‘Living in today’s system is living in a permanent and daily contradiction’—Interview with Paco Barragán

October 8, 2024
Author Dovydas Laurinaitis

Just this last week, ArtVilnius celebrated its 15th anniversary. As the biggest art fair in the Baltics, it spans five of LITEXPO’s halls, fusing offerings from local and international galleries with curated exhibitions, architecture and interior design showrooms, talks and awards. One such speaker at this year’s edition was Paco Barragán, writer, curator and art historian, who has written extensively over the last 16 years about art fairs, analysing their emerging place in the art world, especially in dialogue with other platforms such as biennials. Up until last weekend, I had never visited an art fair, for the simple reason that I wouldn’t be able to afford a single work there. I have never been a fan of window shopping, and perhaps too tied up in the idea that the ‘art market’ was an entity whose breath always smelt of lingering bitterness. This is why I was curious to find out what it was about the art fair as an event that impassioned Paco so.

Paco Barragán: It’s very simple, in Spain, if you live in Madrid, the main contact point with art is the ARCOmadrid art fair. For the people who are not specifically from the art world, the entry point is always the art fair because it’s not elitist; you go there and you are one among maybe a hundred thousand people. We had 40 years of dictatorship and it was ARCOmadrid that made us catch up, not the Reina Sofía museum. It was a moment in time when all these key players coalesced and participated—the state government, the regional government, the municipality, the chamber of commerce, also Caja Madrid, the local savings bank. In the 80s, there weren’t many contemporary art museums. I think the Reina Sofía started in 1992, but ARCOmadrid started in 1982 and they were bringing in international people to do panels.

Dovydas Laurinaitis: I was going to ask you about ARCOmadrid as in previous interviews, you’ve spoken about how it helped to transform its surroundings. Your talk at ArtVilnius is all about art fairs as tools of soft power, and Lithuania has a similar story to Spain, in the sense that after independence, there was a huge, concerted effort to advertise ourselves to the world and become part of various institutions. After a period of sacrifices, we are now at a point of growing prosperity. I’m curious how you would compare these two contexts, and how these art fairs, as instruments of soft power, help to transform their surroundings.

PB: Whether we like it or not, in today’s capitalism, it’s not politics, religion or philosophy that get people to sit around the same table—it’s culture, an expanded idea of culture. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tennis tournament, the Olympics, a pop concert, art fairs, biennials or museums with blockbuster exhibitions, they’re all part of this culture capitalism. Especially in the art world, you have to consider that since the 90s, everything has changed. In the US, it was always private so they needed to look for money and sell tickets, and the idea of a blockbuster was normal. But in Europe, since the 90s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the acceptance of neoliberalism by all the governments without critique, public funding has been decreasing everywhere. That means that you have to become part of the market and the art world has become part of the market and spectacle culture. In this new cultural landscape, most cities that don’t have a big, important, relevant artistic structure, which Vilnius doesn’t have—it’s not like London or New York where you have these big museums and a solid gallery network—these cities need to compete with each other to attract high-end tourism.  In a way, Vilnius has something exotic. I don’t know if it’s exotic enough like China or Brazil to get access to the big museums like MOMA and Tate, but it’s exotic. You also want an art fair for the local audience to come in touch with contemporary art, and it’s lowering the threshold for the general public. As an artist, you need galleries and the art market to sell your work. Art fairs have a certain objective that is very clear. When I talk about soft power, an art fair is a positive way for a country to showcase itself.

ArtVilnius’24. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

ArtVilnius’24. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

DL: I want to read your own quote back to you from 2008: ‘The debate about the market, the spirituality of art and the commodification of art belong in the last century. It’s more interesting to comprehend why art fairs have become so important, even if we consider them excessive.’. I found this fascinating because, for me, these debates are not of the last century, they feel very current. Especially, if we talk about the impact of AI, the internet, NFTs and so on, it feels like this discourse on the commodification of art has become more mainstream than ever before, and you have people totally uninvolved with the art world considering what is the value of art, what are we willing to pay for it, what quality are we satisfied with. Much later, you said your views from 2008 were very optimistic. So I want to put these things together and ask if you stand behind the assertion these debates and questions don’t belong in this century and why your views from that time, in your own words, were so optimistic.

PB: Eight years ago, working as a curator, I said to myself, ‘I don’t know anything’. Meaning, what you learn through art history is just a stupid narrative. You have to learn about the making of the art market, you have to research the history of collecting, you have to study museums. If you want to be a curator, you need to know all this. Most of the museums are the result of private decisions by aristocratic, bourgeois people. When you start paddling back in time, to look at Greece or Rome until today, and you read how the modern art market was made, it was always about commodification. But it was always a very small group of people interested in art. Even in the 1970s, when you read about dealers who went to art fairs in Basel and Cologne, they say clearly maybe 70 people came and then, one dealer went to have dinner with two artists and that was it. This is what I’m going to address in my talk at ArtVilnius. It’s from the 90s onwards that art became popular because trendy magazines started to think artists like Damien Hirst seemed like funky figures they could write about. You also have to consider how neoliberalism changed the whole game, and the most important game-changer was low-cost travel—what made art a global thing is being able to fly cheaply.

Yes, I was very optimistic when I did my first book. Those were the years when art fairs became curatorial platforms. As of today, you can’t imagine an art fair without a curated section. But then, I came to the conclusion that all of that was just fireworks. It’s fun, it’s great, art fairs want to be like biennials, they want to have some artistic respectability. In the end, an art fair is a place where you go to buy and sell art. You have all these self-reflective panels about ecology, saving the world and feminism, which is all nonsense at an art fair. The big problem I see is that at many big art fairs, these parallel activities are taking collectors away from the fair, which is madness. It is good for the collectors but not for artists, because if you paid to be there, you want the collectors to be at the fair. The dealers were complaining, and they were right! I think this global art fair or experiential model has run its course. It’s totally devaluated. You go to Miami and you have 30 parallel art fairs. That’s insane! I was more positive about it, but now I don’t appreciate it. I think art fairs need to be more professional and to the point. If you want to do all the other stuff, you can do a different kind of event like a festival or biennial. We need to call things by their name. And then, commodification has always been an issue, and the art world, until the 90s was very elitist and small, so commodification existing on a small-scale, it wasn’t really an issue.

DL: But how much of that has to do with the relative explosion in economic prosperity? Those who have access to participate fully in the buying and selling within the art market also have to accumulate a certain amount of wealth, which is a barrier to entry, it’s a different kind of elitism. Is it fair to say that elitism isn’t present anymore?

PB: Let’s cut to the chase—the art world has always been elitist. If you look from the end of the 19th century until today, most of the people in the art world are bourgeois. If you were not, like Camille Pissarro, you read his letters and he’s always worried about money. The art world, like it or not, is very elitist and it is very competitive, and if you don’t have good connections, it’s very difficult to survive. Every year, many people enter the art market and those who have been there, stay there. The number of collectors entering the art market is not the same. We have an excess of art and we don’t have the same demand. For some reason, the art world is unable to address other potential clients and attract new audiences, especially young professionals. The professionals who traditionally bought art were doctors, dentists, lawyers… those people have lost money, and they are not buying as much art anymore. We have these new professionals working in computer science, for example, and they’re not buying art.

DL: I think that opens up a bigger question related to the inherent value of art, which could be understood as the ‘spirituality of art’, going back to your 2008 quote. When you can replicate and 3D print a model of any sculpture you want, it becomes a bit redundant to buy something from an artist. But I do want to ask—

PB: Hold on. I want to add something, which is very important to what we’re addressing. It’s the fact the profile of the collector has changed completely. I would call it a neoliberal profile. The key collector in the 60s and 70s was Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, he was part of the aristocracy, he travelled, he listened, bought, never speculated, sold, donated. Then, the iconic collector in the 80s and beginning of the 90s was Charles Saatchi, he was a publicist and a dealer. Today’s collectors, like Steve Cohen, come from hedge funds, they don’t even go to see the art or attend galleries, they buy at auctions. The profile of the collector has changed radically. To this person, people like Saatchi are role models, they just want to buy quickly, sell and make big bucks. This is becoming a whole different game. The key thing is that there is less and less knowledge, especially among collectors. The big galleries don’t care, because they sell what the collector wants and this is also the reason why there is so much kitsch in the art world today. That’s horrible, but kitsch is high culture. Not only Koons, Kusama but also Gerhard Richter; all those lovely abstractions have become the international kitsch style. In every apartment, you have that stupid abstraction with yellow and green… it’s a matter of knowledge. This lack of knowledge is also affecting museums because it’s these people with money who are on the committees, who are the trustees. This whole neoliberal thing, the money thing, is affecting art on all levels.

ArtVilnius’24. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

DL: On this note, I have another quote from you: ‘The worst thing to happen to artists was art history. It pushed artists into a very subservient and insignificant role’. To me, art history has always been inseparable from the art market. What becomes art history is usually the thing that was sold, popularised and accumulated. My question to you is what if the worst thing to happen to artists was the art market? I’m not quite sure what your position is on this ‘new capitalism’, it sounds like there is some critique in it, but also an acceptance of the fatalism of capitalism, which the ‘art market’ represents: giving up on resisting and trying to find itself within this model. This feels counterintuitive to the idea of an artist as the one who is questioning and trying to reveal something about these structures, instead of becoming subservient to them.

PB: I think historically, it hasn’t changed much. If you look at art history, at the Renaissance and the Baroque, the Medici and Raphael or Michelangelo, they were paid artists. Whether you have a boss, or you are Velázquez and work as the royal painter, you have to follow certain guides. Velázquez painted portraits of kings, but he was obliged to paint them in a certain way to serve a certain ideology. To me, it’s not a big change. You work for a boss—you have to adapt and paint what the Medici wanted. You work for yourself, and you have to paint what you think people will buy. That’s not much of a difference. You have to sell your art. About capitalism, there’s no longer any opposition possible—

DL: Do you believe that, or is that how you observe things?

PB: No, there is no opposition possible. It’s surrounding us on all levels, psychologically, physically… For some reason, today’s intellectuals are unable to think of a system beyond capitalism, because when you think of post-capitalism, people think of communism or something like China, a mix of dictatorship. But a third system, I don’t see big intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek proposing a different system. They critique all capitalism but they are part of it. For example, I paid Žižek ten thousand euros for a talk, so please… Hal Foster, and all these guys—it’s very cool to be a critic when you live as a bourgeois. Naomi Klein—she has a one-and-a-half-million-dollar loft. Living in today’s system is living in a permanent and daily contradiction. The art market is a perfect example of these contradictions, it’s a reflection of the rest of society. Also, in the last few years, for some reason, they have sold the idea that art could be a good investment so there has been a lot of speculation in the art market. I don’t think it’s a good investment. I think most things people have bought will be worth nothing.

ArtVilnius’24. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

DL: For the last question I would like to ask, you’ve spoken a lot about the distinctions between biennials and art fairs, such as the interpassive visitor at biennials versus the visitor that has been scheduled for at art fairs, or the narrative of biennials versus the non-narrative of art fairs, but a particular distinction I wanted your opinion on, is to what extent are art fairs able to avoid becoming overshadowed by their surrounding politics? We see at recent editions of the Venice Biennale, there have been protests and discussions about who is participating, and who shouldn’t be allowed to participate. There’s cynicism about the theme, for example, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ against the background of colonial, imperialist politics. Is that the benefit of an art fair, that it is sort of politically vacuous as a place of commerce, so it almost has a neutrality that allows it to escape being implicated?

PB:  You explained it properly, that’s not the case with an art fair. But a biennial is politics because curators are social activists. They think they’re going to save the world. If they work properly, a biennial should create this kind of trouble. It’s also an instrument of soft power but it works from a different angle. If we establish a difference, a biennial is ‘good’ politics and ‘good’ soft power, and art fairs are ‘bad’ soft power. But this is a black and white distinction and reality is much more complex, and I think art fairs like ArtVilnius are very useful and necessary platforms. Biennials are intellectual, they’re about saving the world, saving the seas, saving humanity… and then, the curators jump on business class.

DL: The contradictions of capitalism once again rear their ugly head—

PB: The contradictions of living it.