Seven Days In The Art World

Seven Days in the Art World is a book by Sarah Thornton, recently published in Japanese by Random House about the global art world. She is also a sociologist! I also discuss Don Thompson’s not so good book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses.


Of Art and Ethnography

Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W.W.Norton, Nov 2008)
Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, Sept 2008)

WITH TATE LONDON the most visited tourist site in the capital, and the likes of Damien Hirst getting regular front page news and magazine coverage, contemporary art has never been more visible or more discussed. Perhaps no other form of cultural production and consumption better expressed the spirit and hubris of the high rolling 1990s, which rolled on with the good times while they lasted into the 2000s—an apparently boundless aesthetic playground for the global elite, rich and beautiful. The contemporary art world offers a distinction-packed culture beyond language and borders, thriving in an ever more visual age, and booming with new finance sources, technological innovations and lifestyle reverberations. These two attractive books, written by former or sometime academics, but pitched for a best seller market, take us inside this lurid and seductive world. Sarah Thornton offers us a “stray cat” participant observation of her adventures wandering through seven dimensions of the global art world today, talking to all the protagonists at an auction, at an art fair, at an art school, at a museum prize, in the corridors of an art magazine, in an artist’s studio, and at a biennale. Don Thompson, meanwhile, sets out to explain the inflated sales dynamics achieved by the branding operations of superstar artists, art dealers, and auctioneers: a pop economics aimed at readers surprised or scandalised by kind of price tag achieved in recent years in auctions for rotting sharks in formaldehyde tanks or horses with their heads stuck through white gallery walls.

For Thornton, art is the new religion for an über-cultivated, rootless class of global atheists. More obviously and profanely, though, her stories portray the contemporary art world as the new rock-and-roll for a seemingly vast and growing cosmopolitan elite of rich, ageing hipsters, all in search of their mojo at a rotating parade of glam locations, from Venice and Basel, to London, LA and New York. Seven Days is a quite special book, not only because it stands a chance of reaching a rather less fast lane mainstream airport bookstore audience, but also because it will be received and cherished by the personalities and wannabes of that world itself. Her achievement is to pull off this lightness of effect while retaining the integrity of a rather old school sociological ethnography, combining research techniques from American “grounded theory” – particularly the legacy of Howard Becker’s classic study, Artworlds – with a very effective naturalisation of a Pierre Bourdieu-style structural analysis of art as a competitive field of distinction, identity and value. Such references and academic signposts are elided in the text, although a guide to further reading is provided; the author and her trade publishers clearly do not want to upset non-academic readers. Yet, given the theory and jargon-obsessed predilections of contemporary anglo-american cultural studies, social anthropology or art theory, her book might easily get overlooked as nothing more than sparkling, atheoretical reportage. This would be unfortunate. Seven Days, rather, should be welcomed as a breakthrough contribution to the ethnography of contemporary culture: a close to definitive glimpse, through brilliant polished windows, at one of the most revealing examples of a genuinely global social milieu. With rigour and subtlety, Thornton displays what qualitative sociology can do at its best: listen, observe and learn, while paying meticulous attention to the life-worlds of research subjects themselves.

The author’s strategy is to treat the contemporary art world as a precious game of interaction and trust: a web of interwoven, mutually supportive roles, filled by artists, curators, auctioneers, writers, struggling art students, and (vitally) the collectors who buy the work, and held together by a shared belief that takes everything going on in this often bizarre and crazed world with deadly seriousness. Thornton takes a flat approach to the ethnography, treating everyone and everything she observes with equal importance, and casting herself as the neophyte: “a baby”, as she describes it, learning how to walk and talk her way into and up the art world. Along the way, she really has talked to everyone. Spectacularly famous names are dropped casually on every page, and the extraordinary access she is rewarded with allows her to describe each of her types casually in situ, analysing their thoughts and self-understandings, usually through their own words. The book is a masterpiece of composition. Several years of patient fieldwork, and a no doubt uneven and unwieldy databank of interviews, telephone calls, and snatched conversations, are reconstructed with literary flair as seven flowing days in seven beautiful locations. The material she gathers is almost uniformly good, well edited, well written, with eye for sharp quotations, character and place. And the neophyte asks the right naïve questions: What is an artist? How do dealers sell works? What gives a work value? The answers are complex and inconclusive, but always very entertaining—and Thornton is brave enough to leave the work as a series of open artistic impressions rather than definitive academic conclusions.

It is a warm, affectionate portrait. Thornton nearly always treats her characters with the seriousness they themselves assume, eschewing the obvious temptation for satire. Whatever critical sociology edge she might have brought to the work is thus mostly smoothed off. Thornton does (rightly) complain about the gendered exclusion of frequently undervalued women artists, or the brute dollars-and-cents machismo of the financial side of art, but much more insight is generated as she relaxes into her own self-appointed role: showing that being a curious and attractive young woman, ready to ask an impertinent question, can get you fabulous ethnographic access—and at least a good quote or two. A famous womanising septuagenarian collector whisks her off her feet at the Basel Art fair, getting her precious insights as she shadows his purchases. Then, in one of the funniest moments, she tries her luck with the famous collector couple, the Rubells, asking if she can shadow them too—to be told, “certainly not!”. That would be like asking to have access to their bedroom, they tell her. Later, an off the cuff greeting to an agent in a corridor away from the action, reveals to her the secret purchaser of a new million dollar work by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami… And so on. All this access was surely not as smooth and unproblematic as she narrates it, but the book is a genuinely reflexive ethnography—that lets the reader see how it has been constructed, and which has allowed all those portrayed to read and give feedback on the portrait. This scrupulously fair methodology again captures the spirit of ethnography at its best. The key to this working is not to pass aesthetic judgement on any of the art works in the book: their value is a hermetic product of the milieu itself, a wonder stuff in which everyone believes. Still, her warmest words are reserved for the artists themselves: the pioneers of American conceptual art, such as John Baldessari, and glimpses of genius – or at least geniality – from the Turner Prize runner up Phil Collins, or the young Italian Francesco Vezzoli at Venice.

For sure, the trust and beliefs of this social world are a fragile ecosystem. A more cynical or critical reductive reading could easily burst the art bubble that everyone is living in. Thornton, though, is not interested in spoiling the party. Grayson Perry worries in his blurb that too much of this world has been demystified in the book, but in truth it is a mostly a romantic portrait. The compelling power of Seven Days in fact lies in the degree to which Thornton clearly yearns to be part of the world she observes. Her great expectations are, for the main part, warmly received, so the transaction stays sympathetic and mutual. Critical identity as an analytic scholar is maintained through uncaptioned observations and delicate asides, a balance mostly pulled off as long as she is still fresh faced enough in the new world. Only perhaps in the closing chapter in Venice does the tone get self-congratulatory. Thornton goes for a dip in the pool at the Hotel Cipriani, and gads around by water taxi to a lot of pre-opening parties, transcribing a lot of pompous declarations by famous curators. They hail her now as a friend and co-conspirator in the great art game. Thornton has made it—and she knows it. In the book’s closing image we are implicitly invited to applaud her, just as was the novice superstar artist Anish Kapoor, as she describes him entering a restaurant in Venice after his first breakthrough biennale show.

It is perhaps this socially mobile dynamic in the book, that accounts for the fact that Thornton mostly dwells on success and fame in the art world, not its obverse—despite, in fact, the truth that this world is driven not by the stars who made it, but the also rans, in vast numbers, who get smashed trying. Only once do we get a glimpse of this other side of art: in a light and sensitive portrait of a day amongst slacker students at a California art school. The lockjaw of theory and conceptualism on contemporary art is graphically illustrated in the scorn these struggling and mostly hopeless young artists pour on notions that art has anything to do with “beauty” or “affect”. Everyone in the art world today talks this talk today, but it has to be noted how much a role these desperately old fashioned notions still play in motivating the big auction sales—something well observed by Don Thompson. But apart from the students, Thornton has much less to say about the lives and work of the legions of those who are always hopefully (or euphemistically) referred to “emerging” artists, trying to make the leap across the chasm from art school to Turner prize nomination. The book analyses the anxieties of the Turner prize nominees, but these are already “successful” artists; the everyday action in the art system is generally going on well below this, at a more intermediate level, in the mundane actions of dealers and artists to scratch out a career and living against its brute statistics of failure.

In his book, Don Thompson offers some guestimates of the numbers of such artists in cities in London or New York: it’s a numbing thought. Behind the couple of dozen or so big earners, and the few hundred who make a decent middle class living, there are thousands more – Thompson thinks about 40,000 in each city – devoting their lives at cost to a lost artistic cause. How breakthrough success is produced – and whether talent, creativity, or originality really has anything to do with it – is not really addressed by Thornton. The most salient fact we learn about the surprise winner of the 2005 Turner Prize, Tomma Abts – who is, unusually, an abstract painter – is that she was once Chris Ofili’s girlfriend. Thornton follows art world convention in sidelining the “unschooled” work of “outsider artists” – as would any insider – as worthless, if exuberant, forms of creativity that have by definition no place in contemporary art theory. But on any consistent sociological account, “Art” with a capital A can only be creativity that has been sanctioned by a self-sustaining social system. As her book vividly illustrates, there is precious little dividing these universes of value bar the talk, the social networks, the mutual recognition and the market hype of the self appointed art insiders. In recent years, these fine lines have been very unstable. The dynamics of contemporary art are in fact all about how objects can and do get moved and actively reclassified from valueless junk to priceless art in very short order—a good case in point being the rapid move lately of street and graffiti art from brick walls to white cube walls. This is a symptom of the circularity of modern art theory and history: as Thornton puts it, how making art history is all about “changing the way we look at art”. Hence, the players of this game spend all their time trying to capitalise and commodify anything they can find in the margins that might one day sell, but it is a process of valuation that can only happen once, and leaves the art world racing in circles that have been emptied of any intrinsic aesthetic value.

Joe Public’s contempt for the stuffed shark or headless horses on walls is a part of this game; a source of bankable media scandal that the Young British Artists used to great effect for over a decade in their one-off ascent to fame. But to build a career on one off stunts is a limiting strategy. A similar problem might be pointed to in the work of an ethnographer. Thornton’s material is so rich and seductive precisely because this was a virgin field to which she got to first. The ethnographer living out their material as an observer participant can never step in the same river twice; just as another ethnographer cannot truly re-tread in Thornton’s footsteps or – in scientific terms – replicate and validate her findings. Research such as this depends entirely on the personalised sense of authority and insight the writer herself can generate from their own account. Thornton largely convinces us of her interpretation on most points. Only once or twice does she go too native. One example is the way she misses the chance to challenge the uncomfortable fiction of classlessness that pervades the contemporary art world, despite (paradoxically) its inherent dependence on all kinds of complex stratifications of status, hierarchy and value. A handful of rich kid art students slumming it in thrift shop clothes, cannot mask the massive prop of class and wealth privilege that holds up the gallery, auction and art media systems, debarring access for most. The classlessness that art world insiders feel about their world, is as much as an illusion (or collective delusion) as the $12 million allegedly paid for the famous stuffed shark (that was in fact not stuffed but pickled, and was actually sold for $8 million). The art world’s most famous proletariat acts – Hirst’s foul mouthed PR routines, or Tracey Emin’s drunken mad-for-it provocations on prime time TV – are the exceptions that prove the rule. Class, in fact, is coded in only one way in Thornton’s analysis: through her tart observations en passant about the clothes her various art world characters are wearing. While the auction directors are observed wearing this year’s catwalk fashion, the talkative dealers she meets wear Hugo Boss off-the-rail pin-stripes, and the sad academics she encounters with obvious disdain when wandering briefly back into one of her old haunts – an academic congress – are stuck in their shabby and worn out conference suits. You feel Thornton is wearing Prada by the time she swans into Venice.

Given the timing of the study, one thing that is curiously absent is the Chinese art boom, surely the big art story of the last few years. Instead of letting him theorise pretentiously, Thornton might have asked superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist how and why he has spent so much time in China lately, as he has played a central role in the blowing up of a new East Asian art bubble. As this point suggests, the complacent Euro-American domination of “world” art needed decentring, a shift Thornton mostly misses, although does gesture towards by making the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami her central case study of the superstar artist in action. Unfortunately, Murakami and his acolytes are in many ways a misrepresentation of Japanese and Asian art today, so comprehensively has he seduced the western art world with his distorting, superflat vision of Japanese contemporary art.

It is easy to get lost in translation here. Again, Thornton builds on extraordinary insider access, getting whisked across Tokyo to meet the great man by his Los Angeles dealers, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, and eventually flying up with them all to a foundry in provincial Toyama where Murakami’s new sculptural work is to be unveiled. This chapter is certainly the funniest, with great quotes from the entire cast. Blum and Poe become Coen brother characters, Thornton scoring cheap laughs off these two self styled, hard drinking, west coast money men who have done more than any other western art world figures to make Murakami famous. We wince along with the curatorial assistant, Mika Yoshitake, as she contemplates compromising her hard won academic credentials for work in Murakami’s brash and trashy world. And the laughs get even louder as we follow the effusive Paul Schimmel, chief curator of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, as he offers his measured art historical judgement on Murakami’s new work, a giant Oval Buddha sculpture in platinum leaf: “unfuckingbelievable!”, he gasps.

While everyone else seems to be forgetting there is a stray cat with sharp ears and eyes in the room, Murakami himself cannily shows Thornton only his western face: the chubby, cheerful, workaholic, hippy artist, cod-philosophising about his “much complicated brain” in comical Japanenglish. Murakami as always knows what he is doing. His other, Japanese face, familiar to his fans and foes alike back home, is an arrogant, aggressive, cunning and often ruthless entrepreneur on a mission to smash the traditional Japanese art system, and fool the imperialist West (especially Americans) with a flat and purposefully bland neo-japonist brand. No surprise then that controversies about the value of his plastic, mass-produced art swirl around his work, as much as they do for Maurizio Cattelan (the horse-in-gallery artist), whose ambiguous stature is openly discussed in the book. Murakami wins the PR battle here, symptomatically perhaps, since his Kaikai Kiki organisation is also the most controlled and oppressive space Thornton encounters in the book. The ethnographer pussy foots around the organisation, trying to get a view unmasked by Murakami’s ever present PR minders, and substantiate allegations about exploitation and maltreatment of employees in the company. We get glimpses of the rather miserable lives of his assistants, and the dubious quality of Murakami’s roster of adolescent bedroom girl artist—who are all mass producing western orientalist fantasies of Japan for the corporation. Thornton does well enough to smuggle out her notes here, but she struggles to avoid reducing the strangeness she observes to clichés about Japanese organisations. And so she describes, as a matter of fact, Murakami drilling his hip young employees through a morning session of traditional corporate callisthenics, neglecting to comment on how completely weird this, in fact, is, or why this ageing otaku artist appears to run his company like the doomsday Aum cult.

The qualities of Thornton’s work, though, are illustrated quite vividly in comparison to Don Thompson’s far less enjoyable or authoritative account of the $12 million shark—and all that. While Thornton shows quite deftly in the space of a 30 page chapter how the game of trust, distinction, theatre and personality conflict can put value on work at an auction or art fair, Thompson struggles to really pin down an explanation in over a couple of hundred pages of anecdotes, as he walks us through a year of poking around auction houses and dealerships in London. He covers much of the same ground, and along the way we get useful lists of the top ten dealers or collectors at work today, as well extensive reports of the business stunts of Damien Hirst or the private life of Francis Bacon. The book falls quite short, though, of delivering an “economics” of this world, largely because of the effort to simplify the analysis for the publisher and general reader. The economics is purely descriptive not theoretical, and short of any citations or references, we are never quite sure about Thompson’s sources, or how he might ground his often subjective take on the relative value and importance of various artists. None of the subjects he portrays are given a voice; he is frequently sarcastic or dismissive when it would have been better to let the art world characters speak for themselves. The observations accumulate in strictly linear chapters, without any attempt to structure the material into a systematic account or capture a gestalt.

As it is, his central thesis is obvious, if not trite. Successful contemporary artists are a brand—and to be successful as a brand you need to get branded. Auction houses and successful dealers are also a brand, he says. Thompson describes in some detail how powerful figures such as Charles Saatchi can make or break the careers of rising or falling artists, or the next-to-illegal means by which auctions houses out manoeuvre each other or push up prices. But despite the barrage of anecdotes, we are no nearer at the end to understanding just how or why Damien Hirst gets away with it, other than being sure that he most certainly does. The strong sense of the book in comparison to Thornton’s is that Thompson never really got allowed in. So he is left sneering at nose ringed gallery assistants who won’t tell him the price of a work for sale, or reminiscing about nearly meeting famous curators who didn’t give him an interview.

Thornton and Thompson’s books will now of course stand as time capsules of the boom years in global art: in the literal sense that with the collapse of the bubble economy, the good times too in art are going to stop. All that money spent on over-hyped, big plastic post-Koons art is going look quite foolish if an art ethnographer goes back to Christie’s or Sotheby’s in a year or two’s time. The authors’ timing is good, and coupled with the privileged access she secured, Thornton’s may prove quite exquisite. Seven Days captures the art boom at its peak: from Christie’s scoring new records in 2004, the magazine Art Forum cruising at the height of its powers, and the media circus of the Turner Prize in 2005, to the melée of Art Basel and the party life at Venice in June 2007, when the boom hit its peak. It should, of course, be remembered that some of art’s financial success during these heady global years was conjunctural. The hedge fund managers and Russian tycoons may have started buying art in the late 1990s and early 2000s because their empty rich lives craved meaning, but it was also, more tangibly, because returns on stocks and shares had become sluggish compared to the boom in oil on canvas and plastic installations with weird video accoutrements. Wide boy characters, such as the breathless buyer agent, Philippe Segalot, have emerged as the true brokers of this world. It is no accident that he appears on several occasions in both books, oiling deals and talking up the art superstars, while trying to sneak into art fairs by the back door to get an unfair advantage. That new characters such as this were becoming so central, is a sign that the old art world roles and routines were indeed being warped by the new money.

It remains to be seen who will be left standing after the latest gold rush has subsided. Buying the latest Jeff Koons has become the equivalent of buying football teams; it was trophy art for massive egos, suitably gargantuan in scale, and just as subtle and empty in its charms. We learn a lot about the glorious global world of yesterday from these books. But only when the bubble purchases have been reassessed will we know which of these contemporary artists are likely to be etched in art history and which will be filling the dumpster trucks outside, to be rifled by the next generation for recyclable parts.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com