In Sickness and in Health: Why Art Fairs Are a Problem for Art
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IN RECENT MONTHS, people who are avidly engaged with contemporary art have been checking their pulses so often that I can only conclude they are worried about their vital signs, not to mention the health of the galleries, museums, auction houses, art fairs, and sundry publications that help to sustain them. These health checks have become global in nature, with frenzied reports arriving from galleries in Beijing, auctions in Hong Kong, an art fair in Abu Dhabi. New Yorkers have certainly had their hands full this spring, what with four major survey shows of contemporary art vying for attention along with a couple of blockbuster art fairs. Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker seems to have spoken for many when, after surveying the Whitney Biennial, he announced with relief that this year’s installment was “decidedly among the best ever.” As for Frieze New York—the first North American installment of an art fair that has been a key event in the London season—the painter Chuck Close, a ubiquitous and much-loved figure on the Manhattan scene, offered a decidedly mixed diagnosis to a reporter from The Art Newspaper. “I love Frieze,” Close announced—and then added: “I don’t want my work to be in a fair—it’s like taking a cow on a tour of the slaughterhouse.” That does not sound at all like a healthy situation.
Perhaps the trouble everybody is having goes back to the question of what constitutes health. At a time when more and more medical professionals are raising doubts about the proliferation of tests that may in fact tell us very little, arts professionals cannot seem to resist their own diagnostic procedures. About this June’s installment of Art Basel, the mother of all art fairs, Carol Vogel reported in The New York Times that an American collector bought an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter from the Pace Gallery with an asking price of $25 million. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It all depends on your view of artistic and cultural well-being. And this is a problem in an art world where many people can no longer distinguish between the value of a work of art and the value of an authoritative presentation. This past winter Larry Gagosian mounted simultaneous exhibitions at his eleven eponymous world-wide galleries of Damien Hirst’s “spot paintings,” which may well have the distinction of being the most numbingly awful abstract compositions ever presented to the public. Each painting—they come in widely varying sizes and are done by Hirst’s studio assistants—consists of rows of same-sized but differently colored spots on a neutral ground. Does anybody really believe that the spot paintings are any good? I wouldn’t even compare them to wallpaper: it would be unfair to wallpaper. And yet the spot paintings constitute a phenomenon that certain collectors feel a need to embrace. Walking through the rooms in Gagosian’s three Manhattan galleries, where the spot paintings were protected by uniformed guards, who could doubt that all was well in Gagosian’s corner of the art world, which is a very large corner indeed?