People of Interest · The Art World
Hettie Judah
The author and art critic on why the contemporary art world has become impossible to love, and what it would take to fix it.
The art world has always had a complicated relationship with money, but there's a difference between complicated and captured. What we have now is a market that has so thoroughly colonised the critical conversation that it's genuinely difficult to talk about the value of a work without everyone in the room assuming you mean its auction estimate. — Hettie Judah
The great institutional galleries — the Tates, the MAMAs, the Pompidous — perform accessibility beautifully. They have the gift shops, the family trails, the inclusive ticketing. And then you walk into the main galleries and you're confronted with work that has been selected, at least in part, because the right collectors own it. The building says welcome; the hang says we're not entirely sure about you. — Hettie Judah
There's a peculiar phenomenon where artists who criticise the art market find themselves absorbed by it, sometimes very quickly. Institutional critique has been a genre — a very saleable genre — since the 1970s. The market is extraordinarily good at monetising its own critique. It's almost an admirable quality, if you don't think too hard about what it means. — Hettie Judah
What I find genuinely hopeful — and I am trying to be hopeful — is the degree to which people are finding their own ways to art that bypass the official channels entirely. Studio open weekends. Artist-run spaces. Instagram, for all its degradation of the image. People are not less hungry for art. They're just increasingly unwilling to pay the social-admission price that the traditional art world charges alongside the entry fee. — Hettie Judah
The word I keep coming back to is trust. Not financial trust — whether the work will hold its value — but the older kind: whether the institution is offering you something honest. Whether the curator believes in what they're hanging, or whether they're hanging it because the donor who lent it is sitting on three of the six trustee seats. That trust has been quietly and systematically eroded, and rebuilding it would require an honesty about how the whole thing actually works that I don't see anyone rushing towards. — Hettie Judah