by Dave Hickey
Even then I prided myself in being a gambler, but this was a bad bet. You don’t send good money after bad, ever. So I dropped that stack of white bond back into its stationery box, placed the box in a drawer, and closed the drawer. I walked into the kitchen where my wife was sitting at the table reading The Crying of Lot 49. “I think I’m going to quit this shit,” I announced. She looked up and stared at me for a minute, then she smiled and said, “Great!” That night I called up all my artist pals and told them I was going to become an art dealer. They all said, “Great!” Within the next two weeks, I had borrowed ten grand from a local banker who hung out in rock-and-roll bars, rented a space downstairs from a lawyer who defended drug offenders, had some stationery printed up by an outlaw printer in south Austin, and got a tax number from the State Comptroller.
I put in a phone, painted the walls, moved in some art, and that was it. I was in the art business. It was the easiest thing I’d done to date, and, at that time, the loan, the lease, the stationery, the tax number, and the phone constituted my total qualifications for entering the art world. My graduate readings in Derrida, Chomsky, Foucault, and Deleuze, unfortunately, would not become “art qualifications” for another fifteen years, but I opened the doors anyway and became a “gallerist”—although that is really too fine a word for it. In truth, Mary Jane and I opened a Mom and Pop store.
We repainted walls perpetually and burned our fingers on the lights. We typed labels, hung exhibitions, kept books, mailed invitations, and served cheap champagne in plastic glasses to the locals. We were twenty-six years old. We sold works of art by artists who were twenty-six years old (and maybe a little younger) to collectors who were twenty-six years old (and maybe a little older). The gallery was called A Clean Well-Lighted Place, after the Hemingway short story that concludes with a designification of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our father who art in nada. Nada be thy name . . . ”), because we were seriously into “nothing” at that time, and into making something out of it, which we did for four-and-a-half years. Then we moved to New York and continued our adventures.
Over the intervening years, between that time and now, I have been asked a lot of questions about A Clean Well-Lighted Place, because it did have its moments. But I am never asked the same questions for very long. Back in the nineteen seventies, people always wanted to know if it was any fun, and I always told them, yes, it was a great deal of fun—nervous, anxious, vertiginous, heart-rending fun. My favorite thing, I told them, was showing up at my little store in the morning. I’d come in through the back door, make some coffee in the office, carry it into the dark gallery, and hit the lights. The space would spring to life, and I would just stand there for a little while, looking around and sipping my coffee. Then I would go back to the office, pull over the phone and the Rolodex, and go to work. That was the best part.
In the nineteen eighties, people stopped wanting to know how much fun it was. They wanted to know how much money we made, and they were shocked and dismayed to learn that we didn’t make any money. We made a living. We paid our bills, paid our artists, and eventually paid off our note. We had a place to live, food to eat, work we liked doing together, and no “spare time.” Had I been more candid, I would have confessed that we were totally disinterested in making money. That was what my professors at the University did. They “made money” working in a vicious bureaucracy, so they could spend it in their “spare time” doing exactly what they liked—which, as far as I could tell, was writing crummy novels about working in a vicious bureaucracy, and summering in Italy. Thus, I have always associated the desire to make money with a profound lack of confidence in one’s ability to make a living, to make one’s way in the world through wit and wile. So I wanted to make a living, which I succeeded in doing, and I wanted to win, which I rather spectacularly failed to do.
I had this idea of an art made for the living, you see—of an art that might flourish in the crazy zone between the priests of institutional virtue and the bottom-feeders of commercial predation—of an art that might embody the marriage of desire and esteem (which is, of course, what a marriage is). So I liked to distinguish my practice as an “art dealer” from that of “picture merchants” and “curators.” Because picture merchants were dedicated to exhibiting what they thought the public wanted, and curators were dedicated to exhibiting what they thought the public needed. Everything I did as an art dealer, however, was based on the hopeful, Emersonian premise that on occasion, sometimes, we just might find, we want what we need—that private desire and public virtue might find themselves embodied in a single, visible object.
The vogue of Andy Warhol was my gaudy emblem of this occasion, and, looking back, I can honestly say that Andy showed me the way out of graduate school—that he freed me from its smothering obsession with intentions and intentionality. Because Andy’s rhetoric of fame meant that “what Andy meant” was irrelevant. The work was its public vogue. I attributed this moral to Jasper Johns’s flags as well, because a flag does not derive its “authority” from the fact that Jasper Johns or Betsy Ross made it. It is invested with power and significance by the faith and commitment of those who salute it. So I can see now that, by becoming an art dealer, I was positioning myself to exacerbate the effects of art rather than to speculate on its causes.
I was betting on a practice based on the marriage of desire and esteem. At that time, there seemed a real probability that such a practice might establish itself. But it did not. The antique obsessions with history, psychology, and good intentions that I had left behind in academia followed hard upon my heels into the art world. The antique polarities of body and mind, desire and virtue, brothel and convent reasserted themselves in cultural life, and I failed. But people in the eighties did not want to hear about failure . . . until the eighties failed. Then the questions changed again. They came full-circle, in fact, and around 1987, students happily ensconced in just the sort of graduate redoubts from which I had originally fled began asking me how I ever could have been an art dealer.
How could I stand the degradation of selling objects to people who knew nothing about art? Didn’t I feel lonely and alienated out there amidst the pandemic schizophrenia of bourgeois culture? And what about my complicity in the hedonistic commodification of critical practice!? These must be good questions, I decided—or at least questions with some longevity, since they were the same questions posed to me by my classmates and professors when I escaped graduate indenture in 1967. Traditionally, I have answered these questions with an enigmatic smile, but since—for a change—things seem to be changing for the better, I have decided to have a shot at them now.
Regarding the degradation of trying to sell objects to people who know nothing about art, I can only assure you that everyone in this culture understands the freedom and permission of art’s mandate. To put it simply: Art ain’t rocket science, and beyond a proclivity to respond and permission to do so, there are no prerequisites for looking at it. This is the first thing I learned as an art dealer, because everyone who came into my little store—the paper boy, the mailman, the plumber, the tourists, the hippies, and the suburban matrons—”understood” what was going on, even when they did not approve. They may have objected to the political or sexual content, but they had no ontological problem with giant paintings or scruffy push-pinned drawings—with neon and press-type stuck to the walls—or with piles of debris on the floor. Some were just more interested than others.
My paper boy, Ritchie Turk, was interested. He was fourteen, but he was interested—and by virtue of his daily exposure, he became such a little connoisseur that I routinely solicited his opinion on things. (Ellsworth Kelly, R. Crumb and Ed Ruscha were Ritchie’s favorites, so go figger.) The opinions of Mr. Sparks, my regular mailman, were less reliable, although he enjoyed expressing them once we became pals. As a career bureaucrat and a devout Christian Scientist, Mr. Sparks had no problem with text or abstraction, but he hated “messy.” The paintings that Joan Snyder and David Reed and S
tephen Mueller were making at that time drove him particularly bonkers, since, according to Mr. Sparks, they were not only messy, they lacked “oomph.” I told him that he was right, that “oomph” was momentarily outré, but it would doubtless come back into style. So much for education.
Regarding my putative alienation from the pandemic schizophrenia of bourgeois culture, I never felt it. Even though I was the only big-time art freak in town, I was a part of Austin’s Psychedelic Rotary Club, its commercial counter-culture that consisted of rock-and-roll bars, fugitive publishing ventures, assorted book stores, restaurants, organic groceries, radio stations, head shops, recording studios, and entrepreneurial endeavors of more dubious legality. (Austin, by the way, is the only place I’ve ever lived where they announced the marijuana pollen count as part of the weather report.) Also, I could pass for straight, because even though I was in art, I was also in business, a shopkeeper. So I could sit around at the coffee shop down on Congress Avenue, talk cash flow and receivables, and complain about the assholes in the State Comptroller’s office. And it may sound stupid, but after the hot-house babble of graduate school, I actually felt like I was living in the world.
Finally, as to my complicity in the hedonistic commodification of art, I can tell you two things: First: Art is not a commodity. It has no intrinsic value or stable application. Corn is a commodity, and so is long-distance service, since the operative difference between bushels of corn and minutes of long-distance service is the price. Price distinguishes commodities that are otherwise similar and destabilizes the market, whereas price likens works of art that are otherwise dissimilar and stabilizes the market. When I trade a work by Kenny Price for a work by John Baldessari, as I once did, I am not conducting a commodity transaction, I am hopefully engaging in a subtle negotiation of analogous social value.
Second: Art and money never touch. They exist in parallel universes of value at comparable levels of cultural generalization: Art does nothing to money but translate it. Money does nothing to art but facilitate its dissemination and buy the occasional bowl of Wheaties for an artist or art dealer. Thus, when you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven’t bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything. You have translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another.
If you can’t tell one universe from the other, of course, that’s your problem, but not an unusual one, since art and money are very much alike, in both embodiment and conception. To put it simply: Art and money are cultural fictions with no intrinsic value. They acquire exchange value through the fiduciary investment of complex constituencies—through overt demonstrations of trust (or acts of faith, if you will) of the sort we all perform when we accept paper currency (or, even more trustingly, a check) for goods or services. This is the act of faith that I performed when I traded the Kenny Price for the John Baldessari—but with a difference, since, even though I sold the Baldessari for more than I paid for the Kenny Price, I still want both of them back, because I prefer the universe of art to the universe of money.
The point, however, is that the issuing institution or individual can never guarantee the value of art or money sent forth into the world. It must be sustained through investments by complex constituencies of individuals, public institutions, and private corporations. The government may say a dollar is worth a dollar. Fiduciary investment tells us it’s worth thirty-five cents. The Whitney Museum may say that Wanda Whatzit is the next big thing, but only the sustained investment of money, journalism, exhibition space, scholarly prose, foundation awards, loose talk, and casual body language can maintain Wanda’s work in public esteem. So it helps to remember that the language of external investment extends this far—all the way from the casual shrug at a gallery opening to the gaudy résumé on some bureaucrat’s shiny desk.
Moreover, if you stand at a gallery opening, or on the floor of the stock exchange, and watch people watching the body language of major players, you will begin to understand why folks are not watching your body language. Why? Because external investments of trust are weighted. Specifically, the value of any monetary, written, verbal, or physical investment in a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of risk the investor takes on behalf of the work in question. When the Museum of Modern Art acquires your work, for instance, it takes a larger risk than the Arts and Crafts Museum in Hometown, U.S.A., should it select your masterpiece for acquisition. When Leo Castelli decides to take you on as an artist, his risk is substantially greater than that of Bob’s Art and Framing in West Las Vegas, should they grant you an exhibition. So you want to show with Leo and sell to MOMA, because MOMA and Castelli, by virtue of their investment in your work, may, if they are spectacularly wrong, call the value of their entire endeavor into question. So either your work is worth more at MOMA or Castelli’s, or their endeavor is worth less. (The odds favor the former, but things can change.)
But there is a caveat here. Since there is no absolute authority in the art world, or in the economic world either, we may presume that for every opinion, there is a contrary one. Thus, the social value of a work of art, or an art critic, or a theory, or an institution must be distinguished from its social virtue, since bad reviews, stupid acquisitions, and theoretical attacks, even as they question the social virtue of an object or investment, must necessarily invest it with social value. The raw investment of attention, positive or negative, qualifies certain works of art as “players” in the discourse. So, even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons’s work, the critical point is that people take the time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons’s work with more importance than the work of those artists whose work we like, but not enough to get excited about.
Moreover, on the principle of “my enemy’s enemy,” there will always be those who find anything worth hating worth liking. Take the example of Clement Greenberg. You have probably heard of him. He was an art critic from the postwar era whose practice and preferences were totally discredited and defunct by the time I entered the art world in 1967. Academic critics, however, by laying siege to Greenberg’s gutted and abandoned citadel for the past thirty years, have invested his misty bullshit with such a disproportionate level of social value that the waning authority of academic criticism (due to bad investments) has occasioned a grass-roots recrudescence of Greenberg’s favorite stuff: color-field painting, which, even as we speak, is being translated into money.
All of which is to say that the interplay of art’s domain and money’s is very complex. The relationship of money to any individual work of art, however, is very simple. There is none. Since relative economic value can only be assigned to sets of things (to the works of one artist, one period, one style, etc.), and since even one-of-a-kind objects are valued within the set of “one-of-a-kind-objects” (Catherine the Great’s dildo as compared to Louis XIV’s bed pan), any unique work of art is both worthless and priceless insofar as it is unique. In practice, the culture usually sets a minimum value on works of art, which is really just an ante. When I was an art dealer, any biggish work of art was worth five-hundred dollars. Any littlish work of art was worth two hundred. Today, a biggish work is worth a thousand dollars and a littlish work is worth three hundred. Everything you pay over that is the consequence of previous external investments taken at risk.
So you pay a grand for a painting from an unknown artist’s studio. If you are a serious collector, taking a risk, you increase the value of the work just by buying it. If you are a cheap serious collector, you try to get a discount on account of this, but this is really bad form, because if you wait until that artist has a dealer, you are going to pay more. If you wait until she has good reviews, you are going to pay more still. If you wait until Paul Schimmel down at MOCA notices her work, you are going to pay even more than that, and if you wai
t until everybody wants one, of course, you are going to pay a whole hell of a lot more, since as demand approaches “one” and supply approaches “zero,” price approaches infinity. But you are not paying for art. You are paying for assurance, for social confirmation of your investment, and the consequent mitigation of risk. You are paying to be sure, and assurance (or insurance, if you will) is very expensive, because risk is everything, for everybody, in the domain of art.
That’s why art dealers and art critics stand to gain or lose money as a consequence of their efforts. Because it is a matter of heart and not of policy, a matter of live commitment and not of bureaucratic accreditation. Money is the emblem of the risks you’re willing to take to have some say in the way things look. If you don’t take risks, if you only confirm the prescience of previous investors, you acquire no power, create no constituencies, and have no effect. So you must take risks, but not just any risk, because if you are not right a fair percentage of the time—which is to say, if you are not persuasive about the art on whose behalf you take these risks—your efforts are equally inconsequential, and citizens devoted to inconsequential activities are rarely rewarded in this republic: they are tenured (as well they should be). In order to have any say at all, then, one must take risks and do so persuasively, and continue to do so.