Although it is simply my job to sell the artwork we have in our gallery (roughly twenty different artists), because of this everlasting thirst for the next big thing it has almost been a requirement of my job that I do as much research on the ever-changing art world. What I have found in my homework is that since the emergence of Pop Art in the late 60's, 70's, and early 80's, there has been a struggle to easily define one movement of artists that could be considered the most prominent of all contemporaries. Of course, as all Western industries can identify with, the Asian art market (specifically Chinese art) would have to be considered one of the most successful movements in recent history. However, it seems as if the key players of Chinese and Asian art are still relatively anonymous to the majority of serious art collectors (and especially casual art collectors) who are not asians. Of course this could change in the future as more and more Eastern art crashes like waves against the European and American borders, but for now the art European and American art world (including myself) generally appears to identify with Bill Murray in Sophia Coppola's "Lost in translation".
Another movement that has been just a prominent and probably more long-lived than the Chinese art scene has been British contemporary art. Yes, the British are coming, and have been for quite some time now. I would have to say though that until lately there hasn't just been one specific "kind" of artwork that could be defined as a singular movement, but that British contemporary art in general was spawned some 40 years ago by Francis Bacon, as he certainly threw a change in the art world by producing a body of artwork that included ideals of abstraction, subjects of popular culture, Dutch Master's painterly quality, and a seemingly grotesque imagery that could grab the attention of any passerby. And although Bacon did the majority of his work prior to or during the Pop movement in America, and was unusually independent of any large movement, I would say it was Bacon who directly influenced other independent British artists like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, both of whom are incredibly creative and talented shock-value artists who became famous via installations, rather than canvas or paper, and have in-turn influenced an entire movement of young "me against he norm" installation artists across the globe. Hirst and Emin were the original "Young British Artists (YBA)" introduced by Saatchi in 1992 (which coincidentally happens to be the very year Francis Bacon died...career reincarnation?), and are within that same select group that does/did a relatively small amount of work, compared to pop artists and abstract expressionists, but are some of the most expensive post-war artists to collect (right up there with Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock, among others).So where are we now? We are where the YBAs efforts as revolutionary independent artists (that is to say successful artists that began to move away from the traditional gallery and museum scene, but eventually caved in) left off, and then left a great deal of business influence on other British artists, namely Banksy. Bansky is the anti everything artist who hates popular culture and politics so much that he relied entirely and completely on both subjects to create a massive counter-culture art following, and somehow along the way roared through the European and American art scene and destroyed even the most liberal of auction estimates, gallery egos, and conventional ideas of the art world. Banksy would be absent from his one-man shows in a temporary space and still make a million bucks. Banksy would do a free graffiti for the public and see his sales bump double. Banksy made Ebay his playground and rich Londoners outbid each other to own a small piece of brilliance from a man who mocked them openly with the very artwork they sought to acquire and hang front-n-center. Banksy is so independent that he recently denounced a show in New York city that featured the artwork of Banksy - and in doing so Banksy, along with other anti-establishment artists like Shepard Fairey, created what is now the movement of artists that I have to give the temporary nod to for being the artists that will probably define the next/current artistic era.
What will this era in art be defined as is another question in itself: The political art era? The age of the internet? The graffiti artists take on pop culture? All of the above? It is hard to say exactly. What I can say is that these 21st century British artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, along with American artists like Bast and Faile, have successfully picked up and evolved the shock value of Bacon with the business practices of big boys like Hirst and combined it with the factory-like art-making abilities and cultural (or counter-cultural) references that pop artists like Warhol made commonplace and highly collectible. For example, I recently received an email from Faile.net (which really has some great, and occasionally graphic, graffiti mixed-media artworks) informing me that a new silkscreen print was set for release and that because I was on Faile's mailing list I had the opportunity to give them my credit card number and enter the lottery for one of these great new artworks! Woo-hoo!Wait. Excuse me. Did I just type that correctly?
Why yes I did.
Faile (among others) has used the internet and its communication abilities to actually create a sweepstakes situation in which collectors essentially have to "win" the right to purchase a work of art, yet after entering the sweepstakes no longer have the right to not buy! Faile, who does not show in galleries, has somehow created a situation in which there is a broad market of art sales without ever having to display the art, thus avoiding the gallery (middle man money), the salesmanship (pressure), and the hassle (collectors themselves). "What the hell is this?" you might ask, as I did. This is the new era of art-making, art-selling, and art-buying.
Let's just hope they keep charging dollars and not pounds.
