Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Australia

Well hung – but is it art?

Thursday, 2nd October 2008

Oscar Humphries says museum curators should ignore art market trends and set their own course

September saw much of the commercial art world descend, once again, on gloomy London. Despite their dwindling share portfolios, asset write-downs, and the almost certain possibility of further strife, the very rich appeared single-minded in their covetous desire to buy something at Sotheby’s Damien Hirst sale ‘Beautiful Inside my Head Forever’. Hirst’s masterstroke was showing with an auction house rather than with a dealer, but it owes more to the world of marketing than art. The highest bidder takes home the prize and for the first time collectors, both serious and dilettante, as well as museum curators, were on equal footing.

But suddenly the decision seemed ill timed. Lehman Brothers finally collapsed on the day of the sale. The schadenfreude of those whose tastes or incomes had prevented them from investing in the great contemporary art boom was almost audible. Surely this sale would fail. Surely economic catastrophe would awaken those who had spent millions on sometimes absurd art to the fragility of this market. I walked the exhibition floor with a friend of mine and was struck not so much by the art itself but by the slickness of presentation and the atmosphere — Sotheby’s was bristling with money and the sound of BlackBerries receiving bad news. It was a huge success. Every lot sold. In what I’d pegged as an emperor’s new clothes moment the band, deaf to the critics and global financial meltdown, played on. We live in exciting times.

The art we like, like the clothes we wear and the people we fall in love with, represents a deeply personal choice and bias. In a very small way I collect art. I don’t own a car or a house but I have enough pictures to spend some hours every month rehanging them. ‘I can’t tell the difference,’ my fiancée Sara often says after I’ve sweated over a section of wall. I’m often reluctant to show my art to anyone lest I be judged. I might love my yam mask from New Guinea and my Destiny Deacon photograph of a black doll floating in mid-air but I’m fairly sure not everyone else will. What I love, you might hate and what another collector loves, given the single mindedness of my own taste in art, I may hate.

I met a girl at a party the other day and we got talking. She told me she wanted to become an art dealer. A similar type — five years ago — might have said she wanted to be in PR. ‘You know those artists who sell their work on the street?’ she said. I grimaced and admitted that I did indeed know what she meant. ‘I think some of them are really good and who’s to say one of them isn’t an undiscovered master.’ It is very easy to judge someone else’s taste — and I often do. It’s easy to describe good art as bad and bad art as good. But I think it’s important to remember that we should buy what we love not what we feel we ought to like.

1 | 2 Next page