For seven months I worked in London at a large art auction house. For a long time now I have been trying to write something biting, an indictment of the industry which might express my dormant rage, my hypocrisy, and which might include a few privileged insights into that world. I keep failing.
Yesterday I found this image, a work by the Turkish artist Tunc Ali Cam which reignited my desire to put down just a few things about my experience. I was reminded of the Russians, for one, who came to buy back the glittering, hideous objects Communism made illegitmate, the pre-20th century 'bling', the palace decorations. These oppulent artifacts are able to sit, in such a context, comfortably and without apparent contradiction beside the revolutionary posters and paintings they were once so directly opposed by.
The auction house, far more so than the museum even, historises such tensions. Or perhaps history is too charged a term. Things are reduced there to a vague, factless history. Mere time, without events. Things are old, importantly old, therefore they are rare and thus desirable. The politics of history is carefully ignored. It is, after all, often rather unsavory and too often gets in the way of the sheer pleasure of ownership.
To possess what others cannot, what others would like to possess, this is the drive that keeps such institutions buoyant. The self perpetuating job of the auction house is to reinforce the privilege of this desire, it's exclusivity, and to protect the desirability of such objects from any criticism.
I have read catalogue desriptions which are blatant lies. I have seen collectors purring in forced appreciation in front of a truly awful Picasso (which later sold for two or three million pounds), a big, gunky scribble so bad even Ken Done would have thrown it away. It is sometimes possible to watch such collectors looking at pictures, not trying to 'see' them but trying instead simply to 'like' them, in order, perhaps, to salvage some element of grace from the imminent transaction. I have been gestured at by dealers who are so rich they are unable to speak, to say please or thankyou. They tip extravagantly because money has replaced their language. They walk around grunting. I have heard artworks described as if they were stamps, soley in terms of their rare colour combinations. I have heard sales pitches so vile they turn your stomach. I have heard someone say "Charles Saatchi thinks it's wonderful!"
John Berger has desribed these people: If you could fuck works of art, then they would be pimps' he wrote in his essay Art and Ownership Now.
With similar perspicacity, the Guerilla Girls wrote:
'Thou shall admit to the public that words such as genius, masterpiece, priceless, seminal, potent, gritty and powerful are used soley to prop up the myth and inflate the market value of white male artists.
* * * * *
A painting and beside this painting a small plaque. Upon this plaque a long list of zeroes qualified at the beginning by another number. So simply, the act of perceiving this painting is fundamentally changed. It's threat, it's beauty is filtered through this price tag. If it is strong enough it still reaches us. Occaisonly these works still seem dangerous, they still glow, however dimly now, with the promise and challenge of another world. Sometimes they catch you off guard, but all too rarely. Sometimes it is possible to drag them from the vacuity which surrounds them, but it requires an enormous effort of wonder, something equivelent to love.
None of this would matter really if you didn't care just a little bit for art. If with every extra dollar, something essential, something wonderful didn't become just that little bit harder to recognise.
From A Confrontation With Falling blog by Miles Allinson
