Not For Sale

By David Trigg

“W orks of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”,
a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these
is essential, however: a work of art can survive without
the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”
—Lewis Hyde1
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde argued that if artists begin to produce
work purely to serve the demands of the market, rather than
what he called their “creative spirit,” then “it may be possible
to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity.”
Hyde considered artworks—true artworks—as ‘gifts.’ The
material
object, the property, must emerge from the artist’s
creative talents. Talent is a gift, an immaterial ability that cannot
be obtained through effort or be bought for a price but often
produces material goods. The artwork, he maintains, carries the
creative gift from the artist to the audience who receive the work
in the same way as a gift is received: unless a work of art is
the emanation of its maker’s gift, there is no art, only commodity.
Although writing nearly twenty years ago, and despite his
romantic—even naïve—ideas about artist’s motivations,
his argument still resonates today as the art market continues
to experience an unprecedented period of exponential growth.
During a presentation on her role as curator at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, Chrissie Iles discussed her
views on the negative effect that today’s expanded art market
is having upon contemporary art production: “Art’s become
like milk,” she proclaimed, “pasteurised, homogenised,
and packaged to the point where people think it comes from
the supermarket, not a cow.”2 Iles’ lament was that in a scene
increasingly dominated by the pull of art’s commercial systems many artists today are consciously creating carefully positioned,
slick but anodyne work designed specifically for the market.
“Art students,” she remarked, “now stare rather bored as you
critique their work…and then drop into the conversation at the
end that Geoffrey Deitch just came in and bought six paintings.”
It would appear that for some the difference between
art’s gift value—as Lewis Hyde would have it—and its
commercial value is beginning to collapse; art’s gift value is
being usurped by its commercial value, subsumed by the value
of money. The result is homogenisation and, as Hyde asserts,
the inevitable dissolution of artworks into the space of the
commodity.
As Jerry Saltz has observed, “more and more these
days I’ve been seeing shows of artists I once admired who now
seem to be crumbling under the pressure to sell. I’ve won-
dered
if some of these artists weren’t just trying to cash in.”3
Of course, the wish to profit from making art is nothing new,
nor is it necessarily unethical; but Saltz has perceived a distinct
shift in the practice of certain artists suggesting that something
their work once had—perhaps its gift value—is now absent.
For artists who are directly involved with the flourishing
commercial
gallery system this is hardly surprising: many are
represented by dealers in several countries, all of whom require
work for exhibitions, not to mention the numerous art fairs
and biennials that have proliferated in recent years. For Hyde,
the artist who makes work only with the market in mind is not
making real art at all and perhaps for some today their practices
are at risk of becoming debased.
However, artists who care most about the integrity of their
work will, one hopes, resist the temptation to ‘cash in.’ John
Baldessari once recalled an experience from the early 60s when,
as a young artist, he was trying to secure an exhibition. After
approaching several galleries with his paintings, he eventually
found a dealer who was willing to give him a show in five months.
Excited by this prospect, he continued making the same kind
of work until he found out that the dealer had gone bust. So he
stopped making those paintings, realizing only then that he had
actually concluded that body of work five months earlier and
had only kept going because of the exhibition. “That worried me,”
he said, “what will the hope of money and acclamation prompt
you to do unconsciously?”4 Unwittingly, Baldessari had forsaken
his “creative spirit,” shifting the focus of his work away from
its gift value, and towards the market. For artists working
in today’s profit-driven art world, where sustained commercial
success often means capitulating to a market that demands
repetition and reductiveness for the sake of increased visibility
and signature value, Baldessari’s question is an apposite one.
Of course, not all artists are concerned with the remarkable
gains of the current art market and it is not surprising to
find that some artists are experimenting with alternative ways
of organising social and economic structures by developing
counter strategies within the dominant commercial system. One
notable project, Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN), is a collaborative
web-based initiative instigated by Brooklyn-based artist
Adam Simon. Designed to actuate non-monetary exchanges
of contemporary art outside of a market context, FAAN enables
anyone—or almost anyone—to acquire artworks for free,
directly from artists who have decided to take a very different
and unique approach to distributing their work.5
Commissioned by Art in General in 2005 and launched
in 2006, FAAN functions as an online database where artists
post images of work that they are offering for ‘adoption.’ Users
browse the site and when a desirable artwork is discovered,
an email dialogue with the artist is initiated in which the
potential adopters explain their reasons for wanting a work.
A flurry of exchanges ensues and although the process is
instigated by the collectors, it is always the artist that decides
who can adopt their work. As an inversion of normative market
transactions, the art is offered as a gift, completely for free,
the only outlay being the associated shipping costs. Successfully
adopted artworks become the property of the adopter, although
artists might impose certain stipulations such as restrictions
on the resale of work.
Despite its subversive face, FAAN began as a solution
to a problem. Simon needed to remove a couple of large paintings from his mother’s house because she was moving.
He couldn’t afford to store his works anywhere else and certainly
didn’t want to destroy them. At the same time, he realised that
while there is a lot of good art in the world, very few people
actually own, or can even afford a single painting. Even though
FAAN has its genesis in the need to provide a solution for
an artist attempting to equate a surfeit of work with limited
storage space, there is another driving force behind the
project: the belief that critical, cultural production necessitates
a re-imagining of the processes by which art can be experienced
and shared. This is especially pertinent at a time when
it is becoming increasingly difficult to even start collecting
contemporary art and for many it is perceived as being
an activity reserved solely for a super-rich elite.
FAAN’s modus operandi reflects Marcel Mauss’s gift
economy, an idea he articulated in his pioneering work Essai sur
le don (1924). Through his study of gift economies in (so-called)
‘archaic’ societies, Mauss discovered that, unlike buying and
selling in a market economy (where personal acquaintance
is immaterial), the giving of gifts tends to forge relationships
between people in a community, producing reciprocal
ties.
In a gift economy, there is no concept of a value-based
exchange, only reciprocity-based exchange. It is this observation
that led Hyde to describe gift exchange as an “erotic”
commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union
and involvement which binds people together) to logos (reason
and logic, and in particular the principle of differentiation).
But who really wants to give their work away for free?
After all, artists have to eat and pay the bills just like the rest
of us. It is doubtful that any artist would want to give away
their entire output solely through FAAN; indeed the majority
of artists involved exhibit widely in museums and galleries and
so are already market-savvy. FAAN is attractive because it offers
artists a new way to interact with an audience; as Simon notes,
“both the artist and the adopter are aware of participating
in something outside of the commercial norm. There is a shared
sense of shaping a transaction differently…” The difference
is that these transactions are ‘erotic.’ This principle is exemplified
by FAAN because a relationship between artist (gift-giver)
and adopter (gift-receiver) must occur before any transaction can
take place. As potential adopters attempt to secure artworks,
courtships with the artists are embarked on, resembling
something
akin to Internet dating. “If you sell an artwork,” observes
Simon, “you often have very little contact with the person
getting it. But in this case, the artworks are actually facilitating
human interaction. There seems to be a fast-track to genuine
discussion…somehow, several layers of the usual bullshit
vanish from the moment the adopters open themselves up in
their letters…that is the intimate level at which the exchange
is taking place.”
However, erotic relations are not entirely without their
complications, and, as with any romance, dysfunction is always
a possibility. The notion of giving away art objects as art was
previously explored by Ben Kinmont in the early 90s. In For You
For Me For Painting (1993), he offered to give away twenty-three
of his own paintings, stating that he wanted to “place painting,
the artist, and the dealer in a situation of generosity, one
where a new social and economic context is created into which
a viewer can re-orient his or her experience
of a painting.”
Kinmont offered paintings made over the previous four years
that he said meant “a great deal” to him. Flyers explaining the
project were distributed to passersby on the streets of New
York and, in theory, anyone with a flyer could turn up at the
Sandra Gering Gallery at the specified time to select a painting.
However, what appeared to be a ‘free-for-all’ was, in fact,
engineered
by Kinmont so that many paintings ended up in the
hands of his collectors who were given full details of the time
and location beforehand. The cynic might conclude that Kinmont
was merely trying to save his own neck at a time when the art
market was still suffering the fallout caused by the collapse
of 1990: left with a glut of work, and faced with a dissipated
market, Kinmont’s strategy was to woo his collectors by
offering them free paintings and by doing so renew the buzz
around his practice—perhaps believing that, when the market commerce
and the reciprocal ties that it would create. To be
fair to Kinmont, if indeed he did care “a great deal” about
the paintings, then—in line with Hyde—they are to be considered
genuine gifts. It is only natural that, like the FAAN artists,
he would want his work to go to a good home, to be owned
by a trusted collector who offered an appropriate level of care
and who understood—what the artist perceived to be—their
true ‘value.’ But even free gifts are sometimes unwanted.
Of the twenty-three paintings offered by Kinmont, thirteen went
to previous collectors, eight to strangers, and two remained
unclaimed, not bad considering that one critic described them
as “shoddy and almost repellent…more like the messy rem-
nants
of a high-school chemistry experiment.”6 One wonders
how Kinmont’s work might have faired if FAAN were around
at the time; would anyone be enticed into a courtship over his
“shoddy” work? While the work on FAAN is of variable quality,
it is unclear whether un-adopted artworks have actually
been solicited or not.
By reorienting the parameters of the artist/collector
relationship—transporting it from a market economy into
a gift economy—FAAN emphasizes to artists that their work
has value outside of the marketplace, opening up the potential
for exchanges and encounters that are the antithesis to those
commonly found there. The fact that many artists continue
to use FAAN indicates that something worthwhile is being
offered to them. As Matt Davis, an enthusiastic participating
artist, put it, “this process has a purity that no gallery can
compete with.” Another artist, Austin Thomas, who has pieces
in several major collections and runs her own gallery, described
the adopting process as “an amazing experience.” One adopter
of her work even reported that the gift had “changed their
life,” something that Thomas hadn’t anticipated: “never has
a collector paying cash ever spoken about a piece in that way.”
Just as Baldessari’s realization saved him from a career
serving Mammon, so FAAN avails artists with the occasion
to reflect on the core of their practice, to question the source
of their motivations and aspirations, and to situate themselves
in a position of generosity where they call the shots.
As a public service, FAAN goes beyond a mere critique
of the art market; it provides an alternative to it. However,
artists are undeniably operating in a cultural field that has
become inextricably
linked to, and entirely penetrated by the
market. Claiming that you won’t participate in the market is,
as Saltz has said, “like saying you refuse to breathe the
air because it’s polluted. Unless you live in a bubble, you may
have no choice.” Conversely, FAAN may impact the market
positively by expanding the community of buyers who have had
their appetites for collecting art whetted. There is the potential
here to spawn a new breed of collector who not only values the
artwork itself but also understands the value of erotic commerce
and the potential gains of courting artists for their gifts. Also
for the museum, FAAN offers a chance to connect with artists
and acquire works for their collections wholly apart from the
commercial
sector. This is surely beneficial for both artist and
museum (and even, arguably, the commercial gallery), especially
when curators like Chrissie Iles have complained that the
price of a single painting can be higher than a museums entire
annual acquisitions fund. FAAN, then, should be regarded as an
addi-tion
to the market, rather than an attempt to usurp the it;
and if it is true that “where there is no gift there is no art,” then
FAAN’s presence is a corrective adjunct, which is both timely
and necessary.

David Trigg is a writer and critic based in Bristol, UK. His text was
originally commissioned by Situations at the University of the
West of England, Bristol and funded by the Arts Council England.

From Adam Simon: Fine Art Adoption Network