Jerry Saltz has written another memorable jeremiad about the ART WORLD (which has to be written in all caps these days given its out of proportion status) in the Village Voice this week. Seeing Dollar Signs: Is the art market making us stupid? Or are we making it stupid?, offers a point of view that speaks for me and many other artist day laborers who are busy working away in their studios and operating well below the radar screen. The full article is worth a read, but here is a colorful passage to give you a taste:
The market is now so pervasive that it is simply a condition—as much a part of the art world as galleries and museums. Even if you’re not making money—as is the case with most of us—that’s your relationship to the market. To say you won’t participate in the market is like saying you refuse to breathe the air because it’s polluted.
The current market feeds the bullshit machine, provides cover for a lot of vacuous behavior, revs us up while wearing us down, breeds complacency, and is so invasive that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status, and money in their studios. Yet, it also allows more artists to make more money without having to work full-time soul-crushing jobs and provides most of us with what Mel Brooks called “our phony-baloney jobs.” Last December, more than 400 New York art dealers representing more than 5,000 artists paid for booths in one art fair or another in Miami to participate in this market. Everyone is trying the best they can. For critics to demonize the entire art world, then, as somehow unethical and crass seems self-righteous, cynical, and hypocritical.
Much confusion stems from there being no new, cogent Theory of the Market, no philosophy that addresses the ways in which the ongoing feeding frenzy is affecting the production, presentation, and reception of art. Nothing we say about the market adds up, partly because “the market” isn’t really an autonomous subject. It’s a diversionary tactic—essentially, a blend of economics, history, psychology, stagecraft, and lifestyle; an unregulated field of commerce governed by desire, luck, stupidity, cupidity, personal connections, connoisseurship, intelligence, insecurity, and whatever.
Makes one think, this blog – thanks for posting it!
The word ‘culture’ could be substituted for the word ‘market’ and some of the definitions supplied for ‘market’ seem to apply also. But, am I being too simplistic here?
Yes, they do. There are similarities in Saltz’ description of the “market” that could be applied to “culture.” But that latter term has such a panoply of meanings and slots into which we can engage, I wouldn’t endorse a wholesale substitution.