In the 1960s the Marlborough Gallery in London bought in its own artists’ paintings to keep the prices up. The CIA wanting to counter Communist Russia’s cartoon-bold men and women who should have been in Superman comics not public spaces, went all out for the abstract buying Jackson Pollack’s and funding Prospect Magazine. I don’t think Clement Greenberg knew he was being used.
It was suggested that The Unmade bed was the idea of a curator and manager not Emin, mainly because large million pound spaces need installations not paintings measured in inches. Bigger space needs bigger artwork.
Such revelations as these begin to show how the art arena has been manipulate for prestige and money in the contemporary scene. Amazing how prestige and money can manipulate art for hundreds of years and produce beauty, harbour skill and inform generations of the nature of creativity and suddenly be reduced to banality and ugliness. Something else is going on.
I was born into liberal democracy – not monetarism which came into the 1980s and later miscalled liberal democracy. I was signed up to equality, a freedom of expression and inclusion. Yet in the last 40 years fascism has risen again the west. What went wrong? Artists have not been allowed to do their job.
Artists express themselves and derive their milieu from the thinking around them. Not just the immediate friends – if they have any – but the entire world of knowledge in as far as they have it. Artists who just want fame and money are not artists, they are businesses. The culture of making money no matter how, has infected the art arena and along with it generations of artists and it is only their voices that are heard, Curators don’t go looking anymore, doors to the major galleries are monitored and not everyone can offer their work, trustees are self-interested and big business has made the managers quasi-politicians. Remember how Cool Britannia was spearheaded by artists and sportsmen?
What changed was very simple. If a work does not make someone a profit it is worthless. If it is hanging on a $400m yacht it is art, if it is in a small Soho Gallery for a month it is pointless. And all we can hang onto is the knowledge that the Academies rejected the Impressionists and those they championed are now forgotten. History went elsewhere because the one thing chasing money cannot do is demand the future maintains the same taste. Important art will have its day tomorrow. That’s all we’ve got.
