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.

March 14, 2012

By Adam Lindemann

I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things, as they did with Maurizio Cattelan’s recent Guggenheim retrospective.

 

The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was...

Read more at: adamlindemann.com

"As you plunge into Alarma! BOYFRIENDS, the Norwegian artist/author/polemicist Bjarne Melgaard’s fantasy novella of gore, sex, death and dismemberment, you will likely purse your lips in disgust, but, at the same time, catch yourself laughing inside: laughing at the insanity and the perverse pleasure of it all. When finished with the book, you’ll finally be able to put it down, at which point you’ll glance around to make sure no one’s looking, then shove the dirty little volume under a pile of legitimate literature. Or perhaps you’ll dump it where it belongs, in the trash. It’s worse than porn; it’s the kind of thing no one should catch you thoroughly enjoying."

"Put Me in the Zoo is a famous children’s book by Robert Lopshire, originally released in 1960 on Dr. Seuss’s publishing imprint. It tells the story of a spotted leopard who can change his spots and their colors, and can even juggle them. He fails to convince two children that he is special enough to be in the zoo, and in the end they tell him where he belongs, and the story ends happily.

Little could Mr. Lopshire have known that his story would one day explain Damien Hirst’s spot paintings to a tee. In fact it could be surmised that Mr. Hirst, below referred to as $pot, was directly inspired by this story."

The End of the Art World in 2012

By Adam Lindemann

January 11, 2012

Let’s humor the doomsday prophets: what if the art world ends in 2012?

The web has been rife with Mayan predictions of a 2012 doomsday on Dec. 21. This date was discovered on a stele carving at a little known archaeological site in Tabasco, Mexico, and it points to the day that the gods of the underworld will rise up to destroy the world as we know it. These dire predictions have already been discredited by several Mayan scholars, but people love to believe in false prophecies, and the apocalyptic story has garnered interest from all sorts of quacks, even prompting the scientists on NASA’s website to comment: “There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.”

Read the Press for “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!”

December 6, 2011

Read the waterfall of press for my article: “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!” Read the good, the bad, and the indifferent from The New York, Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The New York Observer, W Magazine, Departures, The Spectator, Artinfo.com, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and Le Quotidien de l’Art.

Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!

I’m not going to Art Basel Miami Beach this year. I’m through with it, basta. It’s become a bit embarrassing, in fact, because why should I be seen rubbing elbows with all those phonies and scenesters, people who don’t even pretend they are remotely interested in art?

And so, here it is, in print, just so no one has to ask me again.

November 16, 2011

Last week’s outrageous auction results have left dealers and savvy collectors giddy, puzzled and mentally exhausted. A number of works soared to stupefying heights, defying the gravity of the euro crisis, the Middle East madness and the unexpected softening of gold prices. How and why, at times like these, can art values continue to peak, and Sotheby’s proudly report that it had the third-highest Contemporary sale results in its entire history?

 

Spending some quality rehash time with sophisticated dealers and collectors revealed that all is not as hunky dory as it appears, and that the market has bifurcated into two distinct price ranges: the items that sell for $4 million and below, and the stuff that brings out the Monopoly money.

 

Let’s start with the Monopoly money art. What is it? It’s the art that sells for prices that no one can imagine or understand, like two large abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, one that made $21 million at Sotheby’s last Wednesday and another that capped out at the same sale at $18 million. Only a year ago a similar and perhaps better one fetched $10 million at auction, a price that seemed awfully high at the time, so how can it be that a 79-year-old artist’s work has doubled in a year of financial crisis? What makes these results even more strange is the rumor that these pictures had been on the market for a while, with no buyers anywhere near these levels. But let’s not forget the early and important black and white photorealist Richter painting that didn’t find any takers in the sale at Christie’s last Tuesday night. The photorealist paintings are the more significant and historic works from Mr. Richter’s oeuvre, and yet the historically “important” art found no buyer while the pretty, colorful abstractions sold for double their presale estimates.

 

Then there was the unusual case of the four rare and handsome Clyfford Stills sold by the artist’s estate to raise money for the Still museum in Denver, Colo. They all sold unbelievably well, but one of them made an outrageous $61 million that night, a number that astounded even the Sotheby’s experts; you could read it on their wide-eyed faces (see them on my website, www.adamlindemann.com). Only two or three years ago, Bob Mnuchin of L+M gallery offered me a similar large Still painting for $20-some million and I thought he was daft, but after these results, am I now supposed to believe that was a bargain?

 

Usually when a group of works by a single artist comes up for sale, you can expect to see some casualties, but in the cases of the Richters and the Stills, the auction house invested in the hype of promotion and marketing, and managed to create a feeding frenzy on the night of the sale.

 

During the Sotheby’s sale hundreds from the art handlers’ union protested raucously outside in Occupy Wall Street style, making the 1 percent (we rich people) feel really weird about the whole art-selling spectacle. But $20 million and $60 million prices are a phenomenon that can spark only among the 1 percent of the 1 percent—those who have seemingly infinite money to spend, and who seem to want to spend it mainly at auction, paying double what they would pay for the same artwork in a gallery. The “real” art market that transacts underneath these inflated, theatrical prices is often struggling and slow, and though things are still moving these days, there’s difficulty, and bargaining, and plenty of teeth grinding.

 

Drop down in price from the crazy-money pictures, and you’ll quickly find that most evening sale lots fall in the $3 million to $5 million range, and though a few outperform, for the most part works sell at the low end of their presale estimates. Far too often the “better,” “smarter” and more historical pieces are the ones that tend to underperform, while the flashy and commercial stuff finds the less sophisticated “bourgeois” audience, the people who like only pretty if inconsequential pictures. Take for example a historic though small 1964 Warhol Car Crash that was rumored to be mine. I watched as it was hammered down at its low estimate of $3.8 million while a decorative but otherwise inconsequential 1981 Warhol Mickey Mouse painting from the “Myths” series made a robust $3.5 million, about the same money one of Warhol’s fashiony Brigitte Bardot portraits would have made. The Car Crash is a piece of art history, but auction buyers aren’t the types to hang “Five Deaths” on their wall. For the same money, they’d rather put up a colorful Mickey Mouse or a big bold Warhol Dollar Sign, one of which went for $3.6 million that night.

 

Take the classic Charlie Ray glass sculpture that made a realistic $3.1 million, while Cady Noland’s Oozewald sculpture soared to $6.6 million. I don’t consider myself to be overly stupid, but the facts would seem to point to it: I was offered the same or a similar Noland piece a few months ago for $2.5 million, and I thought it was a joke. Cady Noland has become a hard-to-get, cultish, niche artist. She stopped making work years ago, she doesn’t allow visitors, and she’s supposedly borderline insane, but who cares? That type of result bears no relation to reality—but then again, perhaps auction results don’t have to.

 

A classic and historic 1999 Takashi Murakami DOB in the Strange Forest sculpture barely squeaked by at $2.7 million, but another work from this edition of three made $3.5 million in 2008, which even then was a disappointing result considering its alleged guarantee at a full $5 million: so some good works are definitely still on their way down right now. How about a large and important 1989 Richard Prince monochrome joke painting selling for only $2.7 million, when that same picture in a gallery would be quoted at a minimum of $3.5 million? Confusing as this may seem to the auction market onlookers, the art market has split, with the top, trendy lots selling for funny money, and the “value” pictures struggling in the backwash. You can often see the strong dealers step in to pick up the valuable casualties, but in this time of financial crisis, even the richest of them are nervous about what may or may not happen in the future, and they’ve become more and more conservative, usually dropping out above the $3 million level.

 

Am I predicting a market crash? Absolutely not. I’m a believer in art’s value, but I can’t help but sympathize with the protesters, though my personal protest is a little different: I think outlandish and irrational prices jilt the whole picture out of perspective because I know for a fact that there’s plenty of death and disaster in the market. Contrary to public perception it’s not all peaches and crème. Last week at auction we witnessed “La vie en rose,” a time when in a bad economy a single and beautiful Andreas Gursky photograph made $4.3 million, a world record for a photograph at auction, when for the same money I would have bought Jeff Koons’s iconic 1985 Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, even though it doesn’t decorate a living room wall. But quality doesn’t always sell well in this environment, and sometimes, as in the case of the 1960s photorealist Richter portrait, it doesn’t sell at all.

 

If last week the art market could speak, it would have cackled and then quoted the great Mark Twain by saying, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” But even putting those spectacular Monopoly money trades aside, the proof was still in the pudding; most of the artworks successfully found new homes at reasonable if not modestly bullish prices. So what’s my advice to those intrepid collectors like myself who are committed to moving forward? These days I’ll take my cue from the wisdom of old Ben Franklin, who once said: “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”

 

 

 

 

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