Jane Johnston

Today’s news about the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the fourth biggest investment bank in the U.S., has sent the stock market reeling, dropping “more than 270 points by mid-day.”

Will the credit crunch bite the artworld?

In April of this year, the Financial Times noted that

The arts and antiques markets are continuing to boom in spite of the credit squeeze as investors look to diversify their portfolios out of traditional asset classes.
“The arts and antiques market remains a viable investment option during this period of financial uncertainty,” said Christopher Ewbank of Rics. “Many investors are using their disposable incomes to buy in at the high end, with the hope that value will stay firm while stocks and bonds ebb and flow.”*

And as recently as June 25, The Guardian noted that as a Monet went for pounds 40.1M “confidence in the market stays strong”:

Camu said that in the past the art market had proved immune to world economic problems. “The market is strong and it recognises quality when it comes up. Art in the past has not followed stock market fluctuations, and also there is an element of people seeing it as a refuge. There are collectors who will collect the best, whatever.” **

Meanwhile, over at Frieze Robert Storr notes that

In the boom-to-bust cycle of 1987–93 it was several years before the stock market crash deflated the art world. It may take that long again. But this summer word spread that some hedge-fund hearties were tightening their equatorial belts, and previously habitual buyers were cancelling deals even as fortunate friends splurged. We’ll know for sure that there’s trouble in River City when over-extended galleries shut up shop and over-extended museums visibly cut corners in their programmes.

On September 6, in an article from The Guardian titled ominously “Art’s new democrats are due a lesson in the economics of taste,” Ian Jack draws a comparison between the current “boom in young British artists” to an earlier boom, “in the last half of the 19th century with painters such as WP Frith, John Millais, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones.”***

They were massively popular - fences sometimes had to be built around their pictures to hold back the crowds - and they sold for large sums, often larger than many of France’s Impressionists made in their lifetimes. What happened next is starkly illustrated in the tables of Gerald Reitlinger’s classic work, The Economics of Taste. Take Alma-Tadema’s The Finding of Moses: sold for £5,250 in 1904; for £861 in 1935; for £252 in 1960. Or Burne-Jones’s Chant d’amour: sold for £3,307 10s in 1886 and £620 in 1930.

Most of these artists were spared the hurt by being dead by the time their reputations and prices collapsed, but the same wasn’t true of the etching bubble of the 1920s, which impoverished etchers and collectors alike.

*Thomas, Daniel. “Antiques and art market shrugs off credit crunch.(NATIONAL NEWS).” The Financial Times (April 22, 2008): 4.

**”Auction: The price of Monet: gone for 40m as confidence in the market stays strong: Art work is most important from water lily series ever to be offered for sale in Europe.(Guardian Home Pages).” The Guardian (London, England) (June 25, 2008): 2.

***Jack credits Melanie Gerlis of The Art Newspaper for this thought.

I arrived early in Minneapolis for a Journalism That Matters conference, “A Passion for Place,” this past June. So I headed to the Walker Art Center and discovered an inspirational exhibition, “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes.” Some of it was quite familiar, including the requisite Gregory Crewdsons.

But I found greatest inspiration in a modest exhibit put together by Interboro, a group of architects who devised “In the Meantime, Life with Landbanking,” a multi-faceted proposal to enliven the “dead” Dutchess Mall in Dutchess County, NY. This mall is across the river from Newburgh, a little further east down route 84. I have childhood memories of going to the movies at this mall in what were its much better days. Here’s Interboro’s project description:

In the Meantime, Life with Landbanking is Interboro’s winning entry to the LA Forum for Architecture’s “Dead Malls” Competition, which asked Interboro to envision a future for a dead shopping mall of its choosing.

Interboro’s project, a reimagining of the Dutchess County Mall in Fishkill, NY was inspired by a conversation it had with the mall’s developer, who made it clear that he was landbanking the property. Interboro asked “what can be done in the meantime?” Rejecting the idea of a traditional masterplan, Interboro’s submission is a collection of small, cheap, feasible moves that come in over time, and lead to many possible futures.

Small, cheap, feasible moves that come in over time: this is almost a description of citizen journalism, another enterprise that leads to many possible futures.

Please join me tomorrow evening, from 6 to 8 p.m., for the opening reception at Schroeder Romero for The Main Event, a group show that I’ll be in. The gallery address is 637 West 27th Street and the exhibition will be up until July 25. My work is a collaboration with Maria Dumlao and Elaine Kaufmann called “Art Star League Draft,” an excerpt from an episode of “The Go Show,” a public access television show we produced in the spring of 2005.