Checklist, Please!

For many people who visit contemporary art galleries the most vexing part of the experience is not the art it’s the checklist. The standard version in galleries that are up to date now seems to be one or more helpful sheets of paper, depending on the scale of the show, with descriptions of the works in the order that they appear. It’s a cool, noirish, crossword puzzle that dates from the time of the typewriter. Some galleries have warmed it up with tiny digital pictures next to the descriptions; a few include inventory numbers which convey a sense that you are looking into the gallery’s inner world. Ironically, the one thing you almost never find on a checklist in these times, when people fear that art is being dominated by money, is a price. That’s why it’s called a checklist and not a price list. For a price list you need to ask. And getting one isn’t always so easy. I’ve been to galleries where it took 5 or 6 minutes of nervous paper shuffling to dig one out; I’ve been to galleries where I had to wait while they printed one up—special. And I’ve been to galleries where I left after 15 minutes because they just couldn’t find one.

Hiding the prices creates the illusion of exclusivity. That’s the practical explanation. Contemporary galleries have to create their own demand and pretend it exists until it actually materializes. When it does, if it does, financial success doesn’t often lead to glasnost. Quite the opposite. Champion businesses like Gagosian Gallery are the most secretive and aloof. They would prefer us to think of them as mini-museums, as though they had moved on from the tawdry selling of individual artworks into a new realm where wealth magically transfers by osmosis. True, Gagosian Gallery is more interesting than most museums. But they do not have a board of donors. They have an army of salespeople who have to sell art. Just not to you or me.

While the gallery profession is standardizing due to the proliferation of curatorial studies programs, it is still an odd business run by people with odd backgrounds and curious motives. There are artists whose studio careers never took off, ex-lawyers tired of racking up billable hours, and hustlers who naturally take to a realm where the truth can always be spun. But for the most part art dealers have one thing in common: a desire to be made special by their job. We still treat the art object as an exalted thing and we act as though its blessings will rub off on us, the priests and handmaidens who deal with it. This is a vestige from the old days when art tried to distinguish itself from other retail objects, when it tried to set itself off as an exception to the rule of capitalism, when it used to think of itself as a substitute for religion. But even the church wasn’t above selling indulgences. Lying $5. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife $25. Redemption through aesthetic consumption: priceless, apparently.

The churchy thing has persisted despite the fact that it’s been almost 100 years since Marcel Duchamp stripped art of its exalted status and returned it to the everyday world of toilets drains and shovels. Warhol made it clear 50 years later that art was precisely about business, that religion had been replaced by celebrity, and that money had become the new god. With the art world seemingly in agreement that art’s relevance is connected to mass culture, and that mass culture is defined by money, the first thing we should expect to see on a check list is the price and yet it is the one thing consistently absent. Every nook and cranny of the human body has been stripped bare by art, every dark corner of our society investigated, explored and uncovered, but the price list teases with what it keeps hidden. Galleries profess their desire for a mass audience but they don’t actually want to deal with the mess of it, the uninformed questions and the reluctance to buy product.

I was fascinated to discover on a recent trip to New York that Mary Boone goes against the grain. The group show in her Chelsea space at 541 West 24^th St. couldn’t be more unassuming in comparison to the mannered curatorial projects that mostly turn up these days. The gallery assembled an impressive array of artists who have worked there over its 30-plus year existence to pay homage to Ron Warren, Boone’s long time assistant. Aside from two portraits of Warren and a few works titled For Ron, the works don’t overtly relate to him. To an outsider the show feels like a celebration of the gallery’s history as much as Warren. The high point comes when you discover that Warren is right there at a desk in the open office, muse and salesman (in that context practically a work of art himself, although not on the check list).

Which brings me to the point of this long-winded entry: Mary Boone publishes a price list. The old kind. Dark, black, coarse font on cheap white paper. Artist, title, medium, date, size and price. The cherries on top are voluptuous red dots next to the sold works. Jean Michel Basquiat canvas with oil stick, $9,000,000.  Julian Schnabel oil on canvas $3,000,000. Brice Marden $400,000. Sherrie Levine $300,000.  All sold. The few price lists I do see are reprinted as soon as something sells with the price replaced by the word sold. The original number is effaced as quickly as possible, as though with its removal came relief from the psychological pressure of its nakedness.

Forensically speaking, the trail of commerce on the Mary Boone price list might seem fishy to some. As my companion suggested, the Basquiat could have been sold months earlier, as could the Marden and the Levine. Boone could have bought one of the objects herself. I do that all the time in my gallery and I don’t announce it to the world. I just write sold and brag about it. Or, maybe, it just is what it is. We’ll never know. And that’s not the point. The price list is like a site-specific drawing that blurs the line between the space reserved for aesthetic acts and the business area. Like an On Kawara it tells us each and every time in the same terms that money is still alive and well and percolating just beneath the show. The mere willingness to consort with prices in public makes the gallery experience at Boone richer and more honest than everywhere the black box, pseudo chastity of the checklist prevails.

 

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