SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER FOR EXTREME WEALTH
Farah Diba and Andy Warhol in front of the artist’s silkscreen portraits of the empress at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 1977.
If you asked the average person to imagine an art gallery, what would be the first thing to pop into her mind? A big white empty space? What determines the typology of an art gallery in our time? Aren’t bigness, whiteness, and above all, emptiness the most recognised architectural signifiers of “artiness”? Perhaps we could take it one step further: that big empty space, painted all white, should be in the most expensive area of a city. So what is this composite of images telling you directly and indirectly? On the surface, the design is supposed to remove distractions, providing you with a Zen-like, quasi-religious state of pure consciousness, as you stare deep into a Koons or let your attention wander across the expanse of a Klein, Richter or de Kooning.
In truth, most of the messages are delivered to you outside the painting and frame. The messages are really about power, wealth, and how the soft cultural capital of art is converted and translated into a tangible and exchangeable hard currency you might use to buy a house or a pint of milk. Art is one kind of currency and cash another. When you take your cash to buy a car, house or a pint of milk, there is no need to have a cultural understanding with the grocer or second-hand car dealer, they just want to know if your money is real or fake and if you agree to pay the asking price. Yet when you take your money to buy art, the first thing the artist or dealer wants to know is who you are, before they’ve even let you into the gallery. Art markets aren’t hard to understand and are driven by the powerful force of scarcity. It’s easier for old masters in this scarcity-driven market. Leonardo is very dead, and has been for a very long time. That means that not only are there no new works being generated, but it’s unlikely that works lost or forgotten can resurface. Dealers in old masters and even mid-century modern art are comforted by the deceased artist’s inactivity. They can always rely on scarcity to price up their wares in the long run.
The original market makers for contemporary art had a much more challenging brief. How do you generate and sustain price inflation in a commodity whose supply could easily keep up with any level of demand? The classic solution is to stop the damned artist working so much or at least offering too much work for sale.
This wasn’t too difficult when artists drew and sculpted with their own hands. Their production levels were limited by definition and as they got older and slowed down the supply would luxuriantly diminish, allowing the dealer to inflate the prices. Andy Warhol never fitted into that system. The pesky American pioneer of pop art mechanised and automated his oeuvre – even naming his atelier The Factory – as if to jangle the nerves of his long-suffering gallerists. Warhol was just too fast, too prolific and irrationally loved making art too damn much. He loved the mechanical means of producing art so much that it drove market makers and collectors alike to distraction. It was almost as if he was deliberately trying to deprive his dealers of a new yacht, while being himself notoriously strapped for cash all the time, despite his ability to print money.
If Warhol’s imagination was the problem, he had also already conjured up the solution. Towards the end of his tumultuous career he started to nudge his early obsession with notoriety towards a fascination with celebrity, especially the moneyed kind. He was smart enough to see that the entitled subjects of his work would be vain enough to want to buy the art he was making of them to display in their homes. It helped if the subjects were stunning and charismatic, but Warhol wasn’t that choosy: minor European aristocracy and potentates of the banking world would do fine, even better if the subject had many homes and would need many versions of his serialised creations. This in no way diminishes his genius; after all, he was only doing what Holbein and Velázquez had done before him. Finding rich patrons with lots of wall space isn’t innovation; Andy’s genius was rather in discovering the market opportunity in places no one else had ever looked. One shining example was Farah Diba, the empress of Iran.
Up until a few decades ago, the contemporary art market was the small playground of the haute bourgeoisie of Western Europe and east-coast America. Art fairs were likewise small and sedate like Rotary Club dinners – very aged, very pale and very clubby. Empress Farah was a favourite of French couture houses and something of an international jet-set fashion influencer in the 1970s. It helped that she was beautiful and spoke fluent French, having studied in Paris in the late 1960s and hung out with the glitterati of the Left Bank. It also helped that she was married to one of the richest and most powerful men of the age, the Shah of Iran. In the 1970s, Iran was a pro-Western, oil-rich country. The Shah would rent out the whole of St Moritz for a month each winter to ski, and block out the whole of the Hôtel de Crillon for visits to Paris. It is said he would charter Concorde, so that the chefs at Maxim’s in Paris could deliver his favourite lobster dish to Kish, his private island in the Persian Gulf, at supersonic speed, before the ice had time to melt. Warhol was in love. Somehow he wrangled a meeting with the empress and asked to create a series of portraits of her. Farah, who already knew her way around the art world and was engaged in a serious collecting spree and building a museum of Modern Art in Tehran, was only too happy to oblige. Warhol got a great deal of cash; Farah got a great deal of art – and Tehran is much richer for it. Today, the museum houses one of the greatest and most valuable contemporary art collections in the world.
When Warhol met Farah, he connected the pond to the ocean, allowing future Warhols to dream of harpooning their own whales in the big blue. He raised the art world’s customer base in scope and size, and flooded the art world with a new, limitless flow of cash.
The market for contemporary art as a whole expanded exponentially beyond what anyone could have imagined. Forty-five years later, every president for life and oligarch from Vladivostok to Vancouver has to have an art collection and a foundation or museum to house it in. These collections generated their own dynamics for the creation of millions of square meters of white gallery walls. More vacancies for architects, curators and, of course, space.
From Bauhaus to Warhol, the vacant space speaks in the language of luxurious waste. Pay attention, because here on the canvas of these white walls is where money is exchanged into power. The desired effect on the chosen few who inhabit such spaces is a splendid isolation from the riff-raff, or at least the appearance of it (we shall ignore, as they do, the invisible army of masseurs and cleaners, cooks and aura cleansers, personal shoppers and yoga instructors out back). The model is Mount Olympus of Greek myth, the city in the clouds from which the gods looked down on humanity – or was it that humanity could look up to the gods? A technology-enabled Olympus may not be quite ready for habitation, but the race to check out the neighbourhood is on in earnest. One self-appointed demi-god, Jeff Bezos, and that other Olympian parvenu, Richard Branson, recently sampled a short visit to the edge of that other space – the big endlessness of the universe. It was a short visit lasting some 10 minutes and with about four minutes worth of godlike weightlessness. Never mind the Carbon footprint, just one ticket for Jeff’s Blue Origin was auctioned for $28 million. If your budget is a bit tighter, you can go on the Big One, Britain’s biggest roller coaster, at Blackpool Pleasure Beach for just £42, if you book in advance. It is said that during the construction of his iconic modernist pavilion in Barcelona, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came across a couple of Spanish builders sitting on his precious Barcelona chairs while having their lunch. Incensed with rage, the genius architect is said to have shouted, “You have no right to sit on these chairs! I have designed benches for you outside!” ◉