Sotheby's (red) and The Flag Art Foundation
Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 10:40PM 
Last Wednesday we visited the Sotheby's (red) auction preview at Gagosian, the day before the Valentine’s Day sale, and the Flag Art Foundation, a new collector-driven exhibition space in Chelsea Towers. (The above photo of Damien Hirst is my shy Paparazzi attempt to participate in the buzz of the day.)
I see these two exhibitions as being on different sides of the same coin with regard to the shifting ground of philanthropy and the arts. For the (red) campaign, philanthropy is being re-channelled from directed responsibility to desire for a sexy product. (Red) celebrates and encourages conspicuous consumption - the visibility of the purchase - as a model of responsible citizenry. This is no less true of the new collector-driven arts foundations, who are less attached to supporting existing institutions as a form of civic responsibility and more actively interested in the visible mobility of the works in their collections.
Collector-driven nonprofit arts organizations are bypassing a curatorial system and its ethical codes by creating their own. This ambition is with the knowledge that the increased visibility they can provide for their own collection increases its value. What characterizes these nonprofits differently from the museum and other nonprofit arts organizations is the speed and fluidity with which art crosses the boundaries between institution and marketplace. For example, the Hudson Valley Center of Contemporary Art is open to and encourages market demand. Work has been removed from the floor in the midst of an exhibition in order to appear in a major Chelsea gallery, and work on sale in galleries only weeks before has appeared at HVCCA. At the entry to the Zwirner and Wirth sale from their collection a Takashi Murakami figure triumphantly standing on a Louis Vuitton trunk expressed cheeky ambition in celebration of its own commercial visual effect.
And so it is with some curiosity that I watch the opening of the Flag Art Foundation, also a not-for-profit exhibition space, but in the very-much-for-profit Chelsea gallery district. The distinction between the kind of exhibition space that a museum or contemporary art center provides as opposed to an art gallery seems to be increasingly vanishing.
What are the similarities between Sotheby’s (red) and the Flag? It's an extreme comparison to make, so bear with me. First, I am not a financial whiz, but from the business angle: Dell is related to both - Dell has recently signed on to the (red) campaign and Glenn Fuhrman manages Dell’s financing. But this is not so important or interesting to me as the kind of art we are talking about, and the manner in which it is exhibited. Here the similarity is quite literal, as there were nearly identical pieces in both exhibitions: a Damien Hirst pill cabinet (this brought the highest sum in the Sotheby’s sale); medicine cabinets by Rachel Whiteread; and Marc Quinn’s sculptures of Kate Moss in extreme yoga poses.
Further, the packaging of the exhibitions are very similar. As (red), there was already a theme for the Sotheby’s sale - all that was needed was a curator to inhabit the preselected theme and make it work. This was the high-profile and crowd-pleasing Damien Hirst. Likewise, the Flag came up with a title for the exhibition that was appropriate to the collection, and then sought the curator to suit that theme. The title is “Attention to Detail,” placing a high premium on visual interest, and the curator is the artist Chuck Close, also a crowd-pleaser. And on their site, even though the next exhibition appears, there is as of yet no curator.
What are the issues here? Scholarly curatorial practice is not held to be relevant in the exhibition of contemporary art, and curators must cater to the private collector’s vision. Not too long ago independent curators appeared to be the new art stars, perhaps even eclipsing the role of the artist. But collector driven enterprises are avoiding them and, in the case of the Flag, putting in their place an artist whose sensational work courts the public. All of this is changing the conditions of visibility for art, and Roberta Smith of the New York Times greets the collector-driven enterprise with enthusiasm as “like making art, as an act of individual imagination spurred by the desire to be different. The goal should be to do something that no one else is doing, not the thing that everyone has already done.”* 
When Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, thanks Eli Broad for the Jeff Koons bunny and claims this sculpture as the Mona Lisa of our time, no one is really being particularly creative. Collector-driven enterprises will cause certain kinds of work to rise to the surface and not others. And so it matters a great deal that the first exhibition at the Flag is devoted to hyper-real artifice and visual interest. In the gallery of the Flag, we spent the longest time standing before Thomas Demand’s Lawn, (1998). There is considerable visual interest in this photograph of a patch of grass from the perfect lawn - the absorption available to the viewer is like that of an abstract all-over painting. An added twist is that this patch of grass is completely artificial, as Demand constructs a paper tableau from an original photograph, distancing photography from being the one-click index of the real world to being the site of labor intensive artifice. In many works at the Flag, such technical replication of things in the world was its own ostentation, and imitative deceit constitutes the success of the work.
Artifice is easily understood as an achievement of art, as is a high level of visual interest. We should be reminded of the famous debate between Donald Judd and Michael Fried, in which Fried responds to Judd’s comment that “a work of art needs only be interesting” with the retort that a work of art must compel conviction. Without being burdened by what Fried meant by it, I think we can take this rather literally. The word conviction can mean two things: the personal conviction that might compel one to break with conventions or even the law (personal conviction is something that we hold dear in our notion of democracy); and as the consequence of legal judgment by state or nation. These are two very opposed meanings, but from their different sides they both stand in relation to convention or law. Fried stands behind judgment, and the canon-building enterprise that judgment has some stake in. There is a quality of thought that matters to him in the development of a criteria of judgment, and I point to this now art historical encounter as still relevant to our time. 
Francis Colpitt has explained that when we say of a work that it is interesting, typically we are withholding judgment - that it is interesting or not is a matter of one’s own personal interest. With regard to the Flag, we should also keep in mind that interest is also a financial term pertinent to the increase in value culled from the increased visibility of these works. Colpitt has also found that Donald Judd was thinking of the writings of philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, who wrote that: “That which is an object of interest is eo ipso invested with value. Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it.”** In our present time, this is perceived to be a crisis for art criticism, where it no longer matters whether a work of art is given a negative or a positive review - to have shown interest in it at all will escalate its mobility in visual fields. In Jennifer Dalton’s The Collector-ibles (2006), also at the Flag, collectors themselves are exhibited, and we strain our eyes to look for the names of those that we know. This is a new register of the visual field, and no one knows what the shakeout will truly be in the end. But I do find it necessary to raise questions about a continued uncritical enthusiasm for high degrees of artifice and visual interest.
By Catherine Spaeth
References:
* Roberta Smith, Rounding Up the Usual Suspects, The New York Times, October 15, 2008, Vol. 157, issue 54221.
** This debate occurred between one small phrase and a footnote. See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965, and Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, #10, June 1967. Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?,” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, V. 43, #4, Summer 1985.
Image credits: Damien Hirst at (red), 2/13/08, paparazzi; Thomas Demand, Rasen (Lawn), 1998, chromogenic photo print, 48”x67”, courtesy of the Flag Foundation; Jennifer Dalton, The Collector, nd., courtesy of the Flag Foundation; Mark Wagner, Chuck, 2005, currency collage, 11”x9”, courtesy of the Flag Foundation.
Reader Comments (14)
Catherine,
Aside from the anecdotal tale of HVCCA”s movement of work from “for-profit” space to “non-profit” space, is there evidence that supports your statement (appearing to be factual), that “…collector-driven arts foundations,…are less attached to supporting existing institutions..and more actively interested in the visible mobility of the works in their collections”?
Further, your statement that “the increased visibility they can provide for their own collection increases its value” would seem to imply that there can be no other motive for collector-driven nonprofit arts organizations to bypass the curatorial system and its ethical codes.
Isn’t it possible that collector-driven organizations are motivated by their desire to develop a mechanism that allows far greater numbers of the public access to the works? I have no experience with this, but it would seem that museum curators might find it easier to access works through a collector-driven organization, rather than dealing through another museum’s curators, who may see a conflict between the requesting museum’s plans and exhibition plans of the lending museum.
Next, I don’t understand your statement that “Scholarly curatorial practice is not held to be relevant in the exhibition of contemporary art”. Does that detract from the quality of the contemporary art that is exhibited?
Finally, you state that “Collector-driven enterprises will cause certain kinds of work to rise to the surface and not others”. That a particular collector would be biased by his/her tastes in art would seem expected. Would curators not bring their own bias to an exhibition?
Thank you, Jerry, these are all really good issues and I'm glad that you've raised them.
Museums appear to be rather desperate - the collection of new purchases that the Whitney exhibited this year is so paltry, a teeny tiny Furnas painting, a teeny tiny Gallagher, and lots of Minimalist drawings...Private collectors are buying the big stuff, and museum curators are desperately bringing their members on art fair tours, acting as consultants in the hope that these pieces will be left to them, but the model for patronage is shifting fast. Major patrons such as the Broads can build a new museum building, donate major pieces, and manage a lending foundation, and LA is lucky for this.
I've written elsewhere that collectors are genuinely passionate about their patronage and support of artists - I think that this is one of the reasons why 'the emerging artist' has become so important - the relationship between a young artist and her patronage can be very personally rewarding for both parties. The excitement may be about participating in art-critical dialogue as much as it is about collecting. This excitement is very much about increased visibility, having ideas catch, participating in history, having a stake and making it count. So by no means is it purely profit-driven.
Greater visibility by more numbers: Most of these spaces are closed to the public but for a few hours on the weekend. It's an insider's pitch with a tax break included, so do not avoid the profit motive here.
However, much like a musuem, the Rubell collection packages many travelling shows from its own storage a year. Saatchi did this long before the Rubells and has definitely left its mark. How did that big and shiny Koons get into the Macy's parade? This is a real question. And one can't say that because it was there, this was a bad thing for art.
For the most part, musuems collaborate very well together, although for sure we have seen some shows that would have been stronger with or without this or that - the missing Luks in the New York exhibit of the Ash Can school is a prime example. But these conflicts would occur for collector-driven non-profits as well.
Having private collectors who are willing to show their work is absolutely crucial to the future exhibition of art. It is clear that serious collectors are not just decorating their homes, and it has become a high end sport to find and embrace work that aspires to conditions of publicity in the contemporary art scene - the art world is not the same as it was in the days of the Barnes collection, very contained within its walls. A part of the new collecting game IS this mobility, and I think we've reached a place where if you aren't doing that, you are not going to be taken seriously as a collector.
I think you're last points are the crux of the matter - the scholarly curator as opposed to the collector's personal taste. What I am noticing at this first exhibition by the Flag is that it appeals to what I believe is a low common denominator - Maurizio Cattelan's policemen standing on their heads are what face you as you walk out of the elevator, and so there is some kind of joke on the law and at the same time we are to be impressed by the wax musuem likenesses. What does it mean to be handed a balloon animal as the new Mona Lisa, really? Can't we acknowledge that there is a degree of hollowness and contempt here? That this kind of work appeals to collectors, and not to critics and art historians, has been an obvious divide for a long time now.
Artists should curate more, so I don't want to steal the role of the artist here. It is more that the concept is chosen in advance, around what the collector finds interesting and important, and that the curator is decided upon afterwards. And artifice, visual interest, attention to detail, ...these can make beautiful, engaging works, but they also can be quite empty as decoration, irony or gimic. The ooh aah effect rules in either case,and what we have are baubles - conspicuous consumption. So yes, I do think that quality is at stake, and the question is, "what counts as quality?" Michael Fried offered that a work of art should compel conviction, and I am at least saying here that much of the work in this exhibit, though by no means all, compels conviction and that it appears quite hollow.
These collections and their spaces will have their own peculiar tastes emerging, and we shouldn't forget that the Dia is also such a foundation, which after years of successfully striving for institutional command has someone like Lynne Cook at the helm of scholarship. That's a good model to follow, and it can be seen without limiting it to the kind of art it supports.
What is at stake here is the nature and value of art criticism, increasingly acknowledged as making a choice to show interest in certain work as opposed to others, because judgment beyond this is lost in the sheer act of making work visible. I would like to believe that entering a dialogue such as this, however, adds to the richness and excitement of our present time.
Correction to above - much of the work in this exhibit does NOT compel conviction and appears quite hollow. The mistake was obvious, but I needed to fix it!
i'm just interesting for the image..is that from a dollar..?
Yes, Mark Wagner uses currency from around the world to make small, delicate collages. Carried by Pavel Zoubok.
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