Assemble Your Own Aphorism

Here's an interesting intersection of three articles/blog posts I read this morning. I'm sure, with enough time on one's hands, a pithy little aphorism could be assembled by weaving the threads running through them.

First stop is Jonathan Jones' blog on the Guardian. Jonathan quotes Art Review's 2008 most powerful man in the art world, Damien Hirst, ranting about art dealers and the market:

Art is about life and the art world is about money although the buyers and sellers, the movers and shakers, the money men will tell you anything to not have you realise their real motive is cash, because if you realise - that they would sell your granny to Nigerian sex slave traders for 50 pence (10 bob) and a packet of woodbines - then you're not going to believe the other shit coming out of their mouths that's trying to get you to buy the garish shit they've got hanging on the wall in their posh shops ... Most of the time they are all selling shit to fools, and it's getting worse.

Second stop is an interview on Art World Salon with Canadian-born, London-based sociologist-turned-journalist, Sarah Thornton, whose new book, Seven Days in the Art World, is described by AWS Founder András Szántó as follows: it "documents the frenzied peak of the recent art boom ... just as that boom appears to be sputtering out. Some would call this bad timing. In fact, it’s a stroke of good luck. It puts Ms. Thornton in the enviable position of having captured an epic chapter in art-world history in its entirety." The part of the interview that forms part of this post's experiment is:

Some say “art business” is an oxymoron. How do you see it?

You have to be willfully romantic to see “art business” as an oxymoron. Important art is always made by people with more profound goals and intellectual ambitions than simply making money. I also believe that there is little straightforward correlation between long-term artistic and economic value. But, even before Warhol, art and business were inextricably entwined.

What is the single greatest popular misunderstanding about the art market?

That it is not about the art.

Final stop is this news item on The Art Newspaper:

Damien Hirst is to work with the dealer Emmanuel Perrotin and is planning an exhibition in his Paris gallery in April 2010. This is a surprise return to the dealer who hosted one of Hirst’s first solo shows in 1991—and claims to be the only dealer never to have made a profit from the artist.

“Everyone has written that Hirst wanted to bite the hand that fed him,” said Mr Perrotin, referring to the artist’s decision to bypass his dealers by going straight to auction at Sotheby’s in September. “But there’s a difference between asserting a bit of independence and turning your back on your dealers.”

Any takers?