The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz

The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz

Author:William Deresiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.


10

VISUAL ART

Visual art—meaning, for now, the art of the “art world,” of galleries, museums, auction houses, and the rest—is subject to a radically different set of economic circumstances than the other arts. The reason is simple: music, writing, and video can all be digitized and thus demonetized. The art world is, by and large, a realm of unique physical objects. If anything—at a time when a single work can sell for nearly half a billion dollars (as did Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in 2017)—the problem in the art world is not too little money, but far too much.

It wasn’t always like this. In the decades after World War II, when American art emerged as a force on the international stage, the scene was small and, with exceptions, financially modest. In the 1940s, the number of galleries that specialized in contemporary American art was no more than twenty; the number of collectors, about a dozen. As Ben Davis writes in 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, “the entire New York art world [could] fit in one room.” For another twenty years, this remained the case, even if the room got bigger. In the 1950s, there were about two hundred artists working in the city. By the late 1960s, the total was perhaps five hundred, dealers and collectors included. As Roger White, the painter and critic, quotes a witness to the era in The Contemporaries, “If somebody had a party at a loft, mostly everyone was there.”

Prices, by the standards of today, were microscopic. Writing in 1965, the critic Harold Rosenberg marveled over sums of “$135,000 for a Wyeth, more than $100,000 for a Pollock, $70,000 for a de Kooning, $30,000 for a Johns”—figures that, even with inflation, represent a tiny fraction of the prices commanded by today’s most expensive living artists ($110 million for a Johns; $100 million for a Richter; $91.1 million for a Koons). Through the 1970s, as rents remained cheap and the city decayed, depopulated, and deindustrialized, the New York art scene, centered by then in SoHo, retained its bohemian character: alternative, artist-run spaces; countercultural values; and ideological preferences that abjured the creation of salable objects like paintings and sculptures in favor of conceptualism, performance, installation, and video.

All that changed, like so much else, in the 1980s. Money came in and transformed the art world, just as it transformed the city: Wall Street money, tax-cut money, inequality money. Once the finance guys got bored with doing blow, they looked around to see what else there was to spend their bonuses on. Whereas before an artist wouldn’t even think about showing for the first ten years of a career, now the galleries began recruiting straight out of art school, at least if you were making stuff that they could sell. Young, in the art world, once meant under forty. Now the stars were figures like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—all of them painters, and all of them famous before they were thirty.

The era set the pattern for the cycles to come, as the art world climbed aboard the roller coaster of finance capitalism.



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