When art upsets…

Art has always held a mirror to society, questioned its own limits and provoked varying degrees of outrage. This past year, the art world spawned a generous crop of polemical reactions; we take a brief look at some of them…

In January 2015, the Belgian painter Luc TUYMANS (1958) was convicted of plagiarism by a court in Antwerp. The court decided that his A belgian politician looked a little too much like a photograph of the politician Jean-Marie Dedecker published in the newspaper De Standaard. Not particularly sympathetic to Contemporary art, the judge convicted the artist of plagiarism. But Luc Tuymans’ work, like that of many other Contemporary artists, is deliberately based on the appropriation of existing images that he re-contextualises to present his own vision of the world. Tuymans is currently the most dearly paid Belgian Contemporary artist (with an auction record of $2.7 million for Rumour on 15 November 2013 at Christie’s New York) a market position that has naturally generated a certain amount of envy.

Another similar accusation was filed in France concerning a Jeff KOONS exhibition. After a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum, which passed off without the slightest glitch with the American public, the artist found himself accused of plagiarism regarding two works from his Banality series (1988) in his Parisian exhibition. Alain Seban, the then Director of the Centre Pompidou, issued a press release in which he stated that “similar questions have already been raised in the United States regarding other works from the Banality series whose very principle is to use purchasable objects or images from the press”, adding that “the concepts of ‘quotation’ and ‘appropriation’ are both fundamental aspects in Modern and Contemporary creation. It is essential that museums should continue to reflect these artistic tendencies”.

Appropriation is indeed a recognised artistic orientation, one of whose major exponents was the American artist, STURTEVANT who died last year. Her works, inexact copies of works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, nowadays fetch several million dollars… In Sturtevant’s case, the appropriation of masterpieces was absolutely flagrant. During the 2014 FIAC in Paris, a French artist Valentin CARRON (1977) was criticised for his overly subtle homage to the sculptor Francesco MARINO DI TEANA (1920-2012) and particularly his translation of the work’s title into English (The Dawn to translate Di Teana’s L’Aube). A lawsuit was narrowly avoided. With a work on a related subject (but in a different medium), Valentin Carron’s sculpture L’Aurore fetched $75,000 at Christie’s New York just several days after the FIAC… suggesting that a little heated debate has more of a positive impact on an artist’s prices than might be expected.
During the same art fair, Paul MCCARTHY’s inflatable Tree sculpture ‑ looking very much like a giant anal plug and installed in Paris’s prestigious Place Vendôme ‑ was vandalised. One hundred and fifty years after the scandal caused by Manet’s l’Olympia at the Salon de Paris, McCarthy’s phallic symbol at the heart of the French capital (a city absolutely full of architectural representations of this type, without the slightest irony) provoked a wave of protest… and a counter-protest of support. Several months later, Anish KAPOOR’s Dirty Corner (rapidly renamed The Queen’s Vagina by his critics) was damaged in the gardens of the Versailles Palace. The French public seems to be particularly sensitive to the issues of plagiarism and indecency, possibly detracting from its judgement, its imagination and its humour…

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Cuban artist Tania BRUGUERA (1968) managed to mobilise the international art community this year. Just a few days after the announcement of a relaxation in diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba (December 2014), she organised a performance in Havana that seriosly irritated the Cuban authorities… She was arrested and her passport was confiscated until last month (10 July 2015). The affair triggered a positive reaction from the market: in May 2015, Phillips sold her Destierro for $81,250 including fees, twice its estimated price, whereas Bruguera’s work had never previously made auction news. Clearly, certain players in the art market decided to express their support for the artist by hyping up her arrest in the auction sphere.

Every country seems to have its sensitive points. People are not offended by the same things in Paris, New York, Cuba, Beijing and Doha; but artists constantly elicit reactions that allow us to gauge the mores of our societies. And today, more than ever, the art market seems to react to the reactions that certain artist provoke.