Market Forces: Re-evaluating the Problem of Value in Contemporary Art

The relationship between money and contemporary art has always been somewhat awkward. Since the late 19th century, generations of the artistic avant-garde have in turn taken it upon themselves to attack the complacency of the society, as embodied by the artistic taste of the bourgeoisie; and in view of the critical spirit on which contemporary art is founded, commercialism is perhaps the darkest threat to it.

But as much as we may secretly harbour a fantasy that art is above earthly matters, at the end of the day we must acknowledge that artists are not supernatural beings indifferent to material concerns. Money is required to make art and support artists, and it is therefore unreasonable to indiscriminately reproach artists for making money. Today, artists sustain themselves by through funding and applying for accommodation, by running classes and workshops, and by making profitable editions to support their larger (and often more costly) projects. In many cases, the line between generating income to sustain art, and ‘selling out’, i.e. compromising art for the money, is very fine. However, even if we try to be more lenient, many of us can’t help but feel uneasy when we see how art is treated as an investment nowadays. Artists are seen to be cashing in by churning out the same works over and over again, and dealers at the top of the game make a fortune in the midst of all the hype.

The distance between the reality of the artworld on one hand, and the ideal and expectation of art’s role and the artist’s responsibility on the other, is what makes the exhibition Market Forces at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong (until 23 August 2012) so timely and urgent. While the curator aims at tackling the problem of ‘value’ in art in a broad sense, most of the works there really focus on questioning the current mechanism which determines the economical value of art. This is supported by the design of the exhibition: consisting of booth-like compartments, the layout parodies international art fairs which have emerged as the most important market place for contemporary art in recent decades.

One of the first works that one encounters is Tintin Wulia’s video work The Most International Artist in the Universe (2011), which shows the artist performing magic tricks on a large number of passports, conjuring them, making them move around and disappear. The title of the work points to the artist’s collection of 140 passports from all over the world, and pokes fun at the method of calculating the value of an artwork that is used in certain ‘market analyses’ of art.

The work of Tintin Wulia exposes the absurd linkage between the perceived value of an artwork and the internationality of an artist, which is at least partially determined by his or her nationality and consequent ability to travel. Ho Sin Tung’s Kluedo for Artist (2012), on the other hand, literally lays down the all the ‘players’ in the game of art: the artist, the collector, the gallerist, the critic, the museum, the auction house… The fact that the work adopts the form of a board game suggests that the balance of power between all the parties is constantly in flux. Another interesting point is that the original Cluedo is centred around the mystery of ‘who killed Dr. Black?’ What would the central mystery of Ho’s game be? Would that be the question of ‘who killed art’?

Like Ho’s Kluedo, Au Hoi Lam’s group of paintings Something About You, Here & Now (2012) also refers to children’s game. One comes across the ‘paintings’ at various turns as one walks around the gallery; on each spot is a hopscotch painted on the floor, and a cardboard with various questions dangling from a thread at eye level. These three works that reference board games, children’s pastimes and magic tricks throw the playful and the infantile in the face of an over-sophisticated artworld with all its analyses, calculations and grand theoretisations.

Moreover, as a multi-part work, Au’s paintings also transgress the boundaries within the compartmentalised space of the gallery. The issue of space is taken up again by Kacey Wong, who places it at the core of his consideration of value judgment with his Transform Bar (2012), which is literally a transformable juice bar inspired by hawkers’ stalls in Hong Kong.

In the city where ‘a foot of gold will only buy you an inch of land’, foldable furnitures have long been a staple in many ordinary households. From the foldable tables and stools that physically form dai pai dongs (open air food stalls) and, by virtue of this connection, symbolise local culinary culture, to Stephen Chow’s popular movie The God of Cookery (1996) which famously proclaims the foldable chair as the ‘Greatest of the Seven Great Weapons’ because of its invisibility and instant availability (both afforded by its commonness), these transformables have long had a special significance in popular imagination in Hong Kong.

While the English name Transform Bar refers literally to the function of the work as an actual juice bar, in Chinese the name becomes a call to transform as the sound ‘ba’ serves as a final particle in a sentence to indicate suggestion. The emphasis on flexibility and adaptability as core values in Hong Kong highlights the contrast between the worthlessness of hawker stalls and the disproportionately high value of the tiny patch of land that they occupy – it is precisely this inequity in the ownership of space that makes the ability to change and adapt a necessity for survival. The funky ‘transformer’ appearance of the bar is therefore a thinly veiled social critique, but at the same time it also exalts the resilience of the common people in face of exploitation – just like the wheatgrass that grows in the bars of the work.

The nod to ‘low’ culture in Wong’s work is echoed in Kentaro Hiroki’s My Work is Rubbish (2012). It is not particularly new to present rubbish as artwork – the most notable example in more recent memory was perhaps Gustav Metzger’s bag of rubbish which was displayed in the Tate a few years ago, and was then mistaken for a real bag of rubbish and thrown away by a cleaner. But what Hiroki did was to make simulacra of rubbish, that is of worthless objects abandoned on the streets of Bangkok. The question here is this: what is the worth of an imitation of something considered utterly worthless by society? But while the original has no value whatsoever, the imitation enjoys the privileged status as an artwork, which is marked by the sign on the floor that asks the viewer to handle the objects with care. The simulated rubbish is picked up and examined, like a delicate piece of jewellery, and this invitation from the artist ultimately subverts the normal way by which we would make value judgment about things.

As such, the exhibition exposes certain characteristics of artworks that usually make them more popular in the market, as it makes a statement by favouring the mundane over the extraordinary, the overlooked over the monumental, the fragmentary over the unified, and the infantile over the mature. In works not discussed above, one also sees the triumph of the copy (David Clarke), the minuscule (Leung Mee Ping), the ephemeral (Poklong Anading) and the anachronistic (Wilson Shieh) over their generally more favoured counterparts. The works effectively problematise the intricate system of value production in contemporary art.

Without subsequent generations as yet to rethink and criticise our judgment today, our perception of quality is more prone to be influenced by passing trends and the tastes of those empowered to create discourses – not to mention our susceptibility to the subtle manipulation by those who have more than their personal preferences at stake. This is precisely why it is so important for artists and curators to pause and ponder about the legitimacy of their world and even of their work, as it is after all the critical mindset that keeps contemporary art alive.