Cents and sensibility: collecting the '80s - Contemporary art market

ArtForum, April, 2003 by Peter; Schneider Plagens, Daniel B.

Obtainment of one more object does not bring an end to the longing. Instead, it is the recurrence of the experience that explains the collector's mental attitude.... Obtainment in whatever way--bought:, found, or even acquired by scheming or tricky means or thievery--works like a mood regulator and provides the owner with a potential sense of success or triumph, and occasionally of grandeur, as is the case with the winner at the gaming table or the astute buyer in the auction room.

--Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (1994)

If the special status of art as a commodity whose dollar value is unrelated to its use value makes those who collect it a special breed, then collectors of contemporary art, the market for which is notoriously fickle, are a breed apart. Risk takers of this order, especially those uncushioned by family or business fortunes, are admired--albeit grudgingly--in the art world almost as much as artists themselves. "In the 1960s," says dealer Michael Findlay, "collectors were thought of as saints for supporting contemporary art--but also as very clever for buying things for fifteen hundred dollars that were later worth millions."

The signal event for that phenomenon was, of course, Sotheby's 1973 auction of works from the collection of taxi-fleet entrepreneur Robert Scull, in which--at a time when one faction of the avant-garde was trying like hell to subvert the market by making deliberately uncollectible installations, performances, and Earthworks--two pieces by Robert Rauschenberg originally bought for a total of $3,400 sold for $175,000.

The art world of the early '70s was a Woodstockian mud party of high-minded unprofessionalism. In reacting against the market savvy and graphic bounciness of Pop, as well as against the pseudo-blue-collar solemnity of Minimalism, '70s work veered into, if not outright abjectness, at least declasse materials--dirt, lint, rubber, broken glass, dust--and hyper-informal configurations. Their art, the artists hoped, would defy salability, repel the slim-suited bankers and their Mary Quant-clad girl-wives who just loved Lichtenstein prints, and cause "alternative spaces" to rush in and show the stuff precisely because it was so virtuously unattractive. Their wishes, for the most part, were granted. But the reverberations from the Scull auction would, in the next decade, almost completely subvert the '70s art world's well-wrought subversion. It proved--or perhaps "predicted" is a better term--that, eventually, any kind of art is resalable at a profit. Bottom line: One could make money off off-puttingly avant-garde a rt just as one could make money off pork-belly futures. And to ratchet up the possible rewards of buying the work of living artists (the wisdom quickly developed), better to buy the work of younger, lesser-known, or even unknown artists.

The nominally holier-than-the-market, touchy-feely '70s eventually gave way to the gallery-gaudy, painting-is-back '80s. To art dealer Tony Shafrazi, the difference between the '80s and the preceding years was radical. "There was finally a new artistic generation not so impacted by the war in Vietnam," he says, "and there was no more fascist boot of Conceptual dogma." Collector Ray Learsy, a current Whitney Museum board member, says, "You had in the '80s a burst of figuration, the idea that real paint--which you could smell--communed with you in a direct way." He speaks, of course, of the work of Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, et al. (Joy in the boom in homegrown peppily painted pictures is not, however, universally applauded, especially in retrospect. Says one very major dealer on condition of anonymity: "My feeling is that the machine in New York which promotes local art was way out of control in the early 1980s. There was so little understanding about European art. T he Whitney Museum was the center of the scene, and it's a museum exclusively of American art. Curators didn't travel to Europe that much. Slowly New York began to discover that Baselitz, Richter, Polke, and Kiefer were fully developed, powerful artists, and when you put them up against the likes of Scharf and Schnabel, the Americans didn't compare all that well." In other words, it was a kind of de facto protectionism, or an implied "Buy Local" sentiment, that helped to fuel the boom, at least for a time.)

The 1973 Scull auction was a bit of an anomaly, and it took a while for its implications of the investment viability of edgy contemporary art to sink in. By the end of the '70s, however, investors were so optimistic about the contemporary-art market that Jeffrey Deitch was able to found the Art Advisory Service in the heretofore staid corridors of Citibank. Along with its titular function, the service would also help art collectors secure big loans (say, $5 million) with their art collections (worth, say, $10 million) as collateral. If banks could open themselves to art, why couldn't an outpost of art, where money was, putatively, of secondary importance, open itself to an aggressively corporate mentality? In 1983, Detroit shopping-mall magnate (and now convicted felon) Alfred Taubman was officially deemed fustian enough by the British courts to buy the British auction house Sotheby's, and he promised the bowler-and-umbrella set that he wouldn't really change things. Raised eyebrows in Old Blighty somehow low ered, and Taubman was allowed to go through with the deal. For their part, the board of the Whitney--of which Taubman was then a member--didn't even widen their eyes. As Taubman told the press in the halcyon year of 1988, "We discussed it, and they concluded that as far as they were concerned, it was not a conflict of interest"--on the grounds that Taubman was not actually on the Whitney's acquisitions committee nor involved in Sotheby's day-to-day operations. That bit of typical self-serving '80s rationalization was preceded in 1980 by board Vice President Leonard Lauder's wanting the Whitney to make a public-relations "splash" with a single art purchase. Director Thomas Armstrong put together a consortium of trustees and an anonymous donor, and came up with a cool million to buy Jasper Johns's Three Flags, 1958. Johns, who was not the seller, remarked, "$1 million... has a rather neat sound, but it has nothing to do with painting," a comment whose sentiment would ultimately be misplaced later in the decade.