From brands commissioning immersive installations at prestigious art fairs to hedge funds transforming artworks into stock-like financial instruments, the line between art and capital is blurrier than ever.

Capitalism, of course, has always been in the process of absorbing art. For the most part, art has historically functioned as a site of patronage, an asset class, and a marker of social stratification — with some crucial exceptions in craft and design as well as folk, socialist, and outsider traditions and figures. But some daylight, at times just a sliver, always seemed to stand between art and commerce. Prominent works from just a few decades ago like Jeff Koons’s series Made in Heaven or Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, while rather transparently intended to burnish the stardom of their creators, were not just a means of printing money. But the art world of today, dominated by the blockchain and an increasingly select group of billionaires, is something different.

In recent years, bankers, financiers, hedge fund managers, crypto bros, promoters, collectors, and at times artists themselves have aggressively vacated art’s political projects, abstracted it from labor, and transmogrified it into a format ideal for trading and speculation. Even when it entertains political activism and critique, contemporary art is stifled by greed.

For some time, news out of the art world has mainly concerned the escalating sums collectors are willing to pay for work. In 2007, Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a diamond-encrusted human skull, was bought by a private consortium (of which Hirst himself, incidentally, was a member) for $100 million, what was then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. The record would be broken just three years later by Jasper Johns’s Flag, purchased by billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen for a reported $110 million. In March, digital artist Beeple sold a non-fungible token, or NFT, for $69 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece of digital art. Even Hunter Biden has gotten in on the action, recently listing paintings for up to half a million dollars.

Artists themselves still manage to pull off occasional provocations drawing attention to the art market’s senseless valuation schemes. In 2018, a copy of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon notoriously self-shredded at the moment of its sale for $1.4 million. Last year, Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, a work that had been purchased for $120,000, became the most famous banana in the world when it was eaten by performance and mixed-media artist David Datuna at Art Basel Miami Beach. In September, in perhaps the most ham-fisted send-up in recent memory, conceptual artist Jens Haaning delivered a piece titled Take the Money and Run, consisting of two blank canvases, to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, for which he was paid $84,000.

While none of these stunts should be understood as overt critiques of capitalism, they have nevertheless functioned to lift the veil, however fleetingly, on the self-indulgence and stupid money that animates the contemporary art scene. Unfortunately, exposure does not equal resistance.

Read more …