Undervaluation of women artists

 BBC radio segment on undervaluation of women artists (roughly, selling at 10% of what male artists sell for) here

For those who recoil from audio, as I normally do, there's also a summary in the Guardian here

je n'interviens pas

Rodin, l’exposition du centenaire, dans les galeries nationales du Grand Palais, n’évite pas entièrement l’écueil. Chronologique et thématique, elle constitue sans doute une bonne introduction, un rappel des fondamentaux pour les néophytes. Rigoureuse d’un point de vue académique, pertinente dans sa progression, l’exposition échoue pourtant à recréer la magie qui caractérise l’œuvre rodinienne, ce parfum de scandale et de radicalité. La faute aux lieux, sans doute, ces immenses galeries froides, difficiles à investir quand on est habitué au sublime et intemporel musée Rodin, qui semble pénétré par l’âme de l’artiste.
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Aucune mention de la réception presque traumatisante de ses premiers chefs-d’œuvre ici exposés, entre incompréhension, malaise et sidération. Ces Bourgeois de Calais qui choquèrent par leurs corps décharnés et misérables, aux antipodes des héros courageux et fiers qu’espéraient ses commanditaires de la municipalité. Ce Balzac qui fit d’abord ricaner, avec sa redingote informe et son aspect massif, presque monstrueux, sans bras ni jambe apparente. Cette Porte de l’Enfer enfin, matrice d’où il tira la plupart des grands motifs de sa carrière à venir, œuvre maudite jamais exposée de son vivant. C’est un Rodin trop propre sur lui, sans porosité, qu’on nous présente ici. Officiel.

Yann Perreau at Les Irrockuptibles on the Rodin centenary exhibition, the whole thing here.


Discussing the Kiefer-Rodin exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Perreau quotes Rodin:

“Je sais pourquoi mes dessins ont cette intensité (…) déclara Rodin avant de mourir. C’est que je n’interviens pas. Entre la nature et le papier, j’ai supprimé le talent. 

My collection of the essays of Rodin is unfortunately in storage in New Jersey.

frieze questionnaire

frieze sent me a list of 10 questions - you answer as many as you want to, within 800 words.

It's probably a good sign if you could in fact have written 5000 words.  Anyway, here I am trying to be concise: http://www.frieze.com/article/questionnaire-helen-dewitt

talk the talk

At the end of the 18th century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart academy, noting that ‘there is too much misery in art already; I do not want to increase it.’¹ Wachter uttered his sullen epigram on art education well before the development of postgraduate programmes in studio art, but the weariness of his tone would have only increased if he had read the raft of ‘written components’ – usually in the form of an exegesis – that are now mandatory in art school submissions. Examiners do their best to maintain fresh eyes in front of works that groan under pointless descriptions of dull making processes, overblown and unconvincing attempts by artists to write their own work in an art historical tradition, or perhaps worst of all, interesting practices (de)formed into ‘research questions’ that the works are then supposed to answer. Duchamp did his best to dissuade such thinking, believing that ‘there is no solution, because there is no problem.’² Now the need to find problems to satisfy a demand for academic rigour seems to be the problem.

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As Dieter Lesage has argued, to require an artist to adopt a particular form of writing is precisely to fail to recognise their status as an artist.³ Artists also seem to recognise that the university exegesis yields little aesthetic or professional reward: the market seeks the artist as a producer of mystery, rather than an explainer.

Danny Butt, The Art of the Exegesis, Mute, the rest here

Piece by Sean O'Hagan in the Guardian about Victoria Miro, a gallerist. The agent we long for.

if that isn't aura it'll have to do

Olav Velthuis’s Talking Prices, in contrast to the reductive analyses of Thompson and Galenson, is an extremely wide-ranging and subtle guide to the way in which value is formed in contemporary art. It is superb at teasing out the intricate social and spiritual exigencies of the art-world: as Velthuis puts it at the outset: "we need to go beyond conventional understandings of markets." He records dealers’ apparent lack of interest in prices, their emphasis on being perceived as "really pure," their hostility to the mercantile auction resale process and their (no less than the artists’) orientation to history. He considers the protestant taboos on ostentation, the rituals of market exchange and the inextricable entanglement of market and culture. He stresses the importance to a contemporary art-seller of a "mastery of critical discourse." He writes of the "consecration" of artworks by the establishment (surely a more fertile and precise epithet than "branding") and contrasts the "sacred" space of the gallery to the "profane space" of the back-room where deals are cut. And he comes to the conclusion, paradoxical but in my view correct, that the rituals of the market are not camouflage or a come-on, they are of the essence; and that prices themselves are "cultural entities," that is to say, they have what Velthuis terms "symbolic meanings."

What we have is "an economy of symbolic goods" (a phrase which Velthuis takes from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) in which it is not artists (or branding, or innovation) that determine prices, but rather prices that are a ranking device for artists. In passing, he makes the important comment that "buyers value artworks according to the "proximity" to their creator." In general, handmade works are more highly prized than mechanically produced multiples, for example.

Matthew Bown on Walking Man I &c

one's own Brain

When, in the 1760s, the Earl of Hardwicke attempted to commission Gainsborough to paint a view for him, the artist replied:

Mr Gainsborough presents his Humble respects to Lord Hardwicke; and shall always think it an honor to be employ’d in any thing for his Lordship; but with regard to real Views from Nature in this Country, he has never seen any Place that affords a Subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude. Paul Sanby is the only Man of Genius, he believes, who has employ’d his Pencil that Way – Mr G hopes Lord Hardwicke will not mistake his meaning, but if his Lordship wishes to have any thing tolerable of the name of G. the Subject altogether as well as the figures &c must be of his own Brain.

In this intriguing response, Gainsborough, who was still far from establishing himself among the elite painters of late 18th-century Britain, nevertheless makes it clear to Lord Hardwicke that he wishes to be regarded as a candidate for promotion to the premier league. He is not a servant painter; he has no eagerness to cater to the mistaken taste of a patron whatever the title he bears or the price he offers. He demands respect for the quality of his imagination, of his invention, and wishes to be compared with the great names of Italian landscape art, an ambition that would be compromised if he were to agree to paint views of real places in a country where the landscape is so obviously second-rate. Gainsborough of course loved the English countryside, as a place to walk in, to sketch in, perhaps to retire to – but not as a subject for painting. Individually, the hills, the trees, the roads, the ponds of England might be perfectly paintable, but only when reorganised into structures imagined by the artist’s ‘own Brain’. The name for an artist who would agree to paint the real places, however tame or scruffy, that Hardwicke’s ignorance might lead him to admire, was ‘Mr Sanby’. Sandby, Gainsborough concedes, is nevertheless a man of genius, but he seems to be pretending to believe that only in order to claim the same status for himself: among us men of genius, he implies, only Sandby is sufficiently obedient or mercenary to do what no man of genius should ever do.

John Barrell on Paul Sandby at the Royal Academy, LRB (mainly behind paywall -- it's at times like this that a gift subscription for one's mother really pays off)

the grass is always greener

In a world where $100,000 buys you a not-amazing painting by a developing artist, there are many. That same $100,000 can be used directly, as patronage: as price inflation for paintings continues to rise, the economics of disintermediating the dealer makes a lot of sense for both artists and collectors. Here's Thompson:

For a mainstream gallery, and for an oil painting on canvas by an artist with no gallery history, £3,000 to £6,000 ($5,400 to $10,800) is about right. This is high enough to convey the status of the gallery and not cast doubt on the work or the artist, but low enough that, if the work is promising, it will sell.
If the first show sells out quickly, the dealer will say the pricing was correct. The artist may be underwhelmed, because even selling out one show a year at new-artist prices means she is still living below the poverty line.

Below the poverty line? If you sell a dozen paintings at $8,000 apiece, and the gallery takes half, that leaves you with an annual income of $48,000. The poverty line, by contrast, is $10,400.

But to give you an idea of the inflation going on here, check out the great Dave Hickey, writing in 1997:

When I was an art dealer, any biggish work of art was worth five hundred dollars. Any littlish work of art was worth two hundred. Today, a biggish work is worth a thousand dollars and a littlish work is worth three hundred.

Now, it seems, a biggish work is worth $10,000 and a littlish work is worth $5,000. This changes things for both artists and collectors enormously. For one thing, that new artist really can live on the proceeds of her work, where there's no way she would have been able to do so ten years ago.

More to the point, an investor with $50,000 to spend on one artist has a choice: she can either buy a middling work from a middling artist at a middling dealer, or she can directly support an artist outside the gallery system entirely, buying pieces as necessary, maybe giving her a couple of thousand dollars to live on now and then, possibly helping out with studio space, that sort of thing. That kind of relationship is generally far more rewarding for the benefactor, and might well enable the artist to stay outside the gallery system for long enough that she has the time to develop a real artistic voice before being thrust blinking into the art-world spotlight. For the collector, the non-financial returns are much higher, while the financial returns can be equally large: what's not to like?

Back in the days when the cost of a middling work from a middling artist at a middling dealer was an order of magnitude lower than it is today, this kind of math didn't make much sense: it was much more expensive to support an artist directly than it was to simply buy their work at retail. But now things have changed, and serious artists who want to concentrate on their work more than they want to become the next branded megastar can support themselves by selling directly to a handful of devoted collectors, who might well consider themselves to be getting work on the cheap.

Felix Salmon on Paradoxes of the Contemporary Art Market, at portfolio.com

Art / Show Me the Money

Getzels and Csikszentmihaly (1976) found that most artists were drawn to painting because it allowed social isolation. However, aspiring painters have to promote social relations with art critics, art dealers and buyers to gain notoriety, increase the demand for their art and generate sufficient sales for full-time artistic activity. Failure to do so forced many of the best artists to take another job unrelated to painting.

From "The Role of Deliberate Practice" in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (link to PDF file at Freakonomics review). The reference is to The creative vision: a longitudinal study of problem finding in art, by J.W. Getzels and M. Csikszentmihaly (must find this book).

Hail to the Chief

A reader in Iraq writes:

I've actually been thinking a lot about art in general and performance art in particular. I want to get 3,300 pairs of combat boots, clean and new, and set them up in one long row along a sidewalk near the whitehouse. The pairs of boots will be spaced 21" apart, to show respect and keep the veterans from becoming (too) affronted. Joe and Jill Washingtonian will walk with their child along these rows of unused boots and think, "ah, so tragic, so many dead." Then they'll run into one pair of boots that sticks out. This pair will be dirty and brown with dried human blood. Near it will be a plaque describing the horrific details of the actual death of an actual person - burned alive in his tank when an IED caused the hatch to fuse shut, captured and tortured by having his eyeballs drilled out with a powerdrill before he was shot, etc. And perhaps a framed photo of the corpse. Only one pair like this - the rest of the boots will be smooth, clean, and plain.