Website review: Seeing Dollar Signs - artnet Magazi...
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laodan discovered 16 months ago- SEEING DOLLAR SIGNS in artnet by Jerry Saltz
Is the art market making us stupid? Or are we making it stupid? Consider the lame-brained claim made by Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, who recently effused "The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart." This is exactly wrong. The market isn't "smart" it's like a camera -- so dumb it'll believe anything you put in front of it. Essentially, the art market is a self-replicating organism that, when it tracks one artist's work selling well, craves more work by the same artist. ... Such confusion stems from there being no new, cogent Theory of the Market, no philosophy that addresses the ways in which the ongoing feeding frenzy is affecting the production, presentation and reception of art. SEEING DOLLAR SIGNS
Christopher Wool. Hole in Your Fuckin Head. 1992. $1,696,000. Phillips, de Pury & Co.
"Is the market creating a competitive atmosphere that drives artists to produce better work or is it mainly fostering empty product?" asks Jerry Saltz. As an artist I should say that I see only empty products on the market. But I have immediately to add that I know of many interesting artworks being produced nowadays, only, I don't see them on the market I see them on the web... I again concur with Saltz when he writes "The market isn't "smart" it's like a camera -- so dumb it'll believe anything you put in front of it." This is half right only, for, the market will believe in anything "an authority in art" puts in front of it. Indeed it's not as if the market accepted anything from anyone. Capital only goes where the bureaucrats of the art market advise it to go. In Saltz's view our contemporary problem in art comes from the fact that "Much confusion stems from there being no new, cogent Theory of the Market, no philosophy that addresses the ways in which the ongoing feeding frenzy is affecting the production, presentation and reception of art.". But what would change if we had such a theory of the market? Do we not know enough already to be able to conclude, in all certainty I should add, that the market has displaced art. It uses the reflection of the image of art, in our mirror of the past, to expand its own reach to that domain by transforming its productions, into commodities, into extremely rare commodities that command fortunes on the paper. We are in this particular moment witnessing the narrowing of capitalistic rationality into a small segment of itself, I mean, finance. It is not only the art market that is afflicted by this. It is the whole of our globalized economic rationality. I'm afraid that the passage to the rediscovery of the societal functionality of art will prove to be an extremely narrow path. What I mean to say here is that as long as finance commands the rationality of our societies there should be no hope. And I'm furthermore even more afraid of the possibility that finance shall derail only, under the weight of reality, under the weight of a collapse of its own reason in the form of a collapse of modernity under the consequences of its side-effects on the environment, on the other species and on ourselves, or to be more accurate, on our children and grand-children.
- SEEING DOLLAR SIGNS in artnet by Jerry Saltz
