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 New York’s Spring art auction season did not echo the performance of the contemporary art market.  Christie’s and Sotheby’s have, again, accrued hundreds of millions of dollars selling some of the finest pictures to be sold.  The names of the big tickets remain the same: Warhol, Freud, Bacon.  The buyers are, by and large, the same.  But so are the sellers.  The undercurrent here is one of inclusion, but not exclusion.  Or, if you have the money at auction, you can get anything.  And business is booming. ¶Looking at the sick half-sibling of the auction house, the contemporary market, things are not doing as well.  The reports from the art fairs are reserved at best.  People, apparently, weren’t buying.  At least not the big ticket pictures.  Smaller art fairs, such as Chicago’s NEXT fair, which focused on less expensive art, seemingly outdid bigger comparators, like ArtChicago, according the Baer Faxt.  The more obvious symptom is the closing of galleries around the country.  The market is recoiling slightly as purse strings drawing shut.  ¶Auction houses are where easily salable picture come up again.  A large element of risk is gone, vanquished by a series of connoisseur checkpoints and market research.  The primary market is the proving ground for art.  There are infinite reasons why art objects don’t sell and so the risk is omnipresent. ¶Tough times are ahead for every industry.  Art, like other luxury goods, was afforded some lag time.   But, as the world’s money weathers the storm, so to will art.  One good thing to note: a flush of any market leaves the strong and talented and so we may well be in for a creative explosion.  Just remember that Weimar Germany was equally as creative.  So that explosion may not be a renaissance.

Dan Cameron has announced the star-studded roster for the inaugural run of his ‘Prospect.1 New Orleans.”  This biennial is supposedly aimed at rejuvenating the city which is still reeling from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina some years ago.  By bringing such names as Cai Guo-Qiang and Fred Tomaselli into the Louisiana bayou, the idea is that something lost in the storm will be reclaimed, that the lives of residents will get better and that the city will actually heal in some capacity.  I am still unsure over the original conception of this event, because all of it sounds like complete make-believe.   Like many others, I do believe in the communicative powers of art.  I also hold that successful works can also parlay some amount of spirituality or emotion or the like.  But I have little faith in contemporary arts ability to bring any level of stability back to a place like New Orleans.  Not only is city still lacking a stable infrastructure, but it is also missing residents and strong political leaders.  That Cameron, a veteran curator and long-time New Orleans fan, thinks a biennial can fix any of those things is myopic at best. I do not believe that this fair is destined for failure, or that it will not bring about some sort of short-term change in the scarred city.  The risk here is more long-term.  On a volunteer trip to the city a year after the storm, it was apparent to me that certain parts, particularly those that catered to privilege, had been rebuilt.  They had running water, police patrols and pedestrian traffic.  Within walking distance from these places, however, some down-trodden neighborhoods were boasting the highest crime rate in the continental United States.  Homes that had been ravaged by the storm were still untouched and the residents were incapable of returning.  Even now, years later, stories of lives interrupted still come out and thousands of New Orleans’s old residents are still dispersed around the country.  In this chapter of New Orleans history, it confuses me what exactly Cameron imagines will be the aftermath of attracting a wealthy art-public to the city.  It may cause some hotels to be built, but with companies drawing contracts with Latin American countries for workers, it will not stimulate the local job market, or bring the old residents back.  It may bring money into the French Quarter and Garden District, but neither were truly incapacitated by the storm.  It may also bring a renewed interest to the city, but without those thousands of residents who are still forced to stay away, NOLA will be only a reminiscent shadow of its former self.  Unfortunately there is little to do but wait and watch as the show goes on view at the end of this year.  One can hope that Cameron will be right and NOLA will be flooded with artsy upstarts aimed at making the city better.  Now it is just a matter of who is defining better.  Sadly, I think those who saw NOLA as a rich center for Jazz and Black American history may not like what develops.  As someone who wants to see the city stabilize itself, I hope that I will be surprised by the outcome of Prospect.1 New Orleans.