You know the night time
(night and day)
is the right time
(night and day)
to be
(night and day)

Kenneth Baker reviews "Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth" at SFMOMA. He says that the Kiefer show, with a nudge from Richard Serra's Gutter Corner Splash: Late Shift—a permanent installation the museum usually tucks away but decided to bring out for company—rises to level of "museum event of the year." I won't argue with that. If Melancholia is any indication, though, Baker's seeing a lesser show than the exhibit viewers were treated to in Fort Worth and the District.

Baker's opening caught my attention:

In 1988, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art paid more than $350,000 for a giant painting—Isis and Osiris (1985–87)—by Anselm Kiefer. At the time, many observers, including me, voiced skepticism about this move on the part of a museum whose collection provided scant context for Kiefer's art and that did not even have its own building. [Link added]

Neither Baker nor anybody else is going to call that a mistake in hindsight, but that's hardly the point. This sale was a capital moment in the American market for Kiefer. The story also serves as the lede for Richard Polsky's Artnet 2005 market report. In it, Polsky rates the artist a "Buy." (In the next sentence he calls Kiefer a "living European art god," which in technical terms promotes the artist to "Recommended Buy" status.) Polsky writes:

Given the immense size of Kiefer's works, their non-archival materials and steep prices, it's a wonder that anyone other than institutions manage to buy them. A few more accessible exceptions come to mind, such as his giant books. These sculptural objects are "bound" with pages of malleable lead, covered with stained black-and-white photographs. Kiefer's books, which need their own sturdy table for display, can still be had for approximately $200,000—but rarely appear at auction.

Kiefer has painted smaller works, too—notably the watercolors that appeared that appear in the show, works I for one was glad to see. These smaller pieces ground Kiefer—even if only by association within the trade. They resemble in scale and scope the bread-and-butter works of many ambitious artists whom the market does not recommend so favorably.*

"Small scale" isn't something you say about Kiefer. Take a gander at Peter Schjeldahl's account of the artist's notorious 1993 exhibition at Marian Goodman, 20 Jahre Einsamkeit (20 Years of Solitude)—featuring finished canvases (worth millions) stacked high in a junk heap interspersed with sunflowers, in addition to a collection of semen-soaked blank journals that documented the artists sexual activity from 1971 to 1991. (There's a priceless bit about a celebratory dinner in which guests were served pancreas and other B-side organs.)

Alec Soth reads the Vanity Fair art issue and snips another Kiefer/market mention from some industry hobnob. Jeffrey Deitch questions Kiefer's market presence:

Great things get lost through the cycles of the art market. Take Anselm Keifer, who in the late 80's was probably the most desired artist of that generation in the art market. Nowadays, one is even cautious about putting up a major Kiefer at auction because you don't know if there will be enough people there to buy it. So a major, major Kiefer might be well sold at a million dollars, whereas Lisa Yuskavage [a 44-year-old painter whose provocative works toy with soft-core porn] might get the same price.

To start, Deitch is talking about the violent indigestion that struck the market after it gorged on the oversized neo-expressionist canvases of the 80s by the likes of Julian Schnabel. And works by Kiefer, too—though he's more guilty by association than for producing a glut of faddish works. Gordon Burn glosses the history in a Guardian review:

If Julian Schnabel hadn't come along when he did in the early 1980s, the market, ever ready to buy into the cult of the driven and angst-ridden artist, would have had to invent him. Wall Street was in full flood; the bull market had started its five-year run, which lasted from 1982–87; and art, in addition to the varieties of glamorous lifestyle feedback it offered, had become the smart place for futures traders and hedge-fund managers to put their money. Schnabel's paintings on horsehide and broken plates, which were priced at $2,000 apiece in his first show, had jumped to $40,000 apiece by his third. At the head of the queue was the bright young collector from England, the newly rich advertising executive Charles Saatchi.

Saatchi promoted Kiefer, too. So while Kiefer's works have held up infinitely better than Schnabel's, everyone took a hit quality notwithstanding, and it's taken the market some time to regain its appetite for large works that present major archival obstacles right out of the box. It would be surprising that the market for these works was ever so strong in the first place, and continues to grow, if we weren't talking about a living European art god.

Lisa Yuskavage, the painter to whom Deitch compares Kiefer, doesn't come close. That's not to say that she isn't good—she is. The brick-house blondes in her "motherfucker" portraits merit her strong sales. Deitch is drawing the wrong conclusions: Yuskavage's painting may be tricky, but it's not radically problematic to buy or own. Kiefer's just that much harder. Deith concludes:

Sex sells. People want sexy images. This goes back to the old masters, to French 19th-century academic painting. You know, Cabanel, or 18th-century painters like Fragonard, Boucher. They're sort of excuses for people to have high-class pornography in their homes. This is nothing new. Go back to the Italian Renaissance with the nude male and female figures. They're religious subjects but have lots of prurient interest, too—for people who are in circles where they cannot have Playboy calendars pinned up to their walls.

That's a bit much, but JL of Modern Kicks made a kind-of similar observation that was much closer to the mark—"who can stand such ponderousness?"—in his response to my notes on Kiefer. Is it really the sex that's selling so much more? Or is the market balancing massive, fussy, gloomy, backward-looking masterpieces alongside relevant, academic, accommodating, fetching portraits? Eros and thanos? More like apples and oranges.

* Now, I'm pretty sure those watercolors never served that purpose for Kiefer, and it's anyway been a long, long time since he's had to think about something so mundane as selling his work. I doubt he's even used the bathroom since the early 70s. If he has made less imposing works specifically suited to a lower market rung, those works have been photographs.

Posted by Kriston at November 15, 2006 2:58 PM