Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Heller tells me that he works for an annual flat fee rather than commissions. “Advisory has the potential to be a sleazy business,” he says. “The mindset of the guys I work for…if I’m advising them to pull the trigger on a twenty-million-dollar painting, there is going to be a shred of doubt if they know that I’m getting a percentage of the purchase price. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”

  The trickle of people abandoning the fair has turned into a flood. We get up and start heading out too. “Wanna know the difference between a great dealer and a great adviser?” Heller asks. “A great dealer does a good job for the collector but a great job for artists. A great adviser does a good job for the artists but a great job for the collector.” Heller puts his fair map in his pocket. He’s a telltale combination of cocky and diffident. In the old days, consultants were employed chiefly for their art-historical knowledge. Nowadays the onus is on negotiating the difficult deal. Enabled by trust on one side and a strong network of relationships on the other, advisers in the new art world are often in a strenuous situation where speed rather than contemplation is the key. For Heller, the rewards are unique and obvious. “The money is a by-product,” he asserts. “It’s about being a part of the legacies that I’m helping to build.”

  The balmy evening air hits us as we open the front doors of the Messe. Heller waves goodbye while I hang back to watch the exhausted crowd. Standing still and looking lost amid the exodus is Jeremy Deller, a Turner Prize–winning British artist with a strong curatorial following. Here to install his room at “Art Unlimited,” he has stayed on for the first day of the fair. He wears shoulder-length hair, oversized sandals with bright white socks, and a deep red corduroy jacket. Apart from the remote possibility that he might be an eccentric left-wing curator who’s had the misfortune to lose his luggage, Deller is coded as an artist from head to toe.

  Did you have a good day? I ask.

  “It’s been a funny day, just floating about,” Deller explains. “It’s chaotic, bewildering. The amount of art in the world is a bit depressing. The worst of it looks like art, but it’s not. It is stuff cynically made for a certain kind of collector. I’m not a very financially motivated person. If I were, I wouldn’t be making the art I do. My art is almost unsellable.” For artists who don’t make easily retailed commodities—because they’re ephemeral, invisible, or purely conceptual—public institutions are often the most important patrons. After a mind-numbing day at an art fair, many art aficionados crave nothing more than a well-thought-out museum show.

  4

  The Prize

  9:30 A.M. on the first Monday in December. Tate Britain, the original Tate museum, which sits upriver from its sexier younger sibling, Tate Modern, doesn’t open to the public for another half-hour. Inside the museum, in a 1970s extension to the original Victorian edifice, Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, and his four-member jury are taking one last, all-determining look at the exhibitions of the four artist-finalists for the Turner Prize, the world’s best-known contemporary art competition. The judges don’t say much to each other. They contemplate the works and grapple with their opinions. One later admits to me that he alternately makes an effort to keep an open mind and rehearses arguments in support of his favorite. How does one compare apples, oranges, bicycles, and bottle racks?

  Outside, a statue of Britannia sits on top of Tate Britain’s neoclassical façade. With a helmet on her head and a trident in her fist, you wouldn’t think that contemporary art was her thing. Some hundred feet below the battleaxe’s gaze, on the stone steps of the museum, Phil Collins, a video artist, is smoking a Benson & Hedges. He was at a pay phone in the subway in Brooklyn when he found out he had been nominated. “I was incredibly startled,” says Collins. “The prize might be a stage for mockery—I might make a fool of myself on a grand scale. I imagined a scene out of a Brian De Palma movie. I felt like Carrie, covered in pig’s blood.” Collins, thirty-six, has an asymmetrical New Wave–ish haircut and wears carefully culled thrift-shop clothes. “It took me a week to accept the nomination. I had to think hard about the joys and threats of exposure.” He waves his cigarette in the air. “Of course, when Carrie is covered in blood, she locks the doors of the gym and kills everybody. So…not everything is bad.” Collins is deadpan. He waits five seconds before he arches his eyebrows and cracks a smile. He takes three quick puffs, drops his butt, grinds his foot into the ground, and says, “I’ve got to get to work.”

  At ten o’clock, as visitors pass through the museum’s front entrance, the Turner Prize jury sits down in a vaulted boardroom used for trustee meetings. Today they must determine a winner. Later this evening, one artist will be presented with a check for £25,000 by a celebrity host at an awards ceremony broadcast on national television. Past presenters have included Brian Eno, Charles Saatchi, and Madonna, who distinguished herself by shouting “Motherfuckers!” on live TV. Tonight the prize will be presented by Yoko Ono. The runners-up will sit on the sidelines, trying to look upbeat, and collect consolation prizes of £5,000 each.

  The Tate inaugurated the Turner Prize in 1984, and its history is in part a tale of newspaper headlines. In 1995, Damien Hirst won the prize and made news on several continents for a sculpture in which a real cow and its calf were bisected from head to tail and displayed in four tanks of formaldehyde. The work was called Mother and Child, Divided. In 1999, Tracey Emin received so much media attention for her entry—an installation that included her own unmade bed, littered with bloodstained underwear, condoms, and empty liquor bottles—that many people believe that she won the prize, even though she was only a finalist. And in 2003, Grayson Perry, whose principal medium is ceramics and who likes to wear dresses befitting a Victorian six-year-old, accepted his award by saying, “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize!”

  For the past several years, the focus on current art has been such that no one waits for history to make decisions about what is great, good, or simply competent. In an ideal career narrative that starts with graduation from a respected art school and culminates with a solo retrospective in a major museum, prizes are important plot points, clarifying an artist’s cultural worth, providing prestige, and pointing to the potential for long-lasting greatness.

  While most art prizes are little more than a line on an artist’s curriculum vitae, the Turner Prize is a national event; people take sides, argue about the contest at dinner parties, and even bet on who’s going to win. The prize process is the same every year. In May, four artists are shortlisted by a jury of four judges chaired by Serota. The artists must be younger than fifty, based in Britain, and have attracted the jury’s attention with an outstanding show sometime in the previous year. In October, each of the four nominees opens an exhibition in a grand room at Tate Britain. Eight weeks later, usually on the first Monday in December, the jury reconvenes and chooses a winner.

  This year the nominees for the Turner Prize are diverse. In addition to Phil Collins, the video artist, there is Rebecca Warren, a sculptor; Tomma Abts, a painter; and Mark Titchner, an artist who works in many media. One morning in October, several dozen journalists and photographers turned up for the press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition. Rebecca Warren’s room contained three types of sculpture: gestural figures made of bronze, unfired clay forms, and display cases that held bits of detritus, including a cherry pit and a used cotton ball. The bronzes were like Alberto Giacomettis that had been given a good meal, a spliff, and a sex drive. The clay pieces had a look that was more preschool than art school.

  A petite curator in low-rise black jeans that revealed a hint of midriff briefed the crowd about Warren’s work. “These female approximations embody unleashed and exuberant creativity,” she said. “They revel in distortion and degradation.” She added that Warren’s influences included R. Crumb, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. The press people weren’t buying it. They balked at the absence of skilled craftsmanship. “Unfired clay?” one murmured. “Is that half-bake
d or entirely unbaked?” To a BBC Radio 4 presenter, I mentioned a memorable display of Warren’s work at the Saatchi Gallery—a large room filled with headless female figures with oversized tits and asses. His quick retort: “But these things are all hips and elbows.” Then I suggested that Warren had made an entirely new body of work for this exhibition, so perhaps we needed to give it a little time. “It’s growing on me, the same way you get used to a headache,” he replied.

  Selling for high prices and winning prizes are two of the most newsworthy things an artist can do—hard facts in a life of relatively unquantifiable achievements. Additionally, in Britain, the press never tires of the question “Is it art?” and finds it impossible to resist sex jokes. So the photographers in the Warren room cheered up a bit when they discovered the suggestion of a few breasts and, better yet, erect nipples protruding from the mounds of gray clay. The writers, however, were grumpy. They’d received the news that neither Warren nor the other female nominee, Tomma Abts, was willing to give interviews. I’d already had a conversation with Warren’s London dealer, who’d told me that I could speak to her “as long as it is entirely off the record.” Unfortunately, “Yes” turned into “We’ll see,” then finally “I’m sorry.” When I called an acquaintance who was a close friend of Warren, hoping that he’d put in a good word, he said, “She doesn’t need to talk to you. She is going to win anyway!”

  The Turner Prize consecrates and desecrates artists at the same time. For many artists, the opportunity to exhibit in the hallowed rooms of Tate Britain, in a show that attracts 100,000 ticketed visitors, is too enticing to pass up. For others, the brutal scrutiny, the possibility of public loss, and/or the ideological compromises are too great, so a string of refuseniks has accumulated in the shadow of the award. This year, for instance, a twenty-nine-year-old Scottish painter named Lucy McKenzie turned down a Turner Prize nomination. McKenzie has worked as a porn model and her oeuvre is sometimes sexually explicit (one painting shows her eating a bowl of soup below a framed drawing of a woman masturbating); the tabloids would certainly have taken an interest. According to a friend, McKenzie was unwilling to “compromise the flexible and critical dialogue” around her work.

  Phil Collins’s work wrestles with media themes, so despite his initial anxiety about being nominated, he thought the prize could be an ideal platform. A few days after the press preview, I was following Collins through Tate Britain when he stuck his head in Room 28 of the permanent collection, where two video screens were playing his 2004 piece they shoot horses, a moving depiction of nine young Palestinians in a dance marathon in Ramallah. In the video, they wriggle and twist, occasionally belly-dance, and eventually heave and drag their tired bodies to international pop tunes with lyrics like “Set me free, why don’t you, babe.”

  Collins walked on, through the magnificent golden stone Duveen Galleries, toward the Turner Prize rooms, until he encountered a museum guard. “Hello, darlin’. Where are you today?” he asked. The sixty-something woman, dressed in a Tate-issue burgundy shirt and black skirt, replied like a longtime Londoner: “I’m in room nine’een this mornin’, but I should be in twen’y-eight this af’ernoon.” She is often stationed outside they shoot horses, and she reports viewer reactions back to Collins. The work in the darkened room seems to encourage the subversion of museum etiquette. People don’t just watch the video; they dance, sing, lie down, sit and sob, even French-kiss. “There was a bunch of schoolkids in yesterday,” she said. “Wanted to know why they was such bad dancers.”

  Collins continued through the galleries, making his way to his “office,” which was installed as part of his Turner Prize exhibition. He disappeared through a hidden door and emerged on the other side of a large pane of glass, in a kind of war room of computers and telephones with a coral-red carpet and peach walls. His shady lane productions team was there, researching a video called return of the real, about people whose lives have been ruined by appearing on reality television programs. One woman was answering a hotline that Collins had set up for victims. Another was cutting an article out of a newspaper, while a third squinted at a computer screen. It was the first time in the prize’s history that an artist had effectively moved his studio into the museum. Regular museum-goers may see a lot of art, but they rarely see an artist at work, and this space subverted expectations of paint-splattered workshops. Collins turned and cast an amused eye over his onlookers, then gestured me over to a small sliding window, the kind one might find in a doctor’s office waiting room. He poked his head out. “I couldn’t normally afford this kind of real estate. I’m instrumentalizing the prize, using its spectacle as a way of realizing a work.” He chuckled and then added, “I needed to be a victim of my own logic, so here I am—a monkey in the zoo.”

  A few days later I met Collins at a pub under a theater in Charing Cross Road. A century’s worth of smoke mingled with an up-to-the-minute deodorizer in the basement air. It was quiet, but populated by a handful of characters for whom life was obviously a stage. We took a seat in a dimly lit crimson booth at the back of the bar. As I switched on my digital recorder, I asked Collins to say something so I could check my recording levels. “My name is Phil Collins—not the, just a,” he said. “That’s what I have to say all the time. If you call for a taxi or a pizza and you say your name is Tina Turner, they’re just like, ‘Yeah, right, fuck off.’ It is like a curse.” Collins lit a cigarette and leaned back. He had just come from a “home visit” where he had done a preliminary interview with a reality TV subject—a woman who, after appearing on the show Wife Swap, found that her son was being beaten up in the schoolyard.

  Collins is fascinated by survival and what he calls the “specific beauty of people living in situations of horror.” Although he officially lives in Glasgow with his boyfriend and their Dalmatian, he spends most of his time traveling to war-torn cities—Belfast, Belgrade, Bogotá, Baghdad—and making elaborate videos with the locals. In baghdad screentests, for example, local Iraqi men and women sit in front of his camera, fidgeting, flirting, and staring. The piece was filmed before the 2003 invasion, and it’s impossible to watch it now without wondering what has become of the participants.

  Collins ordered a round of drinks, then realized he had no cash. He doesn’t have a credit card or a mobile phone. He has never driven a car, and until last year he didn’t own a washing machine. Although his art relies on his extreme sociability, Collins doesn’t know many artists and rarely goes to “private views” (the rather closed British term for openings). “I found art school to be liberating, but the commercial art world…is there anywhere you could possibly feel smaller? It’s the only place where you can give away free booze and no one turns up.” Collins slid his chin so far into his hands that his face scrunched up. “I can’t bear it when someone says, ‘I have to make art or else,’” he said. “That is a very privileged thing to say.” Collins said he didn’t feel much rivalry about the prize. “I have no interest in pushing to the front of the queue. I would rather somebody else got off the train first.” He stared into a well-used cut-glass ashtray, then looked up. “Anyway, I’d rather not recognize the terms of the game. Award-winning art? The category doesn’t apply. You might find a great work of art in someone falling over in a supermarket. That might be the most extraordinary visual encounter of your day.”

  Housed next to Tate Britain in a red brick building called the Lodge, Nick Serota’s office is Edwardian on the outside and modernist on the inside. Resting in the center of his corner office is a black Alvar Aalto table, which serves as a desk, overlaid with a tidy grid of thin documents. Paper is evidently forbidden to accumulate into a stack. On the right-hand wall are shelves of brightly colored art books, and on the left, windows through which one can see the front steps of the museum and, towering above them, the haughty profile of our lady Britannia.

  Serota was running late for his appointment with me; he was on a catamaran whizzing up the Thames from Tate Modern. His assistant stepped into the ou
ter office and offered me tea. She told me how delightful it was to work for Nicholas Serota. One doesn’t call him “Mr.” because he was knighted in 1999; the tabloids call him “Sir Nick.” Art world people like to talk as if they were on a familiar, first-name basis with all the power players, whether they know them personally or not, so one hears about Damien (Hirst), Larry (Gagosian), and Jay (Jopling, owner of the prominent White Cube gallery). In London, Serota owns the name Nick, while other noteworthy Nicholases tend to be referred to by their surname (for instance, Nicholas Logsdail, the owner of the important Lisson Gallery, is known as Logsdail).

  The son of a Labour minister, Serota studied economics and art history at Cambridge, then wrote his master’s thesis on the painter J.M.W. Turner (the prize’s eponym) at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He joined the Tate in 1988, when it was little more than a fine outpost of national heritage, and he now presides over an empire of four museums—Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St. Ives. With more than 4 million visitors a year, Tate Modern is the most popular tourist attraction in London and the most visited modern art museum in the world. Tate Britain’s almost 2 million visitors ensure that it also takes a respectable position in worldwide ranks. (In 2005–6, for example, New York’s MoMA had 2.67 million visitors, Paris’s Centre Pompidou had 2.5 million, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao received 900,000 each.)

  Serota glided in twelve minutes late. “Very sorry,” he said in a crisp accent. “I was giving a tour to American collectors. They arrived late and in turn delayed me.” Serota sets his twenty-year-old, official Swiss Railways wristwatch ten minutes fast. He is tall and thin. His mouth evokes the expression tight-lipped. He always wears a dark suit and a white shirt. On this occasion he wore a muddy asparagus-green tie. He disappeared for a moment and returned without his jacket. He took his seat and methodically rolled up his sleeves. We skipped the small talk.