{"id":5043,"date":"2010-09-22T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=5043"},"modified":"2010-09-22T12:38:55","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T16:38:55","slug":"good-bye-to-all-that-the-art-boom-and-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/22\/good-bye-to-all-that-the-art-boom-and-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"Good-Bye to All That: The Art Boom and Bust"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Art Basel Miami during the boom.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe plug was pulled, but life went on\u2014invigorating life,\u201d Jerry Saltz wrote last fall in a typically optimistic survey<\/a> of \u201cart after money.\u201d You could hear the refrain everywhere, in galleries and studios, museums and bars: The bull market had been unbearable, turning work into a kind of mortgage payment, so maybe the bust would be good for art in this town. Saltz said it already was: \u201cIt\u2019s as if a bunch of spotlights went out when the market crashed last October, and now, as they flicker back on, we\u2019re able to see new green shoots busting out of the establishment\u2019s cracks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But not much has changed in New York since 2008, when that speculative boom ended and an exercise in disaster capitalism began. This season, the big-deal September show at the biggest-deal New York gallery, Gagosian, is the blue-chip debut of derivative<\/a> Deitch darling<\/a> Dan Colen. Money is still cool-hunting. This week, Saltz called the Gagosian show, dismissively, \u201can event straight out of 2007.\u201d But one of these is an elephant and one is a gnat, and the market is stampeding again.<\/p>\n

New galleries have emerged since the crash, whole neighborhoods of them in fact, and new work has been assembled, sculpted, painted, and filmed\u2014some of it very good work. But we are still beholden to art fairs, where the hustle is the spectacle, and we still anxiously await future auctions, when we\u2019ll learn how well we\u2019ve done\u2014in collecting, in working, in making assessments. We are still enamored of gags, puns, and trompe l\u2019oeil. We still tend to follow the scent of sweat where it pools\u2014that antinomian territory called, in the generation after Basquiat anyway, downtown<\/em>. Better would be to chase uptown<\/em>, so to speak, after shows that, if young, aren\u2019t insolent; if brash, aren\u2019t gimmicky; and that do not rely for their power on the incongruity between the work and its staging. From here that frisson looks like a form of irony\u2014and we want to say good-bye to all that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe plug was pulled, but life went on\u2014invigorating life,\u201d Jerry Saltz wrote last fall in a typically optimistic survey of \u201cart after money.\u201d You could hear the refrain everywhere, in galleries and studios, museums and bars: The bull market had been unbearable, turning work into a kind of mortgage payment, so maybe the bust would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[903,904,900,902,901],"class_list":["post-5043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-art-fair","tag-basquiat","tag-dan-colen","tag-jerry-saltz","tag-larry-gagosian"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGood-Bye to All That: The Art Boom and Bust by David Wallace-Wells<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 22, 2010 \u2013 \u201cThe plug was pulled, but 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