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All Grist to the Credit Crunch One evening this summer, I met an art collector who announced that he had anticipated the credit crunch by putting all his shares into cash. The warning signal had been Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, which persuaded him that the madness had gone far enough. He was right about the shares, wrong about the madness, which – in the art market anyway - still seems to have further to go. Hirst’s sale of new work at Sotheby’s this September, predicted to raise £65m, will include a Golden Calf with 18-carat gold hoofs, horns and halo in a gold-framed vitrine; a gold-plated steel diptych studded with industrial diamonds; and Aurothioglucose, the first of a new generation of spot paintings on gold grounds. With the British and American economies sinking ever deeper into the brown stuff, Hirst - and Sotheby’s – are now looking east to India, China and Russia, traditional home of gold leaf. As Sotheby’s Oliver Barker disingenuously put it: ìI think his interest is in getting work into parts of the world that have not had the opportunity of buying major pieces beforeÖî And who can blame him? He knows which side his gingerbread is gilded on. With its seemingly limitless supply of oligarchs, Russia is the new El Dorado for gold-digging artists. Even before Roman Abramovich blew £43m on three rashers of Bacon and £17m on Freud’s busted sofa – his ambition being to collect world records rather than art – Ingliski art world rats were jumping ship to Russia. Norman Rosenthal got in early as advisor to the Hermitage’s 20/21 contemporary art programme, which kicked off last October with his hand-me-down RA exhibition of Saatchi artists, USA Today. Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, former face of Gagosian, has transferred to Moscow, where she will double as Hirst’s Russian agent while programming exhibitions for the new CCC gallery founded by Abramovich’s girlfriend Dasha Zhukova (briefed by Nicholas Serota acting as ‘M’). The Chapman Brothers debuted last December at Moscow’s Triumph Gallery, scene of Damien Hirst’s triumph the previous December when he fobbed off his twice rewarmed exhibition New Religion on a Russian ‘minigarch’ (annual income only $50m). ìHirst is big, brash and expensive. He is bound to succeed in Russia,î was the verdict of one local gallerist. Hirst has another advantage: his work looks expensive. While there are millionaires with space in their many mansions he can be relatively sure of a market because however ugly his message, his presentation is pretty. His copy of Durham Cathedral’s Rose Window in butterfly wings – Sotheby’s auction estimate £700,000-£900,000 – would have hit the spot with a Victorian industrialist. Among his grungy YBA contemporaries, he is uniquely equipped for survival. Grunge and cobbled-together tat are amusing affectations for the rich in times of boom, but in times of bust the default preference is for bright and shiny. Angus Fairhurst was the first casualty of the winds of change; there will be others. Meanwhile Hirst, barks Barker, ìis still an artist punching above his weightî. Whether that means his weight in gold remains to be seen. Who else will survive the crunch? It depends what they’re selling. Artists who sell themselves, like Tracey Emin, may find investors less ready with their cash. Emin has become an artist, like Beuys and Warhol, whose personal image is inseparable from her art. On the press invitation to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s ìeagerly awaited exhibitionî Tracey Emin: 20 Years, she is recognisable by her legs alone. The image on the card, blown up to 20ft at the exhibition entrance, shows a tanned and toned butt in black bikini bottoms, shapely legs going most of the way to the ground, a paint-spattered apron and a brush dangling idly from a bejewelled hand, apparently awaiting inspiration for one of her ìintensely personal paintingsî which, like Sir Lancelot to the Lady of Shallot, cometh not. Till now, Tracey has been a gift to the contemporary art market. At a time when ‘popular art’ is officially proscribed – unlike popular music on which serious critics can expatiate with impunity – our Trace has done a tremendous job of selling unpopular art to a hostile public simply by smothering it in celebrity. In its publicity, the SNGMA courteously acknowledges the art world’s debt: ìHer autobiographical, confessional art has tapped into the mainstream of public consciousness, and has contributed to an unprecedented surge of interest in contemporary art in Britain.î It then rather spoils the compliment by adding patronisingly: ìEmin’s great achievement is to have drawn upon her background – that sort of backgrounds a lot of people share [though not people like you and me darling] but which is largely uncharted territory in the world of artÖî Like it or lump it, Tracey is a national treasure. She’s also a trouper, out there performing for the cameras at the RA Summer Exhibition press view, keeping the show on the road for media hacks who wouldn’t have bothered turning up without her. In her way she’s as much of a show pony as Kylie, and should be considered for the next round of rosettes, sorry, OBEs. What she lacks as an artist in inspiration and perspiration she makes up for in ego. Like Jade Goody, she has won the public’s heart by an almost selfless degree of self-obsession, coupled with a genius for trading on a bad girl image. All the world loves a baddie who plays ball. The scowling Andy Murray won his Highland Spring sponsorship deal because, said his agent, ìHe doesn’t do commercial smiles.î Tracey does do smiles, but they’re twisted enough to persuade us that there’s bad in the old girl yet. It can’t be long before she launches her own perfume; she could trade under the name The Margate Packet. But as the fate of Jade Goody’s fragrance ShhÖ - or Shut-it-you-slapper - illustrates, the celebrity market is fickle. And, as Warhol knew, it messes with your head. In his autobiography, the sage of the celebrity age described how a company once offered to buy his aura, which set him thinking about what it was. He decided it was something only a stranger could see and that it vanished as soon as you opened your mouth (watch out Tracey). This made him nostalgic for the professional security of his days as a jobbing illustrator: ìWhen I used to do shoe drawings for the magazines I would get a certain amount for each shoe, so then I could count up my shoes to figure out how much I was going to get. I lived by the number of shoe drawings – when I counted them I knew how much money I had.î His conclusion was ìyou should always have a product that’s not just ‘you’. An actress should count up her plays and movies and a model should count up her photographs and a writer should count up his words and an artist should count up his pictures so you always know exactly what you’re worth, and you don’t get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame, and your aura.î With the economic storm a-brewing, auras are starting to look more volatile than Aurothioglucose. At any moment the aura market could be gone with the wind, and only disappointed investors will give a damn. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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