The unreal world of modern art

Nick Gillespie looks at the economics of the modern art world:

[. . .] Don Thompson, a business professor at Toronto's York University and author of the insightful and compulsively readable The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, argues that the two activities [owning art and appreciating art] are increasingly indistinguishable. Thompson spent a year touring auction houses, talking with dealers and even hanging out with artists, who emerge as altogether less interesting than the buyers and sellers around them.

Consider the case of British advertising legend Charles Saatchi, one of the central figures in Thompson's study of "the curious economics of contemporary art." Married to voluptuous TV cook Nigella Lawson, Saatchi is "the prototype of the modern branded collector," a tastemaker who doesn't just collect art but creates whole markets in the stuff, no matter how bizarre, sensationalistic or banal it might seem on first (or second, or third) blush. He adds value simply by his association with or interest in an artist.

Back in 1991, Saatchi commissioned "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" — a 15-foot tiger shark suspended in a giant glass tank — from Damien Hirst, whose reputation he had largely created via early patronage. Saatchi reportedly had fallen in love with Hirst's work after seeing "A Thousand Years," an installation featuring a rotting cow's head, flies and a bug zapper.

An artist friend of mine once said that he'd rather have work that appalled and disgusted viewers than to have their indifference. That's an encapsulation of what so much modern art is all about — the strength of the provoked reaction is key, while the actual "artistic" aspect can be all but absent. The degree of art involved is always open to debate, but the shock is what it's all about for many artists.