Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2019
It had to happen: The Apprentice has been let loose on the art market. For episode 8 of the latest series, contestants were corralled in the Centre Hall of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery to be informed by Alan Sugar from a Big Brother screen: “The global art market is worth a massive £47 billion”, and told to get a slice of the action. Their task was to choose the work of one of three Glasgow-based artists – the line drawings of Sophie Morgan, the surreal animal sculptures of Solveig Einarsdottir or the semi-abstract canvases of Eleanor Carlingford – and flog them to a) corporate clients and b) the general public.
Two team members nominated themselves project managers, Jasmine of Team Typhoon on the grounds that she loves art and visits galleries and Jackie of Team Collaborative because she minored in Fine Art and her dream job is to be an art dealer. This did not, however, prepare her for the brief presented by the first corporate client, a maker of luxury sound systems, to find a piece that reflected “three key pillars: innovation, provenance and experience”.
“What would your interpretation of that be?” Daniel, appointed Team Collaborative’s art dealer, asked his colleagues. “Innovation, that was obviously, like, something innovative, out there,” hazarded Camilla, a member of the sub-team in charge of merchandising. “Do you know what provenance means?” interposed Jackie. “ I think it’s like, so, provenance, provoke?”, suggested Camilla. “I thought provenance was in relation to the province you’re from,” offered her sub-team-mate Sarah Ann. “Okay, so nobody knows,” concluded Jackie.
They were more successful at flogging art to the public, though Jackie was marked down for jumping the gun and selling Einarsdottir’s welcome mat spelling HOME SWEET HOME in Gummy Bears to a punter off the street while her corporate clients were away making up their minds. Innovation, tick. Provenance, query. Experience, nil. But she did better than Jasmine, who achieved the extraordinary feat of being fired by Lord Sugar for being too corporate.
The interesting thing about this experiment in salesmanship is that the contestants who claimed some knowledge of art fared worse. Team Typhoon’s art dealer Tom, who came from a family of artists, opened negotiations with Carlingford: “We’re looking at 40-50% commission” and earned the riposte: “Which half of the painting did you paint?” But Daniel, who confessed: “My and Jackie’s selling styles differ in the sense that she knows what she’s talking about and I haven’t a fucking clue,” was a revelation even to himself. He breezed into Carlingford’s studio and verbalised thus: “My eye was initially drawn to this one here. It almost seems quite dark and sinister from one perspective but then, when you keep looking at it, it’s got this brightness that emits from the centre of the picture. Could I ask what your personal take on this one is?” “I could only reiterate what you’ve just said,” the artist beamed. “Top blagging” was the verdict of The Sun’s reviewer. “A load of Jackson Pollocks,” was Lord Sugar’s. Whatever, it worked. Daniel had an instinctive grasp of the business: “There’s a fine line between interpretation and blagging, a fine line that I’m probably treading very dangerously at this moment, but that’s art for you.”
The programme aired the week after the cinema release of Nathaniel Kahn’s art market documentary, The Price of Everything. Shift location to New York and Chicago and tack a few zeros onto the sums involved, and the film is a high-end carbon diamond copy of Glasgow Art Apprentice. The artists, this time, include Jeff Koons, George Condo and Larry Poons; the dealers/auctioneers Jeffrey Deitch, Dennis Yares and Amy Cappellazzo, and the collectors the nonagenarian Stefan Edlis, a gift to any documentary filmmaker. Pearls of wisecracking wisdom fall from Edlis’s lips like Mel Brooks one-liners: “To be an effective collector, deep down you have to be shallow…” and “We’re lemmings… In the art world there are a lot of followers and few leaders, which is OK if you follow the right leaders,” are just two of them.
Edlis and the octogenarian Poons are the stars of the show. Having committed the crime of abandoning the style that made him famous in the 1960s, Poons went to ground in upstate New York, where we catch him shuffling through snow to his studio barn to daub canvases twice his height with delirious colour. “A lot of people thought I was dead for a long time,” he freely acknowledges, but in a Koons v Poons contest he wins hands down through sheer conviction. He demolishes the idea that the best artist is the most expensive with the simple question: “How could it be true?” There’s a poignancy to his childish delight at being brought back from the dead by Yares for a show on Fifth Avenue. Dwarfed by his multicoloured canvases, he’s like a kid in a sweet shop, but art critic Barbara Rose casts a damper on the proceedings with her explanation of the renewed interest in his work: “They do a calculation – it’s sick – which is the most undervalued painter.”
For a masterclass in sick calculations apply to Amy Cappellazzo, Sotheby’s Chairman of Global Fine Arts. Asked how you value priceless art, she responds pragmatically: “You say something is priceless and then you sort of work backwards.” There’s a wonderfully bitchy exchange between her and Edlis about Koons’s sculptures being seen in lobbies. “It’s going to hurt him,” predicts Cappellazzo. “You never get out of the lobby once you’re in there”. Koons himself comes across as the charlatan you’d expect, standing in a factory full of assistants knocking off copies of old masters for his Gazing Ball Paintings. He talks more reflective balls than our own dear Antony Gormley, insisting in his silky-soft snake oil salesman voice that all these images painted by other people “are created through systems. I’m responsible for every one.” As blagging goes it’s not a patch on Daniel’s, but it works on Americans. Deitch’s description of Koons as the archetypal American salesman is intercut with footage from The Wolf of Wall Street. Interestingly, Daniel also compares himself to Jordan Belfort.
The unholy marriage between art and money is not new; as curator Paul Schimmel observes in Kahn’s film: “There’s no golden age without gold”. This much was obvious even to Gulley Jimson, who offers this cogent analysis of the relationship between artist and patron in The Horse’s Mouth: “It’s all in the game. Hickson is a business man. And I’m a painting man. He makes money for fun and needs art to keep him alive. I paint pictures for fun, and need money to keep me alive. He wants to boost the pictures and get fun out of them, and I want to get some money and paint new pictures.”
Kahn hopes his film will encourage audiences “to open their eyes to seeing art again on their own terms”. Not everyone, though, is capable of seeing. Cappellazzo distinguishes between “three kinds of people in the world: those who see, those who see when they’re shown, and those who will never see”. If you can see, and you can blag, you’ve got it made. Daniel, my lad, you’re wasted on The Apprentice. In a £47 billion global art market, what sounds like Jackson Pollocks to Lord Sugar is gold dust.
Laura Gascoigne: The Blag Trade – January 2019
Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2019
It had to happen: The Apprentice has been let loose on the art market. For episode 8 of the latest series, contestants were corralled in the Centre Hall of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery to be informed by Alan Sugar from a Big Brother screen: “The global art market is worth a massive £47 billion”, and told to get a slice of the action. Their task was to choose the work of one of three Glasgow-based artists – the line drawings of Sophie Morgan, the surreal animal sculptures of Solveig Einarsdottir or the semi-abstract canvases of Eleanor Carlingford – and flog them to a) corporate clients and b) the general public.
Two team members nominated themselves project managers, Jasmine of Team Typhoon on the grounds that she loves art and visits galleries and Jackie of Team Collaborative because she minored in Fine Art and her dream job is to be an art dealer. This did not, however, prepare her for the brief presented by the first corporate client, a maker of luxury sound systems, to find a piece that reflected “three key pillars: innovation, provenance and experience”.
“What would your interpretation of that be?” Daniel, appointed Team Collaborative’s art dealer, asked his colleagues. “Innovation, that was obviously, like, something innovative, out there,” hazarded Camilla, a member of the sub-team in charge of merchandising. “Do you know what provenance means?” interposed Jackie. “ I think it’s like, so, provenance, provoke?”, suggested Camilla. “I thought provenance was in relation to the province you’re from,” offered her sub-team-mate Sarah Ann. “Okay, so nobody knows,” concluded Jackie.
They were more successful at flogging art to the public, though Jackie was marked down for jumping the gun and selling Einarsdottir’s welcome mat spelling HOME SWEET HOME in Gummy Bears to a punter off the street while her corporate clients were away making up their minds. Innovation, tick. Provenance, query. Experience, nil. But she did better than Jasmine, who achieved the extraordinary feat of being fired by Lord Sugar for being too corporate.
The interesting thing about this experiment in salesmanship is that the contestants who claimed some knowledge of art fared worse. Team Typhoon’s art dealer Tom, who came from a family of artists, opened negotiations with Carlingford: “We’re looking at 40-50% commission” and earned the riposte: “Which half of the painting did you paint?” But Daniel, who confessed: “My and Jackie’s selling styles differ in the sense that she knows what she’s talking about and I haven’t a fucking clue,” was a revelation even to himself. He breezed into Carlingford’s studio and verbalised thus: “My eye was initially drawn to this one here. It almost seems quite dark and sinister from one perspective but then, when you keep looking at it, it’s got this brightness that emits from the centre of the picture. Could I ask what your personal take on this one is?” “I could only reiterate what you’ve just said,” the artist beamed. “Top blagging” was the verdict of The Sun’s reviewer. “A load of Jackson Pollocks,” was Lord Sugar’s. Whatever, it worked. Daniel had an instinctive grasp of the business: “There’s a fine line between interpretation and blagging, a fine line that I’m probably treading very dangerously at this moment, but that’s art for you.”
The programme aired the week after the cinema release of Nathaniel Kahn’s art market documentary, The Price of Everything. Shift location to New York and Chicago and tack a few zeros onto the sums involved, and the film is a high-end carbon diamond copy of Glasgow Art Apprentice. The artists, this time, include Jeff Koons, George Condo and Larry Poons; the dealers/auctioneers Jeffrey Deitch, Dennis Yares and Amy Cappellazzo, and the collectors the nonagenarian Stefan Edlis, a gift to any documentary filmmaker. Pearls of wisecracking wisdom fall from Edlis’s lips like Mel Brooks one-liners: “To be an effective collector, deep down you have to be shallow…” and “We’re lemmings… In the art world there are a lot of followers and few leaders, which is OK if you follow the right leaders,” are just two of them.
Edlis and the octogenarian Poons are the stars of the show. Having committed the crime of abandoning the style that made him famous in the 1960s, Poons went to ground in upstate New York, where we catch him shuffling through snow to his studio barn to daub canvases twice his height with delirious colour. “A lot of people thought I was dead for a long time,” he freely acknowledges, but in a Koons v Poons contest he wins hands down through sheer conviction. He demolishes the idea that the best artist is the most expensive with the simple question: “How could it be true?” There’s a poignancy to his childish delight at being brought back from the dead by Yares for a show on Fifth Avenue. Dwarfed by his multicoloured canvases, he’s like a kid in a sweet shop, but art critic Barbara Rose casts a damper on the proceedings with her explanation of the renewed interest in his work: “They do a calculation – it’s sick – which is the most undervalued painter.”
For a masterclass in sick calculations apply to Amy Cappellazzo, Sotheby’s Chairman of Global Fine Arts. Asked how you value priceless art, she responds pragmatically: “You say something is priceless and then you sort of work backwards.” There’s a wonderfully bitchy exchange between her and Edlis about Koons’s sculptures being seen in lobbies. “It’s going to hurt him,” predicts Cappellazzo. “You never get out of the lobby once you’re in there”. Koons himself comes across as the charlatan you’d expect, standing in a factory full of assistants knocking off copies of old masters for his Gazing Ball Paintings. He talks more reflective balls than our own dear Antony Gormley, insisting in his silky-soft snake oil salesman voice that all these images painted by other people “are created through systems. I’m responsible for every one.” As blagging goes it’s not a patch on Daniel’s, but it works on Americans. Deitch’s description of Koons as the archetypal American salesman is intercut with footage from The Wolf of Wall Street. Interestingly, Daniel also compares himself to Jordan Belfort.
The unholy marriage between art and money is not new; as curator Paul Schimmel observes in Kahn’s film: “There’s no golden age without gold”. This much was obvious even to Gulley Jimson, who offers this cogent analysis of the relationship between artist and patron in The Horse’s Mouth: “It’s all in the game. Hickson is a business man. And I’m a painting man. He makes money for fun and needs art to keep him alive. I paint pictures for fun, and need money to keep me alive. He wants to boost the pictures and get fun out of them, and I want to get some money and paint new pictures.”
Kahn hopes his film will encourage audiences “to open their eyes to seeing art again on their own terms”. Not everyone, though, is capable of seeing. Cappellazzo distinguishes between “three kinds of people in the world: those who see, those who see when they’re shown, and those who will never see”. If you can see, and you can blag, you’ve got it made. Daniel, my lad, you’re wasted on The Apprentice. In a £47 billion global art market, what sounds like Jackson Pollocks to Lord Sugar is gold dust.
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