July 2008 From the Editor

John Chamberlain The Week That Was (August 22 – 29, 2008) Artists' Dispute Over Alleged Warhol to Go Forward Red, White, and Bored? One Is the Luckiest Number Auction Records Set the Tone at Art Basel $315.9 Million Adds Up to Sotheby’s Best-Ever Sale Stone Sale Sees Strong Prices

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“Not because I need it but because I can afford it,” he added to a round of knowing laughter.

Could the same be said for the growing number of collectors hunting down the shrinking number of trophy works? Do the very rich buy not from a burning need to surround themselves with art that can change the way they view the world and perceive themselves, but simply because they have the means to play the high-stakes game of art collecting, and desperately want to enhance the way they are perceived by others?

Of course, the fellow quoted above was not trotting out his time on the psychiatrist’s couch to present it as a status symbol, a marker of his steady stream of disposable income or enviable health-care coverage. What he meant was that, for a certain type of truth seeker, therapy is a luxury in the purest sense of the word: something that, like art in the critic Peter Schjeldahl’s quotable characterization, “tells you things you don’t know you need to know until you know them.”

The endless quest for self-awareness is a typically American pursuit (this was recently pointed out to me by a friend, a native Midwesterner who has called Paris home for more than three decades). It’s one that’s particularly timely now, as the nation looks ahead to the November elections after five years of combat in Iraq and with the fully formed realization that the American Century is a thing of the past.

Knowledge and clarity—those are  the driving forces behind work with a political or social conscience, the subject of Jeffrey Kastner’s story. Kastner, a New York–based journalist and critic, found that politically engaged art, far from being relegated to the margins, is actually being embraced by the mainstream market. As counterintuitive as this at first seems, dealers such as Paula Cooper, Elizabeth Dee and David Zwirner are in fact making nice profits showing and selling the stuff—some of it subtle and conceptual, yes, but much of it aggressively subversive. “I’ve always been interested in political art,” Zwirner says, “not in art that tells you how to think and moralizes, but political art that asks questions.”

The success of such provocative and probing work flies in the face of what Zwirner calls “an art market that is dominated by aesthetics, and not content.” At the same time, though, it taps into a growing hunger for cultural experiences that open windows onto worlds and ways of thinking just beyond our everyday consciousness.

Consciousness expansion is the stock and trade of John Chamberlain, whose forceful art, more than five decades into his career, retains the power to surprise and even shock. Chamberlain, perhaps America’s greatest living sculptor, has been assembling polychromatic pieces of scrap metal and other unlikely materials into multidimensional collages whose balance and fit and ineffable beauty seem as inevitable as they do impossible. Veteran cultural reporter Annette Grant visited the 81-year-old Chamberlain in his Shelter Island, New York, studio, and she was delighted to learn that “after 60 years of making art, he is still most interested in discovery—a new technique, a new shape, a new material.”

That is not surprising to the truth seekers among us—American or not. As Chamberlain himself puts it, echoing Schjeldahl before him: “The key activity of art is to find out what you don’t know.”

"July 2008 From the Editor" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.