Art Seeks Its Own Market Level | Open Thread

Go to the artists' page on Marian Goodman Gallery's website and scroll down to the section for Tino Sehgal. There is no image, of course. There wasn't one on the gallery's page for Mr. Sehgal's work presented on their "booth" at the VIP Art Fair, either. That's because it's integral to Mr. Seghal's practice that no photographs of his work be taken. Indeed, as The New York Times has noted

[H]is pieces cannot involve the transformation of any material, in any way. No written instructions, no bill of sale (purchases are conducted orally, in the presence of a notary), no catalogs and (to the dismay of photo editors in the art press) no pictures.

I use this extreme example in a lecture I give about "Galleries and the Art Market," in a section about selling non-object based work. If Marian Goodman can sell a Tino Sehgal (and she has), I note, then clearly any dealer can sell anything any artist can create.

Of course the logistics of such sales have been being worked out for quite some time. In his book Art of the Deal (and, no, I'm not going to stop talking about it...so go buy it already), Noah Horowitz cites the sale of Yves Klien's Transfer of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62) as one of the clearest precedents for such transactions. Noah also builds a pretty solid case for the notion that the harder artists have worked to create unsellable work (for a host of reasons that only a few ever seem to remain wedded to), the more sophisticated the art market becomes across the board.

In other words, artists attempting to circumvent the art market only seems to make it stronger.

But before those neo-Marxist artists out there get their undies in a bunch, stop and consider that, arguably, it's artists themselves who are the root of this. We all know that you can purchase a drawing of a Land Art work by even Robert Smithson, for example. Documents of less commercial enterprises have long been viewed as marketable "art" objects in and of themselves, and always with the artist or their estate's approval.

And it's not just the market that's become more sophisticated about/complicit in all this. Again, consider Mr. Sehgal:

But Mr. Sehgal, unlike many performance artists, is not protesting the art market itself. His work is specifically conceived to function within the art world’s conventions: it is lent and exhibited, bought and sold. It is sold, in fact — now that Mr. Sehgal is becoming a star in Europe — for five-figure sums.[...]

Mr. Sehgal studied dance and economics, but economics came first. He says his touchstone belief is that his generation must “come up with alternatives of producing in different ways”: a political rather than an artistic issue.”

I can't quite put my finger on how, but more and more I suspect that economics always comes first. Indeed, lately, I've begun to wonder, believing as I do that human expression is progressive, whether it's not somehow the art itself that seeks out the market....needing to sustain itself, ensuring its perpetuation.

I know...that's silly. And, of course, I'm sure the notion that the market will find a way to commodify and then sell anything chafes the neck of the artist with tons of unsold work bursting out of his/her studio.

Still, consider this an open thread on the idea that you cannot make art that someone cannot sell.