Money talks

THE Art Gallery of NSW is experiencing an increasingly evident crisis of direction.

A FEW weeks ago the sesquicentenary of the National Gallery of Victoria was discussed in this column. The oldest and biggest of our art museums appears to be in good shape, a diagnosis that is also confirmed by the outstanding exhibition devoted to Eugene von Guerard that was reviewed here last week.

The same cannot be said of the Art Gallery of NSW, which is experiencing an increasingly evident crisis of direction. The immediate reason appears to be that Edmund Capon, who was appointed in 1978 and who has generally been a very effective leader, administratively and curatorially, has long outstayed his 30th anniversary.

No one has been especially keen to see Capon go because of the obvious paucity of credible alternatives within the gallery or more broadly in the Australian museum world. But persistent uncertainty concerning the question of succession has taken its toll, leaving the institution, as far as I can see, in an end-of-reign limbo.

This seems to be the background, if not the explanation, for some otherwise very peculiar decisions and developments at the gallery in recent months -- ones that will have serious consequences for a generation after Capon's own eventual departure, which is rumoured to be in a year.

The most conspicuous of these questionable decisions has been what looks like a virtual amalgamation -- through a recent staff reshuffle -- of the departments of Australian and contemporary art. The question this raises is whether these two fields are actually compatible.

Australian art, as a department within the gallery, is concerned with those periods that are far enough from us to be considered with some historical detachment and a degree of objectivity. It covers everything from the early colonial period to the post-war years up until perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. The 19th and early 20th centuries by now can be discussed in an informed and scholarly manner; more recent generations, and especially when the artists are still living, may still be the subject of disagreements.

The contemporary period, however -- the past couple of decades -- is entirely different. It is a field of promotion and marketing, rather than of scholarship. Reputations and market values are still the subject of systematic manipulation by dealers, pseudo-academic copywriters and curators with axes to grind. Large amounts of money, as well as the reputations of the reputation-makers themselves, are at stake.

Contemporary art is a classic case of the fog of war. That fog will not dissipate for a generation, and when it does -- when those who now run the contemporary art establishment have died or retired or moved on to something else -- most of what is now promoted and taken seriously will be left like flotsam and jetsam on the beach. We know this is true because it has happened with every other art fashion during the past century. How many vacuous abstract paintings fill the basements of museums, for the handful we consider of enduring interest?

The only way one can interpret recent developments at the gallery is that the Australian department is being downgraded and subordinated to the interests of the contemporary. That is why the success of the von Guerard exhibition in Melbourne has an almost emblematic significance: it is hard to imagine anything of this seriousness coming out of the AGNSW Australian department in the foreseeable future.

If we also consider the fanfare over the new rooms devoted to contemporary art (the disadvantages of losing storage space within the building appear to have been overlooked), the pattern seems obvious: the AGNSW appears to be reorienting itself towards the contemporary field, to be turning itself into a pseudo-Museum of Contemporary Art.

Readers may recall that we already have one of those down at Circular Quay; but significantly, the AGNSW's press releases claimed that it would now have the biggest contemporary art display in Sydney. Meanwhile the MCA is building its new wing, scheduled to open in March next year -- when, presumably, it will have the biggest contemporary art display once again.

Whatever else one can say about this dubious mine-is-bigger-than-yours squabble in contemporary art, it is hard not to feel that the AGNSW is losing its sense of purpose, chasing after something it is not and neglecting its real mission. What is particularly disturbing, as already suggested, is that long-lasting changes are being made at the end of a director's tenure. Part of the motive for this reorientation to the contemporary must have been the desire to secure the gift of the John Kaldor collection, now ensconced in the new and of course correspondingly named galleries and accompanied by a doorstop catalogue that leaves us in little doubt as to how very important these works are meant to be.

The gallery's press releases have constantly reiterated the monetary value of the Kaldor works. In a market as fashion-driven as contemporary art, such numbers have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Nonetheless, the emphasis is symptomatic of one thing that cannot be stated too clearly: contemporary art today is about money.

For a century and a half, the avant-garde has liked to think of itself as opposed to the status quo: against power, authority, the bourgeoisie, money, commodification, fascism, patriarchy, sexism, ecological destruction and anything else that can be slotted into a simplistic and Manichaean world view polarised into good and bad.

Needless to say, artists have time and again profited from all the things they deplored when the opportunity presented itself; consistency has seldom got in the way of self-interest. But now it's fundamentally different: contemporary art is aligned with fashion and advertising and media in a consumer economy based on novelty and superficial stimulation.

The people who mill around at openings are new-money men in suits and women in designer clothes for whom contemporary art is just chic. Art students and young artists may still play the charades of opposition and bohemia, but they know the smell of money as well as museum directors. And money today is not in subtlety, reflection, memory, sensibility or genuine resistance to stupidity; it's in brashness and compliance.

If we set aside the seduction of financial value, how interesting is the work in the collection really? Views both inside and outside the gallery are mixed; some parts of the gift are no doubt an asset to the permanent collection while others are not. As I said in an earlier preview piece, there are a few things that are certainly impressive. Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs are striking and powerful; some of the other photographic work will enrich the holdings.

Bill Viola stands out too as an artist who shows how new technologies may be used to evoke timeless experiences of a spiritual nature. Nam June Paik's meditating Buddha is a witty piece, not only because the video loop plays back the unchanging concentration of the antique statue -- unlike the constant noise and distraction that are the staple of commercial television -- but also because the little monitor has the shape of a spaceman's helmet and thus suggests an analogy between inner and outer cosmic adventure.

On the other hand, the row of boxes by Donald Judd and the tile installations by Carl Andre seem rather past their shelf life; not everything that is of art historical significance is also necessarily of lasting human interest. It is the duty of art history to note things that were fashionable, or shocking, or made an impact at a given time; but it does not follow that they were ever of real value.

Some of the Christo material is on the cusp of the same remoteness. The wrapping of Little Bay was a striking event and still strikes a chord. Most of the other wrappings, including various parcels and the two trees that now lie on the floor of the gallery, are rather less convincing. The Richard Long installations, meant to exist in the landscape, look emasculated in the neutral space.

Sol LeWitt is an interesting figure, but especially in his more minimal vein. An artificial room painted with bright stripes inside is cheerful enough but does not convey anything deeper than the interior decoration of a play centre. And there are things, like the Jeff Koons, which for all their attempts at irony (the MSG of postmodernism) have never been more than gimmicky.

If all this is rather aesthetically sterile, there is a set of works that claims to provide its own commentary on the vacuity of the commercial contemporary: three pieces by Michael Landy, two white panels and a white box, marked, in lettering that imitates home-brand products in supermarkets, No Frills Drawing, No Frills Sculpture and No Frills Painting.

This is meant to be generic art as a commodity. The wall label assures us that the "series is an ironic swipe at what the art world values and the artist as a brand" -- but this of course is nonsense. The work is itself a brand product; a commodity with the alibi that it knows what it's doing; and so we go around and around in a familiar loop of infinite dishonesty. Perhaps the most telling room of all is the one devoted to Ugo Rondinone's dead or sleeping clown and a particularly deadening, nihilistic soundtrack. Rondinone reminds us why the rich buy art at all, and contemporary art in particular. The basic drive, ever since art was fetishised in modern times as a substitute for spirituality, is to swap mere money for something of higher value; and since that higher value is by definition not quantifiable there is no such thing as a correct price for art.

The poor buy things they need and use; the very rich pay large sums to acquire things they don't need, demonstrating they have transcended the baser constraints of need and utilitarian consumption. But the spiritual conversion rate of the transaction becomes even higher when the work purchased is intrinsically worthless, like Rauschenberg's Combines; and higher again when it is nothing but a statement of nihilism, like the works of Landy and Rondinone.

Spending on nothing is the ultimate demonstration of wealth, like the potlatch ceremonies of the Kwakiutl Indians, in which objects of great value are ostentatiously destroyed in front of one's peers to establish superiority.

A canny director of a big gallery may collaborate opportunistically in these tribal rituals but should not allow an institution to be durably compromised for short-term gain. Time will tell whether the AGNSW has got the balance right.

New contemporary galleries
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney