The Eternal Return of Art’s Death

Or the condition of being less than an object and more than a representation.

I’ve spotted my fair share of writings about the death of good art lately, about how it’s impossible to see and even produce art because it has tied the marketing noose around its own neck. I argue that art dies constantly, a strange and beautiful death, moving on to new forms of existence in the realm of things which are less than an object and more than an image. Mutation mutates constantly and the mutated does too. Change happens not only to stuff, but also to its context, its language, and its impact. Other things do not change at all, and they’re often the ones, I find, we’re most anxious to lose.

But at the present day, [painting] is completely banished,(…) we tapestry the walls of our galleries with old pictures, (…) we esteem them only for the value of the material (…). Thus it is that we possess the portraits of no living individuals, and leave behind us the pictures of our wealth, not of our persons. 77-79 CE

(Pliny the Eleder, The Natural History, Book XXXV, Chap. 1, 2)

The recent Artnews article announcing a “Hauser Spring” in New York was taken by many as another sign that it may be time to write art’s obituary. Alex Greenberger, senior editor and author of the text, laments the fact that 4 retrospective exhibitions in New York’s major museums celebrate artists represented by one single gallery, Hauser and Wirth. Will we have a Zwirner Summer?There are several points made by the article, stemming from this observation. Mainly, the egregious power blue-chip galleries hold over big art organisations is mostly a US (in good part New-York) phenomenon. It also describes the Venice Biennale as a platform of experimentation where “untested talents get their turn in the spotlight” some of whom, Greenberger pleads, should in return be shown in New York museums. He also suggests that the MoMA should follow the lead of the Sharjah Art Foundation and The Met in bringing indigenous artists to its fold with the contextualisation they need. I’ll sincerely admit not discerning whether this ingenuity is feigned or not by the author.

If you consider that the Venice Biennale is a space of “untested talents”, you’re either a young person who, like the Buddha, was raised in complete ignorance of the depravities of the world, or you’re uninterested in seeing mid-level galleries or alternative circuits at the MoMA. Because, as far as I can remember, the Venice Biennale has been two things: on one hand, the validation of artistic success and, on the other, a confirmation of the new loophole through which unknown, peripheral, generally ignored communities are projected onto the global art platform. The artists who find themselves under this Hollywoodian spotlight warrant a gritted toothed rooting from those who stay behind. Granted, from the perspective of someone who lives in the country controlling the direction of the spotlight, these “untested talents” probably seem to have been plucked from the wing of pure creativity; whereas they’ve often moved, in their outlying country, from local to glocal to global.

Accordingly, the expression “untested talents” means “unknown in the Greatest Country of the World” (as Hollywood film characters often say, usually trying to preserve such greatness with a Glock 22) and therefore still missing the most important career stepping stone of all: US recognition. The article’s critique of MoMA’s carelessness is silver lined by the obvious solution of expanding its horizons. It seems to say: hold your hands up and your cards close to your chest, Big Museums! Amplify your roster of artists, ahem, galleries, with the likes of Sean Kelly, Timothy Taylor, Luhring Augustine, Nara Roesler and Lelong, for instance, rather than alternating Zwirner, Gladstone, Hauser and Wirth, Gagosian, and Pace. Furthermore, the article magnanimously suggests, curate retrospective exhibitions of indigenous artists, the new woman–of–a–certain–age–whose–work–never–made–it–to–a–commercial–gallery–discovered–by–a–Big–Museum.

Focusing on the survey exhibition, as Greenberger does, is looking at the top of the established artist ladder because, in his own words, in “today’s art world, sales lead to fame, fame leads to retrospectives, and retrospectives lead to more sales”; conversely, Big Museum solo shows (and not exclusively retrospective exhibitions) lead to sales or a potent new gallery representation and vice-versa. Whether you’re part of the system or not, once you’ve either gained blue chip gallery representation or entered the curating star system, you’re guaranteed a place in this aspirational firmament. The tides of this beach open to the public are created by private undertows such as the art market, patrons, collectors, banks, private equity and private credit funds. Take the recently announced acquisition of Frieze (comprising art fairs and the magazine) which is estimated to be worth $200 million, by Ari Emmanuel. The buyer is ex CEO of Endeavor which is, incidentally, the current owner and seller of Frieze. (When I checked the latter’s website, it merely states that “Frieze is part of the IMG network”, but if you hop off to Endeavor’s website, it reads “brand licensing through IMG Licensing”.) But back to Emmanuel, who is creating a mystery new “global events and experiences company”(The Art Newspaper): he had already bought a stake in Frieze, after which the company established editions in Los Angeles (2019), Seoul (2022) and purchased Expo Chicago and the Armory Show (2023). For those of you who are still reading this paragraph –well done!– and who are now obviously wondering how Emmanuel has already found half of Frieze’s estimated price, he has backers, amongst which Apollo Global Management and RedBird Capital Partner.

Let me tell you that diving deep into private equity’s exclusive seas is dangerous. I developed a fascination for Apollo Global Management. Their website is indescribably soothing, a mix of childhood memories of adults working very slowly, in sepia tones, and skies with the fluffiest clouds your eyes have ever touched, gliding from high-rise to skyscraper, followed by a helicopter riverscape of the Thames. Everything is so far, far away, until you’re shaken out of your torpor by the god of prophecy, Apollo himself (the lyre is a hobby), who declares that here, “we ask what if to create what is”. Wait. Is wealth management stealing art’s modus operandi or is it the other way round? Never mind, I was hooked. My life will now be separated into the pre-Apollo period, an era of hippie nonchalance, and post-Apollo, a time of grounded dreams.

Scrolling down, I come across Torsten Slok, Apollo’s recent hire and husband of the pastor of the Danish Seamen’s Church in Brooklyn Heights. Inevitably, I develop a crush for this nerd. You’ll sympathize. Under a banner announcing that “the only constant is change”, there is a link to a downloadable pdf about this economist who serves tea and snacks in his wife’s congregation, where he’s often asked whether he’s found a nice job to keep him busy while his wife tends to the community’s “spiritual needs”. Ha ha! Slok is obviously the rye bread winner of the house. He is a new phenomenon in private equity but, as I discovered, a normal hire for investment banks who have in-house economists to talk on TV and to the press, rendering “the brand visible” for investors.

At this point, the article candidly recognises that economists are almost always wrong. Torsten Slok is not your common economist however. Despite being also wrong, he sends The Daily Spark every day, a matinal email where his maverick talent for financial synthesis and storytelling in ex-Twitter text length made him a star in the finance newsletter subscribing business (and without Substack!), along with his simplified charts, produced by two associates based in India.

“The market narrative at any point in time is almost always wrong,” Slok wrote one morning last October, an assertion he backed with a chart showing how wildly traders’ bets on future Fed rates had been swinging for more than two years. “Making predictions and occasionally being wrong, is “the name of the game”, he says. “As useless as economic models often are, at least they provide a framework, he allows.(…)”

It doesn’t take a genius–I mean, I really did not a get a word of what I wrote above–to know two things:

1) economists failed to predict the worse recent financial crises, and they weren’t able to understand their outcomes either. (I’ll spare you a few paragraphs in the article about the apparently unthinkable surprise of high interest rates not stopping the US economy in 2022. Again, no idea about all *gesticulates to screen* this.)

2) the leading players of the economy manipulate it to win it. It’s the range of your power that will define whether you’re taking a big or a small risk.

Therefore, the US, as the most powerful player in the Western world, dominates, either directly or structurally, the art world, its biennials and art fairs. When the US sneezes, the global art world catches a cold, and covers its neck with a Comme des Garçons scarf. Therefore, more than a local analysis, the Artnews article is an objective observation and an unchecked symptom. Nizan Shaked details with forensic precision the nature of this private and corporate domination in his book Museums and Wealth, The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) which is a sort of Renaissance actualised model of patronage. By focusing on SFMoMA (starting with its 2019 sale of a Rothko in order to buy other art) he reveals how a private collection used the museum as their own storage in the long term, thus affecting the acquisitions and the permanent collection display. Someone, after all, is making Hauser and Wirth rich.

So, despite Greenberger’s angelic views on the old calcified continent of Europe, no one is impervious to the promiscuity of capital and art. For instance, Greenberger excitedly waves Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery exhibition in the air as proof of the unyielding UK Big Museum system to Big Commercial Gallery pressure. This is ignoring Ed Atkins’ exhibition in the twin museum, Tate Britain, not to mention Mike Kelley’s at the turn of the year, Noah Davis at the Barbican and currently Giuseppe Penone at the Serpentine and many others. Ed Atkins is a successful mid-career artist represented by Cabinet gallery in London, established but far from the luxury art boutique chain status of Hauser and Wirth. So far so good, but bear in mind that Atkins is also represented by Barbara Gladstone in New York, dépendance in Brussels and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin, galleries whose artists are regularly in the international museum circuit.

Sometimes, at either my darkest or awakened hour, I believe that the US’ firm belief in individualistic affirmation can only be attained through arrivism or fandom. An American curator told me recently and publicly that they only wanted to work with well-known artists. None of us would admit this in the old calcified continent. Not that this makes us perfect; a European senior curator has confided-privately-that their art organisation requires them to work only with Big Names because they bring Big Audiences. The solution is always, therefore, to push the program between these and the necessary corrections of history, researched thematic exhibitions, and side programs of performance, screenings, etc. Maybe I’m a Pisces who unhealthily and automatically goes into parallax pose in this yoga of art, but most of us independent art pros have no idea how tough it is to convince whatever external power holding the money strings of one’s institution to show an artist without blue-chip gallery backup or its local equivalent.

Let’s nevertheless flip the coin here, and go to Paris. However irritant Pinault’s Bourse du Commerce Museum is (paying the 109th world’s wealthiest person €14 is a new low), it can potentially be a safe haven if the alt-right ever comes to power. The absurd sleekness of Pinault’s art panopticon (the historic trade building is disconcertingly circular), where most French or France-based artists will never show their work, may shift in times of need, and become akin to the Gulbenkian Foundation during Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, granting money for residencies abroad in exchange of art (artists called it the Ministry of Culture). It’s never been less alarmist to think in these terms but hopefully not a reality any time soon. It’s indeed difficult to admit that there are issues with public art spaces in less extreme times. Nonetheless, however fair and impartial political, executive and administrative powers seem to be from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, they aren’t necessarily art-minded and informed structures. I asked a Spanish colleague how museums were fairing in Spain and she opined that *sigh* government-funded museums create unpredictability and economical uncertainty, not to mention their often incompetent and ignorant administration.

My point here is that it’s important to nudge museums and to point at their failures, but it is equally important to understand how and where things are effectively changing and how. This denouncement of US economic power feels too little too late, especially when most of the press, including the contemporary art one, is funded by the same money as the exposed museums. So I worry that the subsequent laments of art’s announced death are band-aids applied to an old, deep, scar resulting from an I-Love-You-so-Much-I-Could-Kill-You attitude, about which I wrote here, focusing solely on our pleasure as mostly privileged museum-goers.

The value of a Marxist reading such as Shaked’s, is its focus on art making as a need responding to whatever context it’s in:

“Under capitalism art has been cast as a luxury object, deceiving us into believing that it is the prerogative of the wealthy to “generously” share it with us. Yet, art is not a luxury. Art is a necessity. It is a fact of human history that in the worse conditions of slavery, imprisonment and starvation, people have persisted to make art".

I thought the author would write “people have persisted to find art”, but he chose to highlight the simple fact that art is a key need for the spectator/reader/listener only because it is a vocational work for the artist, in a complex relation between the inner creative impulse, the resources available and time. In a period when we focus on wellness and on consumption as “experience”, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that art is a necessity not only for the viewer but also and firstly for the artist, which means that, therefore, it is here, around us. There are art centres and galleries, artist-run spaces. Museums are not for 99% of the art world, and seldom were.

Even an exhibition such as Information at the MoMA in 1970 was an exception back then. It congregated conceptual-ising artists (a very young 24 year old Hamish Fulton for instance) and it veered away from the MoMA’s quiet program to engage artistically with communication media and its silent, global revolution. “What do telephones, poetry and the museum of Modern Art have in common?”, the press realease asked, highlighting its curator Kynaston McShine’s (1935-2018) intention of making it of its time: "Many of the highly intellectual and serious young artists represented here have addressed themselves to the question of how to create an art that reaches out to an audience larger than that which has been interested in contemporary art in the last few decades. Their attempt to be poetic and imaginative, without being either aloof or condescending, has led them into the communications areas that INFORMATION reflects”. There were 96 participants, amongst which Khristine Kozlov, Guilio Paolini, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Walter de Maria, Yvonne Rainer, Bruce Nauman… and a contribution by the MoMA’s administration to the concept of the show, a contrastingly futuristic promotional machine designed by Ettore Sottsass Jr., called Olivetti Visual Jukebox, but renamed there Information Machine, used by the Olivetti company to promote the brand in trade settings. In contrast, Hans Haacke calmly installed his piece MoMA Poll, about the influence of the Rockefeller family on the museum, which he kept secret until the opening. McShine worked at the MoMA from 1959 to 2008, and apparently was one of the first, if not the first, non-white curators of the museum.

The Information show was a landmark not because it was the first of its kind (it wasn’t) but because it took place at MoMA and was such a drastic departure from the museum’s usual fare (Hans Haacke’s work, for example, which criticized the museum’s political connections.). Kynaston was given an extraordinarily free rein. He and I were close friends then and I had some input into the show. But I was living in Spain when I did the text and long distance was part of the point. I was already deeply embroiled in Conceptual art and the idea was that dematerialized objects made distance no problem, as in Seth Siegelaub’s world-wide show that existed primarily in the catalogue, bypassing art world institutions altogether. Today’s protests at the Whitney and MoMA and elsewhere about trustees’ suspect corporate involvements reflect the positions of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which might be considered an invisible participant in the original Information.

Lucy Lippard, for the MoMA celebration of Information’s 50 years.

Information didn’t bring immediate change. In 1970, The MoMA featured exhibitions of: Alexander Calder; George M. Barnard; Joan Miró; Hector Guimard; 34 year old Frank Stella, Mark Rothko (as “a memorial”, one month after his death by suicide); Theo van Doesburg; Archipenko, Barnett Newman (as “a memorial” with the same timeline as Rothko’s); Bruce Davison; Duane Michals (mispelled as Michaels); Pablo Picasso; 42 year old Robert Irwin; Paul Burlin; 40 year old Jasper Johns. The only incidences of artists working with other media or seriously disrupting current conventions were group exhibitions such as Spaces with Larry Bell, Franz Ehrard Walter, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Michael Asher and Pulsa. In 1971, only 32 year old Mel Bochner had a solo show there and in 1972 Richard Nonas (PS1) and a year later David Tremlett.

"With an artworld that knows more readily about current work, through reproductions and the wide dissemination of information via periodicals, and that has been altered by television, films and satellites, as well as the “jet,” it is now possible for artists to be truly international; exchange with their peers is now comparatively simple. The art historian’s problem of who did what first is almost getting to the point of having to date by the hour. Increasingly artists use mail, telegrams, telex machines, etc., for transmission of works themselves—photographs, films, documents—or of information about their activity. For both artists and their public it is a stimulating and open situation, and certainly less parochial than even five years ago.It is no longer imperative for an artist to be in Paris or New York. Those far from the “art centers” contribute more easily, without the ooften artificial protocol that at one time seemed essential for recognition."
Kynaston McShine, "Introduction to Information", in the catalogue.

The immediacy and global speed of art history in the making is made tangible in the motivations of the curator and the work of conceptualists. Uncannily, it places social media and new technologies in line with the changes already felt at the time. Telephones, Xeroxes, photographs, projectors were back then what AI and Metaverses are for us now. Both Lippard’s quote and McShine’s observations reveal the profound mutations in the world and the art system. The hilarious and frankly freeing statement about the art historian “having to date by the hour” stems from the underlying focus of the exhibition, which was photography, whose past was being mulled over as redefined potential.

One can read between the lines that these technologies of communication announce the disappearance of that obscure object of desire for the parket that is the artwork. Since Lucy Lippard’s much discussed opus The Dematerialization of the art Object… (1973), there has been this notion that a conceptual strand of art-making has eluded its objectual condition, and therefore the art market. This has always befuddled me, for two reasons. Firstly, conceptual artists may not have flooded the MoMA in the seventies (with the exception of Information), but they were commercially very successful, especially when they traded New York for Düsseldorf, Rome, Torino, Paris. Others couldn’t sell anyway either because they were female such as Chana Horwitz, or because they just didn’t have that aura. Douglas Huebler became a professor at CalArts and had a good career albeit not with the dimension of his peers. And seconddly, as photographs, books, drawings, photocopies, postcards, computers, film, weird materials, and its machines, conceptual artworks are objects of the worst kind: they disintegrate or become obsolete quite easily, except for the DYI works of Sol LeWitt, for instance, but this implies expertise (as his wall drawings are instructions to be executed in great part). And precisely because as objects they’re not precious and as ideas they’re fantastic, they’ve circulated widely, as McShine sensed, and influenced a lot of people. However, and ironically, what conceptual art also pre-empted in its fungible freedom through a contract / certificate, was the commodification of value itself, proving that there’s no escaping capitalism.

Recently, I went to a symposium where both conservators and curators mingled (a rare occurrence) and it felt like Martians watching Werewolves discourse about reoccurring metamorphosis. Their fascinating exposés detailed what they asked living artists to do: basically fill out forms after thinking about material conditions, technical requirements, delegation of production and replacement of technologies which the artists I know would happily replace with prolonged torture. As Sol LeWitt wrote, artists are mystics, and I would add, for the sake of the argument, that curators are idealists, and conservators are realists. That day, a thought crystallized, of having come to a point in our history where we do not accept the potential dematerialization of the art experience, because we’re obsessed with it as an object. Historic conceptual art doesn’t go up in the auctions. A banana held by scotch tape will go viral, two photos and a typed text do not make for a whole lotta media noise. So if the most prolific and aesthetic artists of the conceptual group were commercially successful in their time, their work is less prone to speculation now. In that sense, I agree that they somehow evaded the bourgeois accomplishment of possession.

As Henri Bergson suggested in Matière et Mémoire (1896), it’s hard to be part of a humanity that separates the world between idealists and realists, to which I annex the condition of the artist who makes non-functional stuff, apart from Marcel Duchamp, whose Reciprocal Ready-Made example was using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. So Bergson suggests, for the sake of intelligibility, that images of the senses are existences which are a bit more than what an idealist calls a representation, and a bit less than what a realist calls a thing. The brain, he recalls, this gelatinous flesh inside the head, is a living thing made of living matter, in the tangible, concrete world, but, ultimately, is an image too. What the artist produces materially is an iconic presence, a relation with a thing in space, but mostly a tangible mirage which will live in us as memory and story, and in books or websites as images. Museum collecting is holding on as much as possible to this dynamic of presence, but it’s also removing it from touch, from time and space, archiving it, dematerializing it.

Conceptual art’s entanglement with dematerialisation, proves the undeniable materiality of the art object while pointing to its stronger existence in a reproductive form: “increasingly artists use mail, telegrams, telex machines, etc., for transmission of works themselves—photographs, films, documents—or of information about their activity”, wrote McShine. Walter Benjamin described motion pictures as recorded theatre. Art is material and therefore it dies–reproductions are material as well, but they’re not the thing anymore–they’re a mutation. We study Shakespeare’s texts, which is akin to studying The Godfather’s script. There are several types of art death: obsolescence of its materials, degradation by natural decay or accident or voluntary destruction, by cultural adaptation or lack thereof…

Meanwhile, as someone who deals with artists, all of these written complaints feel like a form of entitlement to living in an era of Great Revolution that artists need to organise, please. Germano Celant’s death of Covid in 2020 at the age of 79, marked an end to an era of rambunctious monolithical curatorial power, but we mustn’t negate our agency as curators, nor as audiences, either. We–You–can also create platforms of engagement, exposing art that is being made today elsewhere than at Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, Gagosian, while recognising that the artists these galleries show are also pretty good, and some are pretty bad, and most of them are under a special kind of pressure to produce more, bigger, wider, shinier. Cursed by the ultimate damning privilege, they actually have production money. It comes with a tacit clause of commercial efficacy and artistic doom. Maurizio Cattelan, in this light, almost appears like a victim of his own game.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Bones April 8–May 24, 2025 Davies Street, London

I recommend this article wondering about the implications of the announced merger of Sotheby’s and Pace. Sonia Witak phrases the dangers of too much wealth associated with art-making: “can art exist outside capitalism, or is it merely capitalism’s most seductive disguise?” Would Michelangelo’s Sixtine Chapel’s ceiling exist without the hubris of the Vatican? Money allows for art to stay here forever and be admired in its post-death new existence. We should take a note from Werner Herzog predicting his films disappearance over his writing. Perhaps he’s talking about value. But the truth is that most art dies, and cinema may very well disappear or lose its meaning. We’re all working for ekphrasis. Recently, I interviewed Stephen Ellcock, author of Cosmic Dance, Elements, among others, which are Warburgian assemblages of artworks regardless of scale and even, but not often, artwork status. His image obsession started with Facebook and now lives on Instagram, where he has a devoted following of, at the time of writing, 345K people. I remember being unsettled by his feed’s obvious stripping of materiality, scale, place, time. Leafing through his books, it becomes immediately apparent the intelligence with which Ellcok organises the flow of his reproductions, which have become less than objects, but more than images, tucked away in the the author’s mind, recomposed by pixels, haptic when they’re printed, stringed in a flow of connections when constellated by Ellcock. They regain meaning.

Things decay, and with them, their ideas. Or they subsist but lose their power: who knows who the heck our public statues represent? At best, they light an unexpected fire in some people’s imaginations. There’s a funny story in my family about two Brazilian students who referred to a public monument in Lisbon as “the monument to the war of the chicken”. What’s funny to us, is that they were the only ones to actually look at it. We’d never noticed the war nor the distressed bird.

And if you’re wondering what is happening now in the US, Slok’s The Daily Spark says that tariffs are affecting firms which are undergoing “rapid downward revisions to earnings expectations” with “new orders falling, capex plans falling”. Just so you know. But he may be wrong.

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