Art Market

Tied to memory, archives have always spoken to the need to collect and safeguard evidence of the past. An artist’s archives are critically important both to preserving material evidence of participation in certain cultural circles and to determining, defending and certifying the authenticity of works while ensuring they can be accessed and shared. But what exactly is an artist’s archive and how is it structured? What legal measures and customs apply? How are successions organised, and what goes into drawing up an annotated catalogue? What skills and features make archives key reference tools for scholars and the marketplace?This volume – created by AitArt (the Italian Association of Artists’ Archivists) for its course for curators of artists’ archives – addresses various perspectives and areas of specialisation, from humanistic-historical topics to economic-legal issues, as well as more practical considerations of filing and digitalisation. In seeking both to illustrate underlying principles and propose operating procedures, it outlines a full-fledged professional code of conduct, an invaluable guide for anyone needing to develop specific professional skills or in charge of overseeing the complex, invaluable ecosystem that is an artist’s archive.

Those who love art will certainly have noticed a development which, though momentous, is seldom discussed: the absence of genuinely religious works, meaning those whose religious sentiment is free of irony or irreverence, in galleries and museums of modern art. The schism between art and religion, far from being a conspiracy of the art world, has distant roots. Having gradually come into being in the Renaissance, it intensified in the 19th century, until today the break appears irreparable. To mend it, the underlying idea of the entire modernist project must be dismantled.This book, which couples rigorous analysis with experimentation, breaks the deafening silence around an issue so thorny it defies attempts to address it both in official art circles and the world of art education. Indeed, this silence forces students to cultivate their religious feelings in secret, lest they be excluded from the system. Drawing on his experience at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Elkins takes a pragmatically innovative approach to the tangled mass of practices, opinions and misunderstandings, choosing five students of his who each hold a distinct position on the question: five artists’ accounts which deftly describe the troubled relationship between religion and modern art.But the good intentions of a few isolated figures cannot satisfy the author’s wish for a healing of the chasm of incomprehension between the two sides. What is needed are brand-new forms of dialogue, conversations able to encompass the full scope of the participants’ emotions and experiences. Elkins is already working in this direction, providing artists, students, teachers and scholars with the tools needed to start a constructive, enthralling debate.

In the 21st century, the private museum has become a cultural, social and economic phenomenon of global scale. Over the last twenty years, a fulsome landscape of successful modern-art institutions has been created by collectors, even businesses, with noteworthy examples being the museums of François Pinault, as well as foundations affiliated with leading fashion brands. Closely tied to their founders’ tastes and visions, private museums are often derided as “trophy sepulchres” or expedients for tax purposes, and yet the actual situation is far more nuanced and complex.This overview –which Georgina Adam arrived at after researching more than fifty private museum entities in the United States, Europe, China and elsewhere – combines hard facts with the declarations of those directly involved, tracing the underlying motives and implications of the boom. Why do collectors create their own facilities instead of donating works to local institutions? How do they finance them? Are these nothing more than vanity projects or are they genuine philanthropic initiatives? With great acumen, the author explores the thin line between personal ambition and public good, providing a glimpse of individuals and scenarios both controversial and intriguing.

The travel dairies of esteemed figures who took the Grand Tour, such as the explorer and Etruscan scholar George Dennis, the watercolour artist Samuel James Ainsley, and Elizabeth Hamilton Gray, a pioneering nineteenth-century female scholar of Etruria, still contribute to the study of Etruscan civilisation and the sites that were its cradle. But before these illustrious individuals came Wilhelm Dorow, a diplomat at the court of Frederick William III of Prussia, an historian, a man of letters and an orientalist, but first and foremost an archaeologist and collector of antiquities. In fact, he was one of the first to visit the cities of ancient Etruria with a scholarly focus, documenting the artistic and archaeological treasures of the hinterlands of Siena and Arezzo, between Cortona, Chiusi and Arezzo.Dorow’s notebook, published almost twenty years in advance of George Dennis’s celebrated The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, is a key source for the history of Etruscan studies and the collection of antiquities. This Italian edition, translated from the French version of 1829, comes complete with the sixteen original prints. Dedicated to Bertel Thorvaldsen, with whom Dorow corresponded over the years, and who had words of praise for his collection, the notebook documents a trip that Dorow began from Florence in the summer of 1827.Accompanied by Squire Francesco Inghirami - author of, among other works, the imposing illustrated volume Monumenti Etruschi - and by the artist Giuseppe Lucherini, whose task it was to portray the ancient artefacts, Dorow’s in-depth knowledge of the Italian context sets his account apart from those of his English contemporaries, thanks to sharp, precise insights that, even today, are of great use to archaeologists. His descriptions of visits to the places where the most important Etruscan artefacts are found, and to the leading private collections of Etruscan antiquities, are rendered all the more thorough by Lucherini’s painstakingly detailed drawings. What emerges is an overview of Etruria in the 19th century, highlighting Dorow’s invaluable contribution to reconstructing the history of the collections and their destinies, and all this in the decisive years when mere curiosity for Etruscan antiquities was evolving into serious scholarship.

It is 1947, Han van Meegeren went on trial for high treason, accused of having sold a piece of Dutch cultural heritage to Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring during the war. He risked execution, even though the “Vermeer” in question was one he painted himself. Nobody believed him. To prove it, he was asked to make a copy right there and then. Van Meegeren’s contemptuous response was not long in coming: “In all my career, I have never painted a copy! But I will paint you a new Vermeer. I’ll paint you a masterpiece!” The psychological motivations that prompt such a brilliant hand to commit this kind of crime are incredibly varied: simple money-making speculation, anger at the artistic establishment, or to bamboozle so-called expert eyes... While copying the works of the great masters has long been a widespread custom, some have continued to practice it not just out of simple pleasure but to provoke, earning the self-satisfaction of men who measure themselves against the giants of art history. Noah Charney takes us on an adventurous expedition through history, psychology and science, revealing the dramas and intrigues that surround the most famous art forgeries: from Marcantonio Raimondi’s “non-original copies” of Dürer to the golden goblet made by master goldsmith Reinhold Vasters, which ended up at the Metropolitan as a work by Benvenuto Cellini, to Wolfgang Beltracchi, a true genius of the scam, who created an incalculable number of counterfeit masterpieces, and even starred in his own successful documentary. The public, after all, is always fascinated by these shady characters, especially when criminals often pass themselves off as heroes. With their shadowy charm, consumed by the hubris of rewriting history, forgers create perfect deceptions to prove their own brilliance. Which, in many cases, truly exists.

Lack of culture, finance, and globalization are rapidly driving the languages of art into a cul-de-sac. The definitive decline of the avant-garde movements and the erosion of the intellectual power that had supported them, along with the image of art as a status symbol, have fostered the rise of a type of art collecting which, devoid of sufficient knowledge of the object of its desire, has nonetheless imposed new rules of the game and provoked a radical standardization of taste. At one time, collecting – that tangible fruit of developed taste, its material visualization – was the prerogative of a cultured, charismatic aristocracy, capable of bringing legitimacy and authority to the battle of ideas; today, on the contrary, it is mostly seeking consensus while treating art objects like mass-produced souvenirs that should be as recognizable as an image of the Eiffel Tower, familiar even to those who have never been to Paris. Guided by conformity and armed with massive sums of capital, collectors choose trophy-works with the sole aim of confirming that they belong not in an elite of knowledgeable art lovers but in the club of the wealthy. For their part, artists offer no resistance to this standardizing arrangement, having lost the antagonistic role that once sheltered them from the whims of fashion. They are now forced to chase after economic success and produce “obedient” art, respectful of the dictates of marketing and globalized taste, at the expense of the autonomy that had been their most prized and powerful quality until only a few decades ago. This lively essay, scathingly controversial even in its title, analyzes changes in the spirit of the times, in taste in collecting, in the system by which art is disseminated and ultimately in art itself, reflecting the changes over the last thirty-five years in society, geo-politics and the economy.  

Since 2005, the proceeds from sales in the art market have almost doubled, surpassing 60 billion dollars yearly. Art fairs and events have proliferated like mushrooms; auctions reach dizzying figures and the overall demand for artwork has increased exponentially. And yet, this peculiar gold rush is only part of the story. Looking more closely, behind the slick vernissages in museums and galleries, behind Christie’s and Sotheby’s glorious records and ever-changing leadership, lies a much darker side. In fact, the legacy of this boom has been a rapid increase in the concentration of power in the hands of a few mega-players who can singlehandedly determine the price – and thus the value – of an artwork. This concentration has had many repercussions: artists are branded like merchandise; art is increasingly treated as a nothing more than an investment; fraud and the circulation of forgeries are on the rise; the temptation to avoid or falsify tax records has intensified and methods of art production and sales have changed. In recent years, Georgina Adam, astute contributor to the most influential art magazines, has been gathering interviews, statements and testimonies from leading figures in the art system, confronting shady intrigues and scandalous backstories of the often opaque and always poorly regulated art market. With discrete irony, Adam explains the notorious auctions of works by Picasso, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, as well as the financial dealings of luxury tycoons and nouveaux riches Asians. With a genuine outsider’s view, she follows the most incredible intrigues and legal proceedings of the art market, where – as one might expect – all that glitters is not gold.

For at least a decade now, the Western art system has found itself faced in the international arena with new players who appear to want to play according to rules of their own making. The first inklings of change came in the 1980s, when art became a financial opportunity of global potential. Thanks to the use of more accessible languages, postmodern art appealed to increasingly vast audiences, prospering as it expanded onto new terrain: the soaring art market paved the way for the artwork becoming a status symbol, and a broadening of horizons to include countries like China, Russia and India, in search of recognition on the Western stage. The euphoria of that period, however, was soon dampened by the current climate of uncertainty, caused by the break-up of the old system and the declassing of its constituent parts – the intellectual component (the critics, who lent legitimacy to artistic practices) and the institutional component (the museums, which conserved the works for posterity). The current measure of success is the speculative spirit – in all senses – of the new players, who, with the ease of those used to wielding hefty amounts of capital, lay down the law in the closed circuit of gallery-collector-auction house-museum. Even artists, previously the system’s driving force, risk being reduced to the status of mere cogs in the machine. Well aware of the setting they operate in, they have acquiesced to the impoverishment brought about by globalisation: while in the past they sought to innovate, now they stick firmly to linguistic standards that are instantly recognisable in all corners of the globe. In this short work of global scope, which surveys the past in order to have insight into the complex transformations under way in the present, Marco Meneguzzo identifies the dividing line between before and after, namely between art as exclusive and elitist and art as a popular, globalised phenomenon, envisaging a future that wavers between a soft process of change in the art system and the conception of art itself, and a more apocalyptic scenario.

A British artist sells all his belongings on eBay. A Dutch colleague analyzes business culture through his own initiatives. An American prints banknotes and finds a way to spend them. A Swiss sells his invitation to take part in Manifesta. The idea that art and business are incompatible now seems to be wholly superseded. Many contemporary artists not only express their views on the market and the economic implications of art through the media but also use their art to reflect on or parody economic mechanisms in the wake of iconic figures of the 20th century like Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys. Hence the birth of “imaginary economics” – a term indicating alternatives to the institutional paradigms of economics – for those not content with the answers to be found in the cosy rooms of dominant economic thought. The relationship between art and business certainly does not appear to favour the former. On the one hand, given the slender earnings of most artists, the economy could be regarded from their standpoint as a negative force. The artist is generally a victim of the economic system or at best forced to submit to it. On the other, the financial community makes use of art like a duster to give lustre and cultural prestige to company reputations through sponsorship or the creation of collections. Moreover, the symbolic production of companies is often fuelled by the images of artists whose works are not protected by copyright. Olav Velthuis seeks to demonstrate the existence of a new balance between art and business where the art is no longer the victim but becomes an unusual source of knowledge about the market economy. After a brief historical overview, he analyzes the various attitudes of artists and shows how the stances they adopt towards the economic system can be critical, positive and even playful, as though to call into question the presumed aura of seriousness that surrounds the market.

Contemporary art has made its way into numerous productive universes over the last few decades and art enterprises modelled on their ethical counterparts have sprung up all over Europe. The Dutch industrialist Akzo Nobel has created a foundation that hosts artists in residence. The French bank Neuflize OBC and the Belgian group Lhoist, a world producer of lime, commission works from contemporary photographers. The Italian TESECO group, specialized in the environmental treatment of waste, has created a workshop of contemporary art. The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin was born as a joint venture between the Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim Foundation. This interest in art is not, however, confined to major corporations but also affects small and medium-sized firms, and seldom takes the form of one-off sponsorships designed solely to bolster company image. Unlike the American model, which is more oriented towards consumption, the European appears to see art as an investment whose profit is to be found in the contribution made to the development of a sense of collective responsibility as regards the social environment and the assertion of cultural identity. This is an alliance that in turn works to the benefit of art, especially the art of today. Deeply convinced of this, Lisbonne and Zürcher start from the French model but work on the European scale to identify, country by country, sound entrepreneurial strategies and methods in support of projects, the commissioning of artworks and the creation of company collections and foundations. The authors highlight the ability of art, within corporate structures, to facilitate the expression of identity and convey cultural values capable of enriching the everyday life of personnel. As Pier Luigi Sacco points out in his preface, it is for all these reasons that contemporary art is not losing its appeal with the economic crisis but proves on the contrary capable in such circumstances of offering a salutary change of viewpoint, a way of looking at the facts of life through new eyes. Nor is it forgotten that “the art market, unlike the financial markets, handles works whose significance is not confined to the return they promise and that can indeed be regarded during a period of slump first of all as fraught with meaning, as opportunities to understand the world in which we live and even ourselves to some extent”.