The Fighting 44s

Spotted in today’s New York Times: “An Auction of New Chinese Art Leaves Disjointed Noses In Its Wake by David Barboza.”

SHANGHAI — Sotheby’s auction house called it the “most important collection of contemporary Chinese art to ever come to market” — some 200 works by some of China’s hottest names.

And when the first half of the trove, called the Estella Collection, went on the block in April in Hong Kong, it brought in $18 million and set some record prices for artists, like $6 million for a canvas by the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang.

But the sale of the works has stirred indignation among many of the artists and their dealers and some curators.

Those artists and curators say that as the collection was being formed, they were duped into thinking that a rich Westerner was putting together a permanent collection and would eventually donate some of the works to leading museums. (Read rest of Times article.)

I read the article and came to the conclusion that the real headline should be: “The Colonial Raping and Pillaging Never Ends.”

Michael Goedhuis, aka the colonial rapist of this story, conned a number of Chinese artists into thinking that their work was being bought by a serious collector. In reality a group of investors bought many of the pieces for cheap and flipped a number of works at five or six times the original price. In the art world, once a piece is sold, the artist ceases to make money on future sales. Even if a painting sells for twenty million dollars, the artist rarely sees a fraction of that money. If the work does not get donated or sold to a museum, then the artist has a harder time establishing a lasting reputation that will allow him or her to sell work at a high price at a gallery show.

The Times reporter doesn’t highlight the post colonial issues at play in this situation that made such a scandal possible. Though China’s economic fortunes have risen, the West continues to assert itself as the having the proper, civilized culture. This is the message that fine arts institutions in New York and London push: a visual artist is only good if he or she is validated by the West. Thus, success in the visual art world is contingent upon getting this Western validation. A Chinese artist is damned from the start if he or she wishes to establish a long term career in this system.

In response to the angry artists, Goedhuis said:

“ ‘You only benefited from this,’ ” he said he told some of the artists after the auction was announced last fall, and he began fielding complaints. “ ‘You’re in a wonderful scholarly book and you’ve been exhibited in two fine museums.’ ”

Sigh. It’s par for the course–Goehuis is asking the artists to thank him for raping them and pillaging their works.

I hope an artist comes up with a performance piece that involves slinging cow shit at him. I bet the videos and photographs from such a work would benefit that artist’s career.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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