Made it over to the New York Public Library today for a lunch time panel discussion, sponsored by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Ma., about the impact of the thermonuclear art market on the mere mortals who run museums, write about art or just like to look at it. There were three panelists: Jeffrey Deitch, the well known dealer who heads Deitch Projects; Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan; and Roberta Smith, deputy art critic of the New York Times. The high points:
Deitch called art “the ideal product for the post-industrial century.” As he pointed out, you can borrow against it, it’s non-polluting and, if it’s contemporary art we’re talking about, they just keep making more of it. He also made a sobering prediction. Within a decade it will be more common to see a few large global art dealerships, perhaps led by people like Bernard Arnault of LMVH, that will swallow up local galleries and subject their artists to a much greater degree of corporatization. (Think of it as a Counter Reformation with merchant princes as the college of cardinals.) We’ve already seen this kind of centralization in the world of bookstores, publishing houses (and museums), and it hasn’t been a happy development.
Smith had the funniest line. She called the art market, which rains down money on a few very young artists, “a market-driven WPA.” She took the realist position, skeptical of the market but resigned to it. “The art market is just one more form of opinion,” she said. “A gross, inarticulate form of opinion.”
Interestingly, Deitch mentioned that he “recruits” at art schools like Harvard’s and Yale’s, looking for new additions to his gallery, while Smith said she doesn’t generally review shows by kids just out of school. “We’re going to see a lot of artists,” she said, “who we’ll probably forget about.”
Phillips’ greatest concern was that the acceleration of the market — reputations made (and lost) in no time, crowds hurrying from one gallery to the next — runs contrary to the conditions of quiet contemplation that art requires. How to keep those conditions from invading the museums that we count on to defend that quiet space is exactly the problem for people in jobs like her’s. One way to do it, of course, is to resist the occasional pressure from collector/trustees to validate dubious artists in their collections by giving them premature museum exposure.
On the whole, an interesting afternoon. It would have been even more interesting if the Clark people had managed to get for their panel one of the big three bogeymen of the current market — hedge fund traders, Pacific Rim billionaires or Russian kleptocrats. But all of those guys are probably too busy making sell calls and watching Bloomberg News. Gallery owners stir the pot, critics convey names into general awareness, museums can be enablers by lending their authority too soon to artists who haven’t earned it. But at the end of the day, it’s money that swells markets. And a superabundance of money has been driven to the galleries and auction houses in recent years under the prompting of all the usual motives among the rich: status anxiety, boredom with less glamorous investments, even — hey, it happens — a genuine love of art.
But as a place to put speculative capital, art, because it has no intrinsic value, can be riskier than shale oil fields. And contemporary art, because it has less scarcity value than the blue chip (meaning dead) Old Masters, can be riskier still. The “problem” of the contemporary art market wil be solved by the next general shakeout in the stock market. If, in the meantime, a few mediocre artists collect some of the bigger crumbs from the table, so be it. And if museums of contemporary art are priced out of the market for the very new, even that might not be such a bad thing. As Roberta Smith usefully recalled this afternoon, when Alfred Barr was first establishing the permanent collection of MoMA, he was mostly buying work that was already 20 or 30 years old.