To Pretend or Not to Pretend: Cultural and Market Meanings of Art Biennials and Art fairs

“There’s no point in pretending anymore; biennales are as commercial as art fairs,” proclaims Mark Coetzee, director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA).

If buying directly from Venice Biennale is the norm, why does the art world continue to advertise the blissful falsehood of the pricelessness of true art? What is the difference between an art fair booth and a national pavilion--- is it an utopian dream or simply a bad cover-up?

Basked in warm summer sun, Art Basel and Venice Biennale take place within weeks of each other in June, giving rise to the phrase “see in Venice, buy in Basel”. The contrastingly prescribed activities for each reflect the extreme polarity with which the art world uphold the distance between the commercial and the cultural. However, as seeing that the same artists shown at Biennale are often sold at art fairs, and vice versa, the validity of such binary separation is one that is at best unstable, and at worst, arbitrary.

The discomfort with mixing art and money in the art world is a prevalent, implicit cultural attitude that traces back to the Romantic belief that art has transcendental qualities. Baudelaire said it best, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling”.

If an artwork derives its unique value from its ability to conjure subjective, emotional experiences for the beholder, then one should not be appraising it with an economic worth that is by its very nature standardising. However, where one has the urge to create, another has the urge to buy and own that creation. Hence, the challenge of economic commensuration of art in its capitalistic trade becomes a complicated process of de-emphasising the connection between art and money.

Phyllida Barlow, Folly (2017) at the Venice Biennale. Source; Designboom.com

While today, the artworks displayed at the Venice Biennale are in theory not for sale and the biennial presents itself as a non-commercial, government-subsidised cultural event aimed solely at showcasing contemporary art from around the world, there are many ways this is…. well…. not entirely true. Firstly, until 1973, Venice Biennale ran its own, highly lucrative sales office that took a 10 per cent commission on artwork sales. Secondly, dealers of participating artists at the Venice Biennale often voluntarily pitch in on production, shipping, and installation costs to help fund their artists’ pavilions. Phyllida Barlow’s installation for the 2017 British Pavilion was funded with the help of her gallery Hauser & Wirth.

Between the gallery that seeks cultural legitimacy for its artists and the underfunded biennial that seeks financial support is a symbiotic relationship. This shows that behind the outwardly market-impartial Biennale exist an extensive web of interdependent commercial interests and stakes that the Biennale not only is not immune to, but thoroughly relies on to exist.

Sigmund Polke at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Source: Palazzograssi.it

Another way the two universes regularly intersect at art biennials to produce mutually beneficial cultural value is through the strategic sale and placement of biennial artworks post-biennial. Museum directors and owners often act as buyers at the Venice Biennale-- Francois Pinault purchased the entire Sigmund Polke exhibition in the 2007 Italian Pavilion to show it at his private museum in Venice from 2009 to 2011, while MOCAA Mark Coetzee, claims that “Ninety-nine per cent of our acquisitions are made in biennales. Fairs cannot provide the scale of works we want, nor the critical importance”.

Essentially, biennale gives artists the chance to showcase big and conceptual works for the first time, while museums provide the space, scale, and permanence to consecrate them after the biennial. Therefore, dealers work carefully to sell biennial artworks directly to institutions and prominent collections where the market value of the pieces will stay hidden from the public, and the art historical significance of the pieces will be protected and continued. The situation is characterised by hard buy rather than hard sell.

So yes, Venice is very much commercial, but only in a very specific way that involves creating layers of illusions and obstacles that maintain the appearance of market impartiality as well as reinforce the division between the commercial and the non-commercial.

Economists, sociologist, and art scholars have come up with a multitude of critical theories to distinguish the two opposing spheres of artistic valuation. For Pierre Bourdieu, an artwork’s twofold nature as both a commodity and a cultural asset gives rise to a dichotomy of market value and symbolic value. As a commodity on the market, an artwork can be measured and exchanged for a monetary sum. As a cultural object, however, an artwork is evaluated by its symbolic value judged based on singularity, provenance, art-historical relevance, materials and more. This dichotomy correlates with what Coslor identifies as the Hostile Worlds view and the Economic View. The former accuses the latter of being corrupt, while the latter depends on the realisation of the former to justify supply and demand.

The widespread ideological adoption of the Hostile Worlds view in a global market reality facilitated by the Economic view means artists, dealers, and critics must implement particular strategies and sales practices to unite an artwork’s symbolic and market values. The aforementioned examples of creating display formats that highlight the critical values of artworks, as well as being selective about collectors at the Venice Biennale demonstrate ways actors take care to avoid signalling the wrong relationship between art and money. In what Viviana Zelizer refers to as “good matches”, these practices help to obscure the “vulgar” links between an artwork’s market value and symbolic value. The idea is to create a bridged gap between the two opposing spheres that stabilises and promotes belief in the moral value of art.

The practice of good matches and maintenance of the bridged gap can also be seen at art fairs. Though essentially trade shows, art fairs also take care to protect the sanctity of artworks by staging elaborate displays and devising curatorial initiatives. Art Basel launched Unlimited in 2000. Conveniently, many artists shown in this section subsequently get selected to show at Biennials. Plenty of trans-art world cases such as experimental filmmaker Michael Subotsky and installation artist Alicja Kwade prove that the process of cultural legitimisation is not an unidirectional one that goes only from museums and biennials to the market, but also the other way around. By initiating its own platform of cultural substantiation, commercial settings such as art fairs and galleries begin to also operate as cultural authorities.

Through the subsequent dissemination of their ideas and tastes in forms of art magazines and media contents around the world, commercial actors are able to establish and perpetuate their own desired meanings and normative behaviours in the art world, shifting from merely passive economic appraisers of art objects to active tastemakers, trendsetters, and cultural producers.

On the reason why Unlimited was launched, Art Basel director Lorenzo Rudolf explains in 2000, "Our biggest competitors were suddenly not the other art fairs but the biennials. We had surpassed the other art fairs, but suddenly we saw this phenomenon of the biennial turned into a market event; and even if it wasn't official, next to each artwork you would find the dealer and he was selling it”.

In response to the fair-isation of biennials, art fairs had to undergo ‘biennalisation’. These “curated” art fairs, by accentuating artistic importance over commercial interest, demonstrate that cross-worlds view art historians, critics, curators and dealers often work together.

The ability of commercial actors to bypass institutional validation and generate own cultural meanings can be observed frequently throughout art history. From the Medicis to Castelli, to Gagosian, private patrons and dealers have always participated in the taste-making and gatekeeping of the art world, dousing the art history narrative with personal and financial interests. By converting social capital in forms of status, connection, and influence with potential for fame and success, economic value can well generate a sense of artistic importance. This shows that the division between the purely cultural and the purely commercial contemporary art world is a highly skewed and paradoxical construct where actors and values from seemingly unrelated spheres regularly operate in tandem.

Alicja Kwade, Out of Ousia (2016) at Unlimited, Art Basel. Source: alicekwade.com

Beginning with the World’s Fair in 1851, international mega-events such as Venice Biennale and Art Basel has always been about projecting a certain regional or national image. As a tool of soft diplomacy alongside insurgent global middle-class wealth in the late 20th century, these events all perpetuate a sense of Western-exported cultural universalism while drawing in economic revenue in forms of tourism, foreign investment, and employment.

In Neo-Marxist terms, by aestheticising politics and culture, they reinforce capitalist systems’ needs to reproduce itself by the logic of capital and of capital accumulation. As platforms of networking, consumption, instagram spamming rituals, art fairs and biennales both subscribe to the “show-spectacle notion” where they are responsible for offering ever-new products, and satisfying the modern consumers’ need to regularly experience ever-new trends.

Neither art fairs nor art biennales are singular, isolated acts of either pure cultural consecration or pragmatic commerce. Instead, they exist as subsidiaries to an event-based art world, and an experience-based economy. Through the projection of ideal values and visions of society, art fairs and biennials create a space in which people can assert as well as affirm their experience of the ‘official’ version of collective cultural identity.

A more contemporary critique of the increasingly globalised art world and art events such as Venice Biennale and Art Basel focuses not on whether it is too cultural or too commercial, but on its direction and subjects of consumption. Ben Cranfield gives the example of the controversial aftermath of Dana Schutz’s painting of a murdered African-American boy , Emett Till, at the Whitney Biennial in 2017 :

“The ensuing protests and widely distributed open letter by British artist and writer Hannah Black demanding the removal of the painting raised a warning for all biennials. In clamouring to prove themselves timely, to capture audiences’ attention and to locate art in specific geopolitical contexts, curators all too often forget to ask whose lives, suffering and experiences are being visualised and consumed by whom for whom. In these terms, the inclusion of Schutz’s painting represents a misguided move on the part of the Biennial’s curators”.

Hence, the real tension in the international art world is between critical undertaking and realpolitik opportunism. Both art fairs and biennials act as infrastructure for artists and professionals to work and survive, and their roles are one that is deeply entrenched in demands of contemporary global capitalism. Even the most critical voices must oscillate between cynical dissidence and opportunistic modification, and this proves to be a hard line to walk for both critics and dealers. The question shifts from how to hide the connection between art and money, to for whom are art and its money produced for? In this context, regardless of symbolic and market value or motive, international art world events and cosmopolitan actors all exist within the same socio-political plane and therefore confront the same existential questions.

For now, the esoteric art world will most likely continue to uphold its binary values. But in the case of art biennials and art fairs, this application of cultural vs commercial is neither precise nor truthful since actors from both spheres regularly cooperate and assume each other’s roles. With the rise of isolationist nationalism expedited by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the digitalisation of art trade through NFTs, new existential questions are brought to the table---how might the structural traditions and meanings of the art world change in the 21st century?

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Matilda Liu

Art Markets & Business Editor, MADE IN BED