Contemporary Art World -101

I’ve always blamed the excesses of the contemporary art market on Warhol.  Warhol’s art came out of Duchamp, yes. ( Marcel Duchamp was the guy who exhibited a urinal and said it was art.)  The grand idea is that art is anything that an artist says is art.  Great.   But Warhol, being a product of his time, added a devious twist.  The “anything” he chose to be art, was branded commercial images from the media. As you probably don’t recall being too young, it was the proliferation of homogenized media in the 60’s that fed the cult of celebrity and the growth of a consumerist society.  Warhol was a child of the 60’s in that all he really cared about was buying stuff and being famous. So, of course, his art reflected the time.   He was a self-manufactured brand and subject of his art was how branding created a need for a consumer product or celebrity. So why was Warhol, who recycled the photographic images of our consumer/celebrity culture, so popular? The answer is what I call the Warhol paradox.  If you purchase (consume) a Warhol, you are absolved of being a clueless manipulated consumer, because you’re already aware of being manipulated by the Warhol brand.  That’s ironic and cool, and so, therefore, are you.

And thus began the intricate dance between contemporary art and consumerism that has driven great chunks of the art market till everything crashed in October. The art world was flush with an endless supply of stupid money. Newly minted millionaires bought incredibly expensive, excessive, meticulously produced sculptures by artists such as Koons and Murakami and Hirst, each object more brittle and superficial than the last. Luxury brands ruled and the art market was just a more exclusive, more fun and much more expensive brand in the world’s luxury market.  But buying art had two other benefits going for it.  It was cooler to consume art than handbags, because of that old Warholian paradox. If you consume art about consumption, you can be a shopaholic and at the same time be cool enough to know it. But number two, and much more important, is that some idiot got the idea that contemporary art was a new asset class.!!!  The stupid money was not content to invest in CDOs and other junk.  They added contemporary art into their list of toxic assets.

Now luxury branded consumerism is out, outrageous excess is out and even expensive is out.  If contemporary art reflects it’s time and our times are no longer about consumption,  what will be the cultural ethos that contemporary art reflects in the next decade or so?  We’ve been through an anti consumerist phase before, in the 70’s also a time of recession, crummy art markets, and crummy stock markets.  This is when art was either unassuming  and minimal ie Tuttle, LeWitt or huge and minimal, ie. Serra and Tony Smith.   Sol LeWitt sold – not art – but instructions for art – Walter de Maria showed a room of dirt.  An anti-object, anti-consumer, process-oriented stance was typical of the time.  If art is not an object but just an idea, what is there to buy?  But market forces eventually  ruled and all of the conceptualists wound up making objects for sale.

What kind of art will this recession bring? Dense small “authentic” abstraction, more narrative drawing? (paper is cheap), minimal understated Tuttlesque objects?  We’re  definitely back to the handmade, unproduced and manufactured.  And what subject matter  will obsess this next generation  – those who don’t expect an automatic career because they a Columbia MFA?  It will be very interesting to see what moves them once the market is no longer a factor.  I can’t wait.