Not for All the Art in China

For Artnet's art market watch column, Richard Polsky writes:

The market will decline, this season or next, for Chinese contemporary art. The price rise in Chinese contemporary is a sucker bet based purely on speculation rather than on the quality of the work itself. There's nothing innovative here. In fact, other than its specifically Asian content, the work is totally derivative of Western art.

It's certainly reasonable to suggest that a correction in the West's art market will affect the booming Western market for contemporary art from China. That said, it's a mistake to talk about China as a monolith. There's a crude Orientalism supporting the feverish market for Chinese contemporary art. As if there is any sense in the notion of "Chinese contemporary art," a Sinicized style in a nation so geographically and demographically vast. A projection like "There's nothing innovative here" is as baseless as the endless march of gallery shows exhibiting "the new trend" in China.

But we may still talk about a Chinese contemporary art market because, as yet, the infrastructure for the market is still immature and depends on a great deal of Western investment. Building out this infrastructure is good for the West, good for China, and good for Art. However, it's also work paid for by suckers. Economist blogger Ryan Avent and I have been chatting about this issue this morning (read: I've been peppering him with questions over IM), and he points to this Slate column by Daniel Gross that introduces Gross's book, Pop! Why Bubbles Are Good for the Economy. In short: Booms make for lots of bad investments that nevertheless build infrastructure. So the question is, then, whether the avenue connecting Chinese studios and Western collectors has been sufficiently paved by the sort of speculation Polsky decries to survive the bubble's collapse.

Posted by Kriston at October 11, 2007 8:57 AM