In this otherwise mediocre — which I think I’ll poke at in a moment — take on the current state of the artworld, author David Galensen posits that

From the Renaissance onwards, artists were constrained in the extent to which they could innovate by the need to satisfy powerful patrons and institutions. The rise of a competitive market removed this constraint and gave artists greater freedom. Collectors soon recognised that the most innovative art would become the most valuable. In a market setting that rewarded innovation, conceptual artists who could innovate rapidly and conspicuously gained a decisive advantage. And here too Picasso led the way.

While it’s patent that prior to the market, artists were ‘constrained’ by the need to secure their livelihood from patrons and institutions (and it isn’t really obvious to me that this became the case in the Renaissance; medieval artists relied on institutions for their porridge), the lavish praise given to the market as motor of liberty here is pure ideology. The implication is that the personal whim of patrons, apparently, is less desirable that the impersonal adjudication of the market, since the market rewards ‘competition’. This is all cant, even when the talk is about normal commodities like mayonnaise and 3/8” screws, but when it is applied to art it simply becomes lunacy. Artists do not ‘compete’ in the way that artisans and manufacturers do; and the ‘innovation’ that successful artists manage to capitalize has little to do with their product in itself, and more to do with passing trends, the cleverness of curators, and the buzz hummed by gallery-owners. Much more important to an individual artist’s success is the set of practices that established independent galleries (which was mentioned earlier in the piece), but if we turn to that, then we’re not really moving beyond feudalism into a brave modern future; we remain constrained by patronage and personal whim — now, however, that of the gatekeepers of major galleries and other places.

Galensen also makes an odd analytical split between ‘experimental’ and ‘conceptual’ artists:

Important artists can be divided into two types on the basis of their goals and methods. Experimental innovators seek to record visual perceptions. Their goals are imprecise, so they work by trial and error. They build their skills over time, and their innovations appear gradually, late in their lives. Conceptual innovators express their ideas or emotions. The precision of their goals allows them to plan their works and execute them systematically. Radical conceptual innovations depend on the ability to recognise the value of extreme deviations from existing conventions, and this ability declines with experience, as habits of thought become entrenched, so the most important conceptual innovations occur early in an artist’s career.

Even under cursory consideration, the distinction made between these two putative art-practices doesn’t really hold. It’s gasbaggery. Of course, since the overall aim of the piece appears to be the vindication of the independent art market, which Galensen is tying to the explosion of ‘conceptual’ art, ‘experimental’ art is said to have ‘imprecise’ goals.

At any rate the piece is not all bad. It notes that the contemporary art world has its roots in the first impressionist exhibition. This is clearly true. But while Galensen just assumes that opening up of the art market has meant the liberation of artists everywhere, the reality is much sloppier: instead of religious or personal constraints, there are now the constraint of profitability, prestige, and ‘innovation’.

While we’re on the topic of how art becomes a commodity, there’s this news about the Upper East Side art dealer Lawrence Salander: apparently he has a history of this sort of thing. I’m intrigued to see how the operation of the gallery was organized, and to see how exactly Salander (allegedly) turned selling art into a Ponzi scheme. It might shed some light on the way that the value of an artwork is determined.

This weekend, the escape artist and yourstruly took a trip down to the Waterfront and wandered around the Armory Show. Nothing makes you remark your own drabness like noting the chic threads that the beautiful rich wear, and if the Armory Show didn’t really have any amazing art it sure had some sharply dressed, attractive rich folk. I felt positively out of place in my shabby blue jeans and beat up cap, my three days’ shadow and dull scuffed black shoes.

Of course, that the art was so bad, so boring made me feel a bit better. That did not stop the financial wing of the art world from skipping about and looking for lucrative finds. One lilypad for the lascivious lapping tongues of the arttoads was strangely out-of-place: its Very Pretty Hostess was wearing a Very Conservative Powersuit, and its aesthetic seemed to be akin to the Picasso of the classical period — classy tackiness, in a way. Representational, humanistic, anachronistic. Maybe my quizzical look at their selection was noted, because the lady in the powersuit eyed me all the while.

The only pieces of art that really caught my attention were a couple by Bruno Peinado at the Galerie Loevenbruck booth. He smashed security glass and then mounted it on dibond. The effect was to put the lines of fragmentation in relief on the color of the dibond. Pleasing. Then there are also the anarchist resonances of the work.

Sometimes I like conceptual art. Like this piece above by Manzoni: the base of the world. The base of the world! It stands on nothing but thin air. It’s clever, but it’s a bit of a one liner. And after you tease out its implications — groundlessness, the world itself as a work of creation — there’s not much else, and the work itself is a bit boring. The limits of the concept impose themselves, and then a piece’s unidimensionality spells its own ruin. It becomes “cute” or “trite.”

Othertimes though a piece becomes more interesting inspite of itself. Like another one by Manzoni, “Artist’s Shit.” The gag for this one was a bit more performative than that of the base of the world: Manzoni collected his shit and then split it into 30g specimens, divided into 90 cans. He labeled each can with its contents, and then sold each for its weight in gold. Ho ho! The art world’s luminaries understand this as a comment on commodification and reification of the artist’s product — explicitly here, his solid waste. But this doesn’t really comprehend what’s going on; or it only grasps part of it. Because while there is certainly something like commodification going on here, strictly speaking our 90 cans of Manzoni’s solid waste are not commodities proper. If there were, someone else could have shat in a can and sold it for its weight in silver, and thereby driven Manzoni out of, as it were, the shit business.

So there is something else at play in the sale of art in the upper reaches. Those that shell out 50,000 GBP for a 30g, oxidized tin of what very well might be shit are after something other than commodities, and the amount they pay for something is caught up in far more complex process than its costs of production — even in the most simple picture. To get at this would require looking at the complex sequence of events and choices that lends a certain artist the aura or cachet that makes his or her work appear as a constant store of value — the rich do not spend upwards of a 100,000 dollars on one of Manzoni’s tins only to debase it by opening it up to find out just what is inside.

Commodification and reification are presupposed in the production of works like “Artist’s Shit.” But they are not what the work is about, even on a functional level. In order for the art world to function, in its semi-autonomous way, over and above the more basic and brutal labor-market, a given amount of liquidity has to be transfered to the buyers and devotees that make it up, and this transfer is effected by the motor of commodity-production. Of course this is the case. But this is not sufficient for a given art-object to be vaulted into Sotheby’s ambit. A peculiar anticipation of an object’s continued value, in spite of being a bit of shit, or a heap of junk, is what allows Manzoni’s tins to function as art. Hence there is little irony in the fact that people buy it, or a pissoir, despite both being recepticles of human waste. Not only are the buyers playing a role within a specific social milieu where there is a status attached to owning a bit of Manzoni, they are anticipating future worth.

This does not mean, either, that anything can be art. It means that almost nothing can. So you have to wonder who the joke is on.