Goodbye to all That
January 6th, 2009 comment or link to (permalink)
2008 was an early end to a decade with no name. The millennium? The zeros? The decadent decade, perhaps? It was an entire era of price without value, a zeitgeist that artists would surely try to capture, symbolically. But how to do it and still sell your work? Perhaps Damien Hirst knew how?
Damien Hirst is very rich and he is not stupid. His most daring work of art was an elaborate joke that could have become an icon of an entire decade - a platinum and diamond-crusted real human skull, the world’s most vulgar trophy. Like a gorilla hand ashtray or an elephant foot umbrella stand, this $100 million decorative anatomical trinket needed to be sold to someone very rich and very stupid for it to be complete, a tasteless prize that was bought and therefore self-awarded rather than given.
Who would be the recipient of this severed head which was completely covered in money, but in less money ($25M) than its asking price ($100M)? Would it be a Russian oligarch, a Manhattan property tycoon, a member of the Saud family, a London hedge fund manager, a vapid LA Youtube celebrity or any other of the monstrous avatars of the decadent decade. Sadly, even the diamond skull was a flop, and was rumored to have been bought by Hirst himself, to save face. Like the hedge fund managers, Hirst became rich but left no legacy, and the contemporary art market, which peaked with his $170M takings at the “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale, was merely a bubble created by the super rich who wanted to buy taste, fast.
But this bubble was symbolic. The contemporary art market was leveraged beyond real estate and stocks and its sudden demise tells a better story than the art itself ever could.
Ben Lewis tells the story of the contemporary art bubble in Prospect:
“While British house prices took six years to double at the start of this century, contemporary art managed it in just one, 2006-07. (Over the same period, old masters went up by just 7.6 per cent and British 17th to 19th century watercolours actually lost value.) Contemporary art in the emerging economies did even better. The value of its sales in China increased by 983 per cent in one year (2005-06). In Russia they rose 2,365 per cent in five years (2000-05), while its stock market increased by “only” about 300 per cent…The Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6m (1999-2008); work by the American artist Richard Prince went up 60 to 80 times (2003-2008). The German painter Anselm Reyle was unknown in 2003; you could have picked up one of his stripe paintings for €14,000. Now he has a studio with 60 assistants turning them out for about €200,000 each.”