I Lied to ArtNet

Paru's Genmaicha Green Tea

(rating: 4.1/5) This tea tastes like a warm fall's late harvest and has a lovely background aroma of rice. I love starchy teas and Paru's blend of sencha leaves and harvested brown rice from Kyōtanabe makes for a wonderful brew for all times of the day. 

! background of this picture I created with my tea is from wonderful textile artist Imogen Alison Reid, please go look at her work it’s so beautiful, @imogenalisonreid !

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I got an ArtNet article written about me this week.

    About a month ago, I fulfilled the corporate remote worker core value protocol and decided to do anything but work. I felt inclined to scavenge and drove to an estate sale instead. I was desperately trying to save money but as a 19-year-old with extremely low tolerance to the temptations of true vintage, it's quite rare that I walk away empty-handed. I scored a few posters for $2 each: a 90's Georgia O'Keefe gallery NYMoMA promotional, a photo print for my boyfriend's new apartment, and a bright pink oil pastel shoved in a plastic bag that I admired for some reason. I had no idea what to do with it once I got home, so I ended up perching it on top of a wicker purse that was already hanging on the wall of my sublet room. There it sat, ignored and dejected, on a wall where I had placed it to fill an empty space of a temporary summer sublet.

    It wasn't until a week later when my internship ended and I moved back home that I decided to read the pastel's receipt label that was signed: "Marc Chagall". I felt an odd churning in my stomach as I confirmed the slanted signature with the cheeky underline to be his and scoured the Heritage Auctions website for price references. Everything seemed to confirm its validity from the Jan Mitchell Galleries logotype, the calligraphic brush lines, and the chunky waxing crescent moon of his 50's pastel era works--in the height of my elation I shot out a satirical Tweet that gained a lot of traction for some reason. A few hours later, an ArtNet reporter reached out to me for an interview and I was so excited! I'm signed up for their newsletter, reference their research quite often in my video essays, and thought it could be a wonderful outreach opportunity for my art history YouTube channel. 

    I carry a certain paranoia about wasting time, especially regarding other people's. I was already quite nervous and the phone call with the reporter made me feel immature, especially when hearing my clearly youthful voice feedback on the other end of the call. For some reason, I felt invalid, uninteresting, and attention-seeking for being featured in an article; when he asked me how I validated the pastel I envisioned myself sounding naive if I told him I hadn't received professional confirmation from an elite auction and foolishly assumed it to be valuable on my own terms of knowledge. I completely lied--I told him I had a "family friend" working at Christie's who confirmed its value on my behalf and perhaps my pre-existing anxiety regarding social nuances made me read it this way, but he seemed significantly more at ease during our conversation. When he sent me the link to the article with the blatant lie to validate my findings I felt overwhelmingly ashamed of my own capacity for embarrassment and began to question if the piece was even real. 

    But upon further shameful contemplation, even if I had taken it to an "official" elite arts-based auction holder, how would it have been a stronger validation than my own research? What enables these institutions to set the defining fiscal values of art? Art is an entity that is intrinsic to the human spirit--one of the greatest wrongs of capitalism is its construction of restrictive barriers around our access to it. If everyone was given financial access to elite-branded art, the mysterious exclusiveness behind the art market would disappear and so would its power. I picked up this piece for its pure subjective beauty to me and my taste alone, regardless of its potential resale value in the elite art market. Ironically, the only way you can obtain a financially desirable income within the arts sector nowadays is to work for the institutions that are built on exploiting it. 

    Elite art markets reap huge profit returns (both "legally" and through numerous money-laundering schemes), not based on knowledge of art, but rather, knowledge of the community. The art market is a subculture in every sense and maintains its elite status with a white-knuckled grip on superficial relationships with objective human creativity or art history. Art institutions love to fetishize political radicalism, while often abusing or excluding those who live it. Contemporary art galleries are happy to exhibit black, queer or even (occasionally) working-class artists to proudly display on their gallery synopsis decal for diversity points; they just prefer not to sell the art to them or share boardrooms with them. The upper-echelon participants who are rich enough to participate in Christie's and Sothelby's auctions do not care about the true intrinsic value of the art they're buying. The value of art's tether to the human spirit does not matter to the global rich, they're not interested in growth or value at all, only in security, and they'd be willing to pay a premium to store their wealth if it only means that they can control the risk without the infrastructure enforced by their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.

    Should I feel more ashamed for lying about my nonexistent family friend at Christie's, or for succumbing to the pressure set by the elite capitalist art world that demands a "validated" fiscal value estimate for art to be considered worthy? I'm still too embarrassed to correct the ArtNet reporter, but now that we follow each other, I'm hoping he clicks on my blog linked in my Twitter profile one day to read this and laugh at my naivety. I don't plan on selling it, nor do I ever for the time being. It's still casually unframed and perched on top of the wicker bag because truth be told, I'm having trouble seeing it as more valuable just because I happened to accidentally read the Jan Mitchell receipt. It's beautiful to me on my own terms, regardless if it's fake or not, and that should be the only reason to value art, ever. 

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David Graeber is one of my all-time favorite authors for his writings on anthropological economics so finding this collaboration piece with Nika Dubrovsky on art finance blew my mind. It's a three-part article series called "Another Art World" on e-flux Journal that I go back to read at least once a month. Its cultural critique of art's role as a commodity altered my perspective on how I should regard my role as an active participant and viewer. Please read this excerpt from Another Art World, Part 1: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity.

"The art world, for all the importance of its museums, institutes, foundations, university departments, and the like, is still organized primarily around the art market. The art market in turn is driven by finance capital. Being the world’s least regulated market among shady businesses, tax shelters, scams, money laundering, etc., the art world might be said to represent a kind of experimental ground for the hammering-out of a certain ideal of freedom appropriate to the current rule of finance capital.

A case can certainly be made that contemporary art is in effect an extension of global finance (which is itself, of course, closely tied to empire). Artsy neighborhoods tend to cluster around the financial districts of major cities. Artistic investment follows the same logic as financial speculation. Still—if contemporary art were simply an extension of finance capital, works designed to look good in banks, or in bankers’ homes, why should we even care? It’s not as if cultural critics spend a lot of time debating the latest design trends in luxury yachts. Why should changing trends in decorative objects that the owners of such yachts like to place in their sitting rooms be considered relevant, in any way, to the lives or aspirations of bus drivers, maids, bauxite miners, telemarketers, or pretty much anyone outside the charmed circle of the “art world” itself?

Hardly surprising perhaps, since the art market, and the music industry, always operated on entirely different economic principles: the one mainly financed by rich collectors and governments, the other by mass marketing to the general public. Still, if there was a real challenge to the logic of exclusion anywhere in the arts, during the twentieth century, it was precisely in the domain of music, where a defiant tradition from folk to rock and punk and hip-hop actually came closest to realizing the old avant-garde dream that everyone could be an artist—though one can, of course, debate precisely how close this really came. At the very least, it established the idea that creativity is a product of small collectives as easily as individual auteurs. All this happened, significantly, at a certain distance from actual self-proclaimed artistic avant-gardes; and it is telling that the brief mutual flirtation with the art world in the eighties was a prelude to a backlash that left music far more corporatized, individualized, and with far fewer spaces for experimentation than it had since at least the 1950s.

Any market of course must necessarily operate on a principle of scarcity. In a way, the art market and the music industry face similar problems: materials are mostly cheap and talent is widespread; therefore, for profits to be made, scarcity has to be produced. Of course, in the art world, this is what the critical apparatus is largely about: the production of scarcity; which is, in turn, why even the most sincerely radical anti-capitalist critics, curators, and gallerists will tend to draw the line at the possibility that everyone really could be an artist, even in the most diffuse possible sense. The art world remains overwhelmingly a world of heroic individuals, even when it claims to echo the logic of movements and collectives—even when the ostensible aim of those collectives is to annihilate the distinction between art and life. Even the Dadaists and Surrealists are remembered today as a handful of romantic geniuses, whatever they might have claimed to be about.

It is also noteworthy that the only time a significant number of people believed that structures of exclusion really were dissolving, that a society in which everyone could become an artist was actually conceivable, occurred in the midst of social revolutions when it was genuinely believed that capitalism was in its death spirals, and markets themselves were about to become a thing of the past. Many of these trends, unsurprisingly, emerge directly from Russia, where the period from the revolution of 1905 to the avant-garde heyday of the 1920s saw an almost brutal efflorescence of new ideas of what artistic communism might be like."