The Boom's Bombed

In the fall of 2007, I finished a magazine article about the art market for the finance trade magazine I’ve written for on a regular basis. I’d been working in it for months. I spoke with auction house people, gallery people, art consultant people, money people, collector people and even some people people. My final effort was attending Christie’s modern and contemporary evening sale in mid-November. (The image at left is Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God", which was not at Christie's). The party was, in many ways, over after that night, although the truth wasn’t acknowledge until the following year and the November 2008 auctions only served to nail the point home.

As an artist of sorts myself, and not one who will likely earn as much in my lifetime as the amount for a single painting offered at Christie’s that night, I’ve long been struggling with the challenge of balancing what I distinguish as a job versus work. A job pays money which pays my rent. Work is my real work–writing fiction–and it ain’t paying for nothing right now and might not ever. That’s the reality I’ve accepted, as have many people I know who are in the same boat. Yep, there’s a boat and we’re sitting in it together looking for land, drifting in a sea that dislikes experimentation, play, and eccentricity. Doesn’t sell! it tells us. No money in it! it insists.

This article in The New York Times by Holland Cotter corresponds nicely to my thoughts about art and the recession, particularly this bit:

It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

I’m not convinced that van Gogh ever made a real living as a preacher, or at anything, but that small point aside, the trick, as Cotter says, is to have a job that’s not a chore, that doesn’t sap all the energy and imagination that it takes to create, while paying enough for rent and food on a regular basis. Those jobs are getting rarer. I’ve first-hand experience of this. Twenty years of it.

But Cotter offers some land:

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own.

Which is what needs to happen. Aux armes! Seize the factories, comrades! Artists unite! If recessions are good for nothing else, they’re often good for art. The shackles of making a living drop away, through shear unlikeliness, as do conventions. Yes, a sigh of relief. We can be weird again. As Cotter puts it: “a condition of abnormality can be sustained.” The condition of abnormality that is imperative for true creativity to happen. I’m glad we all agree now that we can redirect our boat, maybe break off into little boats, or flotillas, or a kind of new boat, just invented, and be eccentric, strange, do what we like without concern for “the marketplace” because the marketplace is gone, gone, gone. Do what you gots to do to keep a roof over your head, but don’t forget what the real work is. The work that doesn’t always pay in dollars but does is so many other ways that a market cannot appreciate or understand.