Buyer beware: art should be about more than money

Contemporary art has a social conscience but is let down by the cynical and often shallow consumer.

Marco Fusinato’s The Infinitive 7. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

The title of this exhibition refers to the most famous saying attributed to the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who came from the city of Ephesus on the Ionian coast of Anatolia. You can never step twice into the same river, for the water of the river is ever-flowing and ever-changing. The river is thus never the same as itself, never truly identical.

This insight appealed deeply to Nietzsche and supported his critique of the concept of identity, but he also admired Hera­clitus’s idea that war, figuratively speaking, is the father of all things and it is strife that gives birth to justice — a conception ­Nietzsche declared to be quintessentially Greek. The importance of Heraclitus to Nietzsche, and later to Heidegger, made him a touchstone of 20th-century philosophy up to the time of Derrida.

At first sight, Heraclitus represents the radical assertion that all is change and flux, in contrast to Parmenides, who represents the equally radical idea that all of this is an illusion and that being is inherently one and unchanging — a seemingly intractable contradiction that would only be resolved in Plato’s model of two levels of reality.

In fact, though, Heraclitus’s philosophy is more subtle than that. Beyond the apparent flux, his world is ruled by absolute reason and necessity: this was the conception later borrowed by the Stoics, just as the Epicureans adopted the Democritean idea of universal chance and randomness.

Daniel Crooks’s Static No.22 (Gyre and Gimbal) [still], 2017. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Heraclitus calls this world reason or mind the Logos, literally the “word”, but with much broader resonance, in the same sense that John’s Gospel half a millennium later declares: “in the ­beginning was the Word”. And one of the philosopher’s most ­interesting suggestions is that we think correctly when our thought is aligned with, or attuned to, the universal Logos, and wrongly when we rely on our “private minds” — using the word that has given us “idiot”, for an idiot is one who thinks only of his personal affairs and interests.

What has all this got to do with a survey of the past few ­decades of contemporary art in a leading Melbourne gallery? On the face of it, the title seems to allude to the first idea, to suggest that the stream of modern art is ever-changing and that modern or contemporary art can never be identified as a single thing; hence the diversity of the works, the style and the movements represented.

In another sense, the image of the river can be applied to the structure of the exhibition itself, for the works currently exhibited over the two levels of the Flinders Lane premises represent only half the survey, and the other half will be shown in a second hanging to be installed this month. So by the time this review comes out, the exhibition will have changed completely and the reader will quite literally not be stepping into the same exhibition.

But under the variety and flux, there is some reason and pattern to be discerned, as is suggested in the curator’s ­introduction to the show: “Over the past 30 years, the art world has evolved from a modestly sized province of connoisseurs, passion-driven dealers, and hobbyist collectors, into an interconnected, global arts industry.”

Emily Floyd’s A Strategy to infiltrate the homes of the bourgeoisie. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Over a generation or so, the art world, or perhaps we could say the art market, has thus changed from one dominated by artists and “amateurs”, in the original sense of people who love art — to one dominated by dealers who treat artists as content ­providers and package products that they sell to investors.

This new class of purchaser does not buy art on instinct or ­appeal but on the instructions of art advisers, who fit Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Such advisers are inherently agnostic — when not simply ignorant — about the meaning and value of art; their implicit brief is to consider it only in relation to fashion and to probable capital ­appreciation.

There is a clear pattern here, and it is the total and uncompromising assimilation of art into a system of market exchange. ­Except that art has a special place in this system, since it is not priced according to use or consumption value. The real value of art lies in aesthetic qualities that embody spiritual insight; but this is too intangible for the art market, so in practice it is priced as a demonstration that one is rich enough to pay for something useless.

A still from Lida Abdul’s Clapping with Stones. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

There are two interesting corollaries that become clear as soon as we have understood this principle. One is that high ­prices are themselves a symbol of status: that is why the very rich actually want to pay record prices at auction. It is a badge of honour to have paid more than anyone has ever paid for a painting by Monet or Pollock or some other familiar brand.

But it is a still greater assertion of status to pay more for less. So rather than pay a record price for a Monet, like some vulgar oil baron, you pay a record price for something the layman might consider slight if not actually worthless. Of course this only works if the worthless thing is also by an approved brand name, which again brings us back to the role of galleries and museums as gatekeepers and guarantors of the system.

How did we actually get here? The first great explosion of capitalist modernism was with American post-war abstraction, whose massive and vacuous canvases, the products either of drunken macho self-expression or of mystical vision, depending on the artist and the gullibility of the audience, rapidly became and have remained staples of the modern art market.

The art of the 1970s was in many ways an attempt to escape from this market commodification. Conceptual and performance art took forms that were either ephemeral or fleeting and intangible. Political art, even if it lost sight of the old-fashioned Marxist narrative and splintered into special interest movements that were the first forms of today’s identity politics, was vociferously anti-capitalist.

But all that changed with postmodernism, whose main historical role was to help culture get back in bed with business and money. Postmodernism ridiculed moral discrimination, cele­brated cynicism and camp, deliberately confused commercial culture with popular culture, and equated hairdressers and admen with artists — a conflation later hardened into the myth of a “creative class”.

The demolition of all standards of criticism, whether aesthetic, historical or political, has produced the nebulous thing called contemporary art, which can be anything the market ­decides it is, and is essentially a form of investment and a branding vehicle for corporate sponsors. Just as a cryptocurrency can be pictured as coins, art today can be and regularly is pictured as socially concerned, but it exists solely because of the trading system that controls its production and circulation.

To varying extents, all the artists in this exhibition — and the one that readers will see by the time this comes out — are part of this story. Some are individually better than others, and most are trying to do something sincere, but from the historical point of view, all are part of the much bigger generational movement that I have described.

In the current installation, the ground floor is dominated by a mixture of social and political themes, while the first floor is largely devoted to formalist work. Both are interesting to consider in the light of the principles I have mentioned. With the formalist work, for example, there is a general tendency to smallness, slightness and self-consciousness, deliberately asserting difference from earlier abstraction.

Figurative works, too, are inevitably painted either in a naive and whimsical manner or left incomplete, as though the artist were afraid that their idea would evaporate if articulated more clearly. And in all of these things we can recognise the ­unconscious understanding that the market wants to pay more for less.

The social and political work that one first encounters on the ground floor is striking, especially because of the ­impression of disembodied unreality that always consumes such themes in the world of contemporary art. It was ­especially so to me on this occasion because I had just been on a train to Caulfield, full of youngish, lower-middle class men and women already drunk on the way to the races and behaving like caricatures of their respective sexes.

On the way back, it was instead a spectacle of grey proletarian culture in the consumer age. And then I entered the elegant and refined environment of the gallery to be confronted by ostensibly political images being admired by a handful of upper-class cognoscenti. Emily Floyd’s work was composed of letters standing on the ground: “A strategy to infiltrate the homes of the bourgeoisie”; the idea was witty but the joke was still on the artist because the work that infiltrates those homes is neutered, like the attenu­ated or dead viruses used for immunisation.

The best artists in the first section of the exhibition were those whose work, to varying extents, transcended the general flow of art in this period, like Mike Parr with the memorable photograph of himself and his wife sitting on a bed, or, in a completely different vein, Robert Hunter, who pursued his own minimalist development as a monk pursues meditation. Anne Zahalka’s photographic work, as so often, artfully combines a look of spontaneity with careful ­staging.

Some of the younger ones stand out too, like Daniel Crooks and Angelica Mesiti, although her work could not be shown to its best effect in this context. Lida Abdul’s video shot at the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban is hypnotic and moving, the vast cave opening remaining like a huge iwan in Persian architecture and, unexpectedly, the symbol of a ­deeper Buddhist message of emptiness that was beyond the scope and even the understanding of the religious fanatics who destroyed the statues.

The exhibition is cleverly but very expensively installed on steel sheets devised by the architects who, some years ago, ­designed the gallery itself within the shell of an old warehouse. The effect is impressive and no doubt helps provide extra hanging space and separate niches for individual artists, yet it dwarfs some of the minor work, especially a lot of the painting that now looks rather tired and inconsequential.

Apparently the steel constructions will also be partly or ­wholly reconfigured for the second part of the exhibition, meaning even greater expense. Inevitably, this becomes a large part of the meaning of the exhibition: art should be about more than money, and contemporary art is always squirming and proclaiming its social conscience, but the conspicuous expenditure framing its display reminds us that it is effectively treated as a token of wealth in a post-cultural marketplace.

Never the Same River

Anna Schwartz Gallery, until December 21