Show Me the Money

Visitors to last summer’s Volta fair, a satellite of Art Basel, may have been taken aback by the appearance of Art Basel signage on the exterior wall of the booth of Zurich’s Grace Li Gallery. No, Art Basel hadn’t swept in to brand its piggybacker. This was a hyperrealistic painting by Chinese artist Zheng Guogu. Inside the booth, Li had other paintings from Guogu’s “Basel” series, all of them—including a full-length portrait of charismatic outgoing fair director Sam Keller—based on publicity photos from Art Basel and selling swiftly at €70,000 to €90,000 apiece. Guogu’s work is concerned with capturing the art world—more specifically the art market—in action.

With prices going through the roof, it seems only natural that artists would take on as their subject art’s essentially arbitrary valuation and the prevalence of commerce in art world discourse. Indeed, the market’s boom echoes everywhere of late. Some curators have felt moved to resist it with exhibitions like “Not for Sale,” which Alanna Heiss put on this year at P.S. 1, and such prominent critics as Jed Perl and Jerry Saltz have penned long articles assessing its effects. Arguably, a whole school of work has emerged that seems to wink at the market, one that British critic Ossian Ward has playfully dubbed Bling Conceptualism—think Terence Koh’s gold-plated installations and Damien Hirst’s $100 million diamond-encrusted skull incorporating precious materials. But what else has the recent art-price inflation meant for artists besides the obvious: a fatter bank account?

Last May, just a week after a Rothko sold for $72.8 million at Sotheby’s, an exhibition in New York attempted to answer that question. “The Price of Everything: Perspectives on the Art Market,” curated by recent graduates of the Whitney Independent Study program, explored young and midcareer artists’ reactions to the market, including Fia Backstrom’s reduction of an issue of ArtForum to its copious ads and Christian Jankowski’s clever 2002 exercise in role reversal: three TV monitors, with one showing a video of the artist’s dealer, Michele Maccarone, playing an elderly shopkeeper, one displaying the artist playing Maccarone and the third airing an avuncular consultant dispensing strategic business advice. Lending historical ballast to these and other recent efforts was Robert Morris’s 1969–73 Money, a series of papers documenting $50,000 that Morris had the Whitney Museum invest in the stock market on his behalf after his exhibition there in 1969.

Although the “Price” show—taking place in midtown, off gallerygoers’ beaten path, and at the tail end of the season—escaped wide attention, it did spark a heated debate on the prominent blog Art World Salon. Numerous posters weighed in on topics ranging from whether the market was a suitable subject for art to whether the creators of these works were really passing judgment on today’s rampant consumer culture.

Of course, the canvases of the past were also influenced by commercial considerations. Portraiture is one obvious example: Few subjects were as attractive in life as they appear on canvas, and artists were paid for their flattery. Less obviously, Gustave Courbet is known to have painted intentionally difficult pictures that would be rejected by the official Salon, counting on press reports of his controversial work to boost his prices. Around the same time, Edouard Manet, who had his own share of Salon rejections, demonstrated the use of art as currency: A collector had purchased a still life of an entire bunch of asparagus from the artist and dropped off a check for what Manet considered an exorbitant amount. When the buyer refused to take a partial refund, Manet simply sent him a picture of a single stalk, now displayed in the Musee d’Orsay.

The 20th century brought a true market provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who shocked the art world by announcing that his readymades—ordinary store-bought objects—could be recommodified as artworks; they have since been acquired at great cost by collectors and museums. Indeed, New York Times critic Holland Cotter remarked in his review of the Whitney “Price” show that Duchamp’s spirit “hovers like a damaged angel” over the exhibition. In Duchamp’s wake came multiple waves of market art. By the 1960s, Yves Klein had collectors scattering gold leaf into the Seine in exchange for “immaterial” (read: essentially nonexistent) artworks, and Ed Kienholz was making watercolors bearing written descriptions of the items he would barter them for, from a set of screwdrivers to a Mercedes. Jumping ahead, the go-go ’80s saw its own brand of consumer-culture critique in the work of artists like Ashley Bickerton, who made a wall-mounted sculpture with a built-in digital ticker that calculates the work’s increasing value.