Fickle-Down Economics

"Formalism and Its Discontents." "Aestheticism Lite." "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics." New Republic art critic Jed Perl has always tapped the marketplace for the clever coinage in his art criticism. But the market doesn't lend itself to the conclusions Perl draws, and yesterday's contemporary art-market record high at Sotheby's is reason enough to revisit a few of Perl's balder claims.

Perl is a prickly critic; dislike is his default state. He isn't pleased with whatever's clever. That much he's made clear in frequent and often blistering tirades published by The New Republic, from whose ramparts Perl has blasted a broad range of artists who share one feature in common: They enjoy popularity or notoriety. A handful of postwar artists—so-called Silver Age AbEx painters, such as Joan Mitchell—qualify for his grace in New Art City, his (quite decent) reconsidered art history of "the Byzantine city within the Byzantine city" (i.e., present-day Chelsea). But Perl himself can tell you best how he feels about the progress of art: "[C]ertain artists were perhaps not so much acting in history as they were responding to popular demand, to what [Dwight] MacDonald, quoting Kierkegaard, called 'a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public.'"

In his latest piece, the critic is pitted against the titted: "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics", an essay he penned earlier this year, is a double-fisted denunciation of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and that phantom menace, the public, who tolerates them. But Perl gets in another bête noir in this piece, too: the art market. He writes:

Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now pervasive in the upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics.

The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now--think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other.

How to square that downcast view of the market with the record-smashing Rothko sale? Originally valued at $40 M, White Center (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose) cleared $72 M. If financial valuation has forked off of aesthetic valuation, what to say about Rothko, an artist whose work, if not unassailable, probably isn't the standard flown by this new financial-existential threat?

And why say anything about Currin and Yuskavage at all? They aren't the high-tide markers of the market; if anything, these artists benefit from the buoyancy that established master lend. Artnet published an end-of-the-year report in 2006 discussing fall auction results. Of 2,800 auction records, these are the top 10:

There's the real "gold rush" of modern and contemporary art sales, and I don't think you'll find evidence to support "a new attitude" toward art valuation (aesthetic, that is, not financial). Furthermore, it's not merely in the highest tier that the status quo holds:





A sample taken from lower down the list reveals more contemporary artists, but established artists are predominant.

Moving down the list of the top 400 record sales, you'll find no mention of Currin or Yuskavage. Which doesn't say much—they might not have come up at auction in the fall; if they did but didn't set records they nevertheless sold high, to be certain. In any case, 2006 was not the year for either of them. Why did Perl feel the need to highlight these artists as the exemplars of excess?

Or [collectors] may enjoy their Currin as a financial trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power. Or they may regard it as an object of delectation, in much the way that they have been instructed by some art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy a Bonnard.

In fact, collectors are enjoying Bonnard just fine:





But back up: Why should high sales for Bonnard make for dumb collectors of Bonnard? The more he says about collectors and viewers, the more he reveals that Perl's phantom public is one that he's willed into existence by the sheer ecto-plasmodic power of his imagination. Trendy contemporary artist? The buyers don't know art history and don't consult the critics. Established classical master? The buyers happened on it only by paying so much filthy lucre to art-world buttinskis.

Here's the article I think Perl could write: "Fickle-Down Economics". A treatise about how the boisterous art market promotes speculation on the work of untested artists at the margin. This would be, of course, nothing new about art or about markets, but it would give Perl license to hunt his bugaboos. Playing amanuensis to the marketplace doesn't play to his strengths if at the end of the day that's what he's interested in doing.

Posted by Kriston at May 17, 2007 11:53 AM