By Ruth Skilbeck
A lot has changed in the world in the past four years, since the collapse of the global economy. Looking back at the dizzy, and insane, heights of monetary value that were changing hands in 2008, the peak of the art boom, can we predict what may happen in the future next year? That's hard to say and probably rather meaningless, what we can do is reflect. On how art or rather the international contemporary Art World came to reflect our excesses and our fallibility, and also -uncannily- our global economy.
A lot has changed in the world in the past four years, since the collapse of the global economy. Looking back at the dizzy, and insane, heights of monetary value that were changing hands in 2008, the peak of the art boom, can we predict what may happen in the future next year? That's hard to say and probably rather meaningless, what we can do is reflect. On how art or rather the international contemporary Art World came to reflect our excesses and our fallibility, and also -uncannily- our global economy.
Art World Revolution or Bull Market Rampage
By Ruth Skilbeck
By Ruth Skilbeck
14 July 2008
Revolutionary
though this year’s Sydney Biennale undoubtedly is, with its giddy themes of turning
and re-turning, one has to acknowledge with some surprise that the biggest art
stunt turn-around in the contemporary world – China’s intervention into the
global art market and its ongoing repercussions – has been overlooked. This is
strange as this cultural re-revolution is in motion right now practically on
our doorstep – and even creating spectacular spin-offs in far away Britain.
With the world’s highest priced living artist, former bad-boy Young British
Artist, Damien Hirst’s strategic appropriation of the cheeky tactics of Chinese
contemporary art saboteurs busily subverting the power balance of the art
market. ‘Dropping their own works into auction’ is a gambit that has the
middlemen spinning, cutting out the dealers and the auctioneers who
traditionally control the art market. In
symbolic terms of aesthetic shock value, for the economic hierarchy of the art
market this ranks with Duchamp’s reconfiguring of a urinal as a Madonna. In
political symbolism it’s on par with the storming of the Winter Palace by
impoverished workers. With one main qualifying difference: it’s a
cross-cultural phalanx of postmodern ‘brand-name’ artists –the ones who can
afford to seize power – leading the charge.
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| Damien Hirst. The Golden Calf. Photo: Sothebys. |
Damien Hirst's preserved Charolais calf with 18 carat horns sold for 10.3 million sterling; and the self-curated auction of his works in Beautiful in My Mind Forever totalled 62.4 million pounds sterling, on 15 September 2008.
'Postmodern ironies' abound in the spectacle of
the one time artist-exiles of Tiananmen Square: creating a revolutionary
diasporic art movement, a handful achieving untold fame and fortune in the West
– successfully subverting the capitalist auction system to become ‘gloriously’
rich – welcomed back to the free trade
economy of the new China which is now approvingly touted in the Western media
as one of the most exciting centers of contemporary art in the world... Cross
cultural exchange through art-stunts achieved a new twist this week in the
shock announcement in the global media that Damien Hirst is now perfecting the self-referential
art form of Auction Appropriation by creating an entire exhibition, ‘Beautiful
Inside My Head Forever’, specifically for auction at Sotheby’s in London in
September. Andy Warhol who was amongst
the first contemporary artists to use the mass media to deploy the construction
of celebrity as an art form, would no doubt have approved of this tactic, which
draws attention to the increasingly blurred boundaries between economic and
cultural capital by reconfiguring the auction house – the ‘temple’ of art trade
– as gallery. Thus raising the question super-rich art collectors around the
world are invited to ask themselves about the bestowal of the value of art – a
commodity which as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out has no intrinsic
value. In the era of global capital art works are now regularly traded at
auction amongst the world’s most wealthy and powerful – royal families, hedge
fund billionaires, Ukrainian mining magnates, new Russian, Indian and Chinese billionaire for figures reaching
towards the hundreds of millions in US dollars. Last year the Emir of Qatar
bought a Rothko from David Rockefeller for 72 million US dollars through
Sotheby’s in New York. The Qatari’s are amongst Hirst’s collectors, recently paying 9.7 m
(sterling) for his Lullaby Spring pharmaceutical sculpture of painted and cast
pills in a cabinet. (The new Middle Eastern collectors tend to be big on pattern, high colours and abstraction –
spurning figurative nudity).
The elevation of
contemporary art into the new global cultural currency has much to reveal – not
only about the transmission of economic capital around the globe but also about
the changing social formation of aesthetic and cultural values. Taking a
strategic lead from contemporary Chinese artists, the symbolic cultural meaning
of Damien Hirst’s intervention is revealed in the centre piece of his forthcoming
auction exhibition: The Golden Calf. A bull-calf suspended
in formaldehyde, with gilded hooves, horns and a golden halo. This
evokes comparison with the transformation of art – and/or artist – to cult
image, idolatry and ‘false god’. The Golden Calf, which visually appropriates
Poussin’s painting, Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-34) also refers to an Old Testament story. Whilst
Moses spent 40 days and nights on Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments the
Israelites in his absence melted down their ear rings to construct a golden
calf to worship – thus breaking the 2nd commandment against
idolatry: the making of images (similitudes). Hirst’s work takes a reflexive
double-dig at postmodernist appropriation and the ‘pagan celebration’ of
contemporary art. The self-referential in-joke being that the irony of The
Golden Calf performatively and blatantly signifies itself; signifies itself;
signifies its... This is being seriously discussed as his most important work
to date (with an estimate of 8m -12m
sterling). To others, it may seem like bullshitting on a grand scale. And indeed
such stories have an air of unreality here in Australia where culture is
traditionally under-valued and the vast majority of artists remain below the
poverty line. Unlike in China – or the UK – where the successful artists can
afford to live in mansions and drive around in latest model jaguars.
Art works
exchanging hands for the amount it would take to save the victims of the
Burmese earthquake, or relieve the debt of a third world country may seem like
obscene decadence of the very rich.
What is
uncontestable is that Contemporary Art – which speaks a visual language of
cultural capital that all people can read and interpret in their own ways –
including as a vehicle for economic capital – is becoming the new currency in
the global cultural economy of which Australia is a part. As the search for
meaning and connection intensifies in an increasingly globalised and
environmentally unstable world we may expect to be reading a lot more about –
and into – the economic, cultural, and cross-cultural meaning and valuation of
art, in Australia and around the world. Including its entertainment value as
knowing spectacle for the new cross-cultural global high society served up by
artist-showmen such as the ironic maestro of the Golden Calf. Roll over
Duchamp?
Skilbeck, Ruth (2008) ‘Global Art Market Report’. Australian Art Collector. Issue 46. 106-107.
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