De veranderde relatie tussen geld en visuele kunst van 1990 tot 2015

Three major themes are discussed in the PhD-dissertation: the theory of money, the context of the changing and changed art market and the Money Art-case. The cultural-philosophic question that connects the three parts is: How has the changing relationship between money and art been reflected in the visual arts of the past 25 years? The corpus of my research has been subordinated to three constraints: 1990 as the start year, the limitation to the visual arts and the year-end of 2014 as terminus ad quem. This closing date was chosen because 2014 is, until now, the year in which the highest total for auction series in art market history was achieved for post-war and contemporary visual artworks. Two thousand fourteen was also the year in which the European Central Bank organizedlsquo;stress tests’, following rigorous asset quality reviews of European banks, to measure defensibility and allow financial institutions to build up capital reserves with the aim of avoiding future economic recession, dramatically rising interest rates or even the complete default of a euro-state itself. The period between January 1990 and December 2014 encompasses exactly one, remarkably rapidly evolving generation in social, economic and artistic terms. The limitation to, traditional and new, visual arts was based on the fact that these artworks are often strongly associated with money, such as the case of exorbitant auction prices for main pictorial works.Nineteen ninety was not only considered as a specific year, but also as a kind of commonlsquo;time’-divisor or ‘transition guide number’ indicating the period between 1988 and 1992. A telling example of such a transition was the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall took place in 1989; in February 1990 the soviet communist party gave up its 70-year long monopoly of political power and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. This led to a new rise of global neoliberalism and post-capitalism. Around the same time, digitization began to dominate the world - including the fields of art and finance - as a result of the breakthrough of the internet in 1991 and the complete opening up, two years later, of the global network. In turn this resulted, through digital payment traffic, in a period of financial and speculative highly technological economy. From the year 1990, the economic and financial crises, the so-called rsquo; that arose from the 1970s, had much more serious consequences, e.g. the Dot-Com bubble in 2000, the Chinese stock bubble of 2007 and the financial crises of 2007-2008, the worst since 1930. These threaten, as art curator Bahtsetzis has described: ‘to translate a particular crisis of devalorization into a genuine global-market crisis. Credit and speculation capital grow too fast because of electronic transactions – digitally automated – and (…) create virtually instantaneous financial bubbles, always ready to burst.’Around 1990, the art world changed significantly as well: artists like Koons, Murakami and the Young British Artists brought out totally new concepts and notable art exhibitions ushered in the period of globalization in art. Exhibitions such as 'Magiciens de la Terre' (Paris), the ‘Third Havanarsquo; and 'The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain' (London) confronted, during the years 1989 and 1990, Western with non-Western artists and provided, for the latter, the first global occasions to create art under a post-colonial constellation. Around 1990 the art world became, moreover, global through the use of new media and/or art techniques and technologies. Investments in the contemporary art trade were spread over the globe, but global art always kept a local significance, hence the neologismlsquo;glocal’ to indicate the place where it could be disclosed to a local audience.During the 20th century, money became completely immaterial. Its value is no longer covered by precious metals and is, in cases such as the euro, even disconnected from a national state. Actually, the value of money is solely based on trust. Although since 1990, crises have severely affected the money market as well as the economy, the world has become increasingly economized with overconsumption as main excess. This, mainly because Europe, the Western World and even the global world, lack the tools to install a common financial and economic policy. In his Philosophy of Money, published in 1900, the sociologist Georg Simmel had already stated the specific distinction between the essence and the tangibility of money: the essence is unrelated to the substance. The latter has disappeared and the function has become the essence. The fact that money no longer has substance led to the growing power of banks and credit institutions that possess the technology to perform monetary actions autonomously. Money without substance is also found in initiatives like #39; and 'air miles' or artistic money substitutes.Nowadays, goods are valued for their worth and not for what they are or represent. Quantitative assessment replaces qualitative pricing and resources become goals such as money itself. Economic activity is affected by non-economic institutions such as the political world. Simmel and Marx agreed on the fact that money paves the way for the purest form of reification: it elevates not only quantity over quality, but alienates people from their true existence and fragments their personalities to formal properties. Since 1990, art embodies its criticism of society while at the same time consolidating the image of that same actual community. As a result, the interrelation of art and value is quite similarnbsp;the working of contemporary capitalism.Participation in art investment funds seems to increase, but striking twenty-first-century miracle profits of several hundred percents cannot hide that the art market seems to be inefficient. The economist Baumol showed that the average return on art markets is only 2, 5% over a period of 50 years, while the yield is 4% on the shares market. The art investment market includes only 3% of the total art market and is almost negligible compared to other investment markets. Currently, the art world integrates economic logic and appeals to mass market and marketing principles. That paves the way for the fact that the art world increasingly focuses on consumption and profit. It wants to sell dreams and emotions in order to make a buyer quickly and effortlessly happy. Ostensibly, in our actual consumer society, works of art are considered as average goods or commodities which somehow have to grant prestige.From about 1990, art education, including marketing courses, aimed at improving the economic position of the artists, but this did not lead to a greater mastery of their crafts. Nowadays, craftsmanship has become less important, as art predominantly seems to focus on questioning. In the current cultural industry, artistic autonomy is functionalized. The art world incorporates the principles of neoliberal politics and of the post-capitalist market and can thus provide the evidence of its contemporaneity. In return, the market and politics serve as guarantee of art’s topicality and validity. Artworks are part of the capitalist exchange system, but they resist raw rsquo; as a commodity. They ignore their capitalist exchange value and the abstract labour that is attributed to them. The work of art, inconvertible as commodity, thus seems to maintain a multilateral character.A direct ‘psychological’ relationship between art and money appears between worthless money and just as worthless excrements and has led to many top-ranking symbolic-scatological artworks. Moreover, the relationship between money and art has resulted in a specific art genre, Money Art. Created around 1990, this genre encompasses artworks created with, or concerning real or invented money in the broadest sense and represents all kinds of spiritual and artistic tendencies, though the genre is very often critical of society. Money is considered both as a power and a means of communication. This combination implies various forms of deception and negative aspects of globalization that cause an artistic response. The cross-pollination between money and art has grown historically and evolutionarily. However, there has been a clear acceleration in the twentieth century, ranging from Duchamp, Beuys and Klein to Warhol and Murakami. While Duchamp still illustrated exchange as the source of value, Beuys and Klein primarily revealed the dimensions of capital and investment and Warhol and Murakami represented a society in which art and economy, even more so since 1990, meet in a purely commercial way. However, this commitment does not guarantee broader artistic and commercial success. A remarkable paradox is that a lot of artists can be classified as poor or mainly dependent on a non-artistic income because grants lead to the increase of artistic production, but not to increased revenue. The essence of the altered relationship between visual arts and money since 1990 is based on the fact that the art world has become a form of financial economy, a consumerist derivative of a business that operates in the same manner as the profit-oriented financial market.Since about 1990, it is remarkable that both art and finance have led to a very strong sense of confusion. The current turmoil of confusion in the financial world is obvious because the media respond to it almost daily. Nevertheless, contradictions and confusion in the artistic world seem, whether or not in correlation with the monetary universe, even greater. Art historian Martha Buskirk has stated: ‘since the 1960s, almost anything can be called art’ but in the fields of artists and artworks, some discrepancies and paradoxes are apparently often even more extreme. Artistic production as a conscious form of self-realization and what is artistically produced cannot equally fulfil the social criteria of labour. This leads to the paradox of artistic activity as either ‘labourless’ art or artless labour. Within the actual and current artnbsp;there seems to be much confusion as well: lots of genres, styles, trends and media claim their place and internal contradictions sometimes cause medium-confusion.The contemporary confusing overall picture of society cannot longer be denied. This trend is, among others, confirmed in the writings of Andrea Fraser, Bas Heijne or Herman De Dijn who, respectively, emphasize the enormous conflicts in the social world and within ourselves, the uprooted status of the contemporary human in a disenchanted world and the fact that man has to cope with values that have become fluid in a world in which everything can be bought and sold. As a result, the contemporary status of money and visual arts can serve as a kind of pars pro toto for all areas of society, all governed by ambiguity, contradiction and unrest, liquid values and confusion. New horizons and perspectives are certainly needed to again find consistency and clarity in our small personal, as well as, large global, world.

Publication year:2015

Accessibility:Closed