International News Digest
REVIEWING THE NOUGHTIES
Die Welt’s Tim Ackermann takes a look at the past decade, which he argues was better for art than for art criticism. While contemporary art teetered between “boom” and “bling,” art criticism began to show signs of wear and tear in 2002 at Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11. For Ackermann, this “politically correct monster” turned Kassel into a kind of UN summit for global artists while suggesting that the art world had been exhausted. “To everyone,” writes Ackermann, “it became suddenly clear that there were no more real avant-garde artists hidden away anymore in the West African outback and that the dawning decade simply could not be grasped with the old ways of thinking.”
The noughties—“the first truly global decade,” artistically speaking—saw works by budding Indian artists sold by shrewd American dealers to rich Russian collectors. While shifting art-market rules, the decade reached another zero point by eliminating any rules in art production. “Artistically, everybody could do what they wanted to do.” Ackermann’s examples include the return of painting, such as the New Leipzig School, and the rise of businessmen artists (Hirst, Koons, Murakami, Anselm Reyle), who ran their ateliers like factories, albeit producing sparkling sculptures and shiny paintings. By mid-decade, the market had taken over, leaving critical opinion in the dust. “From then on,” writes Ackermann, “expensive art was automatically considered good art.” Auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s excluded art critics, who were left to explain phenomena that no one understood, such as the boom of Chinese Pop painting.
Along with auctioneers, the art consumer—from the private collector to the private citizen—emerged as a big player over the past decade. While an unprecedented number of collectors opened their own museums that outshone public museums, art exhibitions found a new popular audience that cut across traditional social strata. “The 2000s saw the long lineups at the MoMA exhibition in Berlin and the success story of Tate Modern in London, which welcomes almost five million visitors annually since opening nine years ago.” The chaotic passing decade—“between bling and boom, war and crisis”—was “a pretty good one for art.”
LOOKING BACK AT 2009
Les Inrockuptibles’s Jean-Max Colard, Judicaël Lavrador, and Claire Moulene offer a triptych perspective on contemporary art in 2009. Looking beyond “boom” and “bling,” the authors see contemporary art between budget cuts and blockbuster exhibitions—a split that has given birth to a new minimalist strain marked by an economy of means for our tough times.
“Crisis again, ongoing crisis, or crisis already behind us?” ask the authors. “From fall 2008 to last May, the atmosphere was as glacial at the fair stands as in the galleries.” Signs of renewal in the art market—signs that contemporary art might just be a speculative bubble sealed off from other global economies—include the success of the Abu Dhabi fair, although the authors suggest that the fair could benefit from more real buyers than the royal family. Any good news from the recent Art Basel Miami Beach should be viewed with equal doubt. The latest uplifting arguments: “the idea that the art market might have become more rational, more serene, cleaned up, after this past decade of buying anything at any price, and the idea that collectors and galleries are meeting on sound values from now on. [These are] false views but true ultraliberal propaganda: as if the art market were capable of self-regulation, as if there were a morals of money.”
Whatever signs one follows, France experienced some high points in contemporary art in 2009, despite the crisis. Success stories include the Yves Saint Laurent auction and the FIAC fair’s reasonable returns (with respect to fairs in London and New York), as well as Richard Serra’s massive installation in the Grand Palais. The authors argue that the impact of the global economic crisis could be felt more strongly in public institutions and in the French state’s progressive disengagement with culture through budgetary cuts that have been brought to other areas, such as education. The spectacular failures include the year-end strike that began at the Pompidou Center and spread to a host of other French museums, institutions, and monuments.
“One thing’s certain,” write the authors. “It’s in the landscape of art that the crisis made itself most visible. [The crisis] has favored and maybe even proved that a renewed circle of influence was right: Artists, gallerists, art critics, and curators who seem to have had a premonition about the hard times to come and distanced themselves already since a few years from the spectacular and from big productions to return to an economy of means, to a reduced scale or even an ‘arte povera.’” That’s the source for “post-Conceptual” works made with “intoxicating images, black-and-white photocopies, folded paper, micronarratives, tiny collages, precarious materials, and undone sculptures” marked by opaque references and a taste for obscure writers from the past. Another equally minimal trend: the temptations of emptiness, which were fueled as much by the Pompidou Center’s recent retrospective “Vide” on Conceptual art as by Roman Ondak’s contribution to the Venice Biennale—letting the Czech and Slovak pavilion grow over green. Finally, the authors welcome the much stronger presence of the long-neglected realm of performance art in museums and in new international festivals, from New York to Paris. Ultimately, the hour belongs to “minimal radicality.”
LOOKING FOR LEONARDO
A group of Italian anthropologists is looking even further back in art history. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, there are plans to exhume the remains of the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, who died on May 2, 1519, at the Clos Lucé castle in Amboise, France. Using a DNA analysis, the anthropologists hope to establish once and for all whether the bones buried in the chapel of the Amboise castle are indeed those of Leonardo. If the skull is recovered, the anthropologist Giorgio Gruppioni from the Bologna University intends to reconstruct the artist’s face. No word on whether Dan Brown has expressed interest in securing the artist’s DNA code.