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06/03/2005: "Art World Economics" by Andrew Wielawski
A New York artist’s studio, 1983. The director of one of New York City’s three largest contemporary art museums walks in the door, and tells the artist he’ll have a better chance of being in a group show starring **, if he changes his paintings by superimposing words over the work. The artist had been preparing for a year, after having won his place in a selection process for his biggest gig ever. The star’s paintings have words superimposed on them, and today sell for a lot more than they did then.
A New York collector’s apartment, 1989. The hottest female gallerist of the moment sits down with the collector to plan and promote the career of an as yet unselected artist. The only criteria for the selection is that the artist must be dying of AIDS.
A table at Smith and Wolenski’s restaurant, 1989. The editor in chief of one of the biggest and most respected art journals in the world, drinking with friends, laughs about his own selection process for which artists get articles about them published in his magazine. “It’s the artists or the galleries that have spent the most on our full page ads,” he laughs, proud of his very cosmopolitan savvy. Conspiratorial nudges and smirks all around.
1996 Three art events thrust in the public’s face, up and down Park Avenue in New York, up and down the Champs Elysees in Paris, and in the center of Monte Carlo, Monaco make headlines around the world. The articles don’t mention that these cities’ public spaces have been rented, by private, profit motivated individuals, rather the event is billed as a city public interest cultural event. Silence surrounds the objections of the local populations to these displays, even as powerful as Park Avenue residents are.
Cowparade 2000, a street show of five hundred cows altered and painted by artists, is held in Manhattan, and under the slogan, “For Art, for Children, and for Charity”, and is presented so that the public believes it is a charity event. It is not, with profits going into the pockets of a single individual. Publicity is so well controlled that few people hear of the exclusion of one of the most known artists in it, David Lynch, for the subject he chose for his cow, not in line with the image desired by the organizers.
What do these five events have in common? Power and money, babe. They rule.
Globalization
In today’s economic climate, companies whose products are sold around the globe need only keep their costs low and their product visible to become virtually eternal. We shouldn’t forget that artists, when we’re selling them, are nothing more than products. High volume of production, and high visibility, not quality, are what create eternality. If one stops to consider the most successful restaurant in the world, it becomes apparent that quality doesn’t have much to do with success. Stuffed pheasant with truffles is good, yes, but I’d put my money on the success of Big Macs any day.
Stock Brokerage House Collectors
The proportionately high number of stock brokers who collect art can be attributed to one thing besides their interest in gazing at beautiful things, and their wealth. Investment in art is just like investment in stocks, but without the annoying regulations of the SEC. Charles Schwab, Richard McKenzie, and others who collect can’t help but see that an investment can grow enormously if only the perception of the artists and their fame do. Art is the only market in existence where the sales object is judged purely subjectively. Remember the golden rule in buying and selling stocks. Buy low, and sell high.
Stingy Millionaires
If you’re an artist dealing with multimillionaires, remember that they’re not used to paying retail. They will offer to buy two of your more expensive works for the price and a half of one of them, and cut the gallery out, making you lose the latter’s trust as well as money. Each piece you sell them will earn you less as they began to divine what your lowest price is. Mostly, they are very aware of how you view them. (Sugardaddy) The promise of future acquisitions is like heroin as you sit with them in the garden of a monstrous estate, eating caviar and sipping champagne. You’ve finally found a patron. With these types, remember never to deliver work without having been fully paid first, or you’ll lose the work, and the patron. Don’t even dream of suing them.
Museum Curators and the Insider Game
You ever wonder why the same artists are in the biggest museums all over the world? Once a name is recognized by one museum, putting that same artist in a number of others solves quite a few problems. Above all, it absolves the directors and curators of virtually all the responsibility for the artists they have chosen. An artist with work in a Los Angeles museum can be presented in one in Rome at virtually no risk to whoever selects them. Discovering new talent is a parsley flake alongside the Chateaubriand of staying safely entrenched. The bottom line is that curators guarantee their future by agreeing with others at the same power level, or higher.
The caretakers of public cultural treasures should never be financially involved with the choices they make. It’s a conflict of interests. Unfortunately, they nearly always are. If you’re at the highest levels, that means coming into contact with people through whose dirty fingers millions of dollars pass, and there’s the conflict. Marlboro Gallery is intimate with most of the biggest museum directors throughout the world, and the door closes on everyone else when Marlboro comes calling. With most directors, it’s Marlboro that’s the supreme power figure, not them. The lesser directors who follow go down to where they’re not worth bothering with any more. With museums, that’s the level at which outsider’s opportunities begin.
Opportunities for Talent requiring Little Wealth
Let’s face it, to become a name in the arts you have to dominate at least one niche. If you have the means, you can start in New York, among hundreds of thousands, and perhaps win a battle of economic attrition, but if not, you can find a smaller pond and become the big fish. If you do that, then conquering the next pond becomes easier, and before you know it, you’re ready for the ocean. Your work has to be unique to be noticed. Sounds horrible, I know, but being aware of the rules of the game you’re playing has to be a priority if you want to win. You can also decide to create beautiful works and make your own rules in a vacuum. You might even be discovered, the chances of which, without carefully planned exposure, are about like those of winning the lottery.
Choosing your target market has a lot to do with the prices you want to get for your work. People have to be able to afford what you’re making, and part of your job has to be to create the desire to spend the money. Cruise ships can and do sell a hundreds of bad works at auction in just a few days. Why? Even if what they’re selling is an imitation watercolor, in an edition of five hundred or more, why is it that they can command a price of several hundred dollars, and you can’t for a single original of the same or better quality? They frame the work, and mat it well, as if it were an original Monet. A six inch print in a twenty four inch frame looks like it’s worth more. They have a captive audience. The cruise patrons are stuck on the ship, and generally these auctions start half way through the trip, just as people have seen everything there is to see, and are getting bored with the whole day’s journey between stops. There’s a build up of tension. The ‘big’ auction at which all the ‘serious’ players will be, isn’t until the last day, and the auctioneers keep telling everyone that. Generally, all this takes place in a main hallway lounge, rather than a closed venue like a theatre, so that every passenger on the whole ship will eventually walk through the middle on their way to someplace else. Their partner, the cruise line, already has everyone’s credit card. Just raise your hand. It only hurts for a second. There’s an air of professionality that keeps you at a distance, and everything you see is tailored to keep that impression going. Learn from this, and understand why it works.
Whatever anyone sees, must be tailored for the eye. I knew a bad painter once who couldn’t draw, and made everything from digital images transferred mechanically to the canvass. He kept ‘works in progress’ and ‘studies’ on his studio walls, images he’d spend whole days on to make look like they were drawn in seconds by a genius. Whatever wasn’t creating the genius effect, he scrupulously eliminated.
He could sell paintings even with only a few people walking through the studio. Journalists loved to ‘discover’ him. You have to do the same with whatever anybody, even your best friend, is going to see. It’s theater. Use your artistic ability to create a compelling scene. What about artistic freedom and chaos? You become the only spectator in a show you’re performing in front of a mirror. Your competition is creating an aura around the work they’re selling, not just producing quality, and that multiplies their chances in the marketplace. Want to cut yours down to next to nothing? Let your work speak for itself, in a studio that looks like a messy college student’s dorm room.
The effectiveness of minor artistic events, those that a museum or gallery or professional curator has not organized, is almost always diluted by the involvement of too many people. I will give the example of a show I saw where each artist was allowed to position and light their own work as they wished. It looked like a garage sale, and diminished the effect of every piece of work in the entire show. An exhibit has to have a unity of concept that is scrupulously designed in every aspect, from the music to the lighting, to the positioning of the pieces relative to one another, to the choice of food and drink that is served. This is best done by a single, talented and industrious person with vision. Find one, and let them do it all. A purity will surface that ties everything together harmoniously. Henry Berg, a former curator at the Whitney Museum, told me that in organizing a display, the largest works have to be placed first, and then the smaller pieces placed around them. “Like planting a garden,” he said. “You put the big trees in first.”
Because we as artists never can agree on anything, except the need to find a venue to expose ourselves, we have to begin to create venues with inventiveness and effort. These are the best tools that we have at our disposition. Who says we can’t creatively demolish the obstacles that we find in our way? If a city says, no street show, can’t we rent a tractor trailer, decorate it, equip it with glass sides, set up our display inside, and park it all over a city? Drive slowly in rush hour traffic? A fine would be worth an article in the newspaper, and probably bring more viewers. U 2 did that with an illegal rooftop show in New York, creating an image as champions of freedom of expression, got lots of articles, and did it all with an idea that they copied from the Beatles. The truck idea could even get national TV coverage, or be repeated in other cities, becoming a known phenomenon, with ever increasing results. But only if it is kept ever more creative.
The tradition of arriving at success based only on the quality of what we make, is a thing of the past. If I have painted the top end of the art world out to be a seedy, corrupt place, that’s because it is. In preparing the lecture that this is abbreviated from, I steeped and socialized in its stink for so long that I still need a strong cologne.
Yet, I believe that such tyranny leads inevitably to revolution, which historically, in art, happens around the turn of each century. Our time is now.
The events we create to expose our art have to challenge the events and individuals still drawing the crowds, and beat them into the dust with innovation. We may not be skilled criminals, but hopefully we do have a tool that they don’t. Raw creativity that we must not use only in the studio. We have to loudly vocalize our contempt for those museum directors who shame their profession, and spit upon the public’s trust, for money and position. On T shirts, on the internet, in the press, and in our own work. While doing so, we must also offer a legitimate and very visible alternative of works to see and innovative ways to see them. The public is hungry, and sick of having Big Macs thrust at them. Our time is now.
