Contemporary British Art

An Introduction

Grant Pooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415389730
• eBook ISBN: 9781135654832
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

The last few decades have been among the most dynamic within recent British cultural history. Artists across all genres and media have developed and re-fashioned their practice against a radically changing social and cultural landscape – both national and global.

This book takes a fresh look at some of the themes, ideas and directions which have informed British art since the later 1980s through to the first decade of the new millennium. In addition to discussing some iconic images and examples, it also looks more broadly at the contexts in which a new 'post-conceptual' generation of artists, those typically born since the late 1950s and 1960s have approached and developed aspects of their professional practice.

Contemporary British Art is an ideal introduction to the field. To guide the reader, the book is organised around genres or related practices – painting; sculpture and installation; and film, video and performance. The first chapter explores aspects of the contemporary art market and some of the contexts within which art is made, supported and exhibited. The chapters that discuss various genres of art practice also mention books that may be useful to support further reading.

Extensively illustrated with a wide range of work (both known, and less well-known) from artists such as Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Anthony Gormley, Jack Vettriano, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen and Tracey Emin, and many more.

1

Perspectives On the Contemporary Art Market and Its Institutions

Introduction

I don’t see what else you can spend your money on. If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That’s as close as you can get to immortality.

(Damien Hirst, 2007)¹

In the summer of 2007, just before the onset of the global financial meltdown, London was the centre of a stratospheric international art boom. Although commentators throughout the specialist trade press and broadsheet arts correspondents had been calling the top of the market for some months, speculative buying had driven auction prizes to new heights. One recent estimate suggested that in the six years since 2002, the British art market had grown by 600 per cent, to an estimated worth of £4.2 billion.² One anonymous collector interviewed by The Art Newspaper noted:

The insides of the auction houses have started to remind me of casinos – art has become monetised. But it is frightened money. If all of a sudden two or three lots fail to get sold, it wouldn’t take much for people to decide that some of this stuff is no longer a repository for serious money.³

A few examples associated with Damien Hirst (b. 1965), one of the iconic Young British Artists (YBAs) whose professional reputations were established in the 1990s, convey the sentiment of a frenetic art boom. Hirst’s Lullaby Spring (2002), from a series of four themed installations, comprises a stainless steel medicine cabinet with razor blade shelving on which there are an array of brightly coloured tablets, pills and capsules. The series draws upon the metaphors, contrasts and associations of the four seasons, with Lullaby Winter featuring predominantly off-white pills. Lullaby Spring was sold at auction for a record-making price of £9.65 million.

The disposal briefly established Hirst as the world’s most highly priced living artist, before the auction in New York of Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold) by Jeff Koons for £11.3 million in November of that year. A telephone bidding war for a Francis Bacon Self-portrait (1978) resulted in a final sale price of £21.58 million. As The Times arts correspondent Dalya Alberge noted, in four days of auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, buyers had spent over £414 million on art. The amount broke all previous records for London-based sales.⁴

In 2007 Hirst’s For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with diamonds, was sold to a consortium for a stated £50 million. The art division of Hiscox insurers described it as the most intrinsically valuable piece of art of the last hundred years by virtue of its 8,601 flawless or near-flawless diamonds and the 2,156 grams of platinum used for the cast.⁵ The work had been carried out by Bond Street silversmiths Bentley & Skinner. According to art trade rumours, during earlier sale negotiations the price for the piece had fallen to £38 million, a figure robustly denied by Hirst’s business manager, Frank Dunphy. The sale price the piece finally secured is unknown since the transaction was private and cash based, although The Art Newspaper subsequently identified Hirst himself as one of the members of the purchasing consortium.⁶

The following September, Hirst mounted his own two-day art sale, bypassing professional art dealers by directly selling 218 art works. The disposal, the biggest such sale by a living artist, raised a record £111 million, and was widely seen as a challenge to the hegemony of the dealer system as well as a conceptual art ‘joke’ at their expense. It also exposed the more nuanced interdependencies that exist between established artists and their dealers. Had work not reached its stated reserve, it would have damaged Hirst’s value for his dealers (Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian) and their existing holdings, a consideration which underpinned their reported bidding interest in the disposal.⁷ In any event, the record outcome suggested that in particular circumstances, auction houses historically concerned with the secondary market could cut out contemporary galleries and dealers in bringing new and recent work to the market.

In 2007 a long bull market in equities, property and commodities of all kinds finally began to unravel. In September 2008, just after a market high and Hirst’s major disposal of recent work, the merchant bank Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. collapsed and the world’s financial markets went into meltdown. Even before this there had been trade speculation that some auction houses had been helping to keep the art market artificially buoyant, effectively acting as private brokers for high-profile pieces, which in garnering media attention would conceal the wider softening of prices (and sentiment) across the market.

In May 2008 Ian Peck, chief executive of the Art Capital group, alleged that such practices had been ongoing for some time as a means of concealing the weakening prospects for mid-range disposals.⁸ But this was not the first time that insiders had identified apparent irregularities within the art market. During the art boom of 1988–90, the then recently established trade publication The Art Newspaper, ran reports alleging that illicit profits, money laundering and tax evasion ploys from businesses in Japan and Italy had effectively driven the market.⁹

It was in these years that the idea of art as a speculative investment gained popularity, particularly among international collectors and buyers. This trend developed throughout the 1990s, with the contemporary art market in particular being driven by investment-based buying from a new demographic, the phenomenon of the super-rich: those with multi-million-dollar fortunes accrued from share brokerage, derivatives, hedge-fund management, property, private equity and portfolios across all asset classes. Although the City of London had become the engine room of the art market, the profile of those investing – principally in the post-war and contemporary period – was international, underlining the globalisation of the market in art. Throughout this period, auction houses reported brisk business from Russian oligarchs and a spread of overseas investors and buyers from Brazil, China, India and the Middle East. According to market analysis by the database service Artprice, between 2003 and 2007 global auction sales of contemporary art grew more than eightfold.¹⁰

Art, entirely commodified, was being referred to routinely as an ‘asset class’. A former Christie’s finance director, Philip Hoffman, who set up the Fine Art Fund, the UK’s first art-based hedge fund, was explicit about the venture’s rationale and the driver for trading practice: ‘Our focus is purely profit. Passion doesn’t come into it. I have bought a piece for £70,000 which we sold for £300,000 two and a half years later, and I loathe it’.¹¹

Two years later, after the market crash and major slide in the value of contemporary art, Hoffman and a syndicate of buyers were reported to be in firesale negotiations with the corporate owners of two major art collections with an estimated value of £40 million. As collectors scrambled to liquidate their stock, art being one of the less divisible of assets, areas of speculative buying shifted to the market in India which was also perceived to be undervalued.

The Contemporary Art Market

The Modernist American art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), memorably described the patronal relationship between the avant-garde and the power elites which have traditionally commissioned and collected their work as akin to an ‘umbilical cord of gold’.¹² Greenberg’s shade would doubtless recognise the acquisitive and competitive dimension to contemporary art patronage, which has driven both British and international markets in recent decades, as it might the attractions of ownership – social cachet and status, aesthetic interest, financial pragmatism, and for those who establish public collections and foundations, a desire for recognition and remembrance. Others have argued that the act of collecting conceals a fundamental vacuity, both personal and existential.¹³

The art trade is among the last major unregulated markets, its dynamic largely a consequence of historically liberalised and open trading arrangements. There is scant regulatory framework for the purchase and sale of art, although dealers and auctioneers are subject to legislation, depending upon jurisdiction and location.¹⁴ Unlike other commodities, there is no comprehensive and auditable registry and history of sales for works of art, although subscription-based index and market information services provide partial windows on quoted market prices for particular artists’ works. Of these, online services such as www.Artnet.com provide market information on the prices for art sold at auction, although caveats remain more generally about the use and reliability of index information on declared transactions.¹⁵

Insider trading, which is illegal and subject to punitive measures in other commodity-based markets, remains a distinctive feature of the British and international art markets. Although less centralised and more diverse than was the case in the 1980s, the UK’s art trade is still geographically clustered. Its artists, dealers, collectors, buyers and curators still represent a largely socially homogeneous demographic within which the distinction between business, networking and socialising, provided through private views, fairs and auction previews, is typically opaque.

As elsewhere in the international art market, the UK’s art trade operates informal protocols. Collectors can be discouraged by dealers from offloading work they have acquired through gallery purchase onto the secondary auction market because of what is perceived to be the negative effect on prices of other work by the same artist(s). Exceptionally, Hirst’s profile and financial status as an artist and international collector enabled the direct disposal of work mentioned earlier, effectively insulating him from some of these pressures. However, anecdotally it is not unknown for smaller-scale collectors and buyers to be ostracised by the handling galleries of artists whose work they have sold at auction.

The sensitivity that underpins the relationship between collector, gallery and artist was demonstrated by an earlier, if somewhat smaller-scale disposal by the art dealer and collector Charles Saatchi, of six canvases by the Italian neo-expressionist painter Sandro Chia in 1985. The artist alleged that the ‘dispersal’ had subsequently affected gallery and critical interest in his work. The British painter Sean Scully also saw eleven of his paintings traded to a Swedish dealer in 1991.¹⁶ Saatchi has generally disposed of work by living artists through both dealers and the secondary market, although like Hirst, he has sufficient power and status within the art market to be largely immune from the consequences of such disposals or censure within the art trade.

Although major dealers and sellers may have gallery space where work is formally displayed, the greatest volume of secondary trade business is now conducted from dealer back offices circulating jpegs of works to prospective buyers and clients. Since the mid-1990s, both private galleries and public museums have started to develop an online presence, realising in the internet a means of establishing a global reach and an international audience. The inauguration of virtual galleries, handling online sales of art, has been one of the market’s more recent and distinctive developments.¹⁷

An important and indicative market maker for the status and value of an artist’s oeuvre is promotion by a major mid-career retrospective hosted by a leading museum or gallery. The selection and planning process, decided upon by trustees, management and members of acquisitions committees (some of whom may have related commercial interests as buyers or collectors in their own right), is not usually subject to any formal or enforceable embargo. Potentially sensitive market information arising from informal decisions and discussions tends to pass across the art trade before formal or public announcements are even made. At the very least this allows for the prospect of trade insiders hedging or securing commercial interest(s) in a particular artist or their oeuvre.¹⁸ One London-based dealer, Kenny Schachter, is on record in describing his initial response to this particular aspect of the art world ethos:

There’s so much insider trading around these retrospectives. Galleries call their top two or three collectors as soon as they find out and let them in on the deal. In commodities trading where I used to work this was called ‘front running’ and it’s illegal. I remember when I first stumbled into the art world, I was shocked that it could be run in such an archaic manner.¹⁹

Schachter’s concerns are illustrated by instances in which art-related institutions (major galleries are typically registered as charities for commercial and liability reasons), have been involved in perceived conflicts of interest. The Tate has been embroiled in various cases, three of which have involved artists as acting trustees: Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. In Deller’s case, it has been estab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cool Britannia, Contemporary Art and the Altermodern
• 1. Perspectives on the Contemporary Art Market and its Institutions
• 2. Post-Conceptual British Painting
• 3. Installation Art and Sculpture as Institutional Paradigms
• 4. New Media in Transition: Photography, Video and the Performative
• Post-Conceptual British Art: New Directions Home
• Bibliography
• Index