Showing posts with label boom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boom. Show all posts

14/03/2014

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.