Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich

"Chrystia Freeland’s book, however, is a sobering account about why we should care. The top-end art buyers may not be exhaustively representative of the art market, but they are nevertheless representative of a global plutocracy. The fact of their existence, and their modus operandi , have grave socioeconomic implications. What she describes is almost like a separate class of citizenry, with tremendous amounts of influence on things like tax regimes. There’s a sizeable difference between the extremely rich of today and the extremely rich of the last century. The extremely rich of today seem to be completely transnational, which I thought was relevant to the museums in the sense that the great philanthropists—the Mellons and the Carnegies, and so on—were rooted in their communities. They ultimately gave back. They were philanthropic, either endowing a museum or concert hall, or giving their art collections to museums. “There is a big difference between the extremely rich of today and the extremely rich of the last century” A very real difference today is that plutocrats are not often rooted in any community at all. They live in multiple locations. They may make their own private museums, but what will be the future? Before, these works of art would often go to a museum or public institution on their deaths. Today, that may not be the case. I very much question what will happen with the next generation, the heirs to these collections. Even if they do make philanthropic gifts, who will accept them if they have become generic or ubiquitous in some way? To a very large extent, they’re all collecting the same thing. They’re all focusing on some 25 artists. They’ve all got their Gilbert and George, their Kiefer, their Grotjean, their Christopher Wool, who is probably a manipulated artist anyway. So what is going to happen two or three generations down the road? Oh yes, purveyors of opioids to the American public. Art has tremendous cultural cache. Some oligarchs have founded art prizes, collected art in vast quantities. With a few, there is no doubt, it is a way of washing out your reputation and showing that actually you’re not such a bad guy, and here you are doing good for the community and getting kids into London museums. One thing that makes art valuable is the fact that by owning this Picasso, to an extent, you have still a connection to Picasso the person . Or take a celebrity sale, like the recent Rockefeller auction , which gathered all sorts of headlines. His money clip made a colossal amount of money. The money clip itself is not worth anything. It’s the connection with that person. I think ‘Robo-Rembrandt’ has gone wrong. You can produce the perfect Rembrandt with a machine, but you’ll never get that aspect of authorship. Somehow, by owning the true Picasso, you can touch and behold something made by his hand. Picasso touched it, and now it’s mine. And that adds to the value. It’s an emotional value, translated only very approximately into a monetary value. Authenticity is important. Even if a painting is a beautiful copy and it’s perfect, if it’s not authentic it’s not worth as much. There are a number of values in a work of art. There’s the aesthetic value. There’s the symbolic value. There’s the art historical value. You can trace an important moment in history; for example, the moment that an artist moved from figurative expression and started painting abstracts. Well, the reproduction doesn’t have that. I think at the moment it’s less healthy. According to many of us who have been involved with it for a long time, it’s become a much more ruthless space. There’s a lot of financial manipulation, the use of art works to evade tax in one way or another, perhaps legally, but nevertheless, I don’t think this is a healthy trend. It’s become a sort of alternative currency as well. From a financial perspective, however, the contemporary art—the biggest part of the market—is pretty safe. There’s such demand not only from gallerists and collectors but from companies for art, demands that they weren’t really there before. Take hotels. Before, high end hotels might have a print by a big name artist. They were just bought en masse . But now, you walk in and there’ll be something very recognisable, to show how trendy they are. The W hotels will usually have spot paintings or some other art ‘brand’ on display. This is underpinning market values. This is something that I go on and on and on about: most people still haven’t entirely understood the extent to which the market for luxury goods and the market for art are all overlapping. This is a real danger for the art world—that the art will become overwhelmingly a luxury good. It is already in the case of certain artists. The art world becomes little more than an art market, for luxury tokens of status. “ This is a real danger for the art world, that the art will become overwhelmingly a luxury good” I mean, I’m happy if artists are rich. I don’t want them to starve. Let’s face it, artists at the bottom of this sort of inverted pyramid, in a way, when it comes to the art market. It’s their creativity that our whole industry is thriving on. We should never forget that. So, I’m delighted that artists make money. My worry with this sort of corporatization of the art world is that a lot of galleries are encouraging their artists to churn out the same sort of work repeatedly to supply insatiable collectors, their clients. And collectively to churn out very similar things. How many Kusama pumpkins have you seen in your life? This seems to me to be blurring the lines. This is not genuine creativity anymore. This is mass production. So it’s great that artists should be able to make money, but I would hope that they’d retain the instincts that led them to become an artist in the first place. Oh, that was the pits. I have some pleasure in the belief that I don’t think they sold well at all. Have you ever seen anyone carrying one? Why do it? An artist like Koons doesn’t need the money. Is it a game of one-upmanship, as a response to Hirst’s marketplace antics? We can debate that, but I think actually Hirst’s early work means his place is assured in art history. But there are so many examples of art as commerce. Takashi Murakami had that show at LACMA a few years back, which actually featured a shop in the exhibition space selling his handbags. It becomes a case of not ‘exit through the gift shop’, but ‘enter by the gift shop’. Do we need to put up with this sort of flagrant commercialization for artists to make money? Perhaps. But it’s a very different world from when I started in the art market, and is now perhaps at its most cynical, most ruthless. Some works of art have outperformed many other investments by a very impressive amount, but by no means everything. People think that all art is going to go up in value indefinitely. It’s not. To make a good return on your Koons, you need to have already bought that Koons 10 years ago. And the value of those works 10 years from now is anybody’s guess. There is another art world that is under the radar, in which artists are making really good work and they’re selling them through smaller galleries. But the top end will continue to dominate the headlines. If I, as a journalist, went to an editor and said I intend to write this story about an unknown artist with no value in the marketplace, well, that’s a hard sell. But it does not mean we should stop looking for those undiscovered artists that remain true to the aesthetic and symbolic values of the work they produce. One day, their work may have art historic value, too."