Art and the financial crisis

The financial crisis that started for full in 2007, has in many ways left the art market in a limbo. The art bubble of the noughties has burst and it is very unlikely that the contemporary art world as we have known it post 1989 will ever be the same again. However, just as the government and the financial marks fail to acknowledge the fundamental problems behind the mess, and therefore also fail to rightly adapt to the necessary reforms and changes that is needed, the arts world continue to embrace a structure and a paradigm that is just as unsustainable as the continuing rise in the value of houses.  In some ways, one may not blame them for this, as it is almost impossible to leave an old failed paradigm until a new paradigm is being defined. It is nevertheless, important for the arts world to acknowledge that it cannot see itself separated from what is happening in the rest of society in general but that it too will necessarily have to face up to the realities.

The art world is closely related to its markets and the way these changes. In the beginning of the 1990′s, when there was a small recession and little money in the arts market, artists, survived by widening the roles and the practices of art.  Artists were not only making art in the strict sense of the word, but they were also working as curators, producing exhibitions, they started galleries, wrote articles, lectured, worked as consultants and so forth. It was particularly the emergence of the independent curator role that came to change the very notion of what art means. It also changed the very role of the artist.

During the noughties, cheap credit strengthened the art market drastically.  The new, unprecedented boom in the arts world, made it in the end difficult to tell the difference between a city boy and a curator or even an artist. The arts world turned as branding friendly as shiny and sleek as any major corporation in the city.   There are few moments that symbolizes this better than the Damien Hirst auction at Christie’s the day after the fall of Lehmann Brothers, September 2008. Hirst will, for both good and bad, symbolize both the beginning and the end of an era in art that started in 1989 and gradually vanished in 2007.