The Art System: ¥€$

This whole thing about the auction of Damian Hirst got alot of attention. In fact the sum is quite a headline but if you really think about it, the most quoted artist in the world earns, auctioning half of his life's work, as much as Ronaldinho or Valentino Rossi earn in a couple of years. It is not a significant piece of information: the sums of the champions are off the scale, like they always have been. What is interesting is something that peeped out from between the lines of articles filled with knick-knacks: the purchaser. Who bought these 223 objets d'art spending 10 milions of euro is the new animal, not Hirst. It is in the buyer that the significant swerve occurred. When twenty two year old Michelangelo sold the "Pietà" he brought himself a villa, just like Hirst, only Michelangelo sold it to the Pope, not to a wholesaler of Chinese toothbrushes, over the telephone, while raising the bid of a Venezuelan casino holding. The big gap, the leap, is in the fact that art has unusual clients, incomparable to other historical time periods. For twothousand years, artists practically had only two interlocutors: the king (pharaoh, emperor, etc.) and the church (pharaoh, pope, imam, etc.). The political power and the ecclesiastic power. Then, kings, wigs, and various nobles disappeared and in the last two centuries art had to dialogically relate to a more pulviscular structure: the bourgeoisie. The purchaser, that went from being monocentric got pulverized, coins for the first time the word of all words: the public. Because the public of those art works, the bourgeoisie, for the first time in history coincided with who was buying the art. You didn't have to convince the pope, nor the bishop, but, what was perhaps even harder, an entire social class, from the professor to the businessman, from California to Berlin. It was a way for a certain community to have a share in the ordinance of the artist and his cultural value, in a dialogical and empathetic relationship, between the author and the public. This public, or at least the promoter public, is today debased to a role of spectator. From the professor to the passer by, from head to toe, it is a public that participates passively in a universe hidden in rooms very distant from their own. An unconscious public, sometimes even useless, that observes a cultural universe fallen from above, like faithful followers under the paintings of Giotto. If you take away the trappings and decorations, at the end, you are left with only one interlocutor, as a spectator and as a purchaser an single persona: the chinese wholesaler. He is the one that, at the auction, has a debate with his friend in finance as to which one of the two is richer, like boys and their motorcycles, and once hung the Penone in his living room, he looks at it like Totti looks at a book. Essentially we went from a polycentric system of power (art curator, professor, museum, art dealer, spectator, art collector, journalist, critic, etc.) to a system with a pattern like spokes radiating from a centre, the center being the buyer. The artist sells his artwork on the internet directly to the millionaire, thus skipping over the whole spiderweb. A centripetal system, fealty, but paradoxically not autocratic.
Because that art collector, doesn't even have that narcissistic desire like Peggy Guggheneim. We are back to feudalism, but there is no feud: he is out playing golf. Since I find it hard to believe that everyone just woke up with a sudden obsession with money, i'm beginning to think that once the old power system ended, the art community was threatened by the void created and started to grasp onto the strongest so as not to fall. The same logic used by the Italian government after the collapse of the first republic entrusting blindly the richest and most powerful of all. I don't know if this is true but supposing that going back to having a participant bourgeoisie is not a possibility, and neither is going back to a ruling class of the twentieth century, it might be better to break away from the rich man's float, and invent a new pattern for the art system, a new hierarchy, a new public, a new system of selection, and a new power balance in the community. Because spending the next hundred years dominated by the Chinese businessman is not tragic, but certainly very boring.