|
The Jakarta Post, 2 Jan. 2008 Arts kaleidoscope: Aminudin TH Siregar, Contributor, Jakarta To be frank, we are currently facing an intellectual crisis in the world of fine arts. Lately it feels like we no longer have solid critiques and we realize this crisis is dragging us to the point where good critics in Indonesia have become a rare breed. It seems we have also lost our desire to re-discuss the intrinsic aspects of art, which include matters of aesthetics, ideas concerning conceptualization, history, and even art philosophy. Our art scene is slowly losing its identity and heading toward co-modification due to the rapid advances in our everyday lives. The way we view art, in relation to personal taste and aesthetics, has also changed. The one topic that does draw a lot of interest during this time of crisis is the art market. Although this topic first emerged as a popular talking point during the painting boom of the 1980s and the market high in the late 1990s, everyone eventually agreed that discussions on art commerce would always be a hot subject. This is possible because talk about art commerce does not require much furrowing of the brow and, anyway, the topics of commerce are not topics that are filled with complex values, which tend to be what people expect when attending fine arts discussions. The same goes when we talk about the "values" of art. We know that in this severely market dominated world the term "value" has experienced a shift in meaning. We are now being thrown asunder by its currently ambiguous meaning, which accommodates both "artistic value" and "market value". At exhibitions, people are more inclined to discuss the market as opposed to artistic merit. This market syndrome, if we can call it that, has also infected the artists. It has gotten to the point where the parameter of an artist's success is how many works he/she is able to sell at galleries. Is it a boom? Yes, even The New York Times in its 2006 year-ender was driven to include market reports about the phenomenon of Chinese contemporary art. The newspaper offered predictions about the state of Asia's art world in 2007, saying that, along with paintings, Chinese conceptual photography would also be commercially viable. In 2006, the auction houses of Sotheby's and Christie's had an incredibly successful year, selling more than US$190 million worth of Chinese artwork. This situation exponentially changed the nature of the Chinese art scenes. Hundreds of galleries appeared out of nowhere, artists' studios began mushrooming, and museum were built. The Chinese government fully understood this phenomena. Its goodwill toward the arts was apparent in the large sums of money it doled out for the construction of museums. The New York Times report also told of the artist Wang Guangy, who now drives a Jaguar and owns a luxury villa just outside of Beijing. There's also Yue Minjun, an artist known for his cynical realism, who owns several restaurants in Beijing and a hotel in Yunnan. In short, commerce has created a conducive environment for art in China. Even Indonesians have gotten into the action; with some wealthy Jakartans opening galleries in China. The Jakarta-Beijing bridge of art commerce is now wide open, to the point that even the printing of catalogs for shows in Jakarta is being done in China. As one gallery owner stated, both the cost and quality of printing in China are far more satisfactory. Beijing is slated to be a new global art center, sharing the role with New York City and London. Then what of the fate of Indonesian artists? Make no mistake; this Asian market boom has also invaded the Indonesian art scene. In the last quarter of the year we've heard of the works of an Indonesian artist selling for more than Rp 2 billion (around US$ 230,000) at an auction house abroad. This new positive interest from the market toward Indonesian artists was strongly felt all throughout 2007. It is very much correct to say that most discussions about art here in Indonesia -- both in formal and informal forums -- revolve around the subject of the art market. It is also undeniable and no exaggeration to say that 2007 was the year of the market rise; a year in which the transference of funds through the sales of artwork, especially paintings, seemed to be never-ending. This massive flow of cash is not only occurring in art galleries, but also behind the walls of auction houses. The final notable situation that we face at the end of the year is the tug-of-war between galleries and auction houses. Some galleries have accused the auction houses of exhibiting behavior that compromises the commercial integrity of artworks, something that the galleries have worked hard to preserve. Meanwhile, the auction houses argue that it is the market mechanism that causes the price of an artist's work to go through the roof unexpectedly. If we were to dissect the market mechanism even further, we would see that basically no single entity has the right to dictate the market -- not galleries, curators or artists. The market mechanism is fluid and unpredictable in nature. The friction between galleries and auction houses eventually infringes into ethical areas. In some cases, buyers have stopped purchasing work in galleries. To gallery owners, this trend is a financial nightmare. The galleries scream bloody murder at the auction houses for being unable to curb the presence of market speculators -- people who seek profit form the art market boom. What's worse, and proven, is that the speculators will go so far as to purchase works directly from the artists' studios, even when the paint is still wet. They buy the works directly from the artists at low prices and sell them at auction houses at much higher prices. These speculators generally target younger artists. They gamble with market sentiments, and generally their gambles pay off. The outrage expressed by the galleries toward the speculators stems from how the speculators skip the entire process of trade. Meaning, the works the speculators pick up from the studios have not gone through the conventional process of being included in exhibition catalogs. We can find these kinds of nuisances most often at auction houses. Recently, at an auction house, the works of legendary artists such as Rusli, Basuki Resobowo and Zaini were somehow being sold for Rp 7-11 million. Those are obscenely low prices compared to what the works of young artists also on the lot were selling for -- way into the tens of millions. |
Does historical value mean nothing at auction houses? There are many more grievances one can find with auction houses. Are they, for example, still capable of letting us enjoy paintings as works of art? Thus is the parody of our art market. It keeps its distance from art history and art theory and attacks those things, while building its own more acceptable principles. It doesn't end there, now the market even dares to compile its own taxonomy of "alternative history" by placing new names as artists who are deserving of attention. This taxonomy is of course lacking in any responsible set of rules. For some people, the mess that was the 2007 art market is extremely regrettable because it has created a sort of mannerism -- the repetition of technique and aesthetics. Many young artists find themselves falling prey to the aesthetic trend defined by the market. New experimental breakthroughs seem to have been neglected. Artists such as Ugo Untoro, Handiwirman Saputra and Iswanto still hold true to their commitment to explore new concepts and aesthetics through their work in the most amazing ways. Ugo's exhibition, Poems of Blood, which was held at Taman Budaya Yogyakarta and the National Gallery in Jakarta, wowed the public. As was the case with Handiwirman's exhibition of art objects, which seemed to veer away from market trends. Meanwhile, Iswanto, who has a background in architecture, worked on a piece this year titled Blue -- the work took the shape of prototypes of the stealth fighter planes developed by the Americans for the first Gulf War (1990-1991). Iswanto's planes were almost the same sizes as the real planes, filling entire galleries. Critics and observers welcomed their works enthusiastically. * * * This discussion of commerce in the arts is not a new thing. This polemic has colored the arts landscape since the 70s and 80s. If we look even further, this subject has haunted us since the 1950s, when it was first discussed here. During that era, talk of commerce was considered taboo because it might whittle away at the nationalist-romantic souls of the artists of the time. Nevertheless, behind the effort to keep the sanctity of the romantic soul, we saw artists like Oesman Effendi, who repeatedly bemoaned the lack of sales of paintings. In the late 1940s, the artist Suromo publicly declared the economic woes faced by modern Indonesian artists. Artists are just as poor as the people, said Suromo. This bleak portrait of the future of artists is taken from the financial perspective that brings about the premise that, unlike it is in the West, modern Indonesian art is born out of suffering. In the 1950s, this premise was manifested by Trisno Sumardjo and is relevant enough for us to accept as the sociological background for the stance taken by modern Indonesian art. S. Sudjojono, a man stoically present in our memory as a member of the first association of Indonesian Nationalist Artist (Persagi), admitted that the birth of Persagi was influenced by the financial plight felt by Indonesian artists. In other words, the founding of Persagi was intended to compete with the Dutch artists flooding the market at the time "Artists need rice", was what S. Sudjojono added to his concept of "realism", which caused quite a stir decades after the disbanding of Persagi. The shifting of market discourse to this day, compared to the days of Persagi, is a shift in the placing of value on artworks. What happened during the time of Persagi and afterward was not just the placement of "politics over aesthetics", but also the placement of "identity over aesthetics". The shift that we feel now is no longer about "identity over aesthetics", but how far we have placed "nominal value over aesthetics". Let us never forget that the hubbub of the market has not only managed to turn the trivial into the important. In the world of art, the market has the power to mess up our perceptions of art by building a fiction far more utopian than the world of intellectual and aesthetic discourse.
|