Popinjay Art

Without going into arguments about the meaning of art, it would not be too wide of the mark to say that to succeed in today's Contemporary Art market, just two things are necessary. They are: to (1) get noticed and (2) have cred.

To achieve (1) it would be sufficient to ride down the main street in Teheran dressed as Lady Godiva. This gets you noticed, but only in places like Teheran. In the rest of the world, in places where big bucks are being spent on art, the problem facing artists and gallery owners alike is how do you get noticed when people are no longer surprised by any antics?

In today's climate, the feverish and highly publicised competition between Sotheby's and Christie's provides some kind of answer. Get sky high prices for your work and people will pay attention. The mechanism for doing this is quite simple and involves gallery stooges bidding up a sample of an artist's work in return for a kickback from the gallery of most of the price paid. Naturally, because of a cynical public, it only works in tandem with a cred building operation, in which art critics play a vital and equally well remunerated role.

Which brings us to (2). Cred works as long as you have a credulous pool of punters. Lady Godiva will have an uphill task persuading the Teheran morals police that she was making an artistic statement. This may be partly due to her lack of a real message, but I put my money on her apprehenders' limited credulity. Some would call this a lack of culture, but who is right? In the cultural capitals of the world, how much investor credulity is the work of high prices? Time was when exhibition catalogues featured paragraphs of turgid prose, which the artist himself couldn't understand, let alone his poor mother, devoted to puffing up the artist's message. But today, to get credibility, it is enough for a gallery (or for Damien Hurst) to put its money where its mouth is. With enough money, the message part can be left blank.

My point is that when people are punting on stuff just because they see its price going up, you have what is called a bubble. And when the bubble pops, as it invariably does, all your cred goes down the drain along with your moolah. A white canvas with nine knife slashes which was once a statement of wealth, and may once have caused a stir at some dimly remembered exhibition, loses that meaning when prices plunge, and becomes a symbol of gullibility. At least a nice Gauguin on the wall will comfort you until the dunners arrive, but a perspex box of flies will not even serve to settle your debts. Creditors are notoriously conservative in their tastes, which, in a way, explains how they became creditors.

For those dreamers who think the market will be there to bail them out I say this: the large auction houses' practice of guaranteed sale prices, like all insurances, only serves to incite buyers - who will be future sellers - to greater recklessness, and is a safety mechanism they can ill afford to offer in a bear market.

J.K.Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria neatly describes the mechanisms behind the seventeenth century tulip bubble, lest you forget. It should be required reading for those who believe we have moved on from those years. It is as short as its title promises and should be re-read at least once every two years.

One day, I would like to talk about art, as I have a soft spot for real paintings, as a visit to my online gallery will surely show.