Inside the modern art market
The modern art market is a phenomenon we have maybe grown so weary of we no longer even bother to remark on its absurdities.
We take it for granted now that the work of someone who died in poverty only a few decades ago will fetch prices in the tens of millions.
And that the work will hang in apartments and mansions that the living artist would never have been allowed to even enter.
I’ve stood in front of a few Basquiat and Keith Haring pieces and they are astonishing, gorgeous and stratified in a way photos never show, but nothing on the canvas really reveals why they are worth eight-figure price tags, while so much of their contemporary’s work ended up forgotten.
The Price of Everything director Nathaniel Kahn also made the gorgeous My Architect, about his dad Louis Kahn. If you are interested in documentaries enough to be reading this, you need to see that film.
Here, Kahn lays out a case that Basquiat, Haring, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, et al became famous because they were in exactly the right place – New York City – at exactly the right time.
In the late-1960s and into the 1970s, the art market was contracting. The very finite supply of old masterpieces were all bought up and staying put. Museums and old money had them all and they weren’t selling. But there was a tsunami of new money and conspicuous consumerism about to break. So the auction houses, aided by a few influential collectors and critics, set about anointing a new generation of great artists.
If you had the talent, were available to be found and had a marketable back-story, then maybe you could join them. Julian Schnabel’s film on his great friend – Basquiat – is pretty good primer on just how arbitrary and capricious the path to fame was. Kahn’s best idea is to introduce us to the artist Larry Poons, who was a respected and collected contemporary of the gods of modern art, but who shunned the PR games that might have lifted him into the pantheon. Seeing Poons late in life, withering and caustic about the market, but also wondering aloud what might have been, makes all of Kahn’s arguments come to life with authority and poignancy.
I walked into The Price of Everything not knowing who Larry Poons was and walked out quite besotted with the lovable old goat. This is a smart and absorbing film. Very recommended.