When Art meets Money Encounters at the Art Basel Franz Schultheis Erwin Single Stephan Egger Thomas Mazzurana When Art meets Money Encounters at the Art Basel 1 Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek 44 Edited by Christian Posthofen Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2 Franz Schultheis Erwin Single Stephan Egger Thomas Mazzurana When Art meets Money Encounters at the Art Basel Translated by James Fearns 3 Translated and published with the support of the Dr. Albert Bühler-Reindl-Fund of the University of St. Gallen. Layout Conny Jelitte, Druckhaus Zanker, Markdorf Print bookfactory, Bad Münder © Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Ehrenstr. 4, 50672 Köln Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibligrafie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Printed in Germany Distribution: Germany & Europe Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Fon +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-53 Fax +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-60 [email protected] UK & Eire Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street GB-Manchester M1 5NH Fon +44 (0) 161 200 15 03 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 15 04 [email protected] USA & Canada D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers 55 Sixth Avenue/ 2nd Floor USA-New York, NY 10013 Fon +1 (0) 212 627 1999 Fax +1 (0) 212 627 9484 [email protected] ISBN 978-3-86335-744-3 4 Contents Preliminary Remarks 7 1 At the Fair The event and its narrations 11 2 The Market and the Brand Art fairs, an „Olympics“, and its athletes 29 3 Liaisons dangereuses The galleries and the trade fair 63 4 An Art of Distinction Collecting – On the appropriation of immaterial goods 93 5 Confessions and Commodities The cult of art and its public 127 6 Times of Discontent An art market without artists 155 7 Art in Motion On the dynamics of an economy of symbolic goods 171 8 When Art meets Money An attempt to take stock 205 Postscript 227 Appendix 233 5 6 Preliminary remarks The most expensive painting of all time, the most valuable living artist, new sales records at Christie‘s, purchases running into millions in Basel, huge yachts in Venice, fountains of champagne at Miami Beach, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Louis Vuitton – for some years now the relationship between „art“ and „money“ has been thematized with mounting criticism. The discussions create the impression that this relationship has entered into a new stadium, as if one were the witness of at least the engagement if not the wedding of two worlds. But even if the impression is not deceptive, will this ever turn out to be a love relationship? Why is it that the sensation-conscious depictions of these superlatives are at the same time accompanied by a certain degree of moral indignation, which is often only scantily clad as an attempt to show ironic distance? The ambivalence of this constellation becomes intelligible when one takes into account the enormous claims which the art of the present day not only makes but is also confronted with – it should achieve scarcely less than the shaping of a different truth and reality beyond the banality of everyday life and our entanglement in the world. And what is more, it should do so independently of this claim, committed only to its own ideal and exclusively obeying its own laws. It is easy to understand why the barefaced appearance of money in this scenario seems disturbing, even shameless. We are, however, faced here, in the first place, with a very classical script. Modern art, as we wish to know and experience it, has lived since the end of the nineteenth century from precisely this realized myth, from a repression of the economic world, from its increasingly radical distancing from the demands of the state, of bourgeois tastes, of all kinds of affirmative and decorative needs – and it can only be converted into money when „worldly“ tastes have submitted to its aesthetic regime. Is this script still valid today? What could make more sense than to pursue this question by examining a phenomenon which epitomizes this relationship between art and money, its structures and mechanisms, its claims and contradictions as scarcely any other does – the most significant art fair worldwide, the Art Basel. The phenomenon Art Basel gives voice to the tendencies of modern art events in an incomparably succinct fashion and it does so just within the framework of that semantics which to this today feeds on the historically achieved autonomy of the arts over „the world“, of the sacred over the profane. The Art Basel is more than just a fair in the commercial sense of the word, more than a temporally and spatially concentrated gathering of dealers offering their goods for sale to interested buyers. It is at the same time the site of a display of „holy“ goods in the presence of thousands and thousands of believers, a pilgrim‘s goal for the ritualized adoration of traditional relics of art history and the forecourt of the consecration of their contemporary manifestations. The Art Basel is also, and for the very same reason, the decisive witness of the upheaval marking a radical change in that relationship between „art“ and „money“ which has increasingly become a subject of discussion – with all the consequences, not at least for the evaluation of what is to be regarded „globally“ as „genuine“ art. 7 That is the reason behind the choice of this setting and this book. It is the result of a research project stretching over several years, of an „ethnography“ of the fairs in Basel and Miami Beach; and it is supported by an abundance of material. A decisive source is provided by more than a hundred detailed interviews with the most important actors at the fairs, with the management and „staff“, with gallery owners and collectors, with museum directors and curators, art consultants and artists. In addition there are findings deriving from an intensive observation of what goes on at the fair, conversations in the galleries, the initiation of purchasing negotiations, the behaviour of the visitors, which has also been recorded photographically a thousandfold. Of course secondary material must also find a place in such a publication, primarily the results of previous research, statistical sources, the relevant press reports – but the emphasis of the study lies on the precise interpretation and understanding observation of the phenomenon observed, on the social practice. Within the framework of this publication it was by no means possible to exploit the abundant material exhaustively. This results in a certain degree of heterogeneity in the individual chapters. This is not only because four authors have worked on the text, whose personal handwriting clearly remains recognizable. The treatment of the „actual“ givens, often a presentation of facts on the contemporary art market and then the reproduction of „stories“ followed by an attempt to reflect systematically on the perceptions of the actors – the difficult bridgebuilding between the empirical, the practical and the theoretical – has without doubt also left its traces. And nevertheless the reading of the text quickly makes it clear that the conception and interpretation of the ethnography of an exemplary segment of the contemporary art market presented in this case study owes its approach to a perspective which has made decisive fruitful contributions to the discourse on art in the last twenty years – to the many works of Pierre Bourdieu, who can be regarded at the latest since his epochal study Les règles de l‘art as one of the leading representatives of a theoretically advanced and yet empirically saturated sociology of art. This circumstance has some consequences, among others for the style of the argumentation. If one wished to proceed only at the theoretical level the book would, in spite of many concrete examples, turn into an academic treatise. But this was not its purpose. Instead the publication is addressed to the actors in the art world themselves, without however being able to blend out completely the discussion at the level of art theory. There are also consequences in regard to the degree of possible disagreement. If the concrete findings of this study can be generalized then a position comes to the fore which, in spite of all the overlapping, can in a certain fashion be perceived as „uncom- fortable“. One reason is that the talk of the „commercialization“ of art formulates concepts whose suggestive character tends to contradict the requirements of an unbiased understanding. But the dimensions of the processes involved are greater. This is, above all, the case because the discourse in art theory has long bid farewell to „modernism“, although all the indications are that this is a premature departure, if one does not mean by it a sclerosis of the social configurations of the modern art field, but its „modernist“ logic as a whole. The line of argumentation in this book is different and moves in a different direction. 8 And finally there are consequences for the self-perception of the participants in the field. If one does not understand this publication as „socio-analysis“, not as an attempt to describe the logic of the phenomena in the art field with all their immense powers of „devotion“ to art, then this normative constellation can very quickly turn into a „personal“ one and give rise to feelings of hurt. But this also was not our purpose. The disclosure of the ways the „magical“ functions in our profane world puts belief to the test. But it can also help us to better understand ourselves and the world in which we are imprisoned.