The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

April 4, 2012

“Is it the art or is it the hype?” I’ve been asked this question so many times it makes me ill. It always comes from those who don’t look at art and are trying to explain why they don’t buy it. In a skeptical tone they slip me this line on a regular basis. “Yes,” I tell them with a smile, “it’s all a fraud. These contemporary art stars are all phonies and fakes, it’s the fancy galleries promoting this stuff and you’re the smart one who figured it all out.” But what I’m thinking is, “Cretin, you don’t understand a damn thing about art.” But now even most art believers have to admit that parts of today’s art scene have indeed gone too far. Yet when I spelled it out for the world in my satire of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair last December, I was attacked by many insecure pundits, advisers and dealers who felt threatened by the words. But forgetting the whiners, it’s what everyone was and is still talking about. Just last Sunday 60 Minutes ran a Morley Safer-hosted exposé bashing the fair, highlighting the hype in order to suggest that contemporary art is no more than a marketing circus. We can’t really blame old Morley Safer—he’s just another blowhard—but I was shocked to see one respected dealer, Tim Blum of Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, play right into Mr. Safer’s canard. “We’re from Hollywood, this is theater, only theater,” he said when asked about art prices. “It’s the wild west … competition is vicious … when the question of value comes up we drop the subject.” Mr. Blum misspoke—and that’s regrettable because, let’s face it, when the hype booms louder than the art, the art world invites the philistines right to its gates.

 

What bothers art world outsiders is the reality that everything exists within a context, and if they don’t understand the context, they jump to dismiss what they don’t understand. But what’s the matter with some hype? Most of today’s movie stars didn’t make it on their talent alone; they got the right role at the right time, then parlayed the hype. Would Julia Roberts have become a superstar without her breakthrough role in Pretty Woman? What about Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Liz Taylor in National Velvet? So why shouldn’t a visual artist benefit similarly by a breakthrough show, one “produced” by a smart dealer or curator in the right place at the right time? A film can be advertised and promoted; why not an artist and an exhibition? Fine art is often held to an unrealistic standard, a mistaken belief that there is such a thing as “pure” art that exists outside the context in which it’s created and exhibited. Great art is expected to somehow get by without great salesmanship, and great staging.

 

The artist Dan Colen is the perfect example of someone who has plenty of hype. He’s been created by his dealers at the massive Gagosian gallery, right? Might he just be the product of the “fashion of the moment” effect, the W magazine/Interview magazine scene, a leader of the pack of pretty boys who make big prices at auction? This may seem to be the case to some, but the truth is that he was always a good artist. I’ve followed his work for over eight years, long before he joined Gagosian. Even back when he was showing with the smaller gallery Peres Projects, it was clear to me that he was the standout talent of his peer group. His decision to show with Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world, may, in fact, have been a mistake: though he’s had many shows and sold a lot of work in the short term, his market may experience a severe hangover if there is too much work and the market feels saturated. He’s a real talent, though, and so he’ll probably weather the storm of overmarketing and overproduction. The hype that comes from mass marketing an artist is a double-edged sword: it’s a money-making short-term strategy, but it can kill the artist’s career if the work isn’t truly exceptional.

 

The other night I had the pleasure of discussing this topic with one of the top painters in the world, an American artist in his early 70s who has moved far beyond any hype that helped him along the way. I asked him why he has been so loyal to the gallery he’s been with for 20 years. He doesn’t need a gallery—he makes only 12 paintings a year and could sell them all easily even if he hung them in an IKEA for the weekend. By way of answering, he told me, frankly, that most artists are fearful of change. “Do you mean to tell me that at your age you still need to be handled and managed as if you were a child?” I asked. He smiled and said, “I just want to go to my studio and paint, I don’t want to be bothered with the rest of it.” Now, some artists are proactive; they have taken the marketing of their art into their own hands. Damien Hirst shows what he wants, where he wants and, whether you like it or not, he makes his own hype, with Bono and Jagger and sundry movie stars in tow. But most artists don’t play hardball. They stick with their dealers in the old-fashioned way, because they are conservative, or lazy or simply satisfied. I’m sure this will evolve as time goes on. Recently we have seen more artists changing galleries than ever before, though most of them end up joining the rosters of the few mega galleries. That is where they feel safe and secure.

 

Is switching to a mega gallery a sure-fire recipe for market success? Absolutely not. It can be a good career move—the vast majority of successful midcareer artists have stuck with their original galleries, but then again most of them have stagnated, in part because their new work, shown in the same old gallery, gets tiring after a while. But it can also result in overmarketing because the temptation to overproduce, using the generous production budget available, is too strong, so global demand gets oversupplied. The work ends up looking overhyped and oversold­—the hangover effect we see in the careers of so many artists who have bounced around several galleries.

 

Ultimately, the question of whether an artist’s success is the result of great work or great hype reminds me of the time many years ago when I attended a lecture by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the Q&A, trying to sound clever, I asked, “You often speak of the Platonic versus the Aristotelian views of the universe—are these two not contradictory?” Borges answered, “No, no, no, you do not understand—they are not contradictory, they are complementary!” The audience was hushed, a communal gasp was heard as if great words of wisdom had been spoken, but the real message was simple: the two views were necessary to complete the whole.

 

This is true for art and its context—they are complementary, not contradictory. Those who dismiss contemporary art as an overmarketed Ponzi scheme have missed this truth. Warhol and Dali were masters of hype, and that didn’t make their art less meaningful; nor was it the sole reason for their art’s success. Nothing is separable from its context, not even this article, but when the hype overshadows the art, it’s no surprise the skeptics have a field day.

(CBS News) Two decades after Morley Safer took a critical look at contemporary art in his 60 Minutes story "Yes...But is it Art?" he has found the definitive answer to his snide question: Does it matter what it is if it appreciates in value by a thousand-fold? Safer learns this at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami's premier contemporary art fair, where he reports on the boom in contemporary art, a market that's defying the world economic slump and outperformed stocks. Safer's story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, April 1 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

 

Jeffrey Deitch, a former dealer and now the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has a long memory and can't resist ribbing Safer. "In the art world, we remember very well that famous program that you did 20 years ago...it was almost a send-up of the contemporary art market," he tells Safer. One of the objects of Safer's critical eye back then was a Jeff Koons installation called "Equilibrium," consisting of three basketballs suspended in an aquarium. Koons' works have greatly appreciated. "I think [at] the time we were talking Jeff Koons was very well sold for $250,000," says Deitch. "As you know now, Jeff Koons' works have gone for $25 million or more."

 

Last year, sales of contemporary art reached $5.5 billion, just for auctioned works. Billions more probably changed hands at regularly held shows like Art Basel Miami Beach. The contemporary art market has outperformed the Standard & Poor's list of 500 common stocks since 2003.

 

60 Minutes cameras capture the rich buyers and the art works on sale at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most important art fairs held in what is now considered an art capital of the world. Some of the works might pose a quandary for the uninitiated. Among the paintings and sculptures are works incorporating bathroom fixtures and extension cords, works that make noises, works incorporating video. The pieces have no price tags; their worth is negotiable.

 

Foreign money is one factor driving the market. Gallery owner Larry Gagosian says, "I think the wealth in Russia, the Middle East, Asia has changed [the market]...dramatically." Art fairs are now the place to be for people like Gagosian. "The art fair has become a huge part of our business," he tells Safer.

 

Anything can happen in a market comprised of original, one-of-a kind merchandise and billionaires willing to bet monumental sums of money on them. Gallery owner Tim Blum says, "It's the Wild West. This is not a normal retail business. It's an unregulated, utterly bizarre place to conduct business." What sustains it against the odds? "It's inexplicable...almost unexplainable...When we bring it up...begin to talk about it, we sort of drop the subject," says Blum. "Because it almost feels like you should just let it... keep rolling."

 

 

While the majority of garage sale treasures include old family photos, broken VCR's and stained baby clothes, don't give up hope! If you keep scouring you may just find yourself a bona fide sketch by none other than Andy Warhol.

Andy Fields, a businessman from Tiverton, England bought five sketches for a mere $5 at a Las Vegas garage sale. One of them was a depiction of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee, who is famous for the hits "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" and "Lover Come Back To Me". According to the BBC, Fields purchased the sketches from a man who claimed they belonged to his aunt who used to watch over Warhol as a child. Fields didn't think much of it, being surrounded by implausible claims in Las Vegas, but later found Warhol's signature on the back when he reframed the picture.

The early sketch shows Warhol's style, pre-Pop Art, and could have been made when the precocious artist was only 10 or 11 years old. In the IBTIMES video above, Fields says, "I found out it did lead to about 1939 or possibly 1940, when Andy Warhol was in bed with cholera, that I realized to the full extent what we were sitting on." A valuer told Fields the work could fetch just over $2 million, but Fields says he does not want to sell just yet.

This story emerged only days after another lucky shopper found a Picasso print for $14 in a thrift store. So we recommend you keep filtering through all those old workout VHS tapes and fading paperbacks, because you may just find yourself a masterpiece.

Check out the full article with a slideshow of other famous finds below:

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesDamien Hirst’s ‘The Kingdom’, featuring a tiger shark in formaldehyde, on display at Sotheby’s in London in 2008.

LONDON — Don’t know much about art, but you know what you like? Well, what do you think of Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull?

The 46-year-old Briton is reputedly the country’s richest artist after making a fortune of around $300 million since breaking into the international art scene in the early 1990s as the most prominent of the Young British Artists movement.

His erstwhile patron, Charles Saatchi, has called him a genius and placed him up there with the Americans Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd as one of a handful of contemporary artists whose reputations will endure.

But as London’s Tate Modern gallery prepares to launch the artist’s first British retrospective next week to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games, one critic has ruffled art world feathers by advising investors in Mr. Hirst’s work to get out while they can.

“His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week,” Julian Spalding wrote in Britain’s The Independent. “But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”

He said collectors such as Steve Cohen, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaire who was said to have paid $12 million for Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” in 2005, could end up with something no more valuable than a shark in a tank.

“I’ve coined the term Con Art,” said Mr. Spalding, “short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.” He is so incensed that he’s written a book on the subject — “Con Art — Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can” — to be published this weekend.

Hirst’s fans naturally demur. “Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion,” according to the Tate Modern’s blurb, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the thought that art should be seen and not heard.

And no one would begrudge Mr. Hirst his wealth. In an interview to be broadcast next week by Channel 4 television, Mr. Hirst recalls growing up poor in the northern city of Leeds. “When I was a kid we had so little money I remember looking for money on the street,” he says.

Oliver Basciano, a critic writing for Channel 4 News, castigated Mr. Spalding for conflating art and money. “His first key gripe seems to be that he thinks that Hirst’s work is likely to depreciate in financial value and the Tate needs to offload it quick.

“Now I have no idea whether it will or not — I’m no market monitor — but the idea that a public gallery should be building their collection with an eye to its market worth is beyond troublesome.”

Buyers, in any case, appear undeterred. A doodle of a dead shark that Mr. Hirst rapidly sketched as a tip for a cab driver fetched the equivalent of $7,500 at auction in London this week, 13 times the pre-auction estimate.

Perhaps I should declare a personal interest. Mr. Hirst gave a similar shark doodle to my son, Joe, a struggling painter and Hirst admirer who once met the maestro at a private view. Keep it safe, Joe.

Corporate buyers are looking to complete their space in an interesting way. They also select paintings, photography and sculptures for their employees’ enjoyment and to project a certain image. Some view their art as an extension of their corporate work life. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a plan that reflects what a client wants to say about itself.

I’ve been an art adviser to corporations, law firms, developers, trade associations and other organizations for 36 years. Much of my work comes from referrals. I’m often contacted by a managing partner of a law firm or a C.E.O. or firm administrator. If, after interviewing me, a group goes ahead with the project, it forms an art committee to work with me.

Every project is different, depending on the client’s goals. One company wanted to emphasize that it’s a global organization. I suggested a series of antique textiles — tapestries, paisley shawls, 18th-century English bed coverings, Indian embroideries, batiks, costumes and ethnographic artwork — from locations around the globe where the company has offices. We were surprised to learn that one of the shawls was a rare textile that experts believed had been lost. The client became so involved in the company’s collection that he was asked to join the board of the Textile Museum in Washington.

I’ve found that much exciting work today involves merging art and technology. Artists are using computer-generated images, LED lighting, video and other technology, and it’s attracting interest from companies.

Some organizations aren’t sure what they want when we start together. At a law firm I worked with, I learned that many partners had engineering backgrounds. I suggested devoting a portion of the collection to works of art in glass, either blown or cast in molds. I thought the glass-making process would interest people with that type of background.

People have different tastes, so the committees I work with often make trade-offs. When I propose artwork, I present electronic images from the artists or galleries, for example. If two or three people agree and a fourth is reluctant, that person might give in and say that she’ll get what she likes another time. A committee that’s too large doesn’t work well together, and one outspoken member can make the process uncomfortable for the others.

Organizations learn that selecting art is a process. Many groups that are compiling a collection buy artwork over time, as they can afford it. We come up with a master plan according to the budget. Currently, I’m curating a series of rotating exhibits that change four times a year. The organization’s goal is to encourage local artists, and the work of one or two artists is included at a time.

Once art is installed, I often give clients and their employees a tour of their acquisitions. I discuss the art’s context, including the period when it was made, and tell them about the artist. I go over this with the art committee when the art is selected, but everyone else gets to hear this introduction. Employees who understand why the art was selected are more likely to enjoy it.

Organizations that buy art are investing in themselves — and in more than a monetary sense. Art speaks to culture, self-expression and creativity. Corporations appreciate the reasons for art in the workplace more than they did when I started my company, and developers and architects know to consider art at the beginning of a project so it can be visually integrated into the setting.

WHEN organizations buy artwork, they are supporting the arts. That can mean buying from local artists, but it extends beyond that. Art touches lives. One client, a developer, had a perfect opportunity to do this. His Terrell Place project, formerly a department store, was a site of protest against racial segregation in the 1950s.We decided to reflect this event in the building and asked Elizabeth Catlett, a distinguished black artist, to create three large bronze sculptures for the lobby. To accompany them, we chose murals that illustrate the concepts of liberty and equality.

People who view the art and know the building’s history have told me that the artwork has brought them to tears.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.