ART FAIRS AND BIENNIALS
Images: Chelsey Browne
THE MARKET: What is the Value of Art?
This project examines the financial mechanism that powers the art world. How do people in the arts make a living? How does the art market impact on the territory and environment that artists, institutions, curators and writers have to navigate to create, present and discuss original contemporary artwork? Who are the beneficiaries and who are the losers?
This year-long project starts at the Venice Biennale 2019 and continues to Venice Biennale in 2021. We will examine views and reviews of some of the leading biennials and Art fairs, from the Armory Show to Frieze. We will be commissioning writers, artists, collectors, and curators on the current state of contemporary art.
The international art market is dominated more and more by art fairs, biennale’s and the auction houses, the gap between blue-chip artists and huge international commercial galleries with the rest of the art world is growing larger and larger. To have a healthy contemporary scene there needs to be diversity and opportunities to flourish.
The Market is just one part of the cultural economy. Making art visible and maintaining a balance between money and art is a difficult equation.
The Market project looks not only at our the financial structure of the art world exists but also looks at alternative structures, where the same financial structures do not exist.
The close relationship between for example between American museums and patrons is essential for that model where institutions such has the Drawing Centre in New York, are wholly supported by patrons and benefactors. In The UK there has always been a distance between museums and commercial factors but that distance has be eroded over the last twenty years.
There has always been the ambition and hope that art can cross cultrural boundaries, that the openness of art practice speaks to all people. The opening up of the art world as enabled new artists and artistic practice to exist positively. For decades the ‘other’ has been represented in the west as the exotic but never engaged with it as a serious practice just seen it has an area to exploit mirroring the commercial imperative to open up new markets to the western brand.
In these sets of discussions we are looking closely at the work of artists who have had to create their work, either in opposition to or despite the current philosophy dictated to by a system that seeks to narrow the choices and options rather than open them. For example Iranian film-makers and writers: the Makhmalbafs (The Apple, Blackboards, Kandahar, The Gardener). Present cinematic work but which is critical of the cultural system they occupy and which also question the current conventional ‘movie’ language of the west.
Artists like Dara Barabaum, Marta Rosler, Carolee Schemann, and Joan Jonas, have been working for decades in ‘outside’ the usual remit of commodity that dictates the commercial sector and musum sector that demand object over idea and concept.
We have commissioned twenty-five artists and writers and six groups and collectives to respond to some of these questions. A publication, discussions and further events are planned between now and the end of December 2019.
The project began in May during the press days of the Venice Biennale with recorded round table discussions at the Metropole Hotel and with our roving reporters Sacha Craddock, Fari Bradley and Jean Wainwright conducting interviews with artists, writers, curators and international art world professionals. The interviews will be broadcast online through our website and social media.
Venice Agendas ‘Table Top” discussions at the Metropole Hotel, Venice. Jon Sharples, Vassiliki Tzanakou and Jean Wainwright
Images from the Venice Biennale and Armory Show New York 2019. Photography: Chelsey Browne
