Art Business Today: 20 Key Topics
192Art Business Today: 20 Key Topics
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ISBN-13: | 9781848222120 |
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Publisher: | Ashgate Publishing, Limited |
Publication date: | 10/06/2016 |
Series: | Handbooks in International Art Business |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 192 |
File size: | 992 KB |
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Art Business Today
20 Key Topics
By Jos Hackforth-Jones, Iain Robertson
Lund Humphries
Copyright © 2016 Jos Hackforth-Jones and Iain RobertsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84822-213-7
CHAPTER 1
GLOBALISATION OF THE ART MARKET
It is a common belief amongst nations that rely on international trade that mutual economic embeddedness is a virtue. These nations are at the helm of all of our global institutions. However, economic integration is not so much a virtue as a necessity for these states and so the common-good aspect of the term is often overstated. Economic over-reliance on other territories will result in universally shared 'panics', which have visited the late modern world four times in the twentieth century (1903, 1907, 1919 and 1973), although a crash and a structural economic and political shift, such as in 1929, is more rare. The global art commodity market was initiated by the European nation states that established the first joint-stock companies with overseas 'interests'; the Dutch United East India Company (1602) and the English Honourable East India Company (1600) being the two largest and furthest-reaching. This liminal state required the concatenation of military and political attributes before cultural superiority could be added as the final act of global hegemony. The opportunity to change the world order in favour of the maritime trading nations of the Netherlands and Britain was encouraged by a particular notion of freedom.
In his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) strenuously examines the concept of individual choice or volition. Thus, a free man who chooses luxury and debauchery over study and knowledge is no less happier than his counterpart who does the reverse. The fierce, empirical logic of Locke allows for a great degree of moral relativism. The amount of freedom which Locke allows us, has, it can be argued, moved mankind from an antinomian mind-set to a casuistical one. The uneasiness of mind in want of an absent good that Locke attributes to our will and which prompts our desire, he explains, gives rise to the spring of action. At its outer limits, a desire for honour, power or riches, he calls a fantastical uneasiness. When a man is content, he asks rhetorically, what action or will is there left? Locke's philosophy certainly complements the energy with which the Dutch and the English set about being individually industrious and independent; be it in carrying goods across the oceans from a producer to a consumer or manufacturing basic and luxury goods. The ships built in England and the Netherlands scuppered the global ambitions of the greatest contemporary power, Spain. Locke argued that the moral relativism or individual freedom to decide what good is desired can be interpreted by each person according to their moral compass, or short-term blindness as to the eventual good. It can be suggested that the unofficially sanctioned depredations that were visited on the Spanish plate fleet and galleons by English men-of-war and Dutch 'sea-beggars' respectively were acts in the interest of a future greater (national) good. The officially sanctioned trading conglomerates in the north of India, Java and Bali which ultimately formed the backbone of imperial empires for both nations were more permanent examples of the results of the same uneasiness and thirst for individual good and collective improvement.
Locke, widely regarded as the 'father of the enlightenment', lived in both England and the Netherlands, in which country he mixed with the many radical Protestant groups that had provided intellectual succour to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77). In Locke's book, his chapter 'Of Power' really provides an intellectual pretext for the political authority that both nations would enjoy for the next hundred or more years. A quasi-scientific explanation of the causality of movement mimicked the methods by which the British crown first unseated the Mughals and then successively displaced the sub-continent's many rulers. Today we would call it the political momentum encapsulated in domino theory. Locke's expression of freedom as individual consciousness, realised as the desire of a man to move or not to move, culminated in the idea that it is impossible to be more free than to have the power to do what you will. This emphasis on self-determination had an impact on the methods by which both nations embarked on their future period of territorial aggrandisement. Locke likens the desire – which is an uneasiness of mind – for want of an absent good to a pain stimulating action towards short-term satisfaction or, more sensibly, long-term good.
The individual moral philosophy of Locke, which found expression in the perceived fairness or at least justification of the administration of the British Empire, might be usefully contrasted with the antinomian and patently unfair approach adopted by the Spanish conquistadors in the Indies. In 1513, a jurist, Juan López de Palacios Rubios (1450–1524), drew up a document known as the 'Requirement', which began with a history of time from Adam to a grant made by the Pope to the Castilian crown. It obliged every Indian to obey the crown on pain of horrible death. The Spanish diarist Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) declares this to be one of the crassest instances of legalism in European history. It is indeed a perfect example of a fait accompli, without even a vestige of intellectual justification. The account of Spanish atrocities in the Indies by Las Casas was used by Anglo-Dutch propagandists to blacken the reputation of Spanish imperialism from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, until the age of the Protestant empires.
Eighteenth-century political change in Europe aided the cause of the discontented bourgeoisie. The prolonged financial collapse of the monarchy in France, which began with the Mississippi Bubble (1718–20), culminated in King Louis XVI convoking the Estates General (1787) and demanding the payment to the crown of millions of livres. The subsequent French Revolution (1789) opened the doors to political emancipation. In England, the Acts of Union with Scotland (1706/7), victory over the Mughals at the Battle of Plassey (1757), the sales of the art collections of the Duc d'Orléans (1792–1802) and victory over France and her allies at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) marked Britain's concomitant rise to global authority.
Cultural globalisation, evident in homogenised commodities labelled by styles of art, has grown out of the economic union of states and their conglomerates. The international art market is the instrument through which global culture finds its ultimate expression. A painting, for better or for worse, has become the ultimate global possession and it is priced accordingly; for example Les Femmes D'Alger (Version O) (1955) by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) achieved a price of $179.3 million at Christie's, New York in May 2015. But are we now in the state of economic sepulchre before revivification, or is the world about to change? Is globalisation a thing of the past or, more likely, is it about to change face?
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War saw the last significant vestige of 'Oriental' power edited from globalisation. The Orientalist painting style is the visual embowering of the East. The appropriation of African (and other) cultural tropes by late modernist European artists is, by its very act, misappropriation and humiliation. The slow dissolution of the Orient had begun in the art world with the schooling in their respective homelands by European masters of the Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), the Philippine artist Fernando Amorsolo (1892–1972) and the Indonesian Raden Saleh (1811–80) in the European Academic oil painting tradition. More fortunate artists from outside Europe would be instructed, like the Chinese oil painter Xu Beihong (1895–1953), in Paris at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and others like the inventive Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) would become sufficiently esteemed to teach at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Pan is credited with her Shanghai contemporary Liu Haisu (1896–1994), with introducing French impressionism to China. Of course there were nationalist artistic movements even in the early years of this European cultural imperium, such as the early twentieth-century Lingnan School in China and the late-nineteenth century nihon-ga School in Japan, but they failed to stem the universal accedence to Western modernism.
An art made in the language of the global art world today, to be consumed by those weaned on arbitrary Western 'standards' with its local cultural characteristics, signals a certain acknowledgement of two things: that other cultures are integral to globalisation, and more importantly, that by this act of concession, a transition of power is taking place in its broadest sense. This rearguard action by the Western art world seeks to protect a vestige of the great cultural capital it has accumulated over the last few centuries. Of course another reading might be that amidst the clangour of the assimilation of the Communist world into the global fold in 1989, the presiding consensus has accommodated so much polarity that its actual form has been lost. We will see how this condition, perhaps induced by decadence, can equally be applied to art and creativity today.
What are the changes to the art world that will take place in the wake of this transition? The beginnings of this passing may have been felt during the second significant economic tremor of the twentieth century in 1987. Shortly thereafter, Japanese corporations, that were the largest single art market buyers, left the market after paying exorbitant sums of money in a febrile market for unimpressive impressionist and postimpressionist pictures by familiar European artists. The Japanese buyers have not returned since to the international art market in these numbers. The Japanese market has, with the exception of the Shinwa auction house (Tokyo) and one or two internationally conformist contemporary artists, sought refuge in its own arrangement: a rigid system of art exchange around the Tokyo Art Club known as kokankai, in which prices are pre-determined by a cartel of dealers. This system and the nation's indigenous art forms of craft and nihon-ga (painting technique) militate against the international art market and by extension globalisation.
China and other lesser emerging art markets have been encouraged to contribute their own brand of contemporary art and their necessary instruments to the global convocation in the form of artists, art, galleries, museums, art fairs and collectors. However most Chinese interest has been sparked by indigenous modern and Old Master paintings and bibelots made from jade, stone, ceramic and wood. In Russia, India and Indonesia the irresolute acceptance of indigenous international contemporary art suggests that these cultures will refute the West's global cultural assertions. India's art market has been forced to trade in the Modernist aesthetic bequeathed by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) because of national laws prohibiting the commercial exchange in antiquities and religious artefacts. Its art world has remained untouched by globalisation. There are very few kunsthallen on the subcontinent and even dealers and art fairs selling the latest cutting-edge contemporary art are conspicuously absent. Iran, in spite of its efforts to solicit the immediate approbation of the West through the use of its hoard of post-war Western painting and sculpture acquired by the displaced ruling Pahlavi family (1925–79), in common with other significant regional cultures, is now beginning a rapid detachment from Western aesthetics and standards. In fact, Iran would be well advised to sell its art stockpile while the unit values are high.
If one form of globalisation is dying, what will replace it? China and other emerging markets have experienced economic travails since 2011. The West's art world has lauded those artists from different cultures who have subscribed to a neoliberal cultural consensus. The Chinese artists Zhu Wou-ki (1921–2013) and Zhu Dequn (1920–2014) are lionised for their Klee-like abstractions; the Political Pop oil painters from Beijing and Chongqing have received huge sums of money for their work, while the art works of the Iranians Farhad Moshiri (b.1963) and Shirin Neshat (b.1957) have, together with those of the super-realist Turkish painter Taner Ceylan (b.1967), received plaudits from the international art world and high prices on its market.
In short, the art world has accommodated as much material and even ideology as it can, while at the same time maintaining equilibrium. It is extraordinary how dramatically different the intention, appearance and exhibition of works of art are today in internationally inspired galleries, festivals and arenas. It is, therefore, equally astounding how the art world is able to claim all this material as its own. This art may be found at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and in kunsthallen in Europe and in America. This high-end commodity is often site-specific, engaged with its context and sometimes very large. It purports to contain a meaning far beyond the constraints of its material or historical significance. A good example (and there are many) was an exhibition curated by Norman Rosenthal (b.1944) on materiality in the work of Joseph Beuys (1921–86) in the Parisian Marais district branch of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in 2012. The space given to Beuys revisited the artist's performance in which he walked across a stage with a horse, banging a cymbal and reciting parts of Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus. The cymbals were part of Missa Solemnis at his final exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Naples in 1985 where they were placed in a vitrine with the artist's fur coat and a cast of a head. For the Paris show, a white horse and all the other material elements of this performance were collected for display. The art market has been slower to react than the art world; the value of Beuys's art is low. Few emerging market galleries and inconsiderable amounts of work by artists from outside the West have been exhibited at global art fairs. The art worlds of Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi, Tehran and Mexico City have given little support to their respective international art market havens or to the promotion of the global Western aesthetic (with local characteristics) outside of their territorities.
There are several vantage points from which to spy the future. Each gives a different view of the unfolding scene. The East's view is that an entente cordiale between Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran heralds a new world order. The statistics of this supposed entente overwhelmingly favour this orientation: China alone comprises 1.34 billion people, a combined GDP of $12.7 trillion and a land mass of 29.13 million square kilometres. Two policy initiatives, in particular, overseen by the incumbent Chinese leader, Xi Jinping (b.1953), appear to support the outward expression of this alliance of states: the abolition of the one-child and yidai yilu (one belt, one road) policies aimed at connectivity. Predictably, both are aimed at the export of labour and capital, which will inevitably lead to political influence and cultural resurgence. There is an equally robust counter-narrative. In 2007 President Hu Jintao had declared that the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation would be accompanied by cultural power, which affords both cultural cohesion and strength. China, Iran and Pakistan have the deepest and most enduring relationship with Central Asia and with good reason argue that this arrangement reflects the legitimate balance of power. History, size of population and economic ascendancy are introduced to justify their claims. The West's view is that the new policy and alliance is built on disaffection and internal frailty. The Chinese economy is growing at a slower rate than at any time since the economic reforms of 1979. Russia and Pakistan have weak economies and Iran is divided between a powerful conservative constituency that seeks to reassert traditionalism and a young generation that the government deems to have been seduced by Western consumerism. The country is anxious to rid itself of the Western economic embargo, but fearful of the negative social effects of too much liberalism.
It can be argued that China's current policy is constructed out of a fear of neiluan (internal disorder) and waihuan (external threat). The key 'soft' weapon in the West's armoury is that of individual liberty. China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran 'behave' in a contrary way towards their citizens to the global 'norm'; three of the governments in the new alliance are democratic, but not democratic enough. This, the West concludes, compromises and even illegitimises the claims of any one of these states to a universal culture. The great population of the emerging economic world, especially in East Asia, is an actual disadvantage and de-stimulant because it prevents per capita rates from rising significantly. The key lesson learnt from the Industrial Revolution and which is apparent in today's world of technology is that population does not necessarily equate with real wealth and power. The United States accounts for 5 per cent of the world's population and 21 per cent of its GDP. In contrast, East Asia (excluding Japan) contains 60 per cent of the world's people and generates 30 per cent of its output.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Art Business Today by Jos Hackforth-Jones, Iain Robertson. Copyright © 2016 Jos Hackforth-Jones and Iain Robertson. Excerpted by permission of Lund Humphries.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Preface 9
Introduction Jos Hackforth-Jones Iain Robertson 11
The Bigger Picture
1 Globalisation of the Art Market Iain Robertson 30
2 Ethics David Bellingham Tom Christopherson 39
3 Public Funding and the Art Market Derrick Chong 52
Art Markets
4 Art Market Sectors David Bellingham 60
5 The Contemporary Photography Market Jeffrey Boloten 69
6 Design Art and Its Markets Lis Darby 74
7 Emerging Markets Iain Robertson 82
Objects
8 Connoisseurship Jos Hackforth-Jones 92
9 Authenticity Jos Hackforth Jones 99
10 Fakes, Forgeries and Thefts Gareth Fletcher 106
11 Conservation and the Market Yasmin Railton 115
Art and Law
12 Rights of Artists Tom Christopherson 126
13 Due Diligence Tom Christopherson 136
Buying and Selling
14 The Auction Process David Bellingham 148
15 Art Fairs Iain Robertson 157
16 The Impact of New Technology on Art Marios Samdanis 164
Dealers and Collectors
17 Artist-Dealer Relationships Derrick Chong 174
18 Collector-Dealer Relationships Derrick Chong 180
19 Art as Investment Iain Robertson 185
20 Private Museums and the Art Market Melanie Gerlis 194
Bibliography 202
Contributors 210
Index 213