French-language version

ALTERNATIVES TO THE ART MARKET IN NEW YORK


Vanity Fair. Double page, published in December 2006, no 556, pp. 340-341, Illustration Nigel Holmes.

Georges Armaos
Changes in New York Galleries from 1945 until the present

Brett Littman
Alternative Arts Movement in New York A Personal History

 

PREVIOUS LETTER THE INFLUENCE OF THE SAINT-SIMONIANS AND THE IDEA OF ART IN THE VANGUARD OF THE SOCIAL REFORM BODY MORALITY DANDIES The Model Child THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE USEFUL Photographs by amateurs The market, at the start art in the republic the voyage of the avant-gardes Major exhibitions WHAT IS SOCIAL ART ? PRIMITIVISMS realisms Joseph Beuys : A shaman's factory the Artist and the philosopher appropriations THE OPACITIES OF THE TECHNOLOGY

    
 
        Brett Littman, who has worked in the alternative art world of downtown New York, retraces here the history of noninstitutional art forms and art exhibitions from the 1960s to the present. He helps us to gauge the power of art actions that were able to thrive only against a background of protests against capitalism in general and of anti-Vietnam War politics in particular. Not that these experiences would not have survived--some of them have, indeed, endured--but they have done so in a landscape now radically altered by new paradigms where economics has come to dominate all forms of social activity.

        Georges Armaos, for his part, goes back over the "rules of the game" on the New York art market, whose overheating adds to its strange aura. He reviews the role each actor plays on an artistic stage that is directed more and more by dealers to the detriment of museums and critics.

In this landscape, what remains to be written is the international history of the means artists have always availed themselves of in order to escape their condition as pawns on the chessboard of consumerist societies. These, indeed, are societies that regularly prefer to take art as a commodity that is both magical and profitable.