Edward Winkleman: “You Cannot Make Art that Someone Cannot Sell”

In his post “Art Seeks Its Own Market Level,” Winkleman analyzes the attempts some artists make to control – or halt – the commodification and selling of their work and how those attempts alter the rest of the art world. An excerpt:

“Go to the artists’ page on Marian Goodman Gallery’s website and scroll down to the section for Tino Sehgal. There is no image, of course. There wasn’t one on the gallery’s page for Mr. Sehgal’s work presented on their “booth” at the VIP Art Fair, either. That’s because it’s integral to Mr. Seghal’s practice that no photographs of his work be taken. Indeed, as The New York Times has noted, “[H]is pieces cannot involve the transformation of any material, in any way. No written instructions, no bill of sale…and…no pictures.”

I use this extreme example in a lecture I give about “Galleries and the Art Market,” in a section about selling non-object based work. If Marian Goodman can sell a Tino Sehgal (and she has), I note, then clearly any dealer can sell anything any artist can create.

Of course the logistics of such sales have been being worked out for quite some time. In his book Art of the Deal (and, no, I’m not going to stop talking about it…so go buy it already), Noah Horowitz cites the sale of Yves Klien’s Transfer of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62) as one of the clearest precedents for such transactions. Noah also builds a pretty solid case for the notion that the harder artists have worked to create unsellable work (for a host of reasons that only a few ever seem to remain wedded to), the more sophisticated the art market becomes across the board.

In other words, artists attempting to circumvent the art market only seems to make it stronger.”

You can read this post in its entirety here. The image used above was originally found here.