The Commodification Of Contemporary Art?

On March 3^rd, back in the day when you could stuff yourself into a packed room of unmasked art folk, I attended a roundtable organized by Artprice entitled “The Art Market May Have Reached A Turning Point”. The speakers were Judd Tully and Peter Falk, whom I have known as fixtures in the art scene for decades, as well as Jean Minguet of Artprice and Kathy Battista of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

The (sadly, blurred) view in the room at “The Art Market May Have Reached A Turning Point” panel

The author

Today, a panel of that title would focus on the long-term effects of the pandemic on the market. (Not to mention the fact that the title would be “The Art Market Has Reached A Turning Point”.) A mere three weeks ago, though, such a topic as the commodification of art was deemed worthy of heated discussion.

At some point, we will again have the luxury to live that way. So, for now, I am writing this for posterity.

Battista set out the evening’s thesis statement when she announced “Contemporary art has become a commodity. Some people are buying with their egos, not their eyes.” The mindset?- “What is it going to be worth in six months?” Her sentiments echoed those I put forth when I predicted the price of Jeff Koons’ Rabbit and interviewed the founder of Artnet. 

At this panel, they added an analysis of how marketing may have contributed to such attitudes. 

After the talk, Artprice’s founder, Thierry Ehrmann, observed that “Museums have accustomed us to view art history in a linear way, grouping works together by eras and by movements.” Indeed, that was the way I was schooled in art history, and it was the way dealers and auction houses organized their offerings- Old Master, 19^th C. European, Impressionist and Modern, Contemporary Asian, etc..

In recent years, though, this orthodoxy has been challenged. “Remember”, added Ehrmann, “Christie’s sold Salvator Mundi in a Post-War & Contemporary Art sale.” During the talk, Tully expanded on how this may have come about:

“There is a pretty good example that some of you may have seen a couple of years ago at the Frick, this collector Tomilson Hill who collects Renaissance sculpture alongside Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly. He made a big pitch for mixing, in his apartment actually and now in his Foundation in Chelsea. At one point I interviewed him and asked where he got this idea of mixing genres. And he said it was the architect Peter Marino who started it.”

Full disclosure- my wife, Catherine, worked for Peter Marino for many years, and so I learned a bit firsthand about his firm. Its specialty?- adding value. “It is plain old marketing- putting a Koons next to an Old Master”, observed Tully. “The power is with whoever has the marketing power”, added Falk. 

Sometimes, though, others in the art world overstep their bounds and become manipulative and crass in their marketing efforts. “Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s works are selling for £300,000, and she’s not getting any money,” said Battista. Furthermore, in their quest to capitalize on the interest in the genre, “galleries now look for any 89 year old black artist who had her last show in 1973”, she added.

All of the panelists seemed to agree that the rise of social media may help artists assert their rights in the face of such hubris. “The Internet and social media have completely democratized the field. So I think we are living in a new era, and hashtags are emblematic of this new era”, commented Battista. 

Interestingly, that hashtag reference reminded me of the disjointedness Marino advocated to Hill. Just as artists feel free to self-identify with any hashtags they wish, in order to connect themselves to other artists, schools, or collectors of their choosing, so every collector can now feel free to mash up Asian with American, 16th C. with 21st C., or naturalistic with abstract art. The comparison is somewhat strained, I admit, but it does seem that both represent movement away from orthodoxy.

Personally, I am not certain that social media will have the power to overturn the traditional art market. However, if they can at least put a dent in some of its manipulative marketing and commodification, I’ll be cheering it on.