Art without price
Mar. 16th, 2007 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI've had a couple of meetings this past week with a gallerist who's working on an innovative way to sell media art. She's collecting together 70 media artists and plans to sell their work by -- well, I won't let the cat out of the bag yet; all will be revealed when she launches later in the year.
In some ways it would be ideal for me if she could succeed, because I'm "an artist without prices". The last show I held in Chelsea, and my Whitney Biennial performance, were presented as having "nothing prepared, nothing sold and nothing archived". I think, in an art world which is perceived as being more and more about money, this is actually rather refreshing. And note that the "nothing archived" claim rebuffs over-zealous academics too. While money and academic attention can undoubtedly vitalize the art world, too much investment and too much institutional respect tends to deaden it.
After thinking about this stuff more, I decided I like the perversity of this "nothing for sale" stance better than the possibility of getting paid. So for the moment I continue to be an artist with nothing for sale. It's almost like an artwork in itself. I've opted out of the gallerist's scheme, though I wish her every success with it.
She doesn't seem to mind; last night we went for a drink at Barbie Deinhoff's bar in Kreuzberg. "I feel like a tourist in the art world," I told her, "and I want to keep that feeling of its glamour." She started telling me "the art world isn't as glamourous as it --" but I cut her off, sticking my fingers in my ears with a smile and shouting "La la la la la!"
The thing is, glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If I want art to be glamourous, glamourous it shall be! To me, anyway. And perhaps a condition of that continued attraction is to stay somewhat distanced from the bumpy mechanisms and machinations of art's market. I like to quote Kafka about my attitude to Japan, but the same quote applies to the art world: "Happiness consists in having an idea of the good life, but not advancing towards it." I suppose you could think of it as endless foreplay.
You may ask what's left of the art world when money is taken out of the equation. What's left is perhaps what Brian Eno described, in a talk entitled "What Art Is For", delivered last month at Design Indaba Conference in South Africa: “Art is everything we don’t need to do. Art is a way of commonly testing other realities and it is a way of staying in tune with each other.”
One way I am participating in the art world's current money boom is by writing more and more articles about art and artists (for money, hypocrisy hounds!) for catalogues. I just finished a piece about Beck's Futures Prize-winner Matt Stokes which will appear in a book about him published later this year by the Edinburgh Artists' Collective, and a conversation between me and critic Carlo Antonelli will appear in the catalogue of a big exhibition about Futurism to be staged soon at the Bergamo Museum in Italy.
What interests me in writing about artists is how they self-define their own style, hone their interests, and how those interests connect with mine. Matt Stokes, for instance, documents early 90s rave culture as if he were a cultural archeologist of the early Christian period -- as if the sites of M25 "orbital" parties were the catacombs off the Via Appia. In the essay, I connect this to my own ideas about "the passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver", and conclude that subcultures can also be "superlegitimate".
The images on this page are of an installation Mr Liam Gillick made for the communal area of the CCA in Kitakyushu in 2000. His installation consisted of benches, low tables, bookshelves and Japanese lanterns. A book later appeared based on the project.
I've been aware of Gillick (who currently teaches at Columbia) for years, but I think he's someone I should find out more about. His work draws together an elegantly minimalist didactic look (he shares with Julian Opie an interest in spareness and idealized office environments), great colour combinations, Marxisant titles like "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" or "The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune", and "fictional yet non-narrative essays" -- something which brings to mind other "investigative" artists like Jeremy Deller, Rainer Ganahl, Luke Fowler or Annika Eriksson. I think they share something with designer James Goggin and his "ostentatiously non-demonstrative", socially-engaged, playfully didactic design.
I'm just pulling names out of a hat here, but you get the point: as a tourist, all I need is to find one interesting figure, and the whole big top of the art world is justified. Let the money, the logistics and the hype look after themselves. Sure, following my arguments the other day some of you will say "Money, logistics and hype are the whole context of the art world, its field. They change the meaning of every statement in it." That may be true, but to say that the art world was just money speaking money would be gross reductionism. The saving slippage lies in art's non-instrumentality, its eccentricity -- as Eno says, it's "everything we don't need to do".
In some ways it would be ideal for me if she could succeed, because I'm "an artist without prices". The last show I held in Chelsea, and my Whitney Biennial performance, were presented as having "nothing prepared, nothing sold and nothing archived". I think, in an art world which is perceived as being more and more about money, this is actually rather refreshing. And note that the "nothing archived" claim rebuffs over-zealous academics too. While money and academic attention can undoubtedly vitalize the art world, too much investment and too much institutional respect tends to deaden it.
After thinking about this stuff more, I decided I like the perversity of this "nothing for sale" stance better than the possibility of getting paid. So for the moment I continue to be an artist with nothing for sale. It's almost like an artwork in itself. I've opted out of the gallerist's scheme, though I wish her every success with it.
She doesn't seem to mind; last night we went for a drink at Barbie Deinhoff's bar in Kreuzberg. "I feel like a tourist in the art world," I told her, "and I want to keep that feeling of its glamour." She started telling me "the art world isn't as glamourous as it --" but I cut her off, sticking my fingers in my ears with a smile and shouting "La la la la la!"
The thing is, glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If I want art to be glamourous, glamourous it shall be! To me, anyway. And perhaps a condition of that continued attraction is to stay somewhat distanced from the bumpy mechanisms and machinations of art's market. I like to quote Kafka about my attitude to Japan, but the same quote applies to the art world: "Happiness consists in having an idea of the good life, but not advancing towards it." I suppose you could think of it as endless foreplay.
You may ask what's left of the art world when money is taken out of the equation. What's left is perhaps what Brian Eno described, in a talk entitled "What Art Is For", delivered last month at Design Indaba Conference in South Africa: “Art is everything we don’t need to do. Art is a way of commonly testing other realities and it is a way of staying in tune with each other.”
One way I am participating in the art world's current money boom is by writing more and more articles about art and artists (for money, hypocrisy hounds!) for catalogues. I just finished a piece about Beck's Futures Prize-winner Matt Stokes which will appear in a book about him published later this year by the Edinburgh Artists' Collective, and a conversation between me and critic Carlo Antonelli will appear in the catalogue of a big exhibition about Futurism to be staged soon at the Bergamo Museum in Italy. What interests me in writing about artists is how they self-define their own style, hone their interests, and how those interests connect with mine. Matt Stokes, for instance, documents early 90s rave culture as if he were a cultural archeologist of the early Christian period -- as if the sites of M25 "orbital" parties were the catacombs off the Via Appia. In the essay, I connect this to my own ideas about "the passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver", and conclude that subcultures can also be "superlegitimate".
The images on this page are of an installation Mr Liam Gillick made for the communal area of the CCA in Kitakyushu in 2000. His installation consisted of benches, low tables, bookshelves and Japanese lanterns. A book later appeared based on the project.
I've been aware of Gillick (who currently teaches at Columbia) for years, but I think he's someone I should find out more about. His work draws together an elegantly minimalist didactic look (he shares with Julian Opie an interest in spareness and idealized office environments), great colour combinations, Marxisant titles like "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" or "The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune", and "fictional yet non-narrative essays" -- something which brings to mind other "investigative" artists like Jeremy Deller, Rainer Ganahl, Luke Fowler or Annika Eriksson. I think they share something with designer James Goggin and his "ostentatiously non-demonstrative", socially-engaged, playfully didactic design.
I'm just pulling names out of a hat here, but you get the point: as a tourist, all I need is to find one interesting figure, and the whole big top of the art world is justified. Let the money, the logistics and the hype look after themselves. Sure, following my arguments the other day some of you will say "Money, logistics and hype are the whole context of the art world, its field. They change the meaning of every statement in it." That may be true, but to say that the art world was just money speaking money would be gross reductionism. The saving slippage lies in art's non-instrumentality, its eccentricity -- as Eno says, it's "everything we don't need to do".