Part 1
Full disclosure: this is not an essay about the people who pose for artists, as intriguing and largely neglected a subject as that might be. Rather what we want to write about is the economic model by which contemporary visual artists operate. Wait! Get your hand off that mouse or trackpad – you’re not clicking out of here so easily. This really is an important discussion which is absolutely intertwined with fundamental questions surrounding contemporary art…you know, like, what makes it contemporary? So stick around, it might just be illuminating.
Let’s start by looking at the contemporary artist in terms of his/her production model, since economics are closely related to production. How do visual artists generally make their work? Surveying the kind of art generally exhibited in galleries, which is the preferred venue for artists producing quality work, we can safely say that the vast majority of pieces are made largely by hand. Of course, we find an extensive use of various types of machines as well, be they mechanical printing devices, chemical processes such as are used for engraving and etching, and power tools for the production of sculptural objects. Despite the intercession of these non-manual techniques, however, we can still characterize the overall production process used for such work as being essentially manual, because they all require the human hand to operate.
That, in turn, means there must be a degree of variability in the execution of each piece. For example, if a sculptor uses hand-held power tools to carve one block of stone into a figure, and then tries to repeat exactly the same design in a second, the two will be different in small or large degrees, depending on how well the artist can match the ‘choreography’ of the first version. But they will never be exactly the same.
Beyond its purely aesthetic qualities, it is the quality of uniqueness that endows the work of hand-made art with much of its perceived monetary value. That is simply a function of supply and demand economics, and in particular, of the Scarcity Principle. This principle states that the the rarer an object is, the greater its value if there is demand for it. That value will then increase further as demand grows and especially if it exceeds supply.
The perfect storm for artists and gallerists – in the positive sense of the term – is for an artist’s reputation to grow, as that will increase demand for what is inevitably a limited supply of product (sorry, that’s what it is). Because as we all know, a human being can only work so many hours in a day and will only live so long; by its nature supply is going to be limited and finite as long as the artist is expected to be personally involved in the physical production of his/her work.
Some artists have managed this ‘problem’ by operating as proto-industrialists, setting up workshops populated by trained assistants who then carry out much of the labor required to produce their work. Koons, Murakami and, until his recent market collapse at least, Hirst have each employed dozens and even hundreds of such surrogates as a way to boost production to feed excess demand. All have ample historical precedent: Warhol worked under the same arrangement in his aptly named Factory in the 1960s and after, as did the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 17th century Antwerp. Nor was Rubens the first to do this; workshops centered on individual artists working for personal gain can be traced back as far as antiquity.
Whether the artist is highly successful or barely known does not ultimately affect the economic model under which they operate; it’s still very much a question of supply and demand as to how their work is valued. This poses several problems from a market standpoint. Generally speaking, the more successful an artist is, the higher the price for their work, which means fewer and fewer people can afford it. The less successful an artist is, the lower the price, which is positive in terms of affordability but means that the emerging artist is increasingly unlikely to be able to earn a living from it (not to mention the challenges to the gallerist trying to sell it).
Several responses to this problem have been devised over the years. Mechanical processes such as photography and printmaking offered an opportunity to produce artwork in unlimited qualities. In the 1960s the concept of the art multiple was taken up by a number of artists and dealers as a way to make art more democratic and affordable. Keith Haring opened his first Pop Shop in 1986, where he sold gear like t-shirts, bags and posters embellished with his signature line drawings. Even the exalted Gagosian Gallery has entered ‘democratic space’ in opening up a retail store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
But the fact is that none of these developments has truly solved the problem of the market. In fact, the polarities of the market seem to have never been greater. At the upper tier the prices for the most coveted artists continues into the stratosphere (only partly halted by the recent global slowdown), while the ‘bottom’ of the market is more and more served by websites that sell open edition work by the yard, ranging from the not so good to the pretty okay. For quality artists caught in the middle, the financial challenges of sustaining their calling remain significant, while the buying public with real interest in acquiring compelling contemporary art that is not restricted to the usual suspects of photography and prints is left with relatively few choices. That most art galleries are mom-and-pop businesses and therefore limited to certain geographic areas only exacerbates their difficulty in accessing art other than through the internet outlets.
Naturally, we think there is a potential solution, or why would we be going on like this?
Over the past few years there has arisen a wholly new mechanism for the physical production of objects. We have nicknamed this novel set of production capabilities the New Industrialism. It can be considered new because for the first time in history industrial manufacturing equipment has been married to the computer. Laser and water cutting, CNC milling machines, rotational molding and many other techniques have been developed out of this synthesis of the digital and the analog.
The New Industrialism also encompasses what we might call new design and production strategies; these would include mass customization, crowdsourcing, open innovation, on demand and short run production, and various other ways of working that were not viable in the pre-Digital Age.
In Part 2 of this thinkpiece, we will expound on the ways that artists can utilize the tremendous creative possibilities born out of the New Industrialism and in doing so rethink the economic and production models that have guided them for centuries.
References
A Primer on the New Industrialism
Murakami’s Hiropon Factory
Keith Haring’s Pop Shop
Gagosian Goes Retail
