Mr. Falckenberg please choose: does every era get the art it deserves or is every work of art the child of its age?

 

 

Some days ago we have discussed about the essay published one Mousse magazine by Jens Hoffmann. It follows that now we have to disagree with another essay, that is more history-centered then the Hoffmann’s one, but that shares with it a certain kind of evident pessimism and the disputable idea that “every era gets the art it deserves”. Which society shall we thank for Guernica? We don’t believe so, and that is why we prefer the version of the same idea Vasily Kandinsky gives in the introduction of his seminal “Concerning the spiritual in art”:

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

The essay we are talking about is by Professor of Art Theory and contemporary art collector Harold Falckenberg and it has been published on “Art Basel/ Year 44” – an edited version of it is also available on the FT on-line. In the pamphlet Professor Falckenberg draws a recent history of the art market that he himself calls “a disillusioned picture”. Here some passages.

Talking about the 80s, and artists such as “Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach” :

They no longer wasted a thought on the notion of an artistic body of a life’s work, an oeuvre. Bad painting, deskilling and fast-paced careers modeled after showbiz defined the art world of that era.

In regards with the growth of the figure of the art curator during the 90s:

[…] the growth of now almost 100 biennials and triennials around the world saw the orientation and organization of “critical art”, with its often counter-cultural impulses, increasingly defined by a network of international curators, so significant that they are accused of “curatism”: a group of impresarios who use artists as living arguments and evidence of their own ideas.

Moreover, according to Falckenberg, the decision of international auction houses to include young artists in their selling has been considered a “betrayal” by “the artists themselves” and:

A decisive role was played by the billionaires Bernard Arnault, François Pinault and Charles Saatchi, who saw how to incorporate art into their global market strategies. And with them came the speculators and financial jugglers who bet on young art, investing over the long term in dubious funds and in the short term throwing art back on the market at auctions.

The idea of considering art as a religion seems simply “absurd” to the Professor who, by the way, makes also an ingenuous simplification when he writes about the extraordinary Damien Hirst’s solo auction at Sotheby’s and the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, to use it as an example of a “step back towards the re-feudalisation of art”. The best lots of “Beautiful inside my head forever” went under the hammer in London on 15 September between 7pm and 9pm, but the news of the event that led to the financial crisis circulated only a few hours later these sale. It isn’t an irrelevant detail.

 

Flackenberg’s point of view is of course respectable, but how can he declare himself “neither a believer nor a pessimist”? Should we consider the “evolution of society and its art” he tracks neutral and objective? If this evolution has brought to such a bad situation, then what would have been the right path to follow? Professor doesn’t say.

 

September 22, 2014