33 Artists in 3 Acts (62 page)

When people are motivated to buy art for social reasons, their tastes and spending patterns are more likely to be swayed by the vagaries of fashion. Collecting art has increasingly become like buying clothes. As a Sotheby’s specialist explains, “We buy a pair of trousers and we wear them for three years and then move on. Is it right that the trousers sit in the cupboard for the next twenty-five years? Our lives are constantly changing. Different things become relevant at different times in our lives. We are motivated by our changing sensibilities. Why can that not be applied to art as well?”

Art used to embody something meaningful enough to be relevant beyond the time in which it was made, but collectors today are attracted to art that “holds up a mirror to our times” and are too impatient to hang on to the work long enough to see if it contains any “timeless” rewards. Experts say that the art that sells most easily at auction has a “kind of immediate appeal” or “wow factor.”

Lot 44. A Jasper Johns numbers painting from his heyday, 1960–65, gets bought in, despite the fact that Johns is the most expensive living artist.
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Baer explains why it didn’t sell: “Some people think that Jasper’s signature color is gray, and that painting is black. Plus it’s so dark that it’s impossible to see the numbers.”

This is ironic. Numbers are what auctions are about. Lot numbers, dates, bidding increments, hammer prices. On and on, Burge rattles off the figures. Auctions are unremittingly quantitative. They are a black-and-white version of the gray world of art. Artists and writers tend to revel in ambiguity. It is the gray areas that invite and challenge them to represent the world. A hammer price, by contrast, is so final and definitive. It really means, “Say no more.”

Baer yawns. The
New York Times
correspondent is sitting in her chair looking wilted. The air is stale. My mind is numb. The works start to blend one into the other. People are leaving, mostly in pairs. The sale, as Burge predicted, has become boring. Then…all of a sudden the room wakes up. We’re into the bidding on Lot 47, an Ed Ruscha painting called
Romance
. People are sitting bolt upright and looking around. The dynamics of the auction have shifted, and the air is tense. I can’t tell what is going on. “Someone is signal bidding,” says Baer. “They don’t want it known that they’re bidding, so they’ve caught the eye of a Christie’s rep, who is relaying their bids to Burge. It’s a little choreography—a bit of a drama.”

As I survey the small club of people through whom the energies of the market flow, I see a shaggy-haired, burly man leaving his seat. He looks a bit like Harry Potter’s friend Hagrid, and I realize it’s Keith Tyson, a British artist who won the Turner Prize in 2002. As he makes his way out of the salesroom, I slip out of the press enclosure. I find him in the hall in front of a Maurizio Cattelan. It’s Lot 34, a sculpture of a big gray elephant under a white sheet, which sold for $2.7 million. Everyone calls it “the white elephant.”

I tell him that I didn’t expect to see an artist here.

“Everyone from the gallery was coming. Was I going to sit in a bar on my own? I wanted to see what the phenomenon was all about. I’m interested in economics. Other artists are worried about their purity. It’s a huge social faux pas for an artist to go to an auction—so they tell me. But I don’t give a shit.”

What do you think is going on in there? I ask.

“The auction is the symptom of something much more complex, like a rash. It is vulgar, in the same way that pornography is vulgar,” he replies.

I guess that is what people mean when they refer to “obscene” amounts of money. How does it feel? I press.

“At about thirteen million on the mustard Warhol,” says Tyson, “I had a massive urge to put my hand up. But then I thought, ‘I’m sure it has been done before.’ The sale is infectious. You feel the thrill of capitalism and you get into a sort of alpha-male mentality.”

Capitalism
—it’s not a word you hear in an auction room.

“I don’t have any problem with the market for art,” he continues. “It is an elegant Darwinian system. Some collectors are effectively buying futures options on a work’s cultural significance. The high price is right for the number of users who will ultimately appreciate it. The logic is that the people coming into my private mausoleum/museum are going to be thrilled by this painting. There are ten million people on the face of the planet that are willing to pay ten pounds to see it, so it is worth a hundred million pounds. In the long run, economic and cultural values correlate. In the short term, you get fictional markets.”

It’s unusual to meet an artist who has such confidence in the ultimate accuracy of the market’s aesthetic judgments. Paradoxically, Tyson is also adamant that art is not reducible to a commodity. “Unlike gold and diamonds, art has this other value, and that’s what makes it fascinating. Everything else is trying to sell you something else. Art is trying to sell you yourself. That’s what is different about it. Art is what makes life worth living.”

It’s 8:30
P.M
. and the sale is almost over. A skinned bull’s head immersed in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst is up on the block. Last month in London, Sotheby’s sold off the artwork and ephemera of Hirst’s restaurant, Pharmacy. The sale raised $20 million and set new auction records for Hirst’s butterfly paintings and medicine cabinets, and because every lot sold, it was celebrated as a “white-glove sale.” It was the first time a living artist had openly consigned work directly to an auction house. Hirst got 100 percent of the hammer price—a much better split than any deal he could have carved up with his dealers. He also got front-page newspaper coverage and consolidated his position as one of the most famous living artists in the world.

Oliver Barker, the young Sotheby’s specialist who came up with the Pharmacy auction concept, enjoyed his first experience working with an artist: “Damien is very inspirational, quick-minded, hardworking. He was completely on board helping with the design of the catalogue, approving marketing schedules, and the like. He has a keen business sense, but he’s also a risk-taker. It’s an awesome combination.”

Many of the artists who sell well at auction are artist-entrepreneurs. It may be because collectors who’ve made their money in business like to see reflections of themselves in the artists they buy. Or as Francis Outred, another Sotheby’s expert, put it, it may be because “a lot of artists today are succeeding on sound business principles.” Here Warhol and his Factory are the model. Like Warhol, Hirst has developed production strategies to ensure that there is always enough material to keep up with collector demand; for instance, he’s made at least six hundred “unique” spot paintings.
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He has also maintained a media profile that has expanded the audience and the market for his work beyond the narrow confines of the art world.

The last couple of lots sell without a hitch. When the sale is over, it is just over. There is no grand finale, no clapping, just another rap of the hammer and a quick “Thank you” from Burge. Knots of people walk and talk their way out of the room. I hear a few young dealers who work in secondary-market galleries laughing about how “insane” the market is before they get into a fractious argument about whether Richard Prince will ever trade for over a million dollars.
*

In the line for our coats, I bump into Dominique Lévy, an art consultant who once worked at Christie’s and knows how to see through the smoke and mirrors of an auction. So what is your verdict? I ask. “For works that sell below five million, the market is astonishingly deep—deeper than ever,” she says. “But I was surprised that the market for expensive works was thinner tonight,” she adds in a quieter voice. “Very often I was about to write
pass
in my catalogue when Christopher—it was one of his most masterful sales—was able to dig out one more bid.”

As I walk through the revolving doors into the cold New York air, the celebratory expression “making a killing” and Burge’s gladiatorial metaphor of the “coliseum waiting for thumbs” come to mind. Even if the people here tonight were initially lured into the auction room by a love of art, they find themselves participating in a spectacle where the dollar value of the work has virtually slaughtered its other meanings.