The Harsh Reality of Soft Power
Your book Géopolitique de l’art contemporain (1) begins by telling the story of the United States’ cultural emancipation from Europe throughout the twentieth century, then goes on to consider the place of European countries and other major powers—China, of course, but also the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf—before finally coming back to the United States, whose influence remains strong. This analysis flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that equates a country’s cultural dominance with its economic dominance... When I was writing the conclusion to the first edition of my book, which was published in 2019, I realised that the concept of cultural power was detached from that of economic power. China, which had become the second largest economic power, had not been able to establish a cultural soft power, even though the country had opened up to the world since 1978 under the impetus of Deng Xiaoping. China has not imposed a societal model that can compete with the “American way of life,” and no country close to China has dreamt of becoming Chinese. On the contrary, there has been strong resistance to Japanese culture and the creation of an internationally influential Korean soft power. In the early 2000s, however, China was opening up to Western artists thanks to the proliferation of private museums, active collectors and the creation of dynamic galleries and art fairs. But this momentum was shattered by Xi Jinping’s desire to de-Westernise the Chinese mindset, because there was a risk of protest from artists, who are now adopting an attitude of self-censorship so as not to be repressed and prevented from exhibiting in their own country. In 2023, we can see that recognised Chinese artists have virtually disappeared from the programming of Western galleries and museums.
This disparity between economic and cultural power can also be seen in the Gulf states, which overemphasise American and Western artists to the detriment of local ones. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Western artists, who are the stars of the market, represent a means for the region’s sponsors, such as Qatar and now Saudi Arabia, to gain rapid international recognition. Secondly, it is difficult for local artists to make a name for themselves because the religious and political censorship is so strict.
Soft power can only be achieved and disseminated through liberal societies that remain models to be emulated. This is where the United States and the West remain unmatched, especially since they have been able to listen and adapt to societal demands.
You show the extent to which the ideological model is the driving force, and how the United States, having opposed the Soviet aesthetic of “art for art's sake” in the abstraction of Pollock and Rothko, is now leading the movement in favour of a form of art that highlights societal concerns, and especially those of ethnic and sexual minorities. Are we living in the age of American “socialist realism”? The art world is both highly political and highly economic, and in the United States we can see a very strong influence of social demands stemming from cultural studies, which make it possible not to contest the increasingly high prices obtained by living artists. This is the heart of American puritanism, which atones for the excesses of the market by assimilating the sexual and ethnic claims that are nevertheless strongly opposed by a very conservative section of society.The decisionmakers of the art world submit to this reality, forcing museum directors, curators and galleries to introduce preferential choices and quotas for showing artists from different minorities. Artists also know that in order to be shown, it is better to adapt and propose narrative works that speak to the various debates in society. You might say that there is a kind of aesthetic mainstream being established in strategic venues such as the Whitney Biennial and in the programming of museums, and this is also the case for the appointment of artists for the American pavilion in Venice. There have also been decisions by American museums to sell works by white artists in order to acquire artists from ethnic and gender minorities, like the Baltimore museum has done.
You stress the need for the art market to rely on symbolic constructs, and you give the example of the storytelling orchestrated by Christie’s, which enabled the auction house to boost bids for works by
Jean-Michel Basquiat. What did this storytelling consist of, and did it leave room for aesthetic criteria? The USA has always been conscious of creating its own storytelling, and artists played a very early part in this, starting with the great paintings of American landscapes such as those by Frederic Edwin Church, which were treated as biblical scenes in reference to the Promised Land. Then the power of Hollywood across the country and abroad contributed significantly, followed by the New Deal period when politicians realised that painters and photographers could play a role in building the American narrative. The government therefore poured a great deal of money into public commissions, which contributed to American pride whilst providing artists with an income. Nowadays, the power of the market means that these narratives need to be reinforced in order to ensure artists’ global standing and legitimise their place in the history of art. For Basquiat, this was a twofold challenge. The artist became the icon of something that was still considered unthinkable in the 1970s: a black artist achieving the same level of global recognition as white artists. And to consolidate the market and his myth, the smallest details of his very short life (he died aged 28) were dissected and explained in vast exhibitions and voluminous catalogues.Yet Basquiat produced figurative, identifiable paintings, making them commercial objects that are easily traded on the international market. It is easier to build a myth for this aesthetic than for artists with a conceptual practice. Incidentally, we can now see the price discrepancy between minimal artists and pop artists, who are better known and more identifiable.
HOMOGENISATION OF TASTE
Despite the unprecedented focus on diversity in our globalised world, you keep coming back to the fact that we have yet to escape the homogenisation of taste... There is both a homogenisation of discourse and of tastes, because nowadays, despite the art scene being open to every country in the world, a vast global art scene is developing, with specificities of course, but which are very much linked to each other. We can see this, for example, in the phenomenon of biennialisation, in which a small number of
star curators find themselves appointed within the international circuit. Over a period of a few years, the same curator will direct the Documenta, the Biennales of Venice, Gwangju, São Paolo and Lyon, and we are witnessing a standardisation of proposals which, depending on the period, focus more on ethnic, ecological or gender issues... The same is true of the art market, which offers artists from all over the world to buyers from every continent, but whose buyers are trained to buy the same artists because information has become instantaneous and global. Mimicry has become much stronger, and has only accelerated the rising prices for the most sought-after artists.This applies not only to private collectors, but also to governments: currently, in the construction of its cultural soft power, Saudi Arabia wants to have a collection as prestigious as Qatar’s, and we can expect the same sought-after artists to be represented in both collections.
For a long time, the British and the Germans were the Americans’ preferred partners, but their economic situation no longer affords them the same cultural dynamism that used to be the envy of the French. Do the latter now have a role to play? I would distinguish between the American relationship with the British and the Germans since 1945. Since 1945, the Germans have consistently shown that they were capable of producing a new artistic scene after Nazism. Supported by American subsidies, and above all by a high level of investment by a large number of industrialists backed by tax incentives from the Länder, the Federal Republic of Germany saw a proliferation of major acquisitions of artists by private collectors and museums with substantial budgets (Beuys, Baselitz, Richter, Polke, followed by photographers from the Düsseldorf School such as Struth and Gursky). This led to a rapid recognition of German art, compounded by the creation of Documenta in 1955, the Cologne and Basel art fairs, and the acquisition of German artists by Americans from the 1970s onwards. Nowadays, Germany has once again become a major democratic power, and entrepreneurs are much more concerned with the challenges of competing with China than with the power of an art scene that is struggling to renew itself, even though Gerhard Richter is now the most expensive living artist, along with David Hockney.
The British had their golden age between 1980 and the end of the 2010s. With the help of highly strategic commercial activists such as Saatchi, Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists succeeded in bringing the British scene up to the level of the Americans, Damien Hirst’s pride being to have found himself exhibited alongside the star artist Jeff
Koons in the homes of influential American collectors, as well as in Qatar and in François Pinault’s collection. In this respect, Hirst and the YBAs replaced British rock stars and put the British cultural scene on a podium alongside the Americans and the Germans. Brexit and the non-renewal of a young generation of British artists interrupted this momentum, and Paris is once again the place to be for art in Europe.The arrival of Pinault and Arnault as world-leading collectors, the opening of their museums, a new generation of ambitious collectors, French artists who are aware of the international competition, highly professional galleries with an international scope, and finally the fact that Christie’s and Sotheby’s are both owned by Frenchmen, François Pinault and Patrick Drahi respectively, have all helped to put Paris on the map of the global art scene alongside New York and London, which are losing ground.
Gilbert & George do not feature in your list of the highest-rated British artists on the international market. Is there a reason for this? Gilbert & George don’t have an easy market, it’s (fragile) photography, it’s difficult to install, it’s not very “desirable,” as the market would say these days. The work is iconic in the context of English art history, but not for collectors. They are very popular but not very marketable, and their narrative is very much rooted in British culture, which is difficult for foreigners to understand. It’s an interesting case, because they will feature in museums and art history books but not in Christie’s records. The same goes for Christian Boltanski. Fragile, difficult to sell, but part of the history of art.
IMAGE AND REPUTATION
Bernard Arnault and François Pinault have obviously played a major role in Paris’ new appeal. However, you note that their reputation has primarily been built on the interest they have shown in the great names of international art, unlike their American predecessors, who were very much driven by national sentiment. How can we explain this? With Bernard Arnault in particular, is it because he is more concerned with extending Vuitton’s soft power than that of France? There’s just one thing missing from this new situation, which has made France the new crossroads of Europe: French artists need to achieve the same level of recognition and prices as Anglo-Saxon artists, and in order for them to do so, the influential venues need to promote them. Yet very often, there is not a single monograph by a living French artist at the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de la Ville de Paris, the Pinault Collection or the Fondation Vuitton, and this is still the case in the summer of 2023. It’s regrettable that museums are overwhelmingly focused on making a name for themselves internationally, and only want to exhibit foreign artists who are more recognised and more “bankable” in terms of ticket sales, the exhibition curators’ reputation and the museum’s image. The programming of the Fondation Vuitton, which promotes world-renowned artists in the same way as Vuitton products, is up for debate. But it is ultimately up to the public institution to reflect on its mission to defend the French art scene.
You talk about the Berlin scene as a place in which a number of committed intellectual artists come together, artists who can’t be assimilated by the market. Do they have any chance of making history? Is there an artistic life outside of the art market that is not definitively bound to remain marginal? The best-known young German art scene, and the two major events, Documenta and the Berlin Biennale, are now seen as “activist” and highly politicised. By taking an interest in societal issues, they marginalise themselves from the art market whilst simultaneously remaining highly visible to international critics and curators. As we saw at the last Berlin Biennale, the invited artists produce discourses but few works, and are only marginally concerned with aesthetic research. There is a danger of retreating into political proposals, akin to total deconstructionist sociological and anthropological research. If there is no permeability with the art world of collectors and galleries, there is the risk of a fracture, with a scene centred on a political discourse that has little to do with art. This will certainly be one of the debates of the next few years. The idea of “Coloniality-Decoloniality” means that Western concepts will no longer be the reference point, and aesthetic criteria will no longer be the ones that define what can be assimilated by the art market constructed by the West. n
Translation: Juliet Powys
Le Cavalier bleu, 248 p., 13 euros.
Nathalie Obadia founded her gallery in Paris in 1993. She was vice-president of the Comité professionnel des galeries d’art from 2005 to 2008, the year in which she opened a second gallery in Brussels. She has a master’s degree in international and European law, and is also a graduate of Science-Po Paris (International Relations). She has been teaching at this school since 2015.