Grim news from gallery-land, where even Manhattan’s mega-blue chips are shedding jobs by the truckload. ‘The market’s fucked,’ one soundbite-handy dealer told me last week, admitting that the reckoning was probably long overdue. For artists, this is bleak: the oligarchs are stuck in Moscow, public funds have run dry and, short of shilling for the Saudis or tech barons, there remains only one street on which to beg: fashion.
The prestige rag trade has always had a synergy with the art biz: both hawk luxury goods, at least nominally underpinned by visionary genius, for ludicrous prices. Artistic careers have been made by shows at tax-efficient fashion foundations and both domains are notoriously exclusive. Yet even Damien Hirst isn’t selling his work in airports – not yet, anyway – and ‘visual art’ is really just a shorthand for any creative exercise that can’t be otherwise described. Fashion, to be clear, does not share its joyous absence of purpose.
There’s nothing affected about Marten: she really is that kooky
The two worlds, however, have collided, with fashion gaining the upper hand through sheer economic might. Take the example of two female artists of roughly the same age, both of whom came to varying degrees of recognition around a decade ago. Britain’s Helen Marten (b.1985) won the 2016 Turner Prize for a whimsical set of sculptures that reminded me, at the time, of props from The Clangers. Some art screams; this squeaked. Her current showing at Sadie Coles is a film produced in collaboration with Miu Miu, which wisely avoids co-opting its patron’s aesthetic and cleaves hard to Marten’s own winsome vision.
