“Toil and trouble” By Timotheus Vermeulen TANK – How art can create alternative spaces of resistance within the market logic of the globalised world.
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Reading the papers these days, listening to lectures or podcasts, watching the news, it would appear that art has become globular – that is not a typo, not global, but globular, that is to say, bubbly or bubble-like. I do not know whether the phrase “art bubble” has ever been used to positive effect or even neutrally, but today it seems to connote above all the extent to which a progressively isolated, increasingly self-contained part of the art world has supposedly spun loose from the global solar system, drifting away from the other planets, a weightless, precarious pocket of air floating God knows where – until, of course, like all bubbles, it bursts. It most frequently pops up in reference to the inflation of the art market, to the soaring (indeed insane) prices of even the most mundane paintings and run-of-the-mill sculptures, which have reached, as the critic Jason Farago put it in the Guardian, “such stratospheric heights that the numbers seemed unreal”. In some cases, “bubble” is the designated term for an overhyped movement or network of artists. Scott Reyburn, for instance, used it recently in a New York Times article to describe the evanescence of a hip generation of abstract painters like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith and Mark Flood. A discussion in Frieze D/E some time ago invoked the bubble to denote the exclusivity of the Berlin art scene. There are even those who feel that the whole of the art world has pivoted, or perhaps ballooned out of control. The cultural critic Jonathan Jones has noted that the “vast and wealthy system of art, artists, galleries and collectors rests on such slender foundations of actual achievement of any kind”, while the curator Hans den Hartog Jager argued recently that more often than not artists’ outreach to the public goes unanswered – not because their gestures are not understood by the audience, but because, unbeknown to the artists, these gestures are no longer directed at anyone but themselves, like exhibitionists obviously jerking off in a park hours after the last joggers have finished their runs. Art, we are told, is globular – but it isn’t exactly a clean metaphor, less soap bubble than sodden blubber. Read full…
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Tom Clark 