Expensive Art

Felix Salmon submits:

There's two types of expensive in art. There's art which is worth a lot of money in the art market, and then there's art which is simply extremely expensive to make. The latter, of course, is nearly always the former as well: it's hard to imagine that Richard Serra or Matthew Barney would have the budgets to create their grand artistic endeavors if weren't for the fact that they can sell their work for vast sums of money once it's made.

One interesting exception to the rule that expensive-to-make art has to be worth a lot of money is Documenta, the once-every-five-years art show in Kassel, Germany. It has a €19 million budget, which can be spent on any art the curators consider good, even if it has no resale value at all. Hence Ai Weiwei bringing 1,001 of his Chinese compatriots to live in Kassel for a months, or the Documenta curators picking 50 visitors (at random?) to be flown off to Roses in Spain for a gastronomic extravaganza at El Bulli, generally considered the greatest restaurant in the world. (Each day's menu is exhibited on a wall of the Orangerie, in Kassel, which generally serves only to remind art-bludgeoned visitors that they'd much rather be in Spain, experiencing the meal of a lifetime, rather than in Germany, experiencing yet another slide show about the after-effects of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa.)

All the same, a couple of decidedly commercial artworks do stand out as being Really Expensive in the wow-that-must-have-cost-a-pretty-penny sense of the term. In Kassel, James Coleman, with the help of Marian Goodman, is exhibiting an extremely high-definition film of Harvey Keitel intoning grandly, his every breath and glottal stop caught on tape and reproduced perfectly. And in Venice, Felix Gonzales-Torres hasn't let the fact that he died a decade ago stop him and his gallerist, Andrea Rosen, from building two enormous circular pools out of solid Carrara marble.

In the case of Coleman, the production values are so high that one wonders where exactly the art is residing: you admire the shiny surface much as you admire John McCracken's sculptures elsewhere in the exhibition, and you wonder if with Coleman, as with McCracken, that's the point. The impression of the art residing very much on the surface of the piece is reinforced by the way it's exhibited: visitors walking up the stairs to the second floor find themselves confronted with a large glass wall through which they can see McCracken's work, but not hear it. Never mind the meaning, the curators seem to be telling us, feel the gloss!

McCracken knows what he's doing, however, which is more than can be said for the deceased Gonzales-Torres. The pools in Venice recall for me Jenny Holzer's own attempts to elevate inherently conceptual art by enshrining it in expensive marble, and it's not a happy precedent to be reminded of.

Felix Gonzeles-Torres is an artist of simple means. Paper, candy, light bulbs, clocks – these tools are like Dan Flavin's fluorescent lamps, or even Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel. The streets of Venice were full of art-lovers clutching rolled-up works by Gonzales-Torres – take one, take ten, they're free! Whopping great slabs of Carrara marble don't really fit in.

And indeed I missed Felix's lightness throughout the American pavilion. The light-bulb pieces are not naturally suited to the pavilion's low ceilings, and were not helped either by the use of very heavy cabling; and the choice of a black-liquorice candy piece kept the entire color scheme monchromatic, along with the white marble and the black-and-white photos and prints.

Even if Gonzales-Torres is dead, however, Andrea Rosen certainly knows what she is doing. After having been exhibited in the American Pavilion in Venice, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the marble pools have become the single most expensive artwork by the late Cuban-American ever – expensive in the money-changing-hands sense of the term. The piece will look great in the forecourt of any grandly neoclassical building, be it a private villa or a public museum. And the fact that it's made of such luxuriant materials makes it easier for a collector to justify shelling out the megabucks for it.

Of course, it's entirely possible that Gonzales-Torres would have done exactly this piece in exactly these materials had he stayed alive. The art world has a way of pushing artists to do expensive works: artists are human too, remember, and possess the same profit motive that drives the hedge-fund managers who collect them. Artists from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst have shamelessly let money drive their art-making decisions, moving beyond mere marble to the use of actual diamonds in an attempt to boost their prices.

In the secondary market, however, the most expensive art works of all time have all been made of much more modest means: good old-fashioned oil on canvas still reigns supreme as the medium of choice for collectors worldwide. Maybe one sign of the bubble bursting will be when gallerists start urging their artists not to use marble and diamonds.