feAture john baldessari
But it’s always better to have someone who wants to show and sell
your work than not.
Of course! Here’s a case in point. Luckily I got into it when there wasn’t
any money. So if that money evaporates, then I still know what I’m
going to do. But with a lot of artists, you don’t know if they’re going
to continue if the money evaporates. Maybe yes, maybe no. A lot of
MFAs – you know, I’ve taught most of my life – if they don’t have
anything going after two or three years, they say, “You know, why don’t
I just have a good life, where I can go out to dinner and get married
and have a family.” And they just stop. Well, the point I was going to
make is, some of my early pieces, well, I couldn’t give them away! – well,
I did; I gave them to friends – but I think the highest price I ever sold
one of those pieces for was $200. One of those pieces I now have
up at Marian Goodman’s, for the anniversary show, and she called me
up before I left and she said, “Somebody wants to buy it”, and I said it
wasn’t for sale, and she said, “Will you take $6 million?” And I’m thinking,
I couldn’t give it away!? You see what I’m getting at? It’s the same work. No. Not at all. I think you can probably navigate it. But it’s hard. And
I’m the same person. I haven’t changed. I still do the same thing I do. then if you’re a woman artist, it’s even harder, you’ve got a biological
clock ticking. It’s not easy. I think it’s probably less than one percent – I’ll
That’s a little disingenuous. You’re still doing the same thing you do, be generous and say there are probably ten percent – of artists that
but you’ve had this career, and your work and personality have been can live off their work. Of course there are teaching jobs, so maybe you
ascendant in the last decade. can get a teaching job in Wyoming, but, you know, then you’re dead.
But what I’m saying is that whoever is buying it now is buying it for As it regards the market, and the kind of money and the kind of
those reasons, not because they knew the work then, because they exposure that the artworld has seen over the past five years, do you
could have bought it then! think that this just is our reality now and not simply some temporary
inflation as so many think?
But this becomes a question of the market, for which there’s this death
watch. There are those who are rooting for it, that the bubble will burst About a year ago I was with my dealer Marian Goodman and we were
and there will be this cleansing of the artistic soul… talking about the same subject, and she said she thought there might
be a paradigm shift because, all of a sudden, there’s money from other
Well that’s what they said in the 1990s, and because of that there was parts of the world: China and India and the Emirates, and that it might
going to be this whole rash of unsaleable art, but I didn’t see it. continue, that this is going to be our world.
Is it wrong for an artist to want to have a family and a place to live and But that allows for a different ‘future’, different from the one that
economic stability? Those can’t be mutually exclusive, can they? supposes that after some ‘correction’ we’ll be back 30 years…
55 Artreview
John Baldessari.indd 55 4/12/07 16:35:09
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