This Summer Session we’re talking about celebrity, and today we bring you Bean Gilsdorf’s Help Desk arts-advice column and a question about fame. With the art world, the art market, and celebrity so deeply intertwined, what is the difference between being a famous artist and a successful artist, and can it be described by the similarities between Thomas Kinkade and Damien Hirst? This column was originally published on April 16, 2012. 

How do you become a famous artist? I am an artist and make lots of art (performance, paintings, drawings, etc.) but I never went to art school. What should I do to slowly but surely become better known in the art world?

Fame, huh? Without a doubt, you must already know that there is no way to “surely” become “better known in the art world,” especially if you are going to do it slowly. Fame strikes like lightning, white hot and irrefutably blinding to those in its immediate path. If fame is your goal, why bother trying to climb the ladder, rung by greasy rung? Why not charter a helicopter and get airlifted to the top? Since my job as an advice columnist is to answer the queries set before me, here is a short list of actions that others have tried in pursuit of fame:

• Kiss (with lipstick on) the museum-hung artwork of an already-renowned artist. When you are arrested, explain to the press and the jury that it was a form of homage and that you were simply overcome by the power of the art. Alternately, if you are the fighter-not-a-lover type, you could punch, kick, stab, or otherwise wound an artwork you find objectionable or offensive.

• Sleep with someone powerful. It’s pretty well tested as a means to gain recognition, so why not give your favorite rock star/politician/A-list dealer a bounce? And then he or she can give your career a boost in return.

• Make a complete spectacle of yourself: do buckets of drugs while making art, have sex in the gallery, don’t bathe, etc. Be the wild and crazy guy who publicly justifies all the stereotypes of the tortured artist. Bonus points if you are a.) attractive and b.) from an old-money family.

Two words: reality show.

Read the full article here.

Damien Hirst. The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

From the very beginning, Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, was always going to be the target of much contempt. An embodiment of savvy self-promotion, Damien Hirst has become the world’s richest living artist, and with that, a scapegoat for the pompous market and inflated celebrity status representing all that is wrong with contemporary art today. This latest publicity stunt—a gargantuan worldwide retrospective of spot paintings—is an exhibition founded in pure megalomania: big gallery, big artist, and even bigger personalities. As with the ostentatious two-day auction held at Sotheby’s in 2008 at the height of the economic crisis, Hirst simply doesn’t do modest. And with eleven galleries worldwide, neither does Gagosian. A few weeks ago, Daily Serving writer Danielle Sommer offered up two challenges: the first to find something new to say about the work, and the second, to pick a side. I love a good challenge.

First things first: I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try to pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst—that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

Damien Hirst. Levorphanol, 1995; household gloss on canvas. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.

I am willing to admit that I have always had a soft spot for these paintings. As a wide-eyed student, before learning about Hirst and his tyrannical rule over British contemporary art, I found myself lusting after a candy-colored work in New York, instantly hooked by its simplicity and destabilising aesthetics. On a canvas of undulating colour with nowhere for the eyes to rest, I found the spots both agitating and enlivening. Dabbling in pharmacology at the time, I was determined to make sense of the work by doing what humans do best—comparing it to that which I already knew well. My inherent drive to find meaning in chaos lost out in the end—in this case, the art didn’t have anything groundbreaking to say about science, nor science about the art. The relationship between the colors, the arrangement, and the title was simply one of randomness and chance. It was a matter of order being imposed upon disorder—a fundamental truism of both science and art.

The spot paintings are nothing more than color, calculations, sheer surface, and mass production—Hirst’s dissociative attempt at being more like a scientist, in the way that Andy Warhol wanted to be more like a machine. The paintings stand alone as visually intriguing and brutally honest; they do not purport to have any answers or be something they are not. Hirst is not trying to save contemporary art any more than the pharmaceutical companies are trying to cure cancer—it doesn’t suit either of their ends.

The Compete Spot Paintings, as a public spectacle, is positively cringe-worthy. I believe, however, that the paintings, as paintings, are quite good. Yes, perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia that kicks in, but there is something about sitting in front of the work that I still find invigorating.

I, for one, am quite happy to be seeing spots.

How do you become a famous artist? I am an artist and make lots of art (performance, paintings, drawings, etc.) but I never went to art school. What should I do to slowly but surely become better known in the art world?

Fame, huh? Without a doubt, you must already know that there is no way to “surely” become “better known in the art world,” especially if you are going to do it slowly. Fame strikes like lightening, white hot and irrefutably blinding those in its immediate path. If fame is your goal, why bother trying to climb the ladder rung by greasy rung? Why not charter a helicopter and get airlifted to the top? Since my job as an advice columnist is to answer the queries set before me, here is a short list of actions that others have tried in pursuit of fame:

-Kiss (with lipstick on) the museum-hung artwork of an already-renowned artist. When you are arrested, explain to the press and the jury that it was a form of homage and that you were simply overcome by the power of the art. Alternately, if you are the fighter-not-a-lover type, you could punch, kick, stab, or otherwise wound an artwork you find objectionable or offensive.
-Sleep with someone powerful. It’s pretty well tested as a means to gain recognition, so why not give your favorite rock star/politician/A-list dealer a bounce? And then he or she can give your career a boost in return.
-Make a complete spectacle of yourself: do buckets of drugs while making art, have sex in the gallery, don’t bathe, etc. Be the wild and crazy guy who publicly justifies all the stereotypes of the tortured artist. Bonus points if you are a.) attractive and b.) from an old-money family.
-Two words: reality show.

Not pretty, is it? Okay, now that I’ve rinsed the snark from my bloodstream—sorry, the Kinkade thing always riles me up—it’s on to the real advice, and here it is: if you want to become better known in the art world, make great work. Yes, it’s really that simple, and yes, it’s really really hard. It might take you a lifetime. It might happen tomorrow, or never.

From the tone of your question, I’m concerned that you would put something as fleeting as fame ahead of your integrity (see photo, above). Like all but the most saintly among us, I’d be lying if I said that some of the same thoughts never once occurred to me. Nevertheless, your question makes me wince. Wouldn’t it be better to make solid work that no one ever sees than to put renown above all? What do you think might happen to your sense of self-worth if you favor the path to notoriety over building a career by making great work—especially if you fail? The truth is, there are no steps that guarantee success. And since that is certainly true, why not focus on the one thing that you can control: your work.

Maybe I’m naïve, or a dinosaur, but I believe that artmaking should be its own reward (that’s not to say you shouldn’t be compensated fairly for your work, but that’s a topic for another day). Don’t let your quest for public prominence take away your dignity or interfere with the enjoyment of making your work. Let’s put the gratification and pleasure back into hard work and creativity, because to focus only on fame is to miss the point. To quote Erma Bombeck, “Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.”

*           *           *

What are your thoughts on Thomas Kinkade?

Since this question was written to me before the maestro died, I’m going to answer it aside from the issues that have been raised since his untimely demise. My thoughts on Kinkade are quite simple: I feel that in many ways he is no different from Damien Hirst and that it’s a useful exercise to see exactly where the two artists overlap. The main similarity, of course, is that they both make market-driven work that simultaneously panders and condescends to their respective audiences, but I think they also have a whiff of the totalitarian to them.

Of course, I’m not the only one who finds either artist’s output objectionable. On the face of it, Kinkade’s main sin was peddling pablum: hyper-sentimental paintings of garden cottages executed by assistants in saleable colors and hangable dimensions that never challenged the ability of their owners to display above the front hall console or the living room couch. We could argue that Hirst does more or less the same thing from the other end of the professional artist spectrum, provided that the loft walls of his über-rich collectors are large enough. His incredibly un-provocative dot canvases are painted by a squadron of rent-hungry MFAs and are designed to be, if not beautiful or thought-provoking, at least reassuringly easy to identify in terms of market value. The two artists concentrated on creating a trafficable commercial product, though one is placed in the galleria and the other you can find at Sotheby’s. Aside from the base distinctions of high and low, if Kinkade’s paintings insist on a revisionist bucolic America that—for his spiritually-certain followers—reinforce a sense of nostalgia for a time that never existed, then Hirst’s “spin paintings” must bring a similar peace of mind to their investment-savvy owners.

In terms of oeuvre, both Kinkade’s and Hirst’s formulaic work evokes the monolithic and oppressive. Even though stylistically they are worlds apart, they are steadfast in the assertion of their belief systems. Kinkade’s ideologically-loaded work creates an unyielding, emotionally sanitized vision of the home territory, while Hirst’s aesthetics are simplistic to the point of vapidity. Both bodies of work are so defined by sheer economics that they surpass any concern for the defining principles of art and satisfy only the cynical dictatorial control exercised by the free market.

Mildly related anecdote: http://wonkette.com/469282/the-time-worlds-most-collected-painter-thomas-kinkade-who-is-dead-now-lied-to-us-about-the-nea

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There is a specific joy that flares when a familiar space is reanimated by art—whether it’s public sculpture appearing at a junction travelled through often, like the new fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, or something as quiet as a different postcard image on an office bulletin board—it’s a little visual jolt for a view that’s become tired.

When I first arrived at the Courtauld Institute, I was perpetually lost and in a kind of state of wonder walking up and down the Alice in Wonderland staircases, through the tiny doors and along back corridors. For someone whose schooling was mainly spent in North American institutional blocks designed, it seemed, after prison architecture, this was entirely enchanting. A decade later, the building is no longer an unfolding mystery, but the recently launched East Wing X has harnessed that sense of discovery, filling the college with art, and, at a packed private view a few weeks ago, ebullient revelers.

Heringa/ Van Kalsbeek Untitled, 2010-11, ceramics, resin, steel, cloth, porcelain, Courtesy of the artists, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

This year marks the tenth instalment of the Institute’s East Wing exhibition, a biennial show of contemporary art that invades the school’s stairwells, corridors and seminar rooms. The tradition began two decades ago when Courtauld student Joshua Compston lamented the lack of contemporary art at the Institute and sought permission to mount a small show, including work by Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George. EW has ever since offered a counterbalance to the official collection, across the arched drive on the Strand side of Somerset House, where the more famous Western half of the building houses the renowned Courtauld Gallery, and a response to the progressive research interests of the student body. The comparison is indeed hard to avoid: while the eighteenth century William Chambers architecture makes a greaceful backdrop to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces on one side, it sits in stark, though aluring, contrast to the contemporary installations. Like the Saatchi Gallery’s old County Hall site, the well-matched convergence of old and new can generate a particular brand of site-specific magic.

For twenty years, Courtauld undergraduate students have  taken up the EW gauntlet, passing down the tradition as they matriculate through their Bachelor degrees, and the exhibition has continuously grown in ambition and scale. This year some fifty students have taken on roles as curators, press officers and installers, as well as managing special events, education and sponsorship. It is an impressive collaboration, and the resulting show, including work by over forty artists from Hirst and Howard Hodgkin—nods to the original event and in celebration of this benchmark year—bursts with all that energy and enterprise.

Damien Hirst, Dome (Sanctum), 2009, hand inked photogravure on 400 gsm Velin d’Arches paper, Courtesy of Andipa Gallery, London, Photo: Stephen White, Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

Arman, Blue Paint Tubes, 1989-90, paint tubes and perspex, Courtesy of Private Collector

This year’s curatorial theme Material Matters: The Power of the Medium is purposefully inclusive, allowing for a breadth of media from more traditional painting and sculpture to large-scale installation pieces, projections, photography and, at the launch event, performance. In the main reception, the show is introduced with Arman’s Blue Paint Tubes where materials and composition coalesce. An apt place to start, the work sits framed and hung high, an overlooking touchstone for the rest of the show, largely more recent and dynamic work. Below,  Kirsty Howe’s yarnbombing intervention kits out the institute’s permanent sculpture as Olympic mascots in swimming costumes.

Kirsty Howe, Knitting for Gold, 2012, Yarnbombing, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

There’s too much work to detail all of it here, but highlights for me included both stairwell installations, graceful works falling through narrowly turning spirals. Off the main reception, Shi Jindian’s delicate blue steel wire footsteps are a distraction and a guide for those on their way up the long winding path the lecture theatre. The show’s scene-stealer, though, is Gabriel Dawe’s colourful thread installation in the back, white-washed stairwell, a shape-shifting spectrum of colour, it changes with varying light and points of view, like cascading prisms.

Shi Jindian, Footprints, 2006-2011, steel wiring, Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li, Photo: Andrew Lowkes, 2012.

Gabriel Dawe, Plexus 11, 2011, thread, thread installation, Courtesy of the Artist, Sponsored by Gutermann, Photo: Sara Knelman, 2012.

Tucked away in the quiet corner on the top floor, a section titled Anniversary includes more sombre work that considers the slow passage of time: the material objects that mark it out symbolically, like Enzo Guaricci’s concrete balloons, or physical markers of deterioration under the weight of everyday use, like Rachel Whiteread’s Yellow Edge and Sam Belinfante’s Improvisation with Drumsticks, which look like delicately rendered lunar lanscapes.

Enzo Guaricci, Flying Means, 1998, marble powder, resin and natural colours, Courtesy the artist and Stark Projects

Sam Belinfante, Improvisation with Drumsticks IV, 2008, softground etching on paper, Courtesy of the artist

Downstairs in the zones well-trafficked by students, sparks of lighthearted wit extend moments of respite from long library sessions. Korean artist Shin Meekyong’s Soap Buddha sculptures adorn the otherwise sterile loos—an alternative to the soap dispensers, if the user can bring themselves to rub a bit off these functional icons. And, in the student café, a selection of Slinkachu photographs from the Little People Project  hang in the alcoved seating areas, restaging moments of urban life as miniature monuments, wry reflections on contemporary ambition and desire, a different food for thought.

Meekyoung Shin, Buddha Series, 2012, soap, Courtesy of the artist

Slinkachu, Animals, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Slinkachu, The Last Resort, Lambda c-type print on Foamex, 2011, Courtesy of the Artist and Andipa Gallery, London

Additional work by Stephen Carly, Hugo Dalton, Dirk Dzimirsky, Rohini Devasher, Simon Edmonson, Patrick Hughes, Laura Keeble, Mung Lar Lam, Emi Miyashita, Simon Monk, Erik Sanner and Rupert Shrive, among others. Open days including exhibition tours are held on the last Saturday of every month, check the EWX site for future talks and events as they unroll in coming months.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

First things first – I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try and pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst – that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995, household gloss on canvas. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.

I am willing to admit that I have always had a soft spot for these paintings. As a wide-eyed student, before learning about Hirst and his tyrannical rule over British contemporary art, I found myself lusting after a candy-coloured work in New York, instantly hooked by its simplicity and destabilising aesthetics. On a canvas of undulating colour with nowhere for the eyes to rest, I found the spots both agitating and enlivening. Dabbling in pharmacology at the time, I was determined to make sense of the work by doing what humans do best – comparing it to that which I already knew well. My inherent drive to find meaning in chaos lost out in the end – in this case, the art didn’t have anything groundbreaking to say about science, nor science about the art. The relationship between the colours, the arrangement and the title was simply one of randomness and chance. It was a matter of order being imposed upon disorder – a fundamental truism of both science and art.

The spot paintings are nothing more than colour, calculations, sheer surface and mass production – Hirst’s dissociative attempt at being more like a scientist, in the way that Andy Warhol wanted to be more like a machine. The paintings stand alone as visually intriguing and brutally honest – they do not purport to have any answers or be something they are not. Hirst is not trying to save contemporary art any more than the pharmaceutical companies are trying to cure cancer – it doesn’t suit either of their ends.

The Compete Spot Paintings, as a public spectacle, is positively cringe-worthy. I believe, however, that the paintings, as paintings, are quite good. Yes, perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia that kicks in, but there is something about sitting in front of the work that I still find invigorating.

I, for one, am quite happy to be seeing spots.

Damien Hirst, "Isonicotinic Acid Ethyl Ester," 2010–11. Household gloss on canvas, 99 x 147 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

When Lady Macbeth said “Out, damn’d spot!” she was referring to stains of blood, not brightly-colored enamel paint, but I’m sure there are more than a few art critics out there who echo her thought this month. The reason? What to make of “Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011”, now on view at eleven Gagosian galleries worldwide.

The spots at Gagosian LA range from the size of a ladybug to the size of a car door, and the canvases stay proportional, meaning that huge spots live on huge canvases, and vice versa.  The enamel colors are glossy and bright and yet flat, to such an extent that at the opening, I had several conversations that followed the ‘why spend your time laboring over what a computer can do’ track.

Damien Hirst, "Cefaclor," 2009. Household gloss on canvas, 21 1/8 x 16 3/8 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Perhaps the most unique perspective came from an art consultant, who professed his love for one painting in particular—a smaller piece in the second room that had actually been painted by Hirst (Hirst turned the labor of painting the spots over to his assistants in 1993). The spots on this canvas are slightly less uniform, the paint just a bit more uneven, and I swear you can see holes where the point of the compass bit in.

Over 300 paintings – about a quarter of the entire series – will hang from Gagosian walls in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Hong Kong for the next thirty-or-so days. Those who plan to visit all the galleries can register for “The Complete Spot Challenge”. Present yourself and your photo ID at all eleven Gagosians while the paintings are still up, and receive a limited-edition spot print, “dedicated personally to you.” One nice touch: the print has not yet been created, so it really will be personalized for the winner.  One winner equals one print.  Ten winners equals ten prints.

Damien Hirst, "Betulin," 2005. Household gloss on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

There are also two unmentioned challenges here. First, find something new to say about a series of repeated dots, and then, second, pick a side. The reviews vary, from “passé” to something along the lines of ‘enjoyable after you’ve moved past your initial reluctance’. To side with Hirst and Gagosian means you are pro-spectacle and (perhaps) dragging out the dying gasp of an over-inflated, lumbering beast of an art market. The other side is best represented by Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times, who wrote that it’s picture of the “new world order — abstract, interchangeable portraits of post-millennial trade.” The viewpoint I like best, however, comes from Blake Gopnik, at The Daily Beast, who insists that the eleven-gallery exhibition is actually the largest painting ever made, spread out across the globe like, well, a series of spots across a canvas.

Do with that what you will.

Mz 601, 1923; paint and paper on cardboard; 17 × 15 in. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Schwitters’ hallmark was hybridity.  He started his career as a painter and then moved to collage, assemblage, and sculpture, all while never truly leaving painting behind.  He was associated with and influenced by many movements, including Dada, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, appropriating what he thought useful or provocative from each and synthesizing it with fragments from the next without becoming dogmatic about any of them.  In 1919 Schwitters coined the term merz to describe his work.  The origin of this word was a scrap of an advertisement for a bank, and is taken from the German word kommerziell (commerce).  He saw that snippet of a word as the embodiment of what he was trying to accomplish—to take a part of something and make it his own—and he organized his practice around it.  As curator Lucinda Barnes explained, “The merz approach is to connect everything.”

The works in the exhibition are mostly small, some no bigger than the palm of your hand.   Schwitters clipped bits of words from various sources and mixed them with other materials such as paper, fabric, feathers, and paint. Like the word merz from kommerziel, the words are fragmented.  But rather than making them incomprehensible, this practice opens the text up, transforming each word from a linguistic fence to something looser and more associative.  They sometimes provide clues to his interests and lifestyle.  For example, a few collages attest to Schwitters’ more pleasurable habits: snippets of labels from wine bottles, chocolate wrappers, and tobacco often make appearances.  The intimacy of each composition invites an almost forensic inspection, and I often found myself nearly fogging the glass with my breath in order to identify and understand each assortment of fragments so meticulously combined.

pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.; Collection of David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt.

Mz. 310 Carneval. (1921) is one such composition, where fragments of small, readable text are mixed with parts of individual letters and torn pieces of striped paper in a confetti-like arrangement.  Another is Mz. 410 irgensowas. (1922) (“something or other”) where the text fragments take on an almost Constructivist look.  In both of these, Schwitters covered the edges of the collage with a mat to create a clean, perfect rectangle that reigns in the implied chaos of the interior composition.  By making the edges precise and regular, Schwitters creates a window from which to view this arrangement, mimicking the era’s growing interest in the camera-eye, selecting and framing the world.  In contrast, the two small examples of his Oil wiping on newspaper (1939) feature compositions mounted on top of a substrate instead of matted beneath it.  In these, the edges are irregular and raw.  Often the compositions can be “read” like a Rorschach blot.  pink collage (1940) only looked abstract from a distance, but as I drew nearer it resolved into a dark tree trunk with white mountains rising up behind it.  Up close, the compositions have a particularity and a specificity that makes them seem representational.

Mz x 19, 1947; collage, oil, paper, and cardboard on cardboard; 6 1/8 x 5 1/4 in.; Collection of Ellsworth Kelly.

At first, Schwitters claimed that the collages were “not intended to mean anything, [but] only to be strong compositions in color.”  He later amended this view: “Poetry arises from the interaction of these elements, meaning is important only if it is employed as one such factor.  I play off sense against nonsense.”  Although the work is considered historical, the approach that created it is thoroughly contemporary, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha have cited Schwitters as an influence.   He anticipated the rise of commercialism, created collage work to materialize the saturation of information in the modern world, and predicted the indiscriminate use of varied materials as a way to reflect on the society in which it was created. The intimacy of scale and the way the work seems simultaneously expansive and specific makes it well worth seeing in person.  Upon attending an exhibition of Schwitters’ work in 1959, Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “I felt like he made it all just for me.”

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God, 2007; platinum and 8,601 diamonds. Courtesy of White Cube, London.

Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative—revolutionary even.   —Germaine Greer.

In 2007, London-based art critic Ben Lewis wrote an article for the Evening Standard newspaper entitled “Who put the ‘Con’ in Contemporary Art?” The article discussed the overinflated art-market bubble that Lewis thought was ready to burst. Doubting the compelling idea that capitalism nurtures art and creates a free-trade zone for ideas and feelings, he suggested that the current art market might actually not be good for either making meaningful art or for democracy and freedom of expression. Lewis notes that the art market is notorious for its lack of regulations and transparency. He also points out that, between 2003 and 2008, billionaire hedge-fund managers, as well as the new business classes from Asia, Latin America, and Russia, pushed the already inflated prices of contemporary art into overdrive. Additionally, according to Lewis, the world’s biggest galleries, dealers, and artists were buying work by their most prominent artists, propping up their ever-rising prices. He concluded that the art market’s recent roller-coaster ride was fueled by “cynicism, absurdity, and greed,” accurately predicting the art-market crash at the end of 2008.

Lewis is best known for Art Safari, his BBC series on contemporary art. Additionally, he has made films for European television—ranging from the history of French nuclear testing in the Pacific to the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu—and has written regular art columns for several London-based publications. In his most recent film, The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (2009), Lewis investigates the cynical romance between capitalism and the art world through an economic lens. The well-made and entertaining documentary was filmed over a two-year period, between 2006 and 2008, and it favors the reflexive style of documentarian Nick Broomfield. It is, in many ways, a movie about the making of a movie. After viewing the film at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco in January of this year, I interviewed Lewis, curious about his motivation for making the film and what he discovered in the process.

The film clearly shows the consolidation of money and power in an unregulated art market, in which the collusion of collectors, galleries, and artists is firmly enmeshed in the web of finance capital. Lewis introduces the reality principle into this game of smoke and mirrors. While Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling refused to be interviewed, many art insiders spoke on the record, including art advisor Abigail Asher; hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos; Josh Baer, creator of the Baer Faxt Art Industry Newsletter; and collectors Alberto and Jose Mugrabi and Aby Rosen. It is notable that Lewis does not focus on art-historical perspectives for any of the work he discusses in the film. As he notes, My film had hardly any art criticism. It was an economic analysis of the art market. In a way that was my art-critical point―that most of the art in my film did not merit being assessed within the framework of art criticism, and should only be considered as products in a market.

Visit Art Practical to continue reading The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.