Courtesy Grace Li Gallery

Zheng Guogu's "Basel (courtyard)" (2007), a realistic painting of a market hotbed

Mark Rothko Jennifer Dalton Ashley Bickerton Yves Klein Gustave Courbet Andreas Slominski Pablo Helguera Robert Morris

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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—thinkDamien Hirst’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.

Los Angeles–based artist Karl Haendel attached a similar counter to a piece of his featured in “Price,” but his goes in the opposite direction. Two years ago, around the time Haendel, 32, completed the work in the show—a large realistic graphite drawing of a Cadillac SUV—he began to notice that many of his peers were pulling in sums in the mid six figures, while his own output remained modestly valued. As a conceptual gambit, he decided to tag his drawing at precisely the price of the truck itself, as listed in the Kelley Blue Book, and then let the two depreciate in tandem. The SUV’s value when new was $56,055, which became the work’s title. At first, the high initial price kept collectors from biting. But after Haendel’s show last year at LaMoca, the slowly declining figure no longer looked quite so outlandish. In the end, his dealer, L.A.’s Anna Helwing, sold the drawing to Alberto Mugrabi for $50,000.

Other artists have taken swipes at the secondary market by co-opting the auction process. In his 2002 conceptual piece Invite Yourself, Christoph Buchel went on eBay to auction off his participation in that year’s edition of the Frankfurt festival Manifesta. The winning bidder, at $15,000, was New York–based artist Sal Randolph, who used the opportunity to create Free Manifesta, a space where any artist could exhibit work—a kind of show within a show.

But the brashest such artwork must be that of German conceptual artist Andreas Slominski, who, at a Sotheby’s benefit sale in Hamburg in November 2004, had the evening’s auctioneer, Philipp, Duke of Wurttemberg, put on the block as the final lot the very gavel he had used to conduct the sale. Although the sterling-silver hammer eventually brought €4,400 from the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (where it is currently displayed under a large glass bell jar), for Slominski, his true contribution to the benefit auction was not monetary but metonymic: the highly Duchampian gesture of deeming the sale itself to have been an artwork. He had previously pulled the same stunt in London, where the lot came midway through the sale, forcing the resourceful auctioneer to hammer down the remaining items with one of her shoes.

Art-fair art has become another subgenre. As ArtForum’s Jack Bankowsky wrote a few years ago, artists, under pressure to produce enough new work for all the fairs, have begun to use these venues as sites for special projects. One example was a video that Ryan Gander made for Amsterdam dealer Annet Gelink’s Art Statements booth at Basel in 2005: While a screen shows a car in a snowy field, a didactic child’s voice-over gives an encyclopedia-entry explanation of what an art fair is.

According to Serpentine Gallery curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, some of the most incisive work about the market is being made in new market centers, especially China. “Twenty years ago it was only the West that had art markets, and now we see the extraordinary strength and power of China, India, the Middle East, Russia and Latin America,” says Obrist. “What is happening in these new markets in the past three years is so brutally extreme, and so fast, that artists have begun to reflect on it. In China, particularly, there is a strong consideration of how the art world and the art market function.”

Obrist points to young Beijing-based Liu Ding’s Products, which was shown at the Second Guangzhou Triennial, in 2005. Rather than display his own mainly abstract sculptures and installations, the artist paid a daily wage to a group of traditional Chinese painters to create generic-looking landscapes in assembly-line fashion, recreating the environment in which these artists produce such works for export and reducing art to a mundane commodity.

The Christie’s and Sotheby’s logos—potent signifiers of market muscle—turn up in paintings from Wang Guangyi’s well-known “Great Criticism” series, which integrates brand names (Rolex, Louis Vuitton) with Communist propaganda imagery. And an image of Sotheby’s New York headquarters looms in a painting by Yan Lei, with satisfied customers walking, doglike, on all fours away from the gleaming York Avenue building, Burberry bags gripped between their teeth. As for Zheng Guogu’s “Basel” series, dealer Li says the artist chose to paint the buzzy scene at the fair because it serves as a kind of metaphor for the fierce economic, cultural and political competition among Europe, America and, now, Asia.

Long before the market went into overdrive and painters like Guogu made it their subject, American artist Danica Phelps, whose work was in the Whitney show, was examining notions of value. Her most trenchant commentaries on this topic are the “generations” of drawings she has been making for the past 10 years. Each time she sold an original drawing of the same image–there were several subjects—she added a strip detailing the other owners and prices paid. “Just the fact that they were endlessly available really subverted what drives the market,” says Phelps. She is now at work on a series called “The Stripe Factory,” another unlimited line of drawings. “My dealers might be concerned that the prices won’t go up as they do with my unique works,” she says.

If dealers are leery, savvy collectors appreciate art that looks at the art world and the market through a sociological lens. Earlier this year, New York collectors Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy spent $16,500 on Jennifer Dalton’s sculpture The Collector-ibles, 2006; they are also depicted in it. The piece is a large vitrine whose shelves are stocked with thimble-size figurines of collectors from ArtNews magazine’s Top 200, clutching shopping bags labeled for the type of art they collect and perched atop tiny plinths that bear their names and sources of income. “There was an element of flattery, but that wasn’t the focus,” says Learsy. “It’s a wonderfully humorous, elegant, insightful piece that comments on an aspect of the art world that is integral to its pulse.”

According to curator Jens Hoffman, it is a sign of the times that works of institutional critique—a genre of which market art is a subset—are themselves highly marketable. The collectors of this genre seem to have a sense of humor, and artists have taken note. Last year Pablo Helguera put out a tongue-in-cheek book called The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art, which portrayed collectors as ignorant snobs and dealers as ruthless capitalists. His sales have gone through the roof. “Perhaps in part due to the mixed legacy of institutional critique,” Helguera says, “my belief is that the art market, like an endlessly adaptable virus, will now absorb any true critical material produced within the art world.”

Dalton and Helguera are not unique in their awareness that collectors represent a crucial cog in the complex art world engine. In 1998 John Baldessari addressed them directly when he made, in an edition of 250, a wallet emblazoned with the instruction “I will not buy any more boring art.” But like many artists today, Dalton is actively questioning what the roiling market means for her as a practitioner. “When I was in art school, it was considered more respectable to be poor and outside mainstream appreciation,” she recalls. “There was disdain for artists who sold a lot of work, because it meant they appealed to too many people to really be good. In the current climate, there seems to be one model of success: making money hand over fist and being in Vanity Fair. I did a project where I made 500 bracelets that say loser and 500 that say pig. The question is, Would you rather be a loser or a pig?”

"Show Me the Money" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.