Counting sheep ... The Tranquility of Solitude (for George Dyer) by Damien Hirst
Donald Kuspit, the SUNY professor of art history and philosophy, recently caused a rumpus with an uncompromising attack on the financially contaminated art world. Adopting the smugly apocalyptic tone of a theorist pleased to see through the veneers at the detritus below him, Kuspit pulls no punches. He claims that art in recent years has become so dependent on money as to be fully and irrevocably debased by it.
What's really bugging Kuspit? We don't have to look too far: "Critics are the intellectual losers."For Kuspit, it seems, the judgment of the critic is no longer as "important" as the taste of the buyer. "I am suggesting," he writes, "that the price paid for a work of art becomes its absolute and authoritative value." But how do you judge "value"? Kuspit displays no desire to step outside the parameters set by capitalism and divorce business from aesthetics. He argues that Klimt has now "achieved greater fame" than Gauguin because Adele Bloch-Bauer II was recently on the market for almost $88m, as opposed to the latter's meagerly-priced L'Homme à la Hache (just over $40m).
So what, I say? Of course art buying is an act of speculation and an economy determined and inflated by the very value that people want to attach to what's available. This is regrettable, offensive even (I'm not sure any painting - any object - is "worth" $88m), but that's the way capitalism works.
What's new? Aside from the comical pomposity of Kuspit's critique (art apparently having been the last bastion to surrender to capitalism), there is a serious point about value.
George at Edward_Winkelman is in agreement: "Price is about how much someone is willing to pay for something they want." Just look at the virtual world of Second Life, for example, where people are now paying real money for pixellated nothingness. (Can anyone tell me if any virtual art is sold in this dominion? If not, then there's a gap in the market.)
What critics should do, Edward_Winkelman asserts, "is speak louder than money with their expertise." Of course, this is not always so easy. Both newspapers and curators are inevitably swayed by what is popular, and the public will always have an interest in what is pricey. Franklin Einspruch at Artblog had more sympathy for Kuspit: "The publishing market and art market have made it eminently clear that they do not need critics." But what about the public?
Robert Heller is more concerned with what he dubs "the schlock of the new." Invoking Gresham's Law, he argues that "If a lot of bad art is being sold at good prices, then ... the bad will debase the good, and what will those museum curators do then?"
Trust their judgment, we can only hope. More problematic to me is the point that Cederic Caspesyan makes in the Edward_Winkelman debate: "I think the biggest downfall of contemporary arts is that art was supposed to be about ideas, but it soon turned out to reveal itself as being about the patenting of ideas." An artwork can now be nothing more than an idea; good art seeks to unsettle, and, ever since Duchamp, artists have been aware that they can gain publicity and earn good money simply by shocking without producing anything.
We can lose count of the amount of times certain conceptual artists might try to surprise us; and it is only once they have done so the first time - once they are a safe bet - that money is interested. Damien Hirst can now stuff a porcupine, skewer it on a stick, call it "The Ugliness of Transcendence" and earn a million. There's nothing we can do about Charles Saatchi putting a price on this. But that doesn't mean we necessarily have to take it seriously.
