2014-Interview with Anna Dora Wallace Thompson on online auctions
ADWT – You told me you were against online auctions – why is that? Do you feel it devalues an artist’s work?
KH – Indeed I do not like, do not favour and cannot agree to online auctions with works of art. The normal behaviour in an auction is to see the “piece” –whatever that is—and touch it and move around it in space and love with it even for a moment. I collect cameras and I buy online and a lot of times there are cheats and the received item has noting to do with the proposed piece. Imagine what happens for an artwork. Plus, the fact that an artwork –that I personally consider a “sacred commodity” – going online, where you cannot protect neither prices, branding nor marketing….and worse: you cannot control where the artwork goes. I personally work with six galleries, three prime that work with the entirety of my portfolio of mediums, and three with only drawings or small paintings. With all my galleries, we set a strategy: not to sell to hotels, resorts, commercial venues, and focus on private collectors known to the gallerists, museums, and collecting institutions of reputation. You cannot control anything with online bidding. Online sales of artworks are done by parties who do care only about sales, and who are oblivious to marketing and branding of the artist, and even of their own.
What are your feelings on online auctions that do not disclose sales results?
I perceive it as a phenomenon that is absolute crap vis-a-vis transparency. It is not illegal but almost unethical. The risk benefit ratio of confidentiality versus transparency is observed in a universal formula with real-time auctions where the collector sees and touches the artwork prior to commitment and prior to the auction dynamic. This ratio is undermined with online artwork sales through bidding. I also think it is totally degrading for the artwork and for the name of the artist. Perhaps what would be acceptable is to create a totally closed loop of listed and known and declared clients/collectors/bidders, a strictly closed loop, then the auction is broadcast live in the maximum allowed transparency.
Do you feel ‘going online’ is something traditional galleries and auction houses feel they have to do in order to keep up with the times?
Not at all. I have no objection is adopting new models, but the current online method that we see so far does not provide any acceptable standard to observe/respect the artist career or branding, and unless we develop a method to control where the artwork goes and to which collection, I will remain skeptic.
Online sales are a new, yet fast increasing phenomenon. Some platforms, such as Paddle 8, even have artist investment and endorsement (Damien Hirst, in particular) – do you think this is beneficial, or do artists supporting these initiatives have a vested interest?
I have made my own foundation to support younger artists myself, and I have no vested interests, so I cannot claim that other artists have any hidden interests behind endorsing an initiative or the other. I just can’t see where virtual/online points of sales of artworks lead to without damaging the artist’s branding, especially there is no known threshold of quality nor sustainability that is declared with such new models. Anything can be sold online, and anything can be auctioned. I hate for my artwork to be treated or addressed as “anything”. I think dealers who resort to online sales or online auctioning are jest being themselves: dealers, which is the easiest way of sending an artwork to its final destination, without any effort in marketing and/or branding their artists, just sales to absolutely anyone. For an artist like and with the size of Damien Hirst, he can support 100% of initiatives that would enhance sales for artists who are in need. I would not think that way. I would think of other alternative and more sustainable methods to support artists in need.
Auctions are important for artists in establishing certain price points and increasing the value of work – do you feel online auctions have the same clout as live auctions in this regard?
Real auctions are performed after through due diligence, authenticity examinations and proper evaluation after market statistics and other figures and factors. An online auctions is a “cheap method” to get away with a dime and a cent more than the most banal ebay online sale. There are no guidelines to place street art practitioners beside studio artists, plagiarists beside authors, and a million other missing parameters to have a true auction event. I think –just without a solid proof– there are a lot of tax-evasion practitioners and money launderers with online art auctions.
ADWT – So are you saying that with an online auction a) the provenance of the work itself can be harder to establish and b) the provenance of the seller, more importantly, is harder to establish?
KH – Indeed those are two issues that are extremely hard to establish online without proper physical encounter with the artwork. Add to that, the authenticity of the work. Look for the case of the Middle East modern masters: so far there has been at least four cases of fraud with giants like Christies in the past five years with works of Hamed Nada, Abdelhadi El Gazar, Mahmoud Said and Tahia Halim. Those are only four cases and those happened with several thresholds of due diligence and physical examination through experts. In the case of online sales and online auctions, not only it becomes even harder to establish authenticity and provenance, but also the phenomenon encourages fraud and illegal secondary markets as well, a market much reminiscent of the illegal antiquity trafficking.
ADWT – What would you say to the online auctions that use specialists and claim to work the same way as traditional auction houses, evaluating work, providing a guarantee, perhaps even a viewing of the work, just not holding the auction itself physically?
KH – Well, in such cases only can this model work; I think it becomes like telephone bidding in physical auctions. I would still worry a bot about where the artwork goes for its final destination, but I guess it is a risk that one takes once s/he agrees to go to auction.
ADWT: I agree with you that it’s not the same as tangibly experiencing and seeing the work at a viewing, or the auction room itself. But what do you mean ‘you cannot control anything with online bidding’ – how is the control different, in your opinion?
KH – See, there are key factors here: legality, ethics in all aspects of the process that protect buyer, seller/consigner and artist, quality of the model and its sustainability. This applies for online auctions and physical auctions, except that in the online virtual world, things happen faster and than any auditing. Take those elements one by one: if you can control provenance and authenticity then all is legal, the ethical element depends on many factors for each artwork, its owner, need to consign, how the artist’s name and image is affected –if so–though the work belongs to a different owner, the quality of the auction as which names and which artworks are sold with which other artefacts, etc. things can be legal but unethical; I have a personal story. Last year one art dealer I was working with approached a major collection and proposed to the management to carry on an auction to some parts of their collection. It damages my name to get me out of a collection to place me in an auction and perhaps go unsold or go to a lesser collection, or go to a bar or a hotel or a toilet complex. There is absolutely no control there. This happened without my consent, was not legally essential as the work is already in a collection and the consigner is the owner. This operation was perfectly legal, but I consider it non-ethical as it damages my interests, and more unethical as the operation was proposed by an art dealer who must have protected my interests. Everything is out of anyone’s control, and you can argue that this may happen even in regular auctions. I would agree except that this operation was an online auction. All I could do is stop working with this art dealer. I still insist; the whole process was perfectly legal, but I also insist it is extremely non-ethical.
ADWT – Do you feel that, because the nature of online is ‘newer, faster, better, now-now-now’ that a part of this rubs off on the auction too, that perhaps people don’t value what they are buying as much, because of how they are buying it?
KH – what would bother me as an artist is only where the artwork goes at the end. I want my work to go to collections: great collections, museums, institutions, and to major collectors. The online auction has lesser tools –and I think whoever performs such auctions does not give a darn—where the artwork goes. This is an enough reason for me to abort working in such model if I can control it or if the work is my consignment.
ADWT – Let us address now generic issues of art in the region: The cliché and the label. Does the art coming from the Middle East to the international arena have to comply with Western criteria? Is there a problematic with labels such as Middle East Art, African Art, Arab Art, etc?
KH – The nineties saw the international stardom of brilliant artists Mona Hatoum, Sherine Neshaat and Ghada Amer, who share several commonalities in their respective practices: the three were born and partially brought up in the Middle East region, all probe in their art work issues like gender relationship, identity and migration and all are female artists. In the past few years, precisely after the tragic events of 9/11, 2001, many artists from the Middle East region came to limelight and their works are shown today in international events, museum shows and some are inserted in important collections. The question is: are those artists expected to fall into the trap of cliché and produce works in the like of Neshaat or Hatoum or Amer? The answer is difficult to deny, though is a subject of debate today. Then comes the important question of label: many, if not most, artists refuse to be labeled as Middle East artists or Arab artist, a phenomenon not forcibly shared by artists featured in the seminal 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre who came from Africa, and led successful careers for over a decade, curatorially at least, under the label of African artists.
ADWT – International curators and short-term research: the problem of defining good art with a limited grasp of the cultural complexities of the Middle East region.
KH – In the eighties, and for the long exhaustive research for Magiciens de la Terre, there were very few curators who were independent in the world; a curator had to be institutionally trained and had belong to an institution; today, with the plethora of independent curators at all age groups, and those who find attraction in the Middle East, more and more projects are produced in Europe and the USA for Middle East / Arab art exhibitions, mostly with time and budget constraints that is reflected on travel, research, the hasty selection of artists that is not forcibly representative of the complexities of the region, as well as the resulting publications that usually have little or no pedagogic value after the exhibition. The problematic is: since this is a global problem, not just to the Middle East, Is there a future trend that can be traced to indicate any improvement in this practice?
ADWT – Is there enough of a cultural identity in the Middle East, essentially a very heterogeneous cultural background, to drive creativity?
KH – Then comes the problematic of the content of the art work, the core element in an any exhibition; the rapid frenzy in events involving artists from the Middle East region drives many requested artists into a state of forced-production, which may lead to any of many direction, the easiest of which is to fall into cliché. And what can happen to the content of the artwork in a few years from now? Is there enough of a cultural identity in the Middle East, essentially a very heterogeneous cultural background, to drive creativity? What would be the situation in five years time, especially as art education today focuses on concept rather than craft, best described by Stephen Wright as “more and more artists today are radically deskilled”? (1)
ADWT – Colonialism, Post-colonialism: Are there Neo-colonial currents driving cultural practices in the region? Is this reflected on the content, hence the culture itself? Is this reflected on the art market?
KH – In 2008, The 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in China set out to look at dominant curatorial discourses that have provided the context and intellectual framework of contemporary art in the international arena today. Bringing such discourse to the table always proves limits of post-colonial discourse on tendencies towards institutionalization of the term post-colonial, towards its’ serving as the new orthodoxy, as an ideology that restricts fresh thinking.
We cannot escape the fact that cultural politics of the modern world is increasingly played out and negotiated in and through the field of contemporary art. A significant achievement of post-colonial discourse, related curatorial and artistic practices, has been its contribution to questioning elements of western society and its norms, to press for the creation of a more, open civil society engaged with difference, tolerance and diversity. Sometimes this is described as the emergence of the Post-West or, at least, that it signposts a move towards something like it. For ‘emergent’ societies, the post-colonial is a space for negotiation and communication, often for framing new conditions of self-understanding. (2)
Entangled questions arise: Modernity, economic influences and hidden agendas determining or influencing art: does the current western ‘imperialism and modernity’ determine the market?
ADWT – The changing aesthetics in the visual culture in the Middle East: influences and drivers.
KH – More and more artists from the Middle East today are losing interest in critical discourses like the local authentic versus the contemporary, or the intellectual versus the aesthetic. Most of the contemporary artists who lead progressive international careers tackle more challenging issues, in practices that involve documentation, experimentation and docu-fiction, in art projects that raise questions more than they provide answers, forcing the viewer to get entangled in along process of self-questioning. Mediums like video and photography almost undermined traditional practices like painting and sculpture. Artists more and more utilize photo-documentation techniques to trace new realities, manipulate the images in ways to enhance their messages. Question: are visual aesthetics –in Middle East art– being affected by new drivers? If so, is it globalization? Or simply new international market dynamics?
Footnotes:
- Term used in Wright’s panel presentation at the seminar “Neighbours in Dialogue”, Istanbul, Turkey, 2003.
- Please refer to Sarat Mahraj’s introductory text for the curated publication Printed Project 11: Farewell to Post-Colonialism- Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008, www.printedproject.ie published by Farewell to Post-Colonialism: Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008isual Artists of Ireland, 2009.