairs and that sees people prefer to attend such events in one intensive shot over the increasingly quaint practice of gallery-going; and a fascination with buying 'name' art at secondary-art auctions ahead of discovering emerging and meritorious under-recognized artists.

Don't get me wrong. I am not here making the mistake of equating the lot of Gagosian and White Cube (Hirst's gallery representatives) with the situation of the vast below-the-sea remainder of the art gallery iceberg. But nor am I so cynical that I am crying only crocodile tears for the artist-representation dilemmas in which they find themselves due to Hirst playing them off against each other to support his outflanking of each of them (see the article details on how this is being orchestrated by Hirst). For the point is that the Hirst/Sotheby's auction may be a big canary in the coal mine for the signal it sends to artists that they don't really need galleries or, if they do, it is on the basis of very short-term and contingent commitments. It may well be that the evolution of the art world and market will prove these new developments not to be a danger for the quality of art, and collectors and public institutions will find the best artists without the hard work and judgment filters of galleries as a key actor in the art ecosystem. But, right now, my prediction (my cutting off the nose despite the face point) is that the squeezing out of full-operation galleries (versus no-public-premises art dealers) as key actors will not do much for the quality of art. Mass publishing technology on the Internet has not made the editorial judgment and work of the best publishing houses unnecessary (even if they too face similar financial pressures to develop business models that is faithful to good literature while still being commercially viable), and I would argue that the role of good galleries is just as indispensable.

But, in wanting to have their cakes and eat them too, the Hirsts of this world and those keeping-up-with-the-Joneses artists who will take their cue from him may just find fewer and fewer cakes on the counter. It will in any case be interesting to watch the follow-on from the Hirst/Sotheby's auction in the years to come.