Thomas Crow

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  print April 2008

  HISTORICAL RETURNS

  “TODAY, A MEGAYACHT IS INDISPENSABLE. It’s not like 15 years ago, when a yacht was a luxury item.” So says Olivier Milliex, head of yacht finance at ING bank.¹ The art world has heard the call and mustered its response: SeaFair’s $40 million Grand Luxe took to the seas in 2007. Up to twenty-eight commercial galleries, each paying $10,000 to $30,000 per week for a showroom, can be accommodated on board. SeaFair made its gala debut while docked at the hedge-fund epicenter, Greenwich, Connecticut. “What we have invented,” declared the ship’s proprietor, “is the mobile luxury shopping venue. . . .

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  print April 2008

  ART AND ITS MARKETS: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

  EVEN AS GOLD rises and the dollar falls, the expansion of the global art market shows few signs of reversal. This growth has been characterized by incredible immediacy, liquidity, and transparency—but also by inequity, archaic ritual, and social spectacle. Indeed, the economy of art is now both wildly speculative and idiosyncratically regulated, with unparalleled levels of attention devoted to the work of contemporary artists. What are the diverse factors that have contributed to this radical extension of interest and investment in the art of our day? And to what extent have these elements either transformed or reinscribed historical relationships among art’s audiences, institutions, collecting practices, and criticism? How might we best distinguish our present moment from previously bullish episodes and their attendant redefinitions of the aesthetic and the commoditized?
   
  From the fiscal to the formal, multiple arenas of knowledge are implicated in answering such questions. With this complex set of interrelationships in mind, Artforum invited a cross-section of figures—ranging from collector and curator to art historian and auction-house expert—to discuss the ways in which different kinds of value accrue to works of art and affect their production, display, and circulation: Ai Weiwei, Beijing-based artist; Amy Cappellazzo, international cohead of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s; Thomas Crow, professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University; Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Isabelle Graw, a founding editor of Texte zur Kunst and professor of art history and theory at Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt; Dakis Joannou, collector and president of the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece; and Robert Pincus-Witten, scholar and critic, and former director of exhibitions at L & M Arts in New York. Scholar and critic James Meyer and Artforum editor Tim Griffin moderate the discussion.

  THE GLOBAL BOOM

  James Meyer: The extraordinary boom of the contemporary market in recent years, along with the globalization of art’s production and display—two related phenomena—are among the most pressing subjects in any discussion of current practice. The history of modernism is in part a history of the marketing of the new. The Peau d’Ours sale in 1914, which brought a record price for Pablo Picasso’s Family of Acrobats [1905]; the first Parke-Bernet auction of contemporary art in 1965, which featured Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture; and the sale of the Scull Collection

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  print December 2006

  Thomas Crow

  FOR A EUROPEAN ARTIST to arrive in Mexico City trailing paraphernalia of suffering and death might seem the height of folly. From the tzompantli, or skull racks, of the Aztecs to the famous calavera (skull) caricatures of José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913), to the festive altars that mark the Day of the Dead in nearly every Mexican city and town, there would seem to be a national patent on the imagery of death, one that an outsider should infringe only with the greatest caution. If that artist is Damien Hirst, notoriously the author of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone

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  print October 2004

  the School of Pop

  When a cadre of ambitious French artists incorporated themselves into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648, they sought to elevate their new company by setting strict rules of decorum. Prominent in its inaugural code was the stipulation that no academician be permitted to keep a shop or even to allow the display of his work in such a way that it could be seen from the street. At a stroke, the academy severed art in its high-minded sense from its formerly easygoing relations with the everyday requirements of commerce. Beforehand, if a painter or carver wanted to turn out an

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  print October 2004

  A Roundtable

  “JEFF KOONS MAKES ME SICK.” The words are Peter Schjeldahl’s, and the occasion was a review in the SoHo weekly 7 Days, back in the ’80s, before Koons was quite the museum-certified star he is today. In the course of the write-up, Schjeldahl would turn his conceit around, explaining how undeniable, unstoppable, finally essential the experience of the artist’s work was for him. What makes Koons’s art simultaneously so toxic and so compelling? And why is it both institutionally embraced and yet seen by many as an art of diminishing returns, a symptom of all that is wrong with culture today? Koons

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  print September 2003

  SPREADING THE WORD: COLIN McCAHON

  GLOBALIZATION, OUR MANTRA OF THE MOMENT, only carries so far where art is concerned. A case in point: A major contemporary of Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Twombly, and Johns—an artist fully at their level of achievement—is in the midst of his first major touring retrospective. Most of you reading this will be in no position to see it.

  The artist is Colin McCahon, and, yes, he is that good. The exhibition, titled “A Question of Faith” and curated by Marja Bloem, originated at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a venue of no small historical prestige. Despite the best efforts of its organizers, however,

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  print May 2003

  “The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard”

  AN EXTRAORDINARY OPPORTUNITY TO SEE MUCH of the best painting done in eighteenth-century France begins this summer in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada: “The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting.” The number and significance of pictures by each of the three principals alone would constitute miniature retrospectives of astonishing quality. The same could be said for Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who does not receive titular status but enjoys equal prominence both in art history and in the present exhibition. Just to have the opportunity to see his Marriage

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  print April 2003

  MARX TO SHARKS: THE ART-HISTORICAL ’80s

  “Theory”: Nothing recalls the fractious discursive climate of the 1980s better than that single, imperfect word. In part two of “Writing the '80s,” we return to three strands of the discourse that marked the decade. Here, THOMAS CROW assesses the Pyrrhic victory of social art history in the '80s as a generation of artists turned the academic notion of “subversive critique” on its head.

  AT THE ONSET OF THE 1980s, I HAD AN EXPERIENCE AS A teacher that presaged—or so I came to see in retrospect—much of what would happen as a consequence of “the new art history” over the course of the decade,

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  print September 2001

  “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972”

  “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972,” an overdue museum survey devoted to the Italian art phenomenon of the 1960s, attains its full contemporary significance via its transcontinental bounce from Minneapolis to London. Conceived by Richard Flood at the Walker Art Center, the exhibition was cocurated by Francis Morris of Tate Modern, where it first appeared. The great brick pile of the Bankside power station makes an entirely appropriate setting for the show’s debut, as it underscores the degree to which we have come to live in an arte povera world.

  The origins of that world extend back to

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  books February 2001

  Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

  THIS FIRST OF TWO VOLUMES collecting the art-critical writings of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh runs to more than 500 pages; its companion, already in press, will weigh in with equivalent heft. The effect, if my reading is right, will be a new revelation of an intellectual figure who is already widely recognized but curiously unassimilated within the larger verbal machinery that surrounds contemporary art. The strength of Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry is that it serves as an occasion not just to celebrate a career that has genuinely changed the terrain of advanced art but to contend anew with a

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  print September 1999

  Chardin

  CERTAIN FRENCH ARTISTS ARE DEEMED so crucial an element of the national patrimony that grand retrospective exhibitions of their work must follow in regular, stately intervals. In 1979, Pierre Rosenberg organized, as a Louvre curator, the first modern retrospective devoted to Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Now, exactly twenty years later and having been elevated to the Louvre’s directorship, Rosenberg has returned to the scene of his greatest previous success and again mounted a Chardin exhibition, with some one hundred works and a touring schedule that includes Düsseldorf, London, and New York.

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  print Summer 1999

  “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect”

  “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect” has, by all accounts, been some years from first proposal within the Museum of Modern Art to final realization. It is nonetheless difficult not to view senior curator Kynaston McShine’s exhibition in relation to the museum’s recent agreement to assimilate P.S. 1 across the East River in Long Island City. Like an old-line company absorbing a brash start-up for its innovative capacities and ability to scout the peripheries (read Disney absorbing Miramax), MoMA may in a stroke have shored up one of its most conspicuous weak spots, that is, the combined awkwardness