It boils down to immortality. I want to live forever. And the best way to live forever is to be better than everybody else.
– Damien Hirst
When we defined the Altruist League’s mission as becoming the world’s best philanthropy advisory for true systemic change, I expected that I would need to learn a lot about history of philanthropy, and the motivation behind it. I expected I would need to brush up on my finance as we explored new funding models for global grassroots action. I accepted that I would need to know enough about technology to manage data science teams and speak the lingo of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I did not expect that I would need to become a connoisseuse of contemporary art.
Late last year, the League accepted a major art auction house as a candidate member. Our onboarding process is quite long and includes many touch points, and I had the opportunity to learn about their business model in detail, which I found fascinating.
This inspired me to find out more about the 21st century art market, through speaking to collectors, advisors, dealers, museum owners, curators, and whomever else I could find in my network and who was willing to enlighten me over Zoom or, in very rare situations, over a coffee.
I also took the time to read several dozen texts on the subject. I found a handful of publications particularly interesting. Chief among them was an authoritative volume by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz titled Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, a fantastic repository of post-WWII artist though: interviews, manifestos, grant applications, pamphlets, explanatory and critical pieces.
Other, more story-driven publications that I enjoyed include: Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, a bit dated now but still very revealing about the mechanics of the art business; Tony Godfrey’s The Story of Contemporary Art, a decent attempt at updating E.H. Gombrich’s seminal work; and Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, a classic by now.
The outcome of all that research? The first thing I noticed were the undeniable parallels between the many art movements that have sprung up over the past few decades and the grassroots movements of their time. From gestural expressionism, to Piero Manzoni’s highly critical conceptual work to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art, artists, just like activists, needed to define their relationship to the society: should they ignore it, ridicule it, overthrow it or simply be improving it behind the scenes?
For the activists, the answers over the past half-century ranged from church work to neo-anarchism. The parallels persist into the present moment. Just as making it in today’s contemporary art has a lot to do with provocation, marketing and everything that goes with it, so is today’s social action much more self-aware than in the past. Gone are the naive days of believing that a movement can grow “organically” and without structure. Theory and tactics have improved (thanks to organizations like Rhize, Ulex and others) and training is widely available, so the best movements of today know how to communicate and to whom, and approach the scaling of their operation professionally.
The art world of today is fascinating, dependent on trends, bubbles, personal relationships, insecurities and noble intentions; in other words, not unlike that of philanthropy. The buying of pricey art is for the mosts part the pastime of a relatively small group of wealthy individuals. Museums also participate in auctions, hoping to invest the trustees’ money into artworks that will attract attention and put (or keep) their institution on the map, but the so-called ultra high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) make the market.
The living artists most in-demand, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, have understood the essence of success: become controversial to get the publicity, keep things unashamedly pretentious, make your topics (death, immortality) and/or your artworks monumental, and never look back. Confident egos are pushed by confident gallerists and dealers. The average private collector is insecure about his or her own taste, and will be happy to follow the lead. Both the artists and the collectors are tormented by that single unanswerable question: will their art still hang on walls 2, 20, 200 years from now?
The high prices achieved at art auctions are, among other things, a byproduct of the wealth inequality in our society. “The ideal auction,” one of my contacts told me, half in jest, “was an Arab prince going against a Russian oligarch.”
When times are good, prices can go uncontrollably high. That’s how a Basquiat was sold for $110 million in 2017. But the art market itself is cyclical. The Basquiat in question was sold to a Japanese collector. In the mid-1990s, after the Japanese bubble had burst, all the hot Japanese money disappeared, and the global auction prices were severely hit. For a few years, “no one was buying anything.” Until the post-Soviet money came in, that is.
Why do the rich buy art? The reasons can be esthetic, of course, but the status-related ones are clear: “anyone” can have a jet, a yacht or a palace, but not everyone can own Pollock’s Number 17A.
Why contemporary art? Surprisingly, it seems to be almost “the only thing left to buy.” This is not exactly true, but the consensus is that the paintings of old masters are by now in their final resting places – mostly private collections and museums. They do not come up for sale unless people die or go through a divorce, which happens comparatively rarely. Contemporary art is more abundant; money among the UHNWIs is even more abundant.
Of course, not all contemporary art is sought after. Koons, Hirst or Tracey Emin command seven-figure prices for their work. Pretty much 99,99% of other people doing art nowadays are struggling. In fact, the age of big tech has impoverished the average artist so much so that, for most, just surviving and continuing to make art is a success in its own right. The tech monopolies gave rise to piracy and spread the notion that content, including art, should be free. I highly recommend Bill Deresiewicz’s excellent study on this, a book called Death of the Artist.
My business is not to critique or change the art world. It is to note one deep, striking parallel with modern philanthropy, echoed by many of my collocutors. I call it the curse of consciousness.
If you are buying prominence through art and are hoping that it will give you visibility and legacy then you do not want the world to change. You want the same values to continue to be appreciated. You don’t want your mind to change either.
If you all of a sudden experience an “the emperor is naked” moment, you are in trouble. Practically speaking, if you as a collector, or your children, or your contacts, simply stop being impressed by your overpriced inflatable animals your entire structure of meaning may collapse.
To a growing group of altruist investors, token philanthropy, overly visible giving, superficial tinkering that leaves the system unchanged, megalomaniac ego-driven projects that fail spectacularly – none of that is interesting anymore. They don’t believe in such endeavors on moral grounds, and they certainly don’t believe that they will buy them identity or legacy.
And their peers are evolving as well – some of them no longer appreciate the putting of names on libraries and university buildings. After all, wasn’t that what the the Sacklers and Jeffrey Epstein used to do to try and launder the evil that they did elsewhere?
The curse of consciousness has no easy cure. Education, compassion and general sophistication are a one-way street. You taste food from an good chef and you can no longer eat the deep fried junk. Just like you cannot make yourself care about celebrity gossip so you can’t get excited anymore about industrially produced spot paintings or leaving your inheritance to a neo-colonial international organization that isn’t fixing the real problems of the world.
What happens when you can no longer buy self-respect, the respect of others or legacy with money? You need to earn them with your own work. You know, doing something authentic with your time, possibly useful for the world. When shopping no longer satisfies the urge for creativity you need to roll up your own sleeves.
This can be the beginning of altruism as creativity, philanthropy as an artform.
This doesn’t mean that UHNWIs should all of a sudden start giving money to grassroots movement and call that art. Just like any art, that of altruism takes education, practice and a worldview. I hope to have much more to say about that in future articles, as I wrap my mind around the existential crisis that I am seeing in mainstream philanthropy around me.
For the moment – a last observation: I once heard an uber-pretentious art advisor speak about contemporary art shopping as a “private investigation of identity.” The term is so outrageous that I like it. Not only will I keep it, I will raise it a notch – future philanthropy, if it is to keep any relevance, must be a “private meditation on immortality.” Like Helen Keller said it once, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all,” so let’s raise the stakes!
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