The Stand: has art sold out to the market?

As hoary old debating topics go, you can’t beat it. But put two seasoned art speakers in front of a mic, provide the wine and canapés, and you can at least expect to have an entertaining evening.

‘Has art sold out to the market?’ was the question posed in the latest of a series of art debates commissioned by Investec and held at Phillips Auction House in Mayfair. The audience were strictly guest-list and the MC for the evening was the BBC’s amiable arts editor Will Gompertz. Gompertz revealed the results of a pre-debate intro poll: just 15% against the motion, 38% for, and a staggering 47% don’t knows. It was all for the taking and this audience were ready to have their tummies tickled.

Step up the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle, posing as the man with few illusions. He began with an anecdote about his first ever gallery exhibition in the 80s. In the long-ago days before he’d gone over to the dark side as a critic, he’d been an artist. But the art world turned out to be a vicious racket, stupid collectors the lowest form of life (I paraphrase) and artists so busy sucking up to the money they were literally selling out faster than a Jeff Koons balloon dog on the secondary market. And the crummy art they were producing was the result. Bad art. It turned out that being a critic was to be on the side of light after all.

Of course, you’ve got to ‘take a position’ in such a debate, but at least the audience seemed convinced.

The Telegraph’s Louisa Buck stood against the motion, and if it was just points for passion, then Buck won on that alone. From the church to the hedge fund, art had always been subject to the money-and-power-and-self-promotion racket. Sure there were now more art fairs than artists who could possibly sustain a career in this art crazy world, but plus ça change. The nature of the art market might have changed, but the fundamentals of the exchange really hadn’t. And look, money and art have a complicated relationship – of course they do: they’re intertwined (and a Marxian reading will tell you how intrinsically linked the two are) – and yet somehow separate in terms of the quality of the end result. Bad art will always be churned out, but good art survives.

This doesn’t mean to say that it’s only good art that survives. Bad art survives too. Good art sometimes gets left behind, perhaps to be rediscovered again at a later date. It’s complicated, though of course, artists might ‘play the game’ as they’ve always done. But that’s not really the same as selling out.

And what artist wants to produce work that embarrasses them? And how do artists themselves, even savvy ones, even begin to know how to ‘manipulate the market’? Go back to the Dutch Golden Age and see how the newly emerging moneyed middle-classes massaged that market. The identikit guild portraits and dun-coloured memento mori still lifes? Great artists could do all that and still make a tired theme sparkle with newly minted life. This is what great art does. Now think of a time when artists tried to bypass the market by making unsellable work – that era that saw the emergence of conceptual art and performance and land art. Much was good, but so much was bad. And some of the good stuff managed to find a way to monetarise.

What typically happens when we talk about art selling out, is that artists achieve a level of exposure and collectors want more of the same, naturally. At the same time, because artists, even great ones, have a finite wellspring of creativity, they coast. Coasting is what people, including artists, do most of the time.

What the question really should have been is: What’s changed in the art market? But that would have been a duller debate.

Incidentally, the exit poll showed: 5% undecided, 23% for Searle’s For, and 72% for Buck’s Against. Like the market, people are fickle.

The Stand event took place at Phillips Auction House, London on 5 July 2016.

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1-4. Art debate: Has art today sold out to the market?

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