I received an unusually inviting brochure from Sotheby’s in London the other day. It hymned the marvellous prices recorded at its recent sale, at which many new records were established as the clients splashed out on the usual suspects, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, and on less familiar visitors to the auction houses, like Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton and the sculptor Anthony Caro.
Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London III, 1972
This screenprint was sold by Sotheby’s last month (March 06) for 64,800 GBP
While Hamilton passed the half-million mark, Caro more than doubled that. The evidence was unmistakable: the boom in contemporary and modern art is still running very strongly, ignoring (so far) the Cassandras who declare that it’s too good (or bad, depending on political taste) to last. But I’m more interested in another, related issue. Why ‘contemporary AND modern’?
The strange answer is that a work can be modern without being contemporary, and vice versa. Of the two adjectives, the longer is the more valuable label. It equates with another piece of art jargon; ‘cutting edge’. I’ve never been sure what exactly is being cut, but I do know what users mean; they refer, first, to art which is thought to be produced by the most original and inventive artists of the day.
Second, the definition is confirmed by the purchases of museum curators, the backing of known cutting-edge dealers, the purchases of important collectors, and the opinions of avant-garde critics. Contradictory voices are crying in the wilderness, though. Robert Hughes, easily today’s best critic, in my opinion, has long argued that art, unlike science, does not advance over time - that being new does not make a Damien Hirst intrinsically ‘better’ than a 14th century mural by Giotto.
By the same token, repeating an old and brilliant visual joke by Buster Keaton as a video installation hardly counts as original - though it helped get the artist onto the shortlist for the Turner Prize. That competition enshrines the victory of the contemporary over the modern. The young and experimental have dominated the lists, and the camera has lorded it over the palette and the pencil.
The prices of the winners have done well, without heading into the rich heights that would interest Sotheby’s. But this is the world of fashion and striving to impress. I was once lunching at the best restaurant in Basle when I overheard the dealer at the next table ask a smart young couple ‘Are you ready for an Opie?’ That refers to Julian Opie, then a leading contemporary light.
Note the artistic snobbery involved in that sales pitch. Opie’s generation, which included the sculptor Bill Woodrow, recently shown to fascinating effect by Waddington, is more gifted than most of the Young British Artists and has produced notably better work. I don’t think that collectors have any reason to regret their buys - even if the artists are less ‘contemporary’ than, say, Tracy Emin.
But the best course of action is to forget the snobbery and to test today’s fashions against your own ideas of what deserves to last. Auction prices are no better guide here than critics’ opinions - and its noticeable, anyway, that some critics are now swinging away from the contemporary and stressing the superiority of the modern masters. That’s for a very good reason. They ARE superior.
