Ed Winkleman has a good post summarizing a recent debate on ethical standards in the art market vs. ethical standards in the stock market (if the two can be rightly compared). In it he mentions a comment made by the artist Chuck Close that happens to point to an issue touched upon in the Dave Hickey quote in my Bling Bling post from yesterday, which I hope to circle back around to and write more about when I get a chance, regarding the cultural and intellectual value of art.

Close, speaking next, attempted to redirect the debate by arguing that the value of art is not determined by money at all (a point that earned him a ripple of applause) and that the ethics of its marketing were therefore somewhat moot. Even if its financial value can be manipulated, he argued, its long-term significance comes from artists rather than buyers and sellers. {Read more…}

Last Sunday I read Dave Hickey’s cutting essay, Quality, in the February issue of Art in America and I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now. In three days my mind has been churning and I have at least a half dozen different essay topics that I’ll never get to writing, though maybe I can milk it for a few posts. Anyway, in the essay, Hickey tackles the issue of art as luxury product, i.e. art as laundry detergent for ponzied money or perfume to cover the smell of a stinky assholes, and the resulting inability of critics, galleryists, collectors, and artists to recognize/articulate quality in art and the result this has on the market valuation of pieces of art. Opening with a few slaps in the face, he has this to say,

During art’s tenure as a luxury product, some small problems arose, however. First, there was the vestigial infrastructure of art enthusiasts who believed that some works of art are better than others–who imagined that art has cultural and intellectual value that transcends its luxury status. These ex-arbiters of quality haven’t arbitrated for a very long time, of course, but we are only now facing the cold consequences of their acquiescence. This infrastructure once compensated for art’s single deficit as a luxury product: the fact that, unlike precious stones and rare metals, works of art have no intrinsic value. All their value is extrinsic. It is invested from without and over a period of time. The noisy, ongoing quarrel about “quality” that raged between collectors, critics, journalists, activists, publishers, dealers, curators and scholars once generated a fairly stable consensus of relative value among players on the field. The economic function of this defunct colloquy was to sustain objects in public notice during moments of short money or falls from fashion.

An interesting observation, though I would point out that the problem of intrinsic value vs. extrinsic value as framed here in terms of economics is not unique to art. With the exception of coins whose intrinsic value is based on the precious metals used to fashion the coins, all products, luxury or otherwise, have no intrinsic value. Their value is determined by the buyer’s perception and the price they are willing to pay. Blah blah blah.

It seems what we have here is a classic bubble or scam, not in the sense of anything illegal, though I’m sure there was lots of that going on too, but that a bunch of people were convinced to overpay for something. Yeah artists! If they were lucky enough to get a nice piece. Boo greedy gallerists if you didn’t give the artists a fair cut! Now the bubble has burst and we have a crisis of confidence where people realized that they overpaid and nobody knows what to do about it. But hey this is just another piece of W’s legacy!

But this is old news and not so interesting to me. I’m more interested in what he has to say about QUALITY, because if you spend any time around artists, especially in NYC, there is one thing you’re bound to here and that is Chelsea is full of BAD art, with the exception of theirs and their friends of course. And this is what he has to say on this front, which I’m sure could spark a good discussion, or a few more posts at least,

…apply this formula: quality is quantity. The quality of an art object is directly proportional to the quantity of something tat it gives to someone who belongs to some constituency of interest. Critics, scholars, collectors, dealers, curators and decorators expect different things in different measures. The works of art that deliver the most stuff to the most people and serve the most complex constituencies for the longest time are the very best ones. Period.

Now THAT’S a good provokative statement and worth some argument, especially among artists, unless of course we’re all commited post-structuralists!

Lin Tianmiao / Mothers!!! / Long March Space in Beijing, China

I know yesterday I said I was on vacation and taking a break etc…But today there is a good article in the NYTimes written by Holland Cotter about Chinese women artists

Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.

Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long. [Read more...]

Sheetal Ghattani /Untitled / Watercolour on paper / 36 x 36 inches / Bodhi Art

What sets Gattani’s works apart are her philosophy and attitude towards painting. Her manipulation of the medium, watercolour on paper is to mediate through colours without them suggesting any referential reality. Encountering her abstractions leaves one puzzled since they are large areas of colour, which defy definition in terms of specificity, for instance, red or mauve. In the delicacy of soft textures lie the subtexts in her canvases, which gradually settle upon one’s sensibility and one begins reading into them, forms that bring forth the character of her otherwise placid works. Her abstractions do not beckon but gently whisper, and once that whisper becomes audible it translates into a communion, wherein one is compelled to respond. In evoking these gentle persuasive responses from the viewer lies the success of her abstract compositions. Sheetal’s process of creation largely conditions the nature and character of her works. She predominantly employs black paper on which she brushes layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools. With her contemplative wide stroked gestures, Sheetal builds up layers of paint that in the end leave an impression of her self. And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, who says, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality — reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning. Only that pure present moment exists. So painting is a `time-manifested’ process and I become only a means.”

A silent journey through her most recent show titled Silent Soliquyoy, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2007) may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar.’ Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’. This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

www.bodhiart.in

Mary Heilmann / Weave / 1992 / Oil on canvas / 40 1/8 x 30 inches / Spanierman Modern

Don Christensen / Eastbound / 2008 / Oil-based enamel on wood / 31 x 22 inches / Spanierman Modern

Chris Martin / Crystal / 2007 / Oil and spray paint on canvas / 31 x 26 inches / Spanierman Modern

Present Tense: A group exhibition curated by Don Christensen with Mary Heilmann
Spanierman Modern
June 12 – August 2, 2008

The works were selected on the basis of their ability to produce instant and visceral responses in the viewer, without the necessity of contextualization.  The artists included share a preoccupation with eccentric structures and tend toward the use of unexpected materials and techniques.  Working in the abstract formalist tradition, they seek new vocabulary and materials, redefining their boundaries, even to the degree of leaving the confines of the canvas altogether. Diverse in the methods by which they were created, the works in Present Tense reveal the boundless potential now associated with abstraction and demand our immediate engagement with the objects before us.