Required reading

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Woman in a Tub by Jeff Koons

This week’s New Yorker arrived today and it has a must-​​read arti­cle for all of us toil­ing away toward art-​​world rel­e­vance: a pro­file of gallerist/​dealer/​patron extradon­aire Jef­frey Deitch of the ubiq­ui­tous Deitch Projects by author Calvin Tomp­kins. Through Deitch, Duchamp biog­ra­pher Tomp­kins paints a com­pre­hen­sive (and ter­ri­fy­ing) pic­ture of the art world today and I feel smarter hav­ing read it (pho­tograhs by Lisa Kereszi).
Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not avail­able online. Later, if I’m feel­ing it, I’ll make a pdf of all ten mil­lion pages and put them up here. But we’ll see.

The piece charts the tra­jec­tory of Deitch’s career, explain­ing the prove­nance of today’s hyper­ac­tive act mar­ket, fueled by hedge­fund man­agers, and new buy­ers in Rus­sia, Asia and the Mid­dle East. Today’s art mar­ket is global, with records set for the sale of con­tem­po­rary art every time there’s a major auction.

With Impres­sion­ist and Post-​​Impressionist almost com­pletely snatched up by muse­ums, col­lec­tors and who­ever else, how long before this mar­ket, rav­en­ous for con­tem­po­rary art, col­lapses on itself? Also, and way way more impor­tantly, how do I get a piece of the action?

I’m half-​​kidding about that last thing, but seri­ously, my tiny incra­men­tal progress towards what­ever in the past months seems mas­sively insignif­i­cant com­pared to Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons or who­ever. Obvi­ously, I have no busi­ness com­par­ing myself to either of those artists or really any­one else for that mat­ter (hear that Lavalette? In a duel, I’m pretty sure I’d win) but, of course, I can’t help myself. I don’t mean to sound grandiose, either. My work reflects exactly who and what I am: a 22 year-​​old with mod­est tal­ent try­ing to fig­ure our what the fuck I’m doing.

In the past cou­ple weeks I’ve been grap­pling with the work I’ve been mak­ing. So many of us com­ing up have work so sim­i­lar it would be impos­si­ble to tell us apart in a lineup. What makes me dif­fer­ent from the legions of other twenty-​​something snap shot pho­tog­ra­phers? Noth­ing really, except I’m bet­ter, prob­a­bly, though Brad Tre­omel is cut from stone.

So, before my work can sell for hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars, before I should worry about the art mar­ket or greater Amer­i­can eco­nomic col­lapse, I should prob­a­bly put some seri­ous thought into what it is I intend to say with my work. Pretty peo­ple doing pretty peo­ple things is only going to carry me so far.

Posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

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