keep an artist’s name alive
Galleries at Art Basel bring historic works that are fresh to the market as artists’ estates get proactive
by Melanie Gerlis, Hannah McGivern
As the art market’s taste turns towards history, it is not just curators and scholars who are keeping the legacy of dead artists alive. At Art Basel, galleries with big stables of contemporary artists are devoting valuable space to works by artists including the late Mike Kelley, Josef Albers and Joan Mitchell. Such displays are paying off and reflect the increased competition among dealers to represent artists’ estates.
“The hot young artist dynamic has given way to history over the past five years,” says Marc Glimcher, the president of Pace Gallery, whose estate artists include Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg.
Generally, artists’ estates include works that they chose not to sell (often their best pieces). So dealers who represent estates can offer works of historical importance that are fresh to the market.
There is no standard relationship between an artist’s estate and a gallery. Some estates work with more than one gallery, some set up charitable foundations, and there are often legal issues to overcome before a commercial agreement is in place. “It should be a round-table conversation about what is in the best interest of the work. Estates ask galleries to be the barometer of the market; we lean on them for questions of legacy,” says Adam Sheffer of Cheim & Read.
When it works, a commercial gallery can be instrumental in revising an artist’s reputation. In 2007, Cheim & Read staged a show of Joan Mitchell’s works on paper, with institutional loans and a scholarly catalogue. These “misunderstood and underappreciated” pieces were presented not as studies, but as “fully realised works”, for the first time, Sheffer says. As a result, their market “exploded”. At Art Basel, the gallery sold three of Mitchell’s 1991 pastels on paper for $200,000 each. A US museum is mulling over the artist’s painting Untitled (1958, priced at $5.5m).
The phenomenon is not new; Pace began working with Mark Rothko’s family in 1978, for example. But Glimcher says that estates tend to be bigger now that artists are generally more prolific.
Galleries have their work cut out. “It’s tough keeping a legacy alive once an artist is dead,” says Iwan Wirth, the president of Hauser & Wirth. He says that art fairs are one way “to reintroduce and reposition” artists. The gallery has brought works by Lygia Pape, David Smith, Philip Guston and Fausto Melotti to Art Basel, having taken on each of these artists’ estates during the past year. “If an artist isn’t seen by a younger generation of collectors, their art can languish,” says Mary Sabbatino, vice-president of Galerie Lelong. She adds that the institutional exhibition schedule for Ana Mendieta, who died in 1985, is “as intense as for some of our living artists”.
Meanwhile, living artists are being encouraged to plan their own legacies. In March, the lawyer and collector Loretta Würtenberger co-founded the Institute for Artists’ Estates to offer support to living artists and heirs. One aim is to “try to get artists to think of their estate as the last work of art they make”, she says.
? Art Basel Salon: Artists’ Estates Today and Tomorrow, moderated by Javier Pes, editor of The Art Newspaper, Friday 17 June, 3pm-4pm, Auditorium, Hall 1------------------------------------------
Marc Spiegler is the Global Director of Art Basel, leading its wide-ranging activities across the art world. Prior to joining Art Basel in 2007, he was a journalist for 15 years, writing about art, technology, video games, architecture, design and even politics. This month he joins CNN Style as a guest editor, commissioning a series of features on the topic of art and technology.
In 2002, a self-taught programmer named Cory Arcangel hacked the code of a Nintendo Super Mario cartridge, stripping away all the graphics except for the fluffy pixelized clouds.
Marc Spiegler, Global Director of Art BaselTwo years later, his artwork "Super Mario Clouds v2k3" made Arcangel one of the 2004 Whitney Biennial's breakthrough stars. Yet many of his new fans, Arcangel once told me, did not really understand what he had done: they thought they were watching a digital video, not hacked software. A decade later, many people make the same misassumption about the young artist Ian Cheng's "infinite duration" work, in which his cinematic algorithms live-render richly detailed worlds filled with complex landscapes and animated creatures, "shot" with swooping cameras. Cheng uses radically better software, but it's the same disconnect...The ancient art of Kung-fu goes digital
The history of digital art
For decades, art and tech have done an awkward, fitful dance, never fully committing to each other. Things started well, 50 years ago: In 1966, Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs (which later became AT&T) spearheaded Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), putting Bell's cutting-edge equipment into the hands of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Jasper Johns.9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score, 1966 As computers became more sophisticated and widely available, a small group of artists used them in making their work. Yet long after EAT's experiments, digital art remained an outlier in mainstream museums and galleries, generally sequestered at festivals such as Austria's Ars Electronica.For the core of the artworld, most digital art seemed overly enamored with its own technology, and often felt conceptually lightweight.On the flip side, the digerati dismissed the pieces that the artworld embraced as facile stuff, barely pushing past the basics of the Photoshop toolbox. As someone who loves both art and technology, I despaired for 20 years at the succession of stillborn children that their interactions produced.
Digital-native artists
Finally, my wait has ended: Today the digital work coming out of artists' studios -- often just their laptops - shows a clear shift, dissolving the boundaries between "the art world" and "digital art". Read: Can art change the world?Why? First, because these young artists are digital natives, who grew up with broadband at their fingertips, and the virtual never far from the physical in their life. (The curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets label this the "89plus" generation -- because 1989 marked the introduction of the World Wide Web.) Google Tilt Brush: The 'impossible' is now a realityJust as importantly, contemporary artists are working with technologies that make it as easy to create digital works as it is to paint or sculpt. That's not hyperbole: Artists using Tiltbrush technology at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris can sculpt spectacular 3-D volumes in real time by moving their bodies through space, creating a result that looks more organic than digital. That said, many artists are making work deeply steeped in code. Britain's Ed Atkins, for example, uses a mix of motion-capture and CGI to create tightly paced videos run through with anomie. Drawing on the dreams and nightmares of the digital age, Atkins unleashes a mix of hooligans, human organs, effluvia and nods to pop culture. Likewise, the Canadian artist Jon Rafman has become known for his dense VR works. At the Berlin Biennial that opened last week, visitors strapped into an Oculus Rift headset to experience his new piece "View of Pariser Platz." At first, looking down onto Pariserplatz, the viewer saw nothing different. Suddenly (spoiler alert) reality shifted violently, unleashing visions of billowing smoke, flying bodies, beasts swallowing each other. Then you went into freefall, landing among an army of androids. I watched one woman struggle for balance and contort her hands into tight knots as the digital hallucinations hit her.
Beyond coding
But you don't need programmers to make digital art today, because social media offers a platform perfect for social engineering. Amalia Ulman's controversial "Excellences and Perfections" performance, for example, took place entirely on Instagram over the course of four months in 2014. The Argentine artist created a trajectory in which "she" went from good country girl to urban escort to perfect-lifestyle blogger.
A photo posted by Amalia's Instagram (@amaliaulman) on
As she spiraled downwards, many of Ulman's nearly 90,000 followers took the 475 posts at face value and grew increasingly worried for her sanity. (Not that surprising a misunderstanding, really, since on Instagram people's "real" channels tend to be carefully constructed narratives.) Thinking more broadly, technology has also redefined the audience for which artists now create. Camille Henrot's entrancing 2013 Venice Biennale piece 'Grosse Fatigue,' for example, was technically possible long ago. Yet its cascading screens of wildly different videos would have overwhelmed viewers not already accustomed to simultaneously scanning multiple feeds on their phone, tablet, TV, and laptop. Just as importantly, our ever-more digital society redefines how art is made. Geography becomes less relevant by the day: Artists collaborate with a rotating cast of sparring partners all over the globe, not only other artists, but also writers, coders, fashion designers, electronica musicians, etc. Much of the content is not created from scratch but rather generated through a voracious sampling, scraping and repurposing of the memes, images and clips that swirl around in the ether. Copyright seems a tangential issue here. In Berlin last week, I ran into the New Zealand artist Simon Denny standing by his biennial piece -- a series of trade-show booths for Blockchain companies."Artists make work about the world we live in," he says. "And in our society, nearly everything involves private companies -- even individuals act like brands. So if we want art about the contemporary world and brands are protective of usage and copyright, then how are you supposed to make art today?"
Art market disruption? Not yet
Interestingly enough, especially for someone in my position, there's one area where technology has had relatively little impact: the art market. At least not in comparison to the way that Uber has totally disrupted the taxi business or that social media forced fashion to radically reconsider the role of runway shows. The biggest influence on the market so far? Instagram, perfectly designed to make a gallery's pieces go viral, but not a sales platform per se. What's the most contemporary form of art today?Obviously, the art-market killer app may still come. For now, though, what's striking about the digital natives is how differently they relate to the market. Because technology allows them to source endless amounts of material, work across time zones, achieve stunning results without any capital, and promote their work directly to their own generation's curators and collectors. Can galleries still contribute to the careers of these artists? Absolutely. But many artists choose to dip into and out of the traditional system -- or live entirely on its periphery -- while focusing less on originality, objects and ownership than on new modes of producing and experiencing art. Finally, the future is now.