I’m listening to this book on tape, Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rest of Contemporary Art. Is that what people still call it: book on tape? That’s naming two antiquated technologies into one description of a modern medium. How quaint.
The book is interesting in the perspective it takes on the rise of different artists. Instead of looking at the relationships between different artists and their contemporaries, the book focuses on dealers and collectors in relationship to how different artists’ careers unfold.
I guess I’ve always been a doe-eyed believer in the purity of art: an artist can create their work in an ecosystem of their choosing, insulated from any market that is created around that ecosystem. But behavior around the Art Market can really bastardize my feelings of being a deer prancing around sparkling rivers. The dominating raise of the Art Market speaks to the fact that the newest “ism” of art may be entrepreneurism, having started back in the Warhol days and now exemplified with people using 1031 exchanges and auction houses to inflate the monetary value of their collections of objects that are readily identifiable to the general public as desirable.
This 1031 exchange process that rich people use to create value within their art collection is fucking absurd and the sort of thing I imagine that coked up guy in Diehard really loving to talk about on a first date. I feel like someone tried to explain this to me years ago at a party where there was too much glass, too much concrete and not enough things to fill the space, and I sort of nodded and felt embarrassed for myself. Why was I there?
There’s a club in Berlin called Berghain with a bouncer who is notoriously hard to get past: Sven. He had a tattoo of a ruler on one of his arms and a friend of mine joked that it was to measure how far he was going to fist you before telling you to fuck off. The thing about the mystique of Berghain, and the asshole-ness of Sven, is that it made the place keep a lot of what made it good, even after becoming a place of such hype. The music stayed good. The crowd wasn’t crawling with people just trying to say they had been there. The way to have access to it was to be kicked out a few times but always show up again; learn to speak some German; know the neighborhood; always know who was playing. Because the whole point is that you wanted to hear the music. The point is that you loved the nightlife that Berlin as a whole offered up. There was no way to shortcut this love.
And Boom has an undertone that speaks to the shortcuts that rich people take to be cool. Some of them don’t want to take the time to get fisted (symbolically) by Sven or learn the ins and outs of what makes a good painting, but instead they want to purchase something to signal this knowledge. And in the process boost their net value some.
This is an economic system made to give people something to talk about. That's it. And to be clear these are thoughts around The Market of art not The World of art. xoxo. gossip girl.