The art world can be a place of wonder, beauty, courage, connection and community. As an art critic and art historian, I have spent the last ten years swimming in these waters. But it can also feel like a poorly written joke: a place shaped by the 1%, populated by a shrinking middle class, scouted by anarchists and run by unpaid interns. Perhaps “art worlds” is a better way to describe areas that barely overlap. It can be difficult to find the crux between the contradictions of clean wine and conspicuous consumption.
It’s this bottom line, full of friction and contradictions, that has caught the eye of two Australian authors with new books out this month: Bri Lee’s The Work and Liam Pieper’s Appreciation. So are the worlds they create for readers real or fantasy?
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Lally, the protagonist of Lee’s first novel, is a young gallerist in New York facing the death of one of his artists (a financial boon for him) and the public condemnation of another facing allegations of sexual assault. Before the storm breaks, he meets Pat, who is trying to reach the top rung of a prestigious auction house in Sydney by securing the estate of an elderly divorced man at all costs.
Lee has clearly done significant research: He names Jerry Saltz and Artforum, recalls the strict phone policies of security guards at the Frick Collection, and often seems to describe real-world figures. “Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons is entirely coincidental,” the opening disclaimer reads. But Lee’s fictional director of Sydney Contemporary – a bald man named Harry – looks a lot like the art fair’s inaugural (hairless) president, Barry Keldoulis.
But Lee’s story also has a distinct whiff of unreality. There’s ease of expression – something akin to the endless finances of Sex and the City‘It’s Carrie Bradshaw who makes Lally an inexplicable cultural master: young, beautiful, selling art to the Museum of Modern Art and running what we understand to be New York’s hottest gallery. Often this industry is a setting for the painfully simple love between Lally and Pat; Despite the studied details, the sense that we’re consuming an idea rather than a reality never quite shakes.
Lally himself operates with this economics of optics. In one scene, she notes that “having an Asian American with a pixie cut on the table was a great look for the gallery.” In another, Lally reveals that he colluded with two art critics (cultural invertebrates of the worst kind) to create a synthetic controversy to increase the excitement around his show, one claiming to love him while the other wanted to burn him. In this case, my hyphenated presence as an Asian-Australian art critic puts me a little closer to the story than most, and much of it rings false.
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For starters, pixie cuts had their day, and art writers wouldn’t be so rudely manipulated; While it is susceptible to more subtle and commercial pressures from publications that rely on galleries to buy advertising, the critique operates under the myth of its own integrity.
In the last note of his book, Pieper confesses: “This book actually has nothing to do with art.” I tend to disagree. The novel is a portrait of Oli Darling: a “country gay artist” (his manager explains that simply being “bisexual” doesn’t figure much in the press releases) and whose career has been built on his ability to embody his dual positions. “a true blue Australian and a minority”. This is proving to be an alchemical combination. Oli’s life is that of a charming narcissist who constantly plays the game of identity politics in pursuit of shallow virtue and whose radicalism is public performance rather than personal belief.
Pieper also appears to have borrowed from real people to create parts of Oli. There’s a little bit of Ben Quilty’s salt-of-the-earth Aussie-warrior-everyone; Something of Andy Warhol’s cultured reputation; and a (self-confessed) pastiche of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s aesthetic purity. But it is the artist, not the writer, who is derivative: Oli is a rare example of someone who is an expert in this field. should There is imposter syndrome, but not yet.
Pieper’s book focuses on Oli’s fall from grace when he was publicly revoked for acting disdainfully about the Anzacs on live TV. The reality of cancellation finds particular ground in the Australian arts scene, which combines the national pastime of tall poppy syndrome with ever-shrinking arts funding and ever-increasing competition. We need only recall Quilty’s theatrical image of Jesus on the cover of Good Weekend magazine in 2019, which sparked outrage and saw him ironically crucified by many. Pieper’s hero has even less luck.
While Pieper is less specific than Lee about the people who fill these spaces, he is more observant and more playful. Oli constantly forgets the names of his interlocutors, describing them with shortcuts that emphasize their usefulness to him and are recognizable to everyone who works side by side in this world.
We meet “Money”, the patron of the arts whose indescribable wealth gives him influence over the Australian art canon; “The Paperman,” an arts editor and critic who is a noted gatekeeper of culture, angry at our changing world; and “The third-generation slum Baron who inherits enormous wealth and with it an unlimited reserve of white guilt”. The names are ridiculous and the explanations reach outrageous proportions, but Pieper has captured the golden umbilical cord that connects the artist to these figures and nourishes the creative life.
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Both The Work and Appreciation paint a recognizable portrait of the art industry: its obsession with the circulation of capital, the increasing compromises made in the pursuit of creative success, and the impotence of the individual faced with force majeure. However, it is Pieper’s book that takes this complex world beyond the understanding of art and returns a piece of the magic of art to us.