The new seekers | 14 February 2013

Over the past year or so, art world insiders have queued up to denounce the current state of the contemporary art world. Charles Saatchi started the ball rolling with a column at the end of 2011 in the Guardian. Breaking his self-imposed ban on interviews or writing, he launched a withering attack on an art world that, according to him, had descended to ‘the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard’. Around the same time, the American collector Adam Lindemann wrote an article in the New York Observer about why he would not be attending Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most high-profile international art fairs, which, he complained, had become one endless round of parties filled with faux-collectors.

Predictably, the articles by Saatchi and Lindemann, particularly the latter, got short shrift from commentators, who argued that both were seasoned collectors seemingly annoyed that younger collectors with more purchasing power had muscled them aside. More recently, however, disavowals of the contemporary art world have come from other quarters. Dave Hickey, a well-known art critic, announced his semi-retirement (he is continuing to write material for three anthologies and one more book). Hickey’s reasons were wide-ranging, but most specifically he objected to the growth and change of the art world. ‘I went into the art world because I thought it was private, because I thought it was nice manners with sex and drugs …there’s no middle class any more — there’s a courtier class, that would be you and me. We’re intellectual headwaiters to very rich people.’

Then Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World, a popular insider’s account of the art market and an auction analyst for the Economist, announced that she would no longer write about the art market.