Are we headed for the billion-dollar picture? It certainly appears that way with $104m+ paid for a Giacometti and Stevie Cohen’s $110m acquisition of a Jasper Johns Flag (worth more than the country it depicts) ahead of the sale of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s $100m private collection, featuring a smaller version of the flag. Steve Wynn sold his Picasso for nearly $150m before he decided to collaborate with his elbow to the chagrin of Lloyds of London. Surely these purchasers are expecting major upside on their jumbo transactions. Though they’ve come closer than ever before, art and the art market are two very different bedfellows, albeit both strange.
Art is more unavoidable today than ever before. China, Africa, the Middle East and beyond—art and the universe it inspires is ubiquitous, you can’t help but bump into it. From merchant bank’s involvement to fodder for hedge funds, it’s an art, art world. But what does it all say about art and it’s meanings? Participating in the art business, I rarely get to speak on such issues. Art is reportage of our collective unconscious made more pertinent in the face of governmental and economic institutional failure and the dissociative loss of everyday humanity fueled by laptops, i-phones and the blackberry (upon which I am typing while ignoring the beach). Here are some further thoughts on the meaning of art in list format at the expense of being flippant, reductive and silly:
1. A filtered impression and reflection of our surroundings at a given time.
2. Art is life’s stain, like the trail of a slug.
3. An expression of the previously inexpressible.
In the end our batteries have only one charge and the realization that monumental effort must go into creating a fulfilling existence may finally be dawning upon us. That is unless art is no more than another social climb up the ladder of conspicuous consumption. In all probability it’s a mix, in some cases healthy, others not, like there is no such thing as pure altruism, Mother T. not excluded.
It takes more than one sassy Safra (as in Lily, who purchased the record Giacometti sculpture) to tango to the tune of $100m at auction. There was someone real bidding right behind her (the Qatari’s I hear) in her quest for what would become the word’s most expensive publicly auctioned artwork. And to think it was economically forecast that in today’s marketplace paintings wouldn’t be worth the $3.79 cost of pigment and canvas at this juncture. The upside is that finally there is some perceived credibility and glamour to the art world I’ve inhabited for more than twenty years vs. the rather glum shop-keeping image it had at the outset.
For reasons good and bad, the next spate of auctions featuring art of all stripes will continue to go off the charts, even eclipsing previous records (a Picasso will reach a new level). Art not only withstood recession like alcohol, tobacco and McDonald’s, but also morphed into the big business I initially ran away from after university. Let the bids flow, $879,000,000.00 here we come.
Kenny Schachter