"IF YOU WANT TO BE AN ICON OF VIRTUE, THIS IS THE MOMENT BECAUSE YOU'LL STAND OUT" by Dave Hickey

"IF YOU WANT TO BE AN ICON OF VIRTUE, THIS IS THE
MOMENT BECAUSE YOU'LL STAND OUT"

Dave Hickey

29.10.07

Issue 185

The question of how to sell without selling out
is especially relevant in the contemporary art
world and there are few people better qualified
to grapple with this thorny topic than Dave
Hickey. Not only is he Professor of English at
the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Hickey is
also one of America's best known art and cultural
critics, admired for his aversion to academicism
and his robust analysis of the effects on art of
the rough and tumble of the free market. Last
month he delivered a keynote speech at Frieze:
"Schoolyard art: playing fair without the
referee." Here we present an edited transcript.
The lecture is available as a podcast at:

www.friezefoundation.org/talks.

The title of this talk comes from a legend about
the great basketball player Julius Irving, Dr J,
who was famous even in his schoolyard days; he
wanted to be a professional player so much that
he always played by the rules even on the school
yard. He would call fouls on himself. Any of you
who have been around the art world for the last
few years will realise the aptness of this
comparison because whatever rules there may have
been, no longer apply. There are people out there
who like art more than money. The only bad thing
is that there are a lot of artists who like money
more than art. This is a problem but consider the
benefits. There has never been a better chance to
draw attention to oneself by behaving honourably
and honestly and meticulously. If you want to be
an icon of virtue, this is the moment because
you'll stand out.If you behave well, if you
behave correctly, if you make art that will still
matter in 200 years, all you can lose is money.
Did anyone get into the art world to make money?
I got into it for sex and drugs but not for
money. Why is everyone worrying about money? What
are you going to do if you get a lot of money?
Are you going to buy a boat? Are you going to buy
an apartment in Paris? Jesus, stop it! Unless you
have an incredible drug habit, I don't really see
any reason to have money at all. I really don't
care about money, as my wife will tell you. I do
care about being right. My rule is Leo Castelli's
rule and a lot of what I'm telling you today
comes from Leo. Leo said: "You can't be right all
the time but you can never be wrong." If you go
by that rule, you're going to be ok. Leo's idea
of being wrong was to sell something for too much
money. The example he gave was a painter named
Jennifer Bartlett, who was represented by Paula
Cooper Gallery. Jennifer had a little bubble
moment, she began selling her pictures in the
high six figures-they really deserved to be sold
in the low twos. So I asked Leo what was wrong
with that and he said: "It hurts Carl Andre's
prices." Which is to say, the prices of
everybody's work are compromised by selling art
for too much money. For a dealer, this is
virtually impossible to avoid these days. My
friend Bob Shapazian, who was director of the
Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, quit. And why
did he quit? He said: "I'm not an art dealer
anymore. I sit around, a crate comes in, I see
who the crate's from, I go to the waiting list, I
make up this outrageous fucking number and send
it out. That's not being an art dealer. I am
creating value but it is not real value."What we
have here is a strange moment which is the return
of primary practice. In the 80s and 90s, you had
one of the biggest hypocritical moments in the
history of art. You would walk into a gallery and
in the front room would be the work of somebody
called something like Hernando which was
completely composed of confetti and dog turds.
There would be a serious essay about confetti and
dog turds-their interchangeability, their social
relevance, the way they relate to late
capitalism. And then, if you could get into the
back room with your shoes clean, you would buy
the Donald Judd that was back there. We went
through two decades of what was mostly a
secondary market in which the front room was just
a place to put up installation art with popcorn
machines, that nobody had even the faintest
interest in selling, as a loss leader to lure
people into the back room to buy the Donald Judd
and the Claes Oldenburg. With the collapse of
this moment, a lot of things happened. The public
funding disappeared. With public funding gone,
the power of the museum receded. Kunsthalles
closed like little violets across the country. At
the same time we have seen the development of a
business world which benefits from a condition of
borderline hyperliquidity. I was talking to the
president of the Venetian Resort hotel and casino
in Las Vegas. He said: "You wouldn't believe it.
We are bringing money home by the bucketful, we
bring bucket after bucket of money. We are
running out of buckets." When you run out of
buckets, when you run out of places to put your
money, that's hyperliquidity. And I needn't tell
you that hyperliquidity is good for the art world
because if you really want to piss away some
money, the art world is the place to do it. There
is so much money out there at the moment it just
makes you cry. And it's harder and harder to get
hold of it unless you're selling art. So we have
a bubble. Art bubbles are great. Art bubbles suck
money into the art world. Who gets hurt in an art
bubble? Greedy artists; stupid collectors. Who
else? Nobody with their wits about them gets hurt
in an art bubble.Also institutions today have the
power of sucking all the money available in the
community into the museum. I said to a friend of
mine who runs a museum on the West Coast: "You've
had 17 installation art shows, are you ever going
to show any objects again?" He said: "If I show
objects the people on my board just buy them, and
then they don't give me the money." What has
changed is the whole format of the art world as
it existed before 1970: you had artists who
worked in their studios; they took their work to
galleries; the art galleries sold this work to
members of the community. When a community had
purchased a critical mass of this work it was
presumed that it had some aspect of public virtue
and you had to show it in a museum. So what we're
dealing with for most of the 20th century is the
transformation of objects of private delectation
into icons of public significance. This is what
happened when I was growing up in Fort Worth.
There was a moment, and I'm ashamed to admit it,
in which every mid-century modern dining room in
Fort Worth had a Maurice Lewis on the wall. So,
quite naturally, the museum had a Maurice Lewis
show because it presumed you could look at a
Maurice Lewis and figure out something about Fort
Worth-which you could but you didn't want to know
it. The same thing happened with Frank Stella.
When Stella's work permeated the New York art
world to a sufficient level, there was a Frank
Stella show at MoMA [in 1970]. One of the
interesting things about this process is that the
museum shows did not depend upon the
professionalism of their staff, they depended on
the collective taste and wishes and desires of
the community. So when you were looking at the
Frank Stella show you were thinking: "What is it
about these that turns on bond salesmen?" It was
a fairly straightforward business. The
transformation from private delectation into
public significance took place through the
auspices of honest brokers. An honest broker is a
critic like me who is not going to lie but who is
actually going to try and figure out what is
important about Frank Stella. It is going to be a
magazine editor who does not lie who publishes a
review of the exhibition. It is going to be a
curator or a dealer who has staked his or her
reputation on being right about this. The last
example I remember: in 1971 Bruce Nauman joined
the Leo Castelli gallery. Marcia Tucker at the
Whitney put up a big Nauman show and Phil Leider,
editor of ArtForum, assigned critic Peter Plagens
to review it. What this means is that Leo
Castelli who does not compromise, Marcia Tucker
who does not compromise, Phil Leider who does not
compromise and Peter Plagens who does not
compromise, endorsed this work by Bruce Nauman.
This is especially important because they all
have very different taste. So this represents a
consensus of investment from people whose job it
is to be right, and to never be wrong. In
economics we call this a "price point". Phil
Leider's investment was a price point. Another
price point was when Leo Steinberg, one of the
great art historians, would stake his art
historical reputation on Bob Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns, who were then these two virtual
unknowns living on Ludlow Street. This was a
major risk. But, if Leo Steinberg takes that
risk, and if he succeeds, that's a price point.
Ask yourselves: Who can give you a price point
today? Who is never wrong? Who makes a profession
out of never being wrong? Nobody. Who is the
dealer who tries to be never wrong? Who is the
dealer who tries never to sell anything for too
much money? This world no longer exists. The art
market in the 20th century is first of all a
finite market which means there are always more
works of art than there are people to buy them.
What does that mean? It means, as Leo says, that
somebody has to buy two. Somebody has to buy four
or five. If the art does not change, nobody's
going to buy two. To maintain itself in public
vogue, art needs perpetual reinvestment, an
artist needs one show after another show, one
essay after another essay-all these are occasions
for stylistic development. If I happen to have
written about your frog paintings last year and
if you put up another show of frog paintings, I'm
not coming by. But, if Barbara [Gladstone] calls
me and says: "You haven't seen the salamander
paintings, Dave," then I'm going to rush right
over. What happens when you have an institutional
market is that nothing changes. Installation art
did not change, though it had great moments of
innovation. In 1968 Bruce Nauman invented the
plywood box. Do you remember the plywood box?
I've been in every plywood box in the universe.
You could not make the plywood box go away. I've
been in plywood boxes with coal on the floor,
with cotton on the floor, I've been in plywood
boxes you climbed into with a ladder, I've been
in plywood boxes in which there was nothing there
except for, written on the wall, the tiny word
"boogie". All of this created a steady-state
market place in which there was nothing to drive
style change. The logic of an institutional
market is: "We don't care. We're just filling up
this hole in our schedule." It's really more
important [to institutions] if the person
building the plywood box is a Zuni [Native
American] warrior than if we've ever seen the
plywood box before. And the presumption is: We
don't have style development anymore because
history is over. I date the end of history to the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. When they
shot JFK everybody said "Oh God, it's so terrible
it's the end of the world." When they shot Bobby,
everybody said: "Oh no, not again." And the end
of history is pretty much marked by: "Oh no, not
again." The problem is that even though history
may be over-time keeps on going. Not having
history doesn't disable ennui. The art world
works on ennui, that's the only thing that makes
it go. I am bored with giant cibachrome
photographs of three Germans standing behind a
mailbox. It doesn't mean it's bad, it just means
I'm fucking bored with it. This is the crisis
that happened, with the death of installation
art, with the enormous escalation of available
capital, with the collapse of institutional
authority; all this created the world that we
live in today and the art fair is the embodiment
of it. Another appropriate analogy: a couple of
years ago I was at one of those hotel art fairs,
where you walk down the hall and every door is
open and there are little sculptures sitting on
the bedspreads and light works stuck up on the
walls. I was walking through one of these, and I
was thinking it was kind of strange, it was like
Amsterdam without the prostitutes. You're walking
down the hall and looking into all of these rooms
with all of these things. Then I went home that
night and turned on the television. This was two
days after Americans had entered Baghdad and
overthrown Saddam Hussein. There's a guy with a
camera, walking down the hall of the Baghdad
Hilton and every door is open. In here you can
buy Xerox machines, in here you can buy ancient
Sumerian artefacts, in here you can buy
everybody's medical records in Iraq. Every room
was full of stolen shit. And the analogy between
that little moment in the hotel and the little
moment in Baghdad put a special spin on the art
fair phenomenon for me, the idea of absolute,
raw, rapacious capitalism. I have no problem with
it, I love it when people buy art. When I walk
through Frieze looking at everything, I'm saying
to myself, "Does this meet my standards?" My
standards for any gathering of art are: is 99% of
this bullshit? Yes. But, is 1% of it interesting?
Yes. That's about your percentages for anything
in the world.Eventually some dealer will think,
"I've got this great idea. I'm only going to show
art I like." Everybody else will go, "Oh, no,
don't do that. You're fucking kidding.
Everybody's got to show one of each." When you
walk to their stands at art fairs, dealers
currently ask you: "Would you like to see my
Iranian minimalist? If not, our Berlin
pornographer is quite interesting. We've got one
of each here for any taste." What this means is
that the dealer currently has no power. One day
one dealer may say to himself: "I'm going to
gather power the way Leo did, I'm just going to
show stuff I really believe in." That's going to
really change things. And the art world as we
currently know it will disappear. As exciting as
this moment is now, imagine how exciting the
collapse is going to be. It's really something to
look forward to. Boom! Thousands of Icari
plummeting into the surf. Eventually all the
windows where you sell your soul are going to be
closed.

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