In today's art world, a great deal has to do with money. Aesthetic and intellectual considerations invariably bow to financial ones. More people could quote the price of a recently sold van Gogh than could pick the painting out of a lineup. Museums cede space for gift shops and restaurants, even as they deaccession prize works in order to raise money to purchase examples of the latest grossly inflated fad. Galleries proliferate, clustering together like departments in Macy's, each with the requisite price list readily available, as in any retail environment. The auction houses, once places of last resort in which to dispose of estates, have become the arenas in which to fetch the best prices (for a nominal ten percent fee).
Groping for profit, collectors buy on credit (sometimes offered by the very institutions that are selling the artworks). They buy en masse, then bid up prices in order to establish higher levels for future sales. Everyone, from the collector of David Hockney Xerox prints to the dealer, megacollector, museum curator, and auctioneer, is a broker or a speculator of one sort or another - and the work of art itself is mere currency. It's a bull market for art, a time of art as investment.
Commodification
In terms of illustrating the scope and depth of the everyday business of art, an art trade fair surpasses even an auction house. With every work carrying a price tag (in effect if not in actuality) and sales personnel manning every room, these extravaganzas will lay to rest any doubts as to the essential confluence of the contemporary art world and money. In fact, there is no better manifestation of the so-called Commodification of modern art.
An example of this is the early-summer Mecca of the art world - the International Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland. The six-day fair brings together under one roof nearly four hundred twentieth-century-art galleries, more than the total number of such outfits in New York City. Its overwhelming scale reflects the fact that Basel's is the most prestigious of the fine-art trade shows that have been established worldwide over the past two decades, from Chicago, Madrid, Cologne, and Paris, to Los Angeles, London, and Milan.
Making Deals
Works are available by practically every major figure in twentieth-century art, but the talk is not about the work, as such. People come not for delectation, but to make deals. If anything is debated, it is the tenor or market activity. The "results" this year indicated that buying was sluggish over the $70,000 mark, a lapse attributed to the mixed results at recent auctions in New York. Rather than seek to define the next fledgling neostylistic trend, the fair's special exhibition, Art of the 80s from the Marx Collection, Berlin, appropriately - and ironically - offered a concise synopsis of some of the art world's recent casualties. The colossal canvases by Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Keith haring and others not only exemplified the penchant for overblown paintings during the past decade; they also served as a reminder of how quickly even the most fashionable fall from grace.
As evidence of the inflationary power of controversy, and the extent to which collectors will ignore content in pursuit
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