Emerging Issues in Contemporary Design a Roundtable Art Journal Volume 66 2007

Takashi Murakami
From A-lists to aesthetics – the hot, hip globe of contemporary art before the coming of hard times
Angus Trumble
"Vii Days in the Art World is a time capsule of a remarkable period in the history of art. During the past eight years, the gimmicky fine art market has boomed, museum omnipresence has surged, and more people than ever were able to carelessness their day jobs and call themselves artists. The art world both expanded and started to spin faster; it became hotter, hipper, and more than expensive."

Since Sarah Thornton wrote these words, and Granta published them late last year, the international market for contemporary works of art has, like every other, been shrinking, and getting slower, colder and much poorer. The insufficiently small, interlocking communities of professional person artists, critics, auctioneers, dealers, collectors, scholars and curators who are more or less tied to that marketplace now face hard times. So reading this tour d'horizon of what the author more often describes equally "the art globe" than more accurately "the gimmicky art world" is rather like leafing through Country Life in the trenches at Passchendaele, or contemplating loftier-end millinery on Iwo Jima.

So excessive and so improbable are the phenomena that she describes – "the nebulous and oftentimes contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, didactics, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of ane's collection" – that you cannot quite believe that this is the environs in which those of u.s.a. whom Thornton describes as "insiders" take been abode for so long, and until and then recently.

To some extent yous find yourself questioning the accuracy of the picture she sketches, since, as she admits, "the art world is so diverse, opaque, and downright secretive, it is difficult to generalize virtually it and impossible to be truly comprehensive. What is more, access is rarely easy". Her solution: a sequence of gossipy, fly-on-the-wall, in-depth, behind-the-scenes, cat-on-the-prowl, day-in-the-life narratives set in half dozen cities in v countries in Europe, the United States and Japan. The "ethnographic" technique she describes awkwardly as "participant observation" (significant observation), augmented by interviews and reportage, is said to be "curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, only easily ignored". Thornton's seven days, liberally punctuated by chatty, journalistic datelines such as "8:00 P.Grand. Less than an hr to get before the fair closes", are in fact spaced between November 2004 and June 2007.

The first affiliate describes a boom-time fine art auction sale at Christie's in New York. That occasion and its various participants serve to block in the economic background, taking in, among much else, the three "Ds" which generally flush works of art on to the open market (debt, divorce and death), the "wow gene", as Thornton calls it, and the current primacy of Andy Warhol, "a globally recognized brand with a off-white distribution", with whom for many younger specialist scholars the history of art now seems to brainstorm – Marcel Duchamp playing the office of Giotto to Warhol's Michelangelo. She shadows Christopher Burge, Honorary Chairman of Christie's, who conducts the sale at Rockefeller Plaza. She shares fish carpaccio and sparkling water with Philippe Ségalot, an art consultant who boasts that he has on occasion bid for certain wealthy private clients up to twice as much as they originally agreed to pay. She chats with an elderly private collector who attends sale sales to get a sense of which way the wind of taste is blowing. She talks to a couple of journalists, i of whom says he hates this particular saleroom because "you can't run across the [telephone] bidders". And in the procedure she questions the relationship between aesthetic and monetary values. "Information technology'southward not fully correlative", is one answer, a blinding glimpse of the obvious cheerfully furnished by a fellow member of Christie'due south staff. Meanwhile, Warhol's "Mustard Race Riot" (1963) goes under the hammer for $thirteen.v million.

In the second chapter, which is intended to be antonymous, the author sits in on a "crit", "a seminar in which art students nowadays their work for commonage critique", at the post-studio, anti-craft, periphery-embracing California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. The cast of characters here includes the monkish, wise-owl conceptual artist-professor, and the three MFA students who are in that location to be "critted": gloomy, bearded Josh, who identifies with hip hop more klezmer culture; Fiona, who looks similar Frida Kahlo, and sees her practice every bit schizophrenic because although she does "dry sociopolitical work", she always has and says she e'er will paint; and, finally, tomboy Hobbs, who sleeps on the flooring of her studio, and says she trusts the "corporeal and crass linguistic communication of sense of humor and stereotype", and liberally deploys it in her photographs. Between sessions in classroom F200, and a side trip to Whole Foods, Thornton ponders the question: who or what is a professional person creative person? She also nudges us towards some reflections on the nature, purpose and limitations of current higher art didactics.

Thence she brings united states to Art Basel, the art fair, rubbing shoulders with the self-appointed crème de la crème, VIP passholders, wealthy art collectors existence coy most their shopping habits, and dealers complaining almost the location of their stands, and doing their best to talk up the artists. There are a few walk-on celebrity appearances, such as that of the veteran New York dealer Barbara Gladstone, whom one collector sees as "one of my compass points. In that location is north, due south, east, and Barbara". Her berth is front and middle. "Gladstone admits that her calendar is 'more than complicated than it used to be, at present that nosotros take sales for granted'", meaning that until recently she and other distinguished gallery proprietors were to some extent able to "place" works of art in suitable, desirable, prestigious, or in some other sense advantageous spots, rather than to sell them to the person who happens to be standing at the front of the queue. At its most admirable level, this stratagem was designed to protect the long-term interest of the gallery's stable of artists, but it is naturally far harder to achieve when times are tough. "Dealers are editors and conspirators", says Jeff Poe. "We help make up one's mind what gets shown and how it gets shown, and we help put fine art in production."

From Basel, and the magical realism of retail, we shift to Tate U.k., the judging of the Turner Prize, and the canonization process that is often said to exist the special province of the art museum – more and more these days the dedicated museum of modernistic and contemporary fine art. Or is that process, in fact, more than effectively steered by the opinions of contributors to the prestigious journal of art criticism Artforum International in New York – whose Editor-in-Main is anxious not to be portrayed as "the toothpaste salesman for a counterculture" – or, indeed, by some sort of consensus that is forged among scholars and teachers of contemporary art practice at the almanac coming together of the Higher Art Clan, at which Thornton seeks some illumination in Midtown Manhattan? What are the roles played by curators and critics? "Art criticism is to artists every bit ornithology is to birds", answers one wag, while others (apparently more artists than dealers and collectors) question the concept of "a good middle", because it "evokes a connoisseur with a monocle, or a Cyclops with infallible instincts". The volume carries the states ahead to an extended visit to the three-campus studio and design establishments of Takashi Murakami in Saitama and Tokyo, a twenty-first-century Japanese refinement of Warhol's factory, with a chillingly enormous marketing and publicity apparatus. "Every forenoon, I upset people", says the barefoot artist, who is plain "an unrelenting aesthetic micromanager". Murakami's administration agree: "He is e'er aroused", says ane with a shrug. "The atmosphere is ordinarily tense."

On the seventh day, clearly non given over to residue, the author brings us kicking and screaming into the "he's C-Listing, she's B-list, Nick Serota is A-Listing" awfulness of the ceremonies surrounding the launch of the fifty-2nd Biennale di Venezia, and some ruminations, while doing laps of the Cipriani puddle (front crawl), on the nature of the standoff at this enormous event of many members of the author's carefully accumulated dramatis personae.

The book is so sprinkled with picturesque detail – Ricola lozenges, Agnès B here, Prada there, Moët, "HOT Delicious PIZZA", air-kissing, Bellinis, jail cell phones and BlackBerries, "the smoky scent of Lapsang Souchong", "big guns", private planes, free alcohol, cigarettes – that as an analysis of how judgements of taste and quality in respect of new works of art are formulated, and by whom, either as a product of consensus, or constructive advocacy, or manipulation, popularity, or even good fortune, it too ofttimes relies on the concept of complicit insider versus naive outsider, the drifting uninitiated perpetually shut out. Amidst the author'southward many thumbnail sketches there is also a tendency towards caricature. The southern Californian fine art students tend to be incoherent; certain artists mad or eccentric, and then it is also with creepy curators, scary dealers, soigné auctioneers, and complacent collectors, shuttling between London, New York and various fine art-posts. The driver of Murakami's seven-seat Tokyo Toyota is "a cool dude in a fedora and vintage fifties spectacles".

It is among the near anomalous aspects of the contemporary art scene that the more it has prospered lately, the more outrageous has been the hostility and philistinism directed towards information technology in many places past the mainstream print and electronic media. To some extent, those of us who work in art museums have only ourselves to arraign, as we have become steadily greedier for public attention. I was reminded of the media hype surrounding the laurels of the 2001 Turner Prize to Martin Creed for his conceptual "Work No. 227: The lights going on and off". When interviewed on television receiver, the stunned artist was inclined to say no more than than that the work simply was what it was: the lights going on and off. Cutting to Sir Nicholas Serota, whose highly articulate interpretative gloss eventually brought in vestigial recollections of the Holocaust, and, through devious editing, appeared to devious then close to self-parody that it would be hard to invent a more biting satire. Fortunately, withal, Thornton seems to take conceptual art seriously, as indeed she respects the bona fide piece of work of all the artists she encounters, and she likewise resists the temptation to accept the kind of inexpensive shots that are routinely fabricated in the printing. In this respect her book performs a valuable service by separating the real from the nonsensical.

Withal the real in Thornton consists entirely of "big ticket" contemporary artists and their work, non the thousands of professional artists who now labour under the rubrics of "craft" (ceramics, textiles, metalwork, jewellery, and and then on) or graphic and other, innumerable branches of pattern, nor indeed traditional art-makers in many parts of the world who are non at all the focus of the international contemporary art trade.

Peradventure 1 might ameliorate see the processes which, until recently, gave forward propulsion to the Saatchi end of that business organisation every bit taking place within a rather complicated Venn diagram, each chemical element of which consists of concentric circles that define many dissimilar degrees of influence, speculation and professional involvement, both proficient and bad, because, as far as this reviewer is concerned, very few of the scenes that make upward 7 Days in the Art World seem at all familiar. This may be due to the fact that in that location is no longer any such readily definable matter as "the art earth", rather than an countless skein of more than or less precarious reputations, a short supply of coin, much status anxiety amidst the rich, and tens of thousands of young artists graduating every summer from hundreds of art schools all over the world.

Ninety-five years ago, in his consistently under-appreciated volume merely entitled Art, Clive Bell wrote:

"I have a friend blest with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. And so, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear upwards a pyramid of irrefragable statement on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has e'er been a proverb that faultless logic tin can win but niggling credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously faux."

Something of the aforementioned shortage of "aesthetic emotion" seems to have characterized the artistic and art-critical climate of New York and London in contempo years, and it may exist a happy product of the difficult period we now face that, with fewer vernissages, less Moët, tighter budgets and more than time to call up and await hard, nosotros may hope to encounter improve, cheaper contemporary art, in less outlandishly Neronian surroundings. None of which will exist of whatsoever comfort to artists, the vast majority of whom are banished to the very bottom of this item nutrient chain, and volition no incertitude suffer more anyone in the lean years ahead. Sarah Thornton's exhausting vii-day excursion, meanwhile, will serve to remind those of united states of america who were ever fortunate plenty to do so what it was once like to dance on the brink of a volcano.

Sarah Thornton
Seven DAYS IN THE Art WORLD
274pp. Granta Books. £fifteen.99.

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