KEY POINTS:
There is a hilarious - if horrifying - video running on Sotheby's website right now in which some chastened auctioneers are brought before the cameras. Each struggles to maintain a certain silk-suited dignity while attempting to solicit new clients, while also mollifying the old, in the wake of the latest disastrous auction results.
After much persiflage about the "enormous amounts of money" supposedly flooding around, and some barefaced fictions about market stability - six months after Roman Abramovich paid $86 million for a Bacon in May, Sothebys couldn't sell another for less than half that price - the worldwide head of contemporary art makes a staggering announcement.
"Don't worry," he counsels potential sellers, "there is a return to seeing the real object and what kind of presence it has, what's great and what is not so good. And what's great will nowadays sell."
A return to seeing? What a triumphant new dawn this is when art will once again be viewed! And not only that, but these men and women may even be able to sell the good works and not just the bad and the ugly. For in the past decade, there has been no art too sorry to be sold at auction, no art too brainless, slapdash, repetitive, obnoxious or devoid of originality.
Whatever you had, some dealer could probably sell it; the ravening maws were always eager to be stuffed.
More millionaires bought and sold art than at any other time in history. More art was constantly required. It hardly mattered whether the work had any meaning, let alone quality. Practically the only rule was that it must be advanced art - progressive, serious, high-minded, what used to be called avant-garde; all this meant was that if second-rate, then knowingly so, and if kitsch, then in an ironic rather than innocent fashion.
The significance of the work became its market price, its wealth-making potential. By that token, buyers needed a Richard Prince nurse, a Damien Hirst tank, a Jeff Koons sculpture and a photograph by Andreas Gursky. That was the starter pack and the safest collateral for the plutocrats and hedge-fund managers now trying to offload their art.
Anything beyond that, anything less well tested, and the buyer was taking a risk, though the risk was for quite a time unimaginably small. For the ever-increasing index of collectible artists was securely determined by dealers in tandem with tiny groups of super-rich collectors.
If the dealer could persuade the collector to buy the work of a particular artist, then the work was de facto collectible and all the other buyers would roll over. You could call it a futures market, just like any other, except that it was so much less of a gamble.
There has never been anything complex about this system, and anyone who believes that most artists are too principled to play to it ought to try looking about. Even the cats and gondolas of the Royal Academy summer show are made for an audience that knows what it likes and likes what it knows; easy supply and demand.
What this overheated market has now produced is an immoderately vast amount of art: more art than can possibly be bought, more art than anyone could ever need and more art than anyone, apart from Charles Saatchi, could ever look at.
But one thing about this art was that it successfully adapted itself to suit the cash-rich but time-poor.
The speed of consumption, by which I mean viewing as well as buying, could now be measured in minutes and even seconds. This effect is apparent everywhere.
Take the dreg-ends of art recently shown in GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy. Here you could see neoclassical figurines personally smashed to pieces by Georgina Starr, which took about a second and was easily imagined by anyone who has ever broken crockery. You could see chrome-plated statues of fighting cherubs - so anarchic, so expensive, what a neat combination! You could see an outsize replica of a peeled onion.
You might think that the market doesn't matter, that collectors can make fools of themselves without affecting our lives, but the truth is that public galleries are profoundly influenced by the market, their purchases very generally following those of the rich. Every time you enter a commercial gallery, what you see is only there because it fetches enormous sums, and if you notice trends, it is because the market has decreed that art should look like this and so the art does. Then it enters the museums.
But now that the market is crumbling - Sotheby's contemporary art sales in New York in November 2007 and 2008 made US$418 million and US$160 million respectively - what will fill the galleries, both private and public? This year is already looking rather different. Hoxton is collapsing, galleries closing by the week. The London Art Fair was deserted by the end of the first afternoon two weeks ago. Prestigious galleries are planning to show what pass for contemporary old masters such as Cy Twombly and Robert Mangold. These are exhibitions one wouldn't want to miss.
It is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker.
Whether we will ever progress to anything better - more subtle, refined, intelligent, inventive, perhaps even original - is anyone's guess, but these hard times have got to be propitious.
Less money means less genuflection to collectors, less subservience to donors and less demand-based product. It may even mean less dross of the sort that surely dismays (be honest) every visitor to Frieze. And if less money can elicit a promise from the industry to look at the art object for what it really is, then this is truly the start of a new era.
- OBSERVER
