Sold! Irish Art of The Celtic Tiger

Before Christmas 2008, I bought myself ‘Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug.’ It was a superbly written study of the great Celtic Tiger art boom of 1996-2008. However, its subject – the rampant greed, vanity and stupidity of the art stars and mega collectors – made me feel sick. During that period I had sold over €43,000 worth of art - but only a third of that was left after dealers fees, framing and art materials. I simply spent the money I earned on more paint and canvas and stayed in my home. The height of the boom 2003-2008 was the period in which I had totally detached from Ireland, stayed in my house, rarely went out, had only a handful of friends and was totally forgotten by the Irish art world. So to see how insane the Irish art world had become finally put in print was shocking in the extreme for me. I felt like a total loser.                                                                              

  

The first wave the Irish art boom happened in 1996 when the prices at auction of Irish art shot up 26%. Dead Irish artists like Paul Henry, Gerard Dillon, Leech, Lavery and Orpen saw the prices fetched for their canvas double or quadruple. The boom in the prices of these painters was in part due to a streak of Patriotism in Irish buyers who wanted to support the prestige of Irish visual artists. However, buyers were still wary of living artists. The strength of Irish collectors in London, boosted English interest in Irish visual art. Meanwhile small private galleries began to open up with dizzying regularity, our major museums built extensions, older museums were renovated, new museums were founded and an art lover in Ireland suddenly had more to see and of better quality. Our museums had greater funding to stage tour exhibitions from abroad – something art lovers in Dublin were starved of in the 1980s. The drop of the Down after 9-11 and then the Dot-Com crash momentarily slowed the frenetic pace of the Irish art market but the from 2004-2008 it went into overdrive. The big sellers of art in the Celtic Tiger were Louis le Brocquy, Kenneth Webb, Basil Blackshaw, Kingerlee, William Crozier, Shinnors, Teskey, Mark O’Neill, John Doherty, Robert Ballagh, Kevin Sharkey, Guggi and Rasher.                                                                                         

Kevin Sharkey was a likeable buffoon who believed his own hype, faked it untill he made it, made it, then blew it through hubris. He was propelled along by sheer egotism making dreadful parodies of Jackson Pollock. “His output was colossal; hundreds upon hundreds produced in 17-hour working days, and Sharkey boasted to a British newspaper that he’d made £2.5m in four years. The art establishment sneered, but what did he care? When galleries wouldn’t accept him, he opened his own: in Dublin’s Francis Street, in London’s Mayfair, in Ibiza, Donegal and Mayo. He says he sold 450 paintings in 2007 alone. Many of these were at art fairs where, jealous rivals noted, Sharkey would leave buyers weakened with his charm, cajoling them in his lilting Donegal accent... Bob Geldof had one of his works, as did Kate Moss, Pete Doherty, Sinead O’Connor, Liam Neeson, Charles Saatchi.” John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.211-212.                                 

Irish artists like this were given lots of easy life-style interviews, in which they regaled the viewers with funny anecdotes, funny stories of hard times and pretended to be men of the people. It was the era of the housing bubble, which saw the building of hundreds of thousands of houses in Ireland and an unknown hundreds of holiday homes abroad – all with wall space to fill. The book highlighted a selection of the most commercially successful living and dead artists, some I knew well others I had only vaguely known. None of them impressed me as painters of genius, in fact, most of them struck me as the worst kind of bimbo painting – all crass surface and no soul. Moreover key painters like Brian Maguire, Patrick Graham, Ciarán Lennon and Paul Doran who I considered impressive, intelligent, skilled and interesting artists were not mentioned.                                                

I knew of course of Robert Ballagh although I wished I didn’t. He was one of the most commercial artists we have ever produced. He was an illustrator who fancied himself as Van Eyke, a capitalist who flew the banner of socialism and a thinker in borrowed clothes.                                            

John Doherty was a far better painter from photographs and his choice was at least second year art student quality. But in an era of countless painters the world over painting from photographs nothing about his stood out as important.                                                                              

Donald Teskey painted drab, arty looking Irish landscapes of limited visual strength. It all looked like very unambitious Kiefer, or safe Hughie O’Donough.                                                                     

Percy French who though dead was highly collected, painted technically beautiful, limpid watercolours of Ireland, but was most famous for his music. As the holiday watercolours of the happy amateur they were up there with members of Royal families but as art they had nothing significant to say.       

                                                                                                              

John Kingerlee painted abstract blocks of impastoed oil paint, he was known to be eccentric, and had lead a colourful life – running away from the circus, working odd jobs, trying writing, pottery, living in squats and painting. His paintings had some small beauty – but it was undermined by over production, commercialism and hype.                                                                              

Martin Mooney painted technically accomplished classical oil paintings of the kind one saw a lot in traditional and reactionary galleries. Mark O’Neill specialized in syrupy soft-focus, oil paintings of dogs which sold for five figure sums at auction. I found his technique sickeningly cynical and manipulated – but knew why art lovers liked them so much – they pandered to the lowest common denominator – animals looking cute.                                                                                           

However, it was what the book revealed about the economic boom in Irish art galleries and the wealth achieved by a small minority of artists that was most shocking to me. “Some galleries did go to the wall during the boom, but far more opened than closed, and there were about 130 in the Republic at last count. A peek at their accounts in Companies House reveals a sheaf of healthy balance sheets. On The Wall Gallery LTD. Which owns the Kerlin, had €683, 207 cash in the bank when it filed annual returns in October 2007, with debtors owing €132, 335 and net assets of just under €0.5m. The Taylor Galleries’ directors – John and Patrick Taylor – paid themselves €203, 333 in 2004, €248, 012 in 2005 and €666, 666 in 2006. Dublin’s most prestigious gallery had €1, 811, 681 cash in hand in August 2006, up from €1.37m the previous year, although its debtors owed €986, 152.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.233.)                                  

The book also took aim at the controversial Artist Tax Exception Scheme which I myself had benefited from. “Due to the Freedom of Information Act, the Revenue Commissioners now publish the names of everyone who successfully applies for the artists’ exemption scheme. In the period from 1 April 2002 to 31 March 2008, some 1,146 “painters” got this exemption. Under the Revenue’s liberal definition this includes 81 “artistic photographers” and six cartoonists. There were 259 sculptors availing of the tax scheme, of which at least 30 were doing installation art pieces. So in total, 1, 400 or so visual artists joined the tax-free scheme in that six-year period.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.172.) Then Burns detailed the earnings of these artists: “Revenue has said that over half of those in the scheme had artistic income of less than €10, 000. This statistic has sometimes been used by art lobbyists to argue that most artists are living in penury. On the other hand, 59 artists who avail of the scheme declared income of over €200, 000, and grossed a total of €56m. Publication of that statistic caused considerable envy, and undoubtedly influence Brian Cowen’s decision, as minister for finance, to make artists pay tax on income over €250, 000 a year.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.172.) Personally, I had no strong feelings one way or another about the scheme. It meant a lot to me, because I made so little from art. I also approved of the original strategy to encourage Irish artists to stay in Ireland and to lure foreign artists into the country. However I did see its unfairness when it allowed a small minority to profit like U2 had.

David McDermott and Peter McGough in IMMA

I went on Tuesday 5th of February with Carol and Stephen - to the opening of An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photogrpahs 1990-1890 by David McDermott and Peter McGough in IMMA The two Americans who are now in their mid fifties - had emerged in the early 1980s as part of the East Village scene in New York. In an age of mannerism, pastiche and neo-this-and-neo-that - they went even further into the regurgitation of the past by living their life as though they were in the early 1890s. I suppose in this they were strangely more honest than their peers. They wore (somewhat tatty and thread-bare) vintage suits from the 1890s, photographed themselves in their Spartan studio in arch poses that recalled the eccentricity of early photographers and their subjects - and also signed their paintings with dates that came decades before they were even born.                                                            

  

As you know, I had meet David McDermott many times in Dublin – but then who hadn’t. He was a very nice man – very funny, very camp, very gay, very outgoing, very eccentric and unusually honest for the art world. But as artists we couldn’t have been further apart. He had no phone, electricity or modern gadgets in his home – which I visited once. But at the opening I saw Peter McGough had a digital camera circa 2007 - which he quickly hid in his pocket!                          

Their show was of vintage style photographs of themselves and their friends taken with old plate cameras and developed using arcane print techniques like Salt-Prints, Cyanotypes, Palladium Prints and Gum Bichromates. The poses recalled early homoerotic erotica, nineteenth century Dandies, and Christian iconography. Basically, lounging young men in summer linens, looking mournful and interesting.                                                                                                 

Like with their previous show in IMMA in 1998 they went all out to impress with their professionalism and perfectionism. Instead of the usual wine there was Moet Champagne, there was a very expensive catalogue (at €58 it was too much for a fickle fan like me) as well as two forms of giveaway texts. In order to get the lighting as close to daylight as possible (it was a dark cold February night) they hired a lighting company to shine spotlights in the windows of the galleries from outside. Inside they displayed their photographs in black and gold frames hung high and low and in banks as was fashionable in the early 1900s. In the centre of the rooms they had the large old plate cameras - which they had used - and the walls of the first room was hand painted to look like Victorian wallpaper. I respected this attention to detail and professionalism - and found their early rather amateurish photographs from the 1980s (oops should that be the 1880s) charming and funny. However, I found the later photographs more mannered and banal.                                              

Ultimately, I could not see the point of any of it. I too found myself becoming nostalgic – but for the good old days of the religious painters or even the Abstract-Expressionists – when art really did aspire to something greater than the recording of the trivial and theatrical lives of artists – but then who was I to talk! However compared to the art students they inspired in the noughties - McDermott & McGough were practically old masters.                                               

What Good Are The Arts?

In late November 2006, I had read with immense interest John Carey’s book What Good Are The Arts? This intensively researched, study of the arts, had provoked me to a more in depth study of arts meaning than anything I had read in a long time. Its polemic against the pseudo-religious, elitist, and commercial vanities of art in western culture, was long overdue and well made. Even if in trying to make these arguments Carey resorted not only to quoting the most extreme examples of conceptual art (Duchamp’s urinal, Manzoni’s supposed cans of shit, Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and Emin’s Bed) but also the tastes and policies of Hitler to make his point.                                                                         

Over all I found Carey’s book the most nihilistic study of art I had ever read. His prose was exemplary – accessible, cogent, well argued and hard to refute. But there was also a complete lack of love expressed for any paintings, drawings, sculptures, symphonies, movies or television programs of any period what so ever. Instead, the second half of the book was an argument for literature as an art form. Carey claimed that only literature could criticize itself and contain arguments against it. Well this should not have been so surprising given that Carey was professor of literature. But in fact many artists I knew had made work which criticized the nature of art not least many of the conceptual artists he decried.        
                                                                                                         
  
By tearing down arts; religious, High-Art, moral, therapeutic and critical delusions, Carey brought art down to the level of personal subjective taste, declaring that art was: ‘anything that anyone had ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.’ At the turn of the millennium’s godless, multi-cultural, consumerist, materialistic and politically relativistic world this may have been a logical conclusion. But it made criticism unworkable and indeed true appreciation impossible. Carey's argument was empty, meaningless, tautological and solipsistic. Art I felt did not exist in a vacuum - just as no man was an island. Art like personal life was intermeshed in human society – and it could only be understood as part of that society. Art I felt reflected the concerns of different aspects of society and of that society in its various manifestations. Art was part of the webs of meaning that made up humanity. Separating art from those webs, only led in my experience to the madhouse. By suggesting that art was “anything that anyone had ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person art”, Carey condemned appreciation of art to the solipsistic and subjective whims of the individual.                  


But art, I had come to realize was not about individuals – it was about communities of taste. Every artist was part of society and their work was important only in terms of the effects it had on its audience. Geniuses like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso or Duchamp, were only geniuses in respect that they fulfilled the expectations of their society. Even artists like van Gogh and other outsider artists like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, who were ignored and marginalized in their lifetime were only important because history had proved their work to be prophetic and relevant to subsequent generations. Outside of the matrix of the art world, I knew there were millions of artists producing ‘art’, but to be true art, their art had to be recognized by those on the inside. This may have been cruel, this may have been arbitrary, this may have been elitist, this may have been unjust – but no more so than poverty or social injustice was in general. Art I felt was not merely about consumerism, it was about dialogue, argument and agreements of taste. As a result, what was surprising was not so much the range of disagreements on art, but the degree of agreement on what was great art.                      



Time and time again, in art history, members of the art elite as well as members of the public had come to agreement on the value of certain artists and certain movements in art. But even if that were not the case, it would still not matter. The fact was that time and time again certain tribes, groups or elites had championed certain artists or artistic styles in the face of the majority opinion, and had won for themselves and their art a place of respect and recognition. As such art, like religion, politics, and philosophy I had come to believe was part of the social dialogue that gave society and humanity its sense of meaning. The meanings may have been particular, but they were the best man could hope for.