China Celebrates the Year of the Art Market

Lucas Schifres/Bloomberg News

Yue Minjun in front of his 2006 painting “Seen in the Grass Land” in his Beijing studio. The demand for, and price of, Chinese art around the world has been soaring.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: December 24, 2006

COLLECTORS of contemporary art had a new set of names to learn this year: those of Chinese artists whose careers are soaring in a new and frenzied sector of the market. Much of the art is politically charged, with references to Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square and, increasingly, globalization and consumer culture. Among the hottest names are Zhang Xiaogang, whose “Bloodline Series” consists of portraits set during the Cultural Revolution; the painter Yue Minjun, whose portraits of Chinese men look very much like himself; and Zhang Huan, a conceptual artist who produces works like “To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond.” (That piece was part of a performance in which Mr. Zhang photographed local workers standing in a pool of water to show how little effect they had on the water.)

These images can be found in galleries, art fairs and auction houses in every one of the world’s art-buying capitals, often fetching several million dollars apiece. Charles Saatchi, the London advertising magnate, collector and gallery owner, has begun snapping up works by Chinese artists, many of which he plans to exhibit in his new gallery, under construction on Kings Road in London.

“In a single year we sold over $60 million worth of Chinese contemporary art, whereas in 2005 we sold only about $15 million,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s managing director in Asia and Australia. In April, the auction house devoted a special New York sale to this category that brought $13.2 million. The prices have been climbing steadily ever since.

A November auction at Christie’s, which holds its Chinese contemporary art sales in Hong Kong, brought in $68 million. Yet Christie’s experts in New York and London think it’s a mistake to market these artists in a narrow category. As a result the auction house also sprinkles such works into its general postwar and contemporary art sales. (Sotheby’s holds auctions devoted strictly to Chinese contemporary art in New York and Hong Kong.)

Whether the boom in prices for Chinese art will last is anyone’s guess. “It may feel like the first flush of fashion, but it’s actually a much deeper market,” said Brett Gorvy, one of the heads of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department worldwide. Mr. Howard-Sneyd said the soaring sales totals had more to do with years of underrecognition of these artists rather than inflated bidding.

So it may be an oversimplification to predict that this is a bubble about to burst. “While there has been a rapid internationalization of Chinese contemporary art,” Mr. Howard-Sneyd said, “there’s bound to be a correction, and then prices will simply level off.”

I Like Ur Art: Saatchi Creates an Online Hangout for Artists

Denise Parsons

“Being an artist is a solo endeavor, and this is a safe way to see what others are doing,” says Denise Parsons, an art student in San Francisco who shows her work, above, on the Saatchi site.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: December 18, 2006

Julie Ann Travis , 23, a graduate student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, is curious to see what her peers are up to and to share some of her latest work. So recently she posted a self-portrait in which her head is buried in a pile of dirt at Stuart (saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart), the latest addition to a recently redesigned Web site for the Saatchi Gallery in London.

The brainchild of the London-based advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi, this social networking outlet — a kind of MySpace knockoff for artists — is causing something of a sensation, boosting traffic at the gallery’s Web site overall to more than three million hits a day.

In May Mr. Saatchi, famed for spotting young unknowns and turning them into art-world superstars, created a section on his Web site for artists of all ages to post their work at no charge. It is called Your Gallery, and now boasts contributions by about 20,700 artists, including 2,000 pieces of video art.

Everything there is for sale, with neither the buyer nor the seller paying a cent to any dealer or other middleman. About 800 new artists have been signing up each week.

And since Stuart (shorthand for “student art”) went online last month, some 1,300 students (including 450 in the United States) have created Web pages there. No one vets the quality or style of the art.

With dealers and collectors scouring student shows for undiscovered talent and students hunting for dealers to represent them, Mr. Saatchi has tapped a vein that can’t stop gushing. If Stuart gains anything like the cachet of MySpace, it has the potential to morph from a nonprofit venture into a gold mine for Mr. Saatchi.

For now, he said, he is simply enjoying the role of spectator. “When I launched the site, I took the view that the best thing was to leave it alone for the first year and purposely not buy anything, because I didn’t want to compromise what the site was supposed to do: appeal to a wide group of students,” he said.

His office, meanwhile, is fielding e-mail messages and calls from dealers, museum curators and directors, and collectors around the world who have discovered new work at the site and want to meet some of the artists in their studios. (Of the 20,700 or so artists at Your Gallery, roughly 6,000 are from Britain and 6,000 from the United States, with the rest scattered across the world.)

But for students visiting Stuart, the main attraction for now is linking up with their peers.

In addition to lists of her favorite artists, books, films and television shows, Ms. Travis has posted the name of a new friend on her page at Stuart: Erhan Ozturk, a photography student at T. C. Maltepe University in Istanbul whose work she viewed at the site.

“I don’t know him,” Ms. Travis said, although they have conversed electronically. And while she doesn’t love his art, she said, “I think it’s pretty interesting.” (New friends tend to reciprocate: Mr. Ozturk lists Ms. Travis on his Web page, and with a simple click, visitors viewing his work can connect to hers.)

Some students hear of Stuart by word of mouth from friends, and some through their schools, many of which were alerted to the site by Mr. Saatchi’s office. In addition to a free Web page, each student has the opportunity to share ideas, inspiration and advice on a discussion board, an arena that can forge new friendships and foster exposure on expanding lists of friends.

The site’s Web masters have ensured that creating a personal page is as easy as singing up for an e-mail account. After supplying a name, gender, school, college, country and e-mail address, each student must post at least one image.

“Electronically is the way we tend to communicate these days,” said Denise Parsons, 39, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute who has a page on Stuart. “Being an artist is a solo endeavor, and this is a safe way to see what others are doing.”

Mr. Saatchi said he was startled by the rapid response, which had driven home how “students very much need to talk to other students about their work.”

As one of the first people to exhibit the work of unknown British artists (and now stars) like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Chris Ofili, Mr. Saatchi is a natural magnet for students who hope that someday they too will be discovered by a kingmaker.

With Mr. Saatchi’s willingness to take on emerging artists (although some fault his propensity for selling off their work as soon as they get hot), many students dream of one day being shown in his new gallery, a 50,000-square-foot space on Kings Road in the Chelsea section of London that is scheduled to open next summer. Until then Mr. Saatchi is without a gallery, having closed his former site on the South Bank of the Thames in 2005.

The Saatchi name gives the Web site “a certain cachet and legitimacy,” said David W. Halsell, a 39-year-old installation, video and performance artist who is a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Mr. Saatchi said he seized on the idea for remaking his overall Web site, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk, “because I haven’t got my gallery to play with.” With the site’s revamp in May, it began with an online daily magazine and blog offering art news and reviews, an interactive forum in which visitors debate art issues, a chat room for art enthusiasts and a page where children can create and display art.

Stuart grew naturally out of and Mr. Saatchi’s voracious appetite for the new. “I’m glued,” he said. “I spend hours a day looking at students’ work on the site.”

He said he was thinking seriously about allotting rotating space in his new gallery to artists discovered at Your Gallery and Stuart. “There’s something thrilling about seeing the work of young artists for the first time even before their school shows,” he said.

The diverse offerings have caught the eye of contemporary-art experts like Olivier Varenne, director of the Museum of Old and New Art being established in Tasmania, the island state of Australia. He recently contacted the Saatchi Gallery by e-mail. “I am always looking for new talent,” he wrote, and since then he has arranged studio visits with four artists whose work he finds interesting.

In addition to linking artists with new friends and dealers, the site has in some cases enabled artists to reconnect with their old schools. Tori Murphy, a 26-year-old student at Kingston University in Surrey, England, who has heard from a gallery in Dublin and one in London, said she had been contacted by Repton, her old boarding school, which ended up buying a painting for nearly $1,400.

“I’ve done a couple of commissions, but this is my first sale,” Ms. Murphy said. Yet what she likes best about Stuart is not so much the commercial rewards as the ability to gain access to other students and their work.

“Before we were very limited to our school,” she said. “This is the first time I have had the chance to see what’s happening all over the world.”

From maverick to one of the herd

From The Sunday Times

December 3, 2006

Damien Hirst’s private collection elicits a sense of déjà vu. Has he lost his cutting edge, asks Waldemar Januszczak

A large slab of Damien Hirst’s art collection has gone on show at the Serpentine Gallery, and the sum of £100m is being bandied about as its value. That, apparently, it what the Murderme collection, as he calls it, is insured for. It’s a whole heap of money. And even if £100m is too neat and round a number to be true, it certainly gives you a sense of scale. We are talking about a serious collector here: a player.

Hirst has never been one of those artists who sees his role as making art. Of course, making art is part of it. But even the most casual perusal of his career finds him having a go at so many other things. He’s been a restaurateur, a decorator, a film-maker, a curator, a publisher, a property developer and, most recently, a multimillionaire. And wasn’t that him a few years back, mouthing the words to that catchy chart-topping football ditty, Vindaloo, with Fat Les? Yes, it was.

Since we generally prefer our artists to be single-minded, and would, I guess, trust them more that way, this unusual busyness of Hirst’s can trigger our flibbertigibbet alarm. Get back in the studio, Damien, we chorus, and make some art. But what if having a finger in many pies has replaced the long, lone slog as the most productive approach for a modern creative? What if refusing to settle is the new way of going forwards? If multiskilling is the future — and I am sure it is — then Hirst realised it long before the rest of us.

Apart from his films, which are spectacularly bad, his various departures have generally been worth the effort. His restaurants are fun. His decor is enticing. Vindaloo was a decent football anthem, as football anthems go. And the exhibitions he has curated have been genuinely important, notably Freeze, in 1988, which kick-started Brit Art. So, is collecting another distraction he does particularly well? The Serpentine show certainly proves that Hirst owns lots of exciting things. The busy hang, orchestrated by Hirst himself, crowds the gallery with catchy sights. There’s a Bacon, a Warhol, a Koons. So stuffed is the gallery with cross- generational modern-art goodies that the contents have overflowed onto the grass outside, where they seem to be taking the mickey out of the usual sorts of sculpture you find in London’s parks. Michael Joo’s life-size family of Peter Pan types appear to be relieving themselves on the lawn. Angus Fairhurst’s one-armed gorilla is an amusing Brit Art alternative to those polite dolphins you find on fountains.

Having been perfectly placed to acquire fine examples of the work of his Brit Art contemporaries, Hirst has been particularly astute in vacuuming up the output of Sarah Lucas. He recently bought all the works by her that Charles Saatchi was offloading, and must now be the world’s biggest collector of her art. As Lucas is second only to Hirst himself in terms of Brit Art importance, this greedy gathering of her stuff is a smart bit of acquisition. When it comes to seeing Britishness for what it is, Lucas has no peers. Her gloriously absurd sculpture of a shire horse pulling a cart, inside which are dumped two giant marrows, is a hilarious townie’s gag about Archers Britain that manages both to mock the tastes of rural folk and to celebrate them. But in case we imagine she has gone all Stubbsy on us, and abandoned her usual fascination with the squalid mind-set of the Sun-reading urban bloke, the gallery contains a vandalised BMW, inside which the automated arm of a road yob pumps out the gross one-armed salute that is such a familiar sight on our dual carriageways today.

Lots of the things Hirst owns strike you as a tribute to himself. Stuff with blood in it. Stuff about death. The impressive Steven Gregory gives us a gruesome row of human skulls decorated with beads or slivers of lapis lazuli. The show’s most grisly exhibit, by John Isaacs, seems to show the blubbery, blood-soaked remains of a hunted whale. One of the blobs of blubber still has an eye in it, which looks at you. Creepy.

This fascination with darkness and gore has played a key role, too, in Hirst’s well-heeled pursuit of blue-chip exhibitors. The Warhols he prefers are car crashes and electric chairs, not Marilyns or Elizabeth Taylors. His Bacon is a superbly angry Study for a Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted in 1944, which belongs to the same series as that momentous triptych in the Tate, in which a pack of howling monsteroids, half hyena, half human, projectile-vomit their cosmic rage in the vague direction of the crucifixion subject. Bacon’s triptych is one of the Tate’s most famous possessions. I still remember the impact it had on me as schoolboy, and so, surely, does Hirst.

But buying it now for a shedload of money strikes me as an act of nostalgia rather than a display of proactive collecting. When you buy Warhol, Bacon, Koons, you are hardly being a pioneer or an instigator. You’re being a trophy-gatherer. For collecting to be something more than mere accumulation, for the possession of things to add up to a cultural act worth noting and commemorating in an ambitious show, it is necessary for that collection to have a sense of higher purpose, an agenda. Does this selection have one? Not that I could discern. There’s lots of nostalgia discernible in various corners of this surprisingly dated display. In particular, the show kept reminding me of Saatchi’s old gallery at Boundary Road, which Hirst would have known so well and whose aesthetics he seems almost to be quoting. So many of the old Saatchi favourites are here: Sean Landers, Haim Steinbach, Koons, Lucas, Gavin Turk, Marcus Harvey. Looking across at Koons’s neon-lit vacuum cleaners, shimmering so enticingly with urban commodity cool, I suffered a particularly strong attack of déjà vu and was thrust straight back to the wonderful Saatchi show that first unveiled them.

Saatchi, of course, was the man who pioneered modern collecting: he’s the prototype all the other nouveau collectors stoking the art market’s fires to crazy temperatures are attempting to copy. But the difference between Saatchi and Hirst as collectors is that Saatchi actually changed something. When he put his Brit Art holdings on show at the Royal Academy in that notorious Sensation exhibition, he achieved lots of things. He put Brit Art on the international map. He drummed up a huge audience for new art. He annoyed the hell out of large numbers of RAs. Sensation had a powerful cultural impact on many fronts. Hirst’s Murderme collection isn’t in that league. It’s a perfectly pleasant and lively show, but it’s the handiwork of a follower, not a creator. And that is really surprising.

In the Darkest Hour There May Be Light: Works from Damien Hirst’s Murderme Collection, Serpentine Gallery, W2, until Jan 28