The In Crowd
Brooke Casillas
“Miffy Fountain,” one of the sculptures that showed as part of Tom Sachs’ exhibition “The Bronze Collection,” turns heads in front of the Baldwin Gallery last summer.
Debate the merits of Tom Sachs’ work if you will, but it’s hard to accuse the New York artist of deceit. In the description that accompanied Sachs’ exhibition “The Bronze Collection,” which showed this past summer at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery, it said right there that the sculptures were “ordinary objects, simple shapes” and “vacant vessels of nothingness.” The word “mundane” is used to describe “Quarterpipes,” which is a barely glorified skateboard ramp, though it is made of cast bronze. Even more telling, the statement reveals that the art is “playing on the discernment and capricious nature of value”—which might be obvious enough but is also a startlingly naked confession given that Sachs’ “Miffy Fountain,” a bronze fountain that transforms the Hello Kitty figure into an oversized bunny, is priced at $450,000. The capricious nature of value, indeed.
Aspen is a place where the price—and, separately, the value—of land and houses, not to mention lift tickets and beers, seem made up outside the realm of the usual law of supply-and-demand. Four million for a two-bedroom condo? Sounds good. Fourteen-buck cheeseburgers? Why not?
The same can apply to paint on canvas, pieces of metal or digital pixels put together by a certain person deemed an artist of importance. The money is here, so why not ask for it? In the art world—especially with contemporary art, where issues of supply, enduring appeal of the artist and aesthetic merit are open-ended questions—the final word on worthiness is the amount a collector will pay or whether a gallerist or curator grants the artist exhibition space. Whatever the sum a buyer forks over to Galerie Maximillian for a matrix of colored circles by Damien Hirst, it’s hard to argue with the pricing strategy.
PARIS, NEW YORK, LONDON … ASPEN?
Decisions on price, value and which artists even get to enter the discussion are increasingly being played out in Aspen. The Baldwin Gallery, which represents blue-chip artists like Donald Baechler and James Turrell, was opened in 1994 by the late Harley Baldwin; almost instantly, it was pegged as the most significant contemporary-art gallery between Chicago and Santa Fe. Galerie Maximillian, which once stuck to work from centuries past, now deals in highest-profile contemporary artists like Hirst, Chuck Close and Peter Doig, who last year shook the art world by selling a painting for more than six million euros.
Aspen is home, or second home, for Deborah and Dennis Scholl, Susan and Larry Marx and Nancy and Bob Magoon and a few handfuls more whose collections are as influential as they are impressive. And with the hiring three years ago of Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson as chief curator and executive director, the Aspen Art Museum took a giant step toward becoming one of the insiders who help define the latest trends.
Which doesn’t exactly answer the question of how close Aspen’s overall tastes are to the leading edge. Baldwin and Maximillian represent mostly well-established artists, not the young rebels challenging them. Certainly the town is not as much at the vanguard as it was in the late ’60s and into the ’70s, when the Aspen Center of Contemporary Art attracted Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and others for conferences and art “happenings.”
Milton Rosa-Ortiz, who lived in Aspen through the ’90s and is represented by the Baldwin Gallery, calls the local tastes “very conservative, actually.” As evidence, he observes that the Baldwin Gallery has “the hardest time selling anything with penises.” But he concedes that the upper reaches of the art world are well represented here, even if their conversations are held at some remove from the public discourse.
“There are collectors in Aspen who are savvy enough, who can see the artistic wave coming,” says Rosa-Ortiz, who now lives in Brooklyn. “But in Aspen proper, not very much at all.”
SURPRISE AND DEMAND
Where the cutting-edge actually lies, who cashes in on it, and who decides such matters can seem like a house of cards—supported by the thinnest foundation and mere air. There is the pervasive notion that there is more (and less) to it than the eye can see. Demand is not necessarily dictated by the art itself.
Return to the case of Tom Sachs, who has had three shows at Baldwin. It is possible that the value attached to a Sachs piece—such as the $250,000 “Cinderblocks Battery Tower,” a work from last summer’s exhibit comprising a Diehard car battery atop a cinder block—has
little to do with visual aesthetics, or even the high concepts underlying the art. Instead, the worth of the art—and the fact that Sachs can ask, and even receive, payment in the mid-six figures—might have more to do with a Wednesday night in October of 1999. On said evening, Mary Boone, a prominent New York City gallerist, was arrested and handcuffed to a chair for seven hours at the Midtown North Precinct before being transferred for the rest of the night to the Manhattan Detention Center, a facility commonly known as “the Tombs.” The charge? Possession of weapons and ammunition. The reason? Sachs’ “Haute Bricolage” show, which included a vase full of live bullets on the gallery’s reception desk and a cabinet stocked with guns, which, though homemade, were determined to be functional.
Sachs, who had trained as an architect, was already establishing himself as a “bricolage” artist, cobbling together unique products that commented on consumerism, functionality and adolescent pursuits. (A 2004 exhibition at Baldwin was centered around “The Delinquency Chamber,” a $225,000 walk-in closet equipped with a booze-stocked mini-fridge, a bong and a large-screen video hooked up to the ultraviolent video game “Grand Theft Auto.”) But his gallerist’s night in prison, vividly documented in The New York Times, made him the buzz of the art world.
“There was this huge media outcry,” says Rosa-Ortiz, who, like Sachs, was an architect before turning to fine art. “What is brilliant about that was, he got all this incredible attention, and he was able to use that wave. Once the media takes the artist to that level, then he becomes the artist everyone wants to have. At some point, he becomes a phenomenon. Not just Sachs, but anyone—he can do anything, and it will sell for a lot of money.”
More often, the event that generates momentum for an artist is not getting your representative busted, but the sale of a work. Often a single sale to the right collector can start the domino effect.
“There can be a buzz: ‘Oh, that person bought this piece, so get on the bandwagon,’” says Jill Bernstein, a collector for 25 years—long enough, she notes, that “my contemporary art isn’t contemporary anymore”—who lives in Aspen and Long Island. Mentioning the Scholls, and the Rubell Family, fellow collectors with ties to Aspen, Bernstein added, “If they buy it, people think, OK, that artist has a chance.”
The case of Tom Sachs proves that the traditional values of beauty and refined technique often aren’t part of the equation in assessing contemporary art. Or more to the point, Sachs, by not even pretending to care about such qualities, is making us confront that reality. The fact that a single transaction, or one notorious event, can make a career points to the conclusion that it isn’t necessarily the art itself that matters.
TASTEMAKING
So what is holding up the contemporary art world, which has drawn increasing public attention and in turn, greater demand? It might be that it is constructed largely on the tastes of a very few, very influential insiders—curators, collectors, gallery owners and museum directors—with a notable concentration in Aspen.
It could be said that all of the arts are pitched this way: music by a select few record company executives and concert promoters; movies by studio moguls. But a key difference in the fine-art realm is that an artist needs to sell relatively few pieces of work; it is a tiny number of people who need to be convinced to buy in. In music and the movies, the buying audience is counted in the tens of thousands, if not the millions—numbers that, in themselves, tend to confirm the existence of an intrinsic value.
The impact that one tastemaker can have is evident in the story of dealer Joel Soroka and photographer Béatrice Helg. When Soroka opened his eponymous photography gallery in Aspen in 1993, among the first artists he exhibited was the Swiss-born Helg. A collector with 20 years of experience at that point, Soroka had come across Helg’s photographs—meticulously constructed images that touched on architecture, light and design—at the Association of International Photographic Art Dealers Show in New York. The work was strong enough to make Soroka rethink his exclusive devotion to black-and-white photography.
“I was amazed. I’d never seen anything like it before,” he says. “I said, ‘Would you sell this to me?’”
She sold him a piece, which retailed for about $5,000, and when Soroka opened his gallery in Aspen, Helg was represented by his small, one-person, start-up operation. Then, in 2002, the photographer had her first show at Galerie Jan Krugier & Cie in Geneva, one of the world’s most significant galleries—not just of photography, but all forms of art. The association with Krugier reverberated all the way to Aspen.
“I was selling the work really well. But it changed the market,” says Soroka of the Krugier exhibition. “She had a book published; last summer, she had three consecutive museum shows in major cities in Europe. It increased my sales dramatically. Suddenly, I had people come in, serious contemporary art collectors, who had been hesitant to make their way to a photography gallery.
“Once Krugier put his imprimatur on her, it changed things. It changed the perception of her; it changed the perception of me. Definitely, one gallery can make a huge difference.”
Another anecdote from Soroka’s gallery adds fuel to the idea that people can be swayed by opinion more than the art itself—and the notion that Aspen may be following rather than leading the art universe. Soroka tells of the Aspenite who came to his gallery and stated his desire to buy a work by the British-based duo known as Gilbert & George.
“I asked him why he wanted that particular artist, and he didn’t know,” says Soroka. “He knew someone who had a piece by them.
“A lot of people, I think, buy a piece because of the prestige it brings. They want to say, ‘I bought a so and so.’”
Those who create the trends in art contend, naturally, that there is more behind their decisions than grabbing a piece of the latest headline-maker or getting in early on the newest, strangest thing. There are standards to be followed, and even if they are amorphous and personal, they at least address the issues of artistry, quality and lasting value.
Bernstein, the collector, needs an internal reaction to the art: “For me, the first thing is, you always have to love it,” she says, adding that she often favors the work of young, lesser-known artists as a means of keeping her costs down and eliminating, to an extent, any celebrity factor. “When I buy it, I buy it because I love it. Because you may get stuck with it forever.”
KINGMAKING (AND UNMAKING)
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, in catering to the Aspen Art Museum’s wider audience, ponders a broader range of questions in deciding what gets several months under the spotlight in Aspen’s premiere art facility.
“It’s me thinking about the artist: How are they impacting me? What are they trying to say? Is it important? Should it be seen by a wider audience? Does it matter?” she says. “That’s something we ask here at the museum every day: ‘So what?’ We have to be able to answer that question.”
Zuckerman Jacobson’s tastes run toward the cutting-edge, and sometimes to the extreme edge. This past summer, for example, the museum presented “Imaginary Thing,” an exhibit/performance in which, for 30 consecutive days, one art object was deposited in a hole, seven-and-a-half feet deep, outside the museum. Then the hole was covered, and there the items remain, constituting an art exhibition that can not be seen.
Such high concepts are lost on Rosa-Ortiz. The Puerto Rican native began making his sculptural works at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Snowmass Village facility known for blurring the distinctions between craft and art. The experience there left him with the mindset that artists should be, in part, laborers and not mere thinkers. So when he looks at a piece of work, he wants to believe that the artist has left some of himself there.
“A piece that you have labored over, the more time you spend with it, it has more of you, your energy in it. It gives you time to think about it, to process it,” says Rosa-Ortiz, whose art touches on history, geography and politics, with light, texture and an undeniable measure of beauty. “You can sense that someone spent a hell of a lot of time on it. I gravitate toward that. I want something that has been labored over.
“A lot of contemporary work is ready-made, almost like a factory. And it has no soul.”
Zuckerman Jacobson, in her time at the Aspen Art Museum and beforehand, at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, has earned a reputation for spotting artists in the early stages of their career arc. At Berkeley, she presented the first one-person
museum exhibit by Doug Aitken, who earned considerable acclaim last year for “Sleepwalkers,” a series of projections shown on the exterior walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In Aspen, she has presented work by Paul Chan, Andrew Wekua and Javier Téllez, all of whom have continued on their upward paths.
Zuckerman Jacobson says that track record speaks more about her skill in assessing art, rather than her muscle as a power broker. She is confident that shows like Aitken’s aren’t one-time flukes, that she is savvy enough to visualize the success that lies ahead for certain artists.
“If they do a sensational show here that people love, they won’t disappear,” she says. “Because it means the work is great and should be supported. And it will be.”
But probably the greatest evidence of the clout that Zuckerman Jacobson, and people in similar positions, wield is not in their ability to make an artist, but their power to break one.
“If someone comes here and does a bad show, the interest will decline,” says Zuckerman Jacobson, in a voice that makes you fear for the future of such an artist. “Part of my job is to not pick someone that would happen to. After all, I’m an art historian. The choices I’m making are intended to stand the test of time. At least the majority of the choices. It’s all about the art.”
