Disseminating culture

Corbett | October 6, 2006 9:32 AM

Jason and I spent the afternoon looking for art in the 798 Factory District, which is now the upscale trendy art district of Beijing that used to be a huge electronics factory. Aunt Liu came with us and told us that 35 years ago she spent 3 months working there as a student under a mandatory work/study program assembling radios. The area is very cool, with lots of space, and about the size of a college campus.

I have a sort of jaded ambivalence towards commercialized art, though I admire and repect the individuals making their creations, I'm put off by the people who package and sell it, and the hanger ons who want to be arty, but can't. I don't know how this buried animosity occured since a lot of my college days were spent in the MFA studios with grad students and my friend Homare Ikeda. I even bicycled up to Maine to hang out for a few weeks with rising art stars at an invite only art retreat.

I think it has to do with the gallery/agent factor of the art business and the similarity to the music business.

It's like this: Agents are needed to get into a good gallery, and you need to get into a name gallery so people can say your art is "good." Once your art is "good" it can command a price, and the agents and gallery get the lion's share of the profits. As for the similarity to the music business, you can have a young hit songwriter, but unless he gets to the right agent, which signs him to the right publisher, the song can't get to a name artist. Then it needs to get on a hit album so people can hear it and say the song "good." Once the song is "good" it gets royalties which the publisher and agent take the lion's share of.

While I was thinking about all this, Jason says, "Hey I know that guy." (Jason's mom by the way is a big time art dealer in NY) We walk over and meet Rob, who's made a killing shipping modern Chinese art to galleries in NY and turning a huge profit. We talk for a while, and I say "So you're essentially a venture capitalist for artists, right?" The undertone of this statement is: You invest in someone, and take all the profits, right?

Rob smiles a big art dealer smile and says, "No, I prefer to think that I'm disseminating culture to the rest of the world."

Yeah right.

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