Michael Pearce

Metaphors are useful ways of understanding complex situations by replacing things with symbols, allowing us to visualize the relationships between them with greater ease. A metaphorical way of thinking about the emergent 21st Century art world is to imagine it as a cluster of bubbles, each one representing small and large creative communities, bumping against each other, sometimes overlapping, sometimes inflating and deflating, occasionally bursting. Constantly dynamic, various bubbles rise and fall as time passes. 

A century ago, the art world bubble bath was dominated by a single, large, strong bubble. This avant-garde bubble depended upon the authority of a powerful class of rich Americans to provide support to the modernist project – people like Solomon Guggenheim, Peggy Guggenheim, Abby Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller, Edsel Ford, Gertrude Whitney, and John Barnes built a network of foundations providing support for the artists and writers who would become the icons of the avant-garde canon. Through their political influence, they persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to endorse avant-gardism as the aesthetic choice of the state. Through their financial influence, they encouraged a generation of avant-gardists to take positions in America’s burgeoning university system, where they gradually assumed control. They built their own museums which provided cultural centers supporting their ideas. An avant-garde bubble was created that dominated the art world, steered by an oligarchy of American aristocrats who directed aesthetics toward progressive ideology.

In the last quarter of the 20^th Century, the avant-garde bubble made by these aristocratic and idealistic avant-gardists was deflated by a new class of wealthy people with a cynical and manipulative view of art as a placeholder for money. These were neither aristocrats nor progressive idealists. They inflated a new capitalist bubble. Andy Warhol led the way, treating art as a product to be exploited in free enterprise. Gallery owners like Saatchi and Gagosian followed, treating their stables of artists like racehorses they could bet on. Later, cynical art flippers like Stefan Simchowitz appeared, discovering young artists who could be manipulated into producing work that he knew he could sell to his wealthy friends. If there was any idealism shared among them, it was the idealism of Gordon Gekko.

Artists realized that they could play the same game. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst were poster-boys for people hungry to become the new stereotypical capitalist-artist. Recognizing that art could be treated in the same way as pork bellies, Koons became a commodities broker so he could afford to make the things he wanted to make. Hirst financed his art by getting into real estate.

Money provided Koons and Hirst and their imitators with the freedom to make whatever they wanted to regardless of the opinions of second and third generation avant-garde art academics and art critics. By completely ignoring these ideologues Koons and Hirst cast them as ivory tower retirees clinging to memories of their golden days of cultural hegemony and puffing air into their leaking bubble. Koons and Hirst didn’t share their ideas about what true art might be and were busy catering to their own audience, who they understood well.

The progressive avant-garde art bubble deflated as the tumescent capitalist art bubble grew. Other bubbles grew too, as various communities found themselves, thanks to the power of social media. In our spectacular society, art is neither merely a tool of the aristocracy nor a vehicle for money. There are many bubbles in the 21st Century art bath. Digital art became tremendously popular and financially successful. Fantasy and Science Fiction art became flourishing bubbles. The ecstatic sculptural art bubble of the Burning Man community thrived. The representational art community bubble grew. The aged avant-garde bubble deflated with a long, slow fart, losing its authority as it diminished. A new bubble of left-wing art activism arose. A nascent bubble of conservative art began to emerge. By the teens several significant art bubbles had manifested as distinctly different parts of the art world. While the capitalist bubble became dominant in high-finance art exchanges and attracted a lot of attention because of the large amounts of money changing hands, other kinds of art produced by and for the other 99% of the population emerged, providing more meaningful experiences. The deflating singular aesthetic bubble of avant-gardism found itself competing with many bubbles of refreshing new art that had no reliance upon the old hierarchy.

In emergent societies art rises up from the people, it isn’t imposed from the top down. The future of emergent art does not lie in the hands of the super wealthy, whose top-down influence is only powerful within the bubble of the people who cater to them. The egalitarian internet allows many millions of people to see sculptures and paintings without the mediation of a monolithic cultural hierarchy of aristocrats, art critics, or experts: this is the bubble-bath of emergence. There is no singular authority. Art bubbles rise and fall as we choose to take interest in them, to participate in them. Small choices may have big impacts. When we like and share images of paintings in our social media, or when we comment in an online conversation, or when we buy paintings or sculptures, we are engaged in inflating an art bubble.

The Party’s Over for the Avant-Garde

Friday 18^th September, the board of the Guggenheim Museum acquired a $120,000 banana for its permanent collection.

In December 2019 crowds at Art Basel Miami Beach laughed themselves into a lather when Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a gallery booth wall. Appropriately titled Comedian, three editions of the banana sold for up to $120,000 each, setting a world record for the price of bananas.

Before Covid-19, Art Basel was a big-top event on the calendar for the partying jet-set who travelled the world in search of the hottest, most exciting, and most expensive art. The world’s press gleefully reported on this banana outrage, and stories made the front page of national newspapers throughout the world. It made incredibly good copy for the art fair hosting the sale, and for Cattelan, the entertainer, the popular fool for the art world court. The life of the story was extended when a lesser clown, a self-described “performance artist,” ate the banana, which was probably the most expensive breakfast he’ll ever enjoy, certainly gave him his fifteen minutes of insta-fame, and was perhaps the highlight of his entire insta-career. No legal proceedings were instigated against him for destroying an artwork of such value, because a spokesman for the gallery announced that the banana wasn’t a real artwork anyway, unless the owner had a certificate of authenticity. Besides, the gallery had a stand-by banana they had picked up from a local grocery store which was quickly installed in the same spot as the original. Thus, this stunt-banana was instantly transformed into another $120,000 masterpiece. And sold in three editions.

Peak absurdity had been reached, and security guards were hired to control the giggling mass of insta-fashionistas which gathered at the booth to snap filtered selfies with the banana, annoying the tenants of neighbouring booths, because of the threat to the safety of other artworks, which they not unreasonably thought were of greater intrinsic value than a banana, and eventually it was removed so these unfortunate dealers could return to quieter and more serious transactions.

For ordinary people the news that half a hand of bananas had sold for more than their annual salary could only be taken as a condescending joke, as cruel and mocking insult that ridiculed their station in life, that derided their position. Only very, very rich people have the money to drop $120,000 on a bit of a laugh.

Now, the Guggenheim Museum has accepted one of the duct-taped bananas into its collection, sending a clear message about its cynical priorities. This is not art for the people, it is an obscene insult to both the bourgeoisie and the working class, who are struggling to get through the pandemic. The Guggenheim is blind, tactless, or cynical. Its president, Wendy Fisher, should have declined this dubious gift. The party’s over, Wendy.

Americans dislike talking about class, and they don’t like having the economic void between themselves and the super-rich thrown in their faces. They like to believe in the foundational ideal that everyone is equal, even though they’re quite obviously not. In 2015 the Pew Research Center published a poll that revealed that Americans earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year all consider themselves middle class. But the boundaries of this imaginary middle class expand beyond this already broad range. Only 6% of people with a household income of more than $100,000 describe themselves as “Upper Class,” and only 27% of people earning less than $30,000 describe themselves as “Lower Class.”

Perhaps vulgar spectacles like Cattelan’s $120,000 banana will help to raise awareness of the enormous chasm separating us from the very rich, and will clarify the unavoidable fact that elite avant-garde galleries like the Guggenheim are hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of American people.

Because the Guggenheim is a 501ciii corporation, art donations may be written off to the value of their purchase price. A banana purchased for less than fifty cents, even if it’s an organic free trade banana, can be given to a gallery as if it was a valuable object, once it has been sold for $120,000 as a pretentious work of art, and that value can be deducted from the donor’s tax bill at the end of the year. Revelations like this harm the art world. No-one is accusing the banana donors of foul play – their fault is merely being tactless – but other high value transactions of poor quality art have been perceived as unregulated covers for money-laundering. Is this what art has become? The tool of clever accountants, a hiding place for criminal finance, the plaything of the rich?

Three editions.

Performing for the members of the upper class who can think of $120,000 as fun money, Cattelan is one of the art world’s courtier clowns, occupying a privileged position as conscience and entertainment for his decadent and aristocratic friends. While these aristocrats gulped Almas caviar and washed it down with Armand de Brignac champagne, the clowns provided them with laughs and outrageous amusement. Before Covid, Cattelan commanded impressive budgets for seriously expensive projects set in palaces and country estates, and the Guggenheim’s board and curatorial staff were among his snickering champions. They gave him a retrospective in 2012, hanging his work from the ceiling of the spiral gallery.

Among Cattelan’s amusing and clever jests for the board was his casting of a working toilet in solid gold, which was plumbed into the smallest room of the Guggenheim Gallery in New York in 2016. The golden toilet was opened to the public, and punters formed lines for a chance to get scatological in the proverbial. The aristocrats on the giggling Guggenheim‘s board and it’s well-heeled staff laughed all the way to the other kind of proverbial. While New York punters paid good money to tug their forelocks and use the loo, in 2016 the Guggenheim reported income of $70,615,121. It paid its ten senior officials annual salaries ranging between $219,980 and $801,324.

In 2018 Cattelan’s golden toilet was installed, uninsured, in the wood-panelled splendour of Blenheim Palace, England, where it was quickly stolen by a practically minded gang of working lads, and doubtlessly melted down in a hurry, reducing its worth to its more honest weight.

The message of Cattelan’s spectacles was that avant-garde art could be hugely amusing entertainment for the very rich, and now the Guggenheim board has confirmed that this is their priority. The avant-garde art world they adore is a spectacle, a glittering performance for the elite. Their clowns provide amusement for the grandees, even in this time of hardship and deprivation. Their hypocritical avant-garde has never been for the people – it’s a circus for the rich and the pretentious, and the great unwashed only get to watch from the cheap seats, craning their necks for a view of the performers over their betters’ designer-draped shoulders, a crowd of desperate aficionados paying for the dubious privilege of taking a dump in the aristocrats’ golden toilet.

Recently I noticed a strange phenomenon – the old centers of bohemian life had vanished, and young bohemians were no longer gathering together in communities as they once did. Now, the bohemians are using the internet to find connection with their tribe, and looking for inexpensive places to live and work far from the cheap parts of the great cities.

My story at MutualArt.

This story came up because of a strange synchronicity between a Facebook meme and looking at paintings. The Facebook meme simply explained the meaning of the Welsh word “hiraeth,” which is a deep feeling of longing for home, like nostalgia or yearning.

I have recently become fascinated by Daniel Sprick’s work – his paintings are extraordinarily layered and reward close scrutiny. Look at this beautiful piece of work. A simple landscape? Not under Daniel’s eyes. It’s a complete invention, and look at the brilliant and impossible light! I think he’s one of the great painters of our time. But what really caught my imagination was the idea that these gorgeous paintings are perfect expressions of hiraeth.

I’m always keen to build my collection of art books. Daniel has a few books on Amazon which are worth having.

My story “Adam Miller and Salvatore Guerrero. When Artist & Patron Go Big” – in the latest edition of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. Don’t miss it! Here are the first few paragraphs, but you’ll have to buy your own copy to read the whole story and to see the gorgeous art that Adam is creating.

“In this historic year of elemental iconoclasm, when monuments to yesterday’s flawed heroes and Confederate generals alike are dishonored or ripped down, perhaps it is strange to speak of the importance of sharing humanity’s great ideas. Although it is easy to be discouraged by the graffiti, boarded-up windows, and overall mood of destructive anarchy, now—more than ever—we need to be reminded of the good ideas that have shaped us, and to prioritize them over those that are evil.

Mobs tearing at the scabbed sins of history cannot erase its wounds, but their destructive zeal will change the aesthetic priorities of our shared cityscapes, sometimes perhaps for the better. After the spray-paint and shattered stones have been removed, empty plinths will remind us that society once prioritized the evil of inequality, and now it does not. It is likely that decades will pass before new sculptures fill these empty spaces, for the fragile sphere of public discourse is too easily punctured by insensitive choices, and well-intentioned committees will slow their procedures to a crawl. All public art is political, and there is little chance of finding consensus in this divided time.

Because public art is frozen, we will have to depend upon private patronage to nurture the big ideas of our time. But what are they? The Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari’s epic survey of the big ideas, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015), has inspired the brilliant painter Adam Miller (b. 1979) and his patron Salvatore Guerrera to produce an ambitious cycle of four 8-by-10-feet oil paintings. Together these scenes will span human history and reveal its most important strands: the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, the scientific revolution of 500 years ago, and the present.”

For more, subscribe to Fine Art Connoiseur…

Don’t miss picking up your copy of the September edition of Fine Art Connoisseur. In it, you’ll find my story about the relationship between Adam Miller and his patron Salvatore Guerrera. Adam is producing extraordinary art, doubtlessly made possible by the support he receives from Mr. Guerrera.

I suspect that we will see a lot more private patronage in the next five years.

MutualArt published my story: Julie Heffernan’s Fountainhead, Her Annihilation, Her Eve, Her Eden.

“Many of the surrealists left the mysterious landscape of the imagination largely uncharted, barely penetrating the frontiers of the subconscious. Not so Heffernan.”

I really enjoyed writing this.

I try to write my articles to reflect the art, and it seemed to me that the rich flow of imagery that I love in her paintings resembled hypotaxis – a sentence with multiple subclauses and sideways journeys, so I wrote the first paragraph in that manner. It’s 354 words. However, I was also struck by the contrast between the richness of the paintings and her studio, which is so simple and bare. So I wrote the next paragraph describing the studio using parataxis, which is the opposite of hypotaxis, language written in short, undecorated sentences, punchy, to the point. I liked the juxtaposition of the two very much, because the styles paralleled the real world.

You can see more of Heffernan’s paintings in her books:

My article about Laurie Lipton is probably the darkest story I’ve written.
When she read it she said, “A good read, but I think I need a drink.” Curiously, that’s how I feel about her drawings.

I wrote this article for MutualArt about the problem with hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s purchase of a Basquiat for $100,000,000. In it, I describe the issue faced by US museums that it doesn’t really matter how many paintings by minority artists they buy, nor how many of their employees are from minorities – they will always be accused of virtue-signaling until their aristocratic, white boards include minority members who are equally as rich as them.

You can see why Basquiat made such a huge impact on the art world by flipping through this lovely volume of his energetic work, published by Taschen.