The Grand Tour

Felix Salmon submits:

Well, that was quite the tour. Wednesday: Villa Panza, in Varese. Thursday: Byblos Art Hotel. Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Venice. Monday, Tuesday: Kassel. Wednesday (today): Berlin, and No Art At All Please God. (Thankfully, I saw the Brice Marden retrospective in New York already, which gives me a good excuse not to see it here.)

The Grand Tour, it turns out, is not only exhausting – I slept for about 11 hours last night, after napping on the train from Kassel – but also physically painful. All that tromping around art galleries for hours and days on end takes its toll on those with less-than-perfect posture, and by the time I got to Kassel I was hugely grateful to Chinese conceptualist Ai Weiwei for installing hundreds of Qing dynasty chairs (he collects them) all over Documenta.

At the same time, the Grand Tour turns out to be incredibly stimulating, intellectually, and so when I did get back to my computer with the intention of blogging, I invariably ended up instead reading up on what I'd just seen. With any luck, now that I'm not trying to drink from an art firehose, it'll be easier to blog.

But what does this mean for collectors and art-world professionals who feel obliged to "do" Venice and Kassel this summer? It means, for one, that if you're serious about going to both of them, you have to take your time: I'd say that two weeks would be the minimum, really, since most people can't look seriously at art for more than about three or four hours a day.

Many collectors understandably shy away from that kind of commitment, either because they've got day jobs or because life's too short to spend two weeks looking at art most of which they will have no interest in collecting. That's where art consultants come in. They're not just a way of catapulting your name up the waiting list at Marian Goodman; they're also a way to pay someone to look at all this art for you, and show you the stuff they'll know you'll be interested in.

It's a bit of a cheat, to be sure. But it's certainly the case that there is a whole class of collectors now who are acquisition-minded and who have relatively little interest in anything they have no ability or desire to buy. Sports gamblers find themselves unable to get interested in any game where they don't have money on the line, and art collectors similarly take Tyler Cowen's advice to its logical conclusion.

Cowen also offers advice for how to defeat the boredom that, despite our best intentions to be culturally literate, overtakes many of us minutes after we enter an art museum. How do we deal with this “scarcity of attention”? Pretend to be an art thief, he suggests—in every gallery, pick one picture that we’d like to run off with. Sounds juvenile, admits Cowen, but it “forces us to keep thinking critically” rather than daydream about the snack bar.

Instead of pretending to be an art thief, much better to genuinely be an art collector, especially at a fair like Art Basel where everything is for sale. But at Venice and Kassel, a very large proportion of the work is not for sale, and much of the rest is not particularly collectible (I'll try to expand on this idea later). Which means that the collector's attention device – wondering whether he wants to buy the thing he's looking at – is weaker in Venice than it is in Basel, and weaker in Kassel than it is in Venice.

One big surprise, to me, of the Grand Tour was the huge number of perfectly ordinary people from all over Germany who were attending Documenta. This year's show was not well received in the art world – Richard Dorment of the London Telegraph went so far as to call it "the worst art show ever". But it's undeniably popular, even at €27 ($37) for a two-day ticket. Maybe one lesson of the Grand Tour is that a lot of art, especially documentary-style installations, is much more popular among the general public than it is among the art world's cognoscenti.

Maybe art collectors, then, shouldn't feel obliged to go on the Grand Tour. They live in their own art bubble, and a great deal of the art in Venice and Kassel lies outside that bubble entirely.