When was the last time you went to an art show? Not a museum exhibition — not the Matisse cutouts at MoMA — but an exhibition of work by a contemporary artist at a gallery space?
It is, at least in theory, one of the assumptions of life in New York — that we live, and might even occasionally participate in as collector or browser, the churning center of an art world of ideas and creativity. But more and more, as reports seem to shift from measures of quality and ideas to the boatloads of money spent at the latest auction, that world is seen as an empty, seven- or eight-figure, unwelcoming place for most people.
Even, surprisingly, someone like the musician and artist David Byrne, as he revealed in a blog post, “I Don’t Care About Contemporary Art Anymore?” at his website.
“I used to be able to convince myself that contemporary art was some kind of forum for ideas and feelings about the world we live in,” Mr. Byrne writes. “But hang on! It is! Those ideas and feelings are now about money and sucking up to those that have it and will part with a little bit of it. That is the world we live in! The work is indeed a commentary on our world, but the work is part of that swirl of luxury as well.”
For him, the economics now affect how he sees the work. “I have begun to view the work itself as being either intentionally or unconsciously produced expressly to cater to the 1%,” he writes, adding: “I can’t see the work or any ideas behind most of it anymore — if there even are any. The ideas might be there. The artists might be holding on to their integrity and be maintaining their distance from the dirty business of buying and selling, but I can no longer see it.
“It’s my lack of curiosity about what’s happening that has put the brakes on.”
Even some professional critics see the impact of market mechanics on the aesthetics of young artists. In a roundup about some contemporary abstract work, the critic Jerry Saltz at New York magazine wrote, “A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends’ wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-alike art.”
Perhaps the most visible figure of this confluence of art and market is Jeff Koons (Mr. Byrne does not mention him specifically, but he does mention Damien Hirst), who for some has become a potent challenge to what art is and should be.
Jed Perl, writing at The New York Review of Books in response to a recent Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum, called the art, in its “chilly chic arrogance” “a succession of pop culture trophies so emotionally dead that museumgoers appear a little dazed as they dutifully take out their iPhones and produce their selfies.”
“To evaluate this onslaught can feel hopeless, if not downright absurd,” Mr. Perl says, “as if one were some Judge Judy of the art world, examining a situation so incredible that the very act of judgment calls one’s credibility (and credulity) into question.”
Mr. Perl sees this kind of work as “a habit-forming drug for the superrich.”
Of course just as many critics praise Mr. Koons’s work, just as Mr. Saltz has praised many recent shows (Chris Ofili, for example). Even Mr. Byrne identifies a couple of exciting recent shows in his post (like one by Marcel Storr). Yet as with Mr. Perl, there seems to be a level of discomfort with Mr. Koons’s work. Felix Salmon at The Guardian writes: “It’s bling, but it’s venerable bling, equally at home in the halls of Versailles or in the Whitney’s stark modernist spaces. This isn’t easy: Koons is a man who gives a whole new meaning to the term lightweight.”
But with Mr. Koons, art fairs and auction houses, it’s often more about the metrics than the art. And the metrics used for measuring success, both in price and location, in the art world bother Edward Winkleman, writing at his blog: “The overarching trend here is to lazily borrow metrics from other asset markets or entertainment channels, even though most everyone will argue that true importance and quality in art transcend mere market concerns or popularity.”
Location also matters to the artist and former gallerist Ric Kasini Kadour, writing at Hyperallergic, who says that Mr. Byrne is looking in the wrong places. Mr. Kadour points out that the Chelsea gallery district may be the “part of the art world that everybody talks about; whose exhibitions get reviewed in glossy art magazines; from whom museums acquire new work — they may be the center of the art universe, but they are a minuscule part of it.”
But, he continues, has he not “figured out that Manhattan has bridges and tunnels and a subway” leading to spaces, especially in, say, Brooklyn? Or even farther afield: “Let me tell you about the art that makes me angry, makes me cry, makes me feel like there is still hope for this world, and then let’s go to Provincetown or Harrisburg or Taos or Seattle and see it.”
“I’m tired of pretending that a global elite has a monopoly on the expression of ‘ideas and feelings,’” he concludes, “when there are thousands of people working every day outside of that slipstream as proof otherwise.”
The artist Erik Odin Cathcart at his blog ImagineZero agrees with Mr. Byrne’s view of the hold of the superrich on the art market: “Art has always been a profitable investment, out-earning the stock market with regularity. It’s experiencing a bubble and with bubbles come breaks and then something interesting usually happens.”
But he’s concerned with the plight of young artists. There is a glut of art-school graduates, and “until we change the underlying dynamics of how artists learn to practice their craft, how they form a professional practice while holding down a full time job and how they can create collectively owned gallery spaces that establish themselves in the suburbs and lower income communities, using micro payments and shared economic models, nothing will change in the art market of America.”
Indeed, as Alexis Clements notes at Hyperallergic, according to a recent report by the collective Bfamfaphd, “people who graduate with arts degrees regularly end up with a lot of debt and incredibly low prospects for earning a living as artists.”
Only about 10 percent of art-school graduates make their living as artists, according to the report.
Still, many young artists are finding ways to make their art a meaningful part of their lives. In an interview with Alex Zafiris at Guernica, the art critic Ben Davis says: “Instead of looking to the market and galleries, they are looking to nonprofits and grants and different kinds of community organizations. It’s a different, in some ways richer, conversation.”
And Mr. Winkleman encourages people not to overlook a fundamental fact about the art world: no art, no art galleries: “It behooves everyone in the art world to keep that simple fact firmly at the forefront of their thinking about the art world and the art market in particular. Many artists feel they are the least powerful participants in this chaotic circus, but without those among them making the artwork that inspires the rest of us, we’re a vast, complex system with no purpose.”