Best of the Noughties - A decade in art's ecosystem

In the last decade the art world inflated to a degree that no one anticipated. The market expanded and fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze dictated the art calendar for the year. Biennials became more popular as the queues for the blockbuster exhibitions became longer. The auction houses became more packed, with records for sales being broken time and time again. The YBAs (Young British Artists) and Saatchi generation placed a signature over the nineties, defining, for many, the art of a decade. With 2009 drawing to a close, it’s time to ask what’s happened to the Art World in this decade and who or what is and are the art/artists of today? Electronic Beats speaks to Zoo Art Fair’s Soraya Rodriguez, director of Europe’s most exciting art fair, and to multi award winning conceptual artist Ryan Gander about making and selling art in the last ten years.

With regard to the growth of art fairs and a suggestion that the public is moving into the commercial, how has the map of the art world been transformed over the last 10 years?
I think there has been a general growth all round. In as much as we’ve seen a growth in commercial galleries, we’ve certainly seen a growth in project spaces, artists’ collectives and alternative publishing houses. Louisa Buck referred to it as an ‘Art Ecosystem’, which I think is very true. I think the art fair has created a much more international scene. People are travelling much more to see things and you’re getting more things in from other places, it’s a lot less regional than it used to be. I think that Frieze Art Fair had a huge impact on the whole ‘eco system’, not just the commercial aspect of it, created a calendar moment where people from all professions – curators, critics and collectors – descend on London at the same time. London has responded by showing them what’s best. This has generated a lot of enthusiasm and really pushed art into a much more public sphere.

What do you feel has been the most successful art or artists that have come through in the last decade?
Blimey! There are too many of them! I guess the artists from the nineties are more crystallised now, and in terms of this decade there are people like Ryan Gander, Cyprien Gaillard, there is a whole load of them and a bunch coming up, people like Kate Owen who is amazing, very much idiosyncratic practices, people like Karla Black, who I think is an astonishing artist.

Were there any art movements that came through in the last decade?
I think ‘isms’ and movements were easier to define when you had small pockets of people. I think now the world has changed, not just art, we are much more globalised. We have not just television telling us what’s going on outside, we have something much more interactive, the web, which means that the whole thing has exploded, so within that, if you can find trends, then you’re much more likely to find them as sort of incidents. I think if there has been any trend that I’ve seen come through, it’s been the general sort of breaking down of boundaries, I don’t really talk about painting or sculpture or film so much, I just talk about art now. The biggest shift in this century has been the shift towards conceptualisation, not treating art as a commodity type product, there has been a lot of work there, that’s certainly one of the most interesting changes for me.

How has what happened in the last decade shaped the art market, and what do you think will happen next?
I’ve never lived through a recession before. In terms of the Zoo, in many ways the recession has been good for us in that it has made us contract and think about what we want to do as opposed to what we thought we might have to do. If you set up an art fair, you think you have to stay an art fair, and this year we thought if selling isn’t the point, then let’s set up some curated shows. Let’s just look at art, and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t do an art fair because we believe above all that an art fair is the best model of display. I think we will just have to wait and see what happens, what will happen in London and what is happening internationally, we could end up putting more emphasis on curatorial projects, or we could go back to being a tiny fair, we could end up selling burgers! I don’t mind as long as what we are putting out there is good.

Where do you think is the starting point to begin talking about contemporary art in the last decade?
The place where I guess it all starts is art School, that’s a good place to talk about contemporary art. I went to Manchester in 1996 and did my MA in 2000. When I wanted to leave my home-town and go to Art School, I wanted to go to Goldsmiths and or one of those reputable colleges in London, but I didn’t get in, so I ended up in Manchester.

Why Goldsmiths? Around that time the YBA phenomenon was occurring and a lot of them went there. Did this have something to do with your wanting to be there?
It’s got nothing to do with the YBAs, if you think about the YBAs now, people from my generation are a bit embarrassed about it. I think people who are my age and making art purposefully try to ignore that it ever happened. They don’t speak about it as they are a bit ashamed about how terrible British art was when Italian, French and German artists were getting ahead and pushing art history and British artists were just making bad advertising for themselves. London had the best art colleges as art is primarily in London because it is the capital.

Why do you think, as a working artist today, the YBAs were an embarrassment?
Friends my age, who are artists, or work professionally in the art world, I’d say that they think it’s a load of shit, that it’s conceptually very weak work, and essentially art that can’t really stand up in the context of Art History. It can only stand up in the circles of the media circus that it creates. I think that the artists of today are just glad that it doesn’t exist any more, and that fifteen years have gone and that’s enough time for British art to recover. Now we can get on with making some really good art and contribute to art history.

So, for example, Damien Hirst’s Skull – do you think that it’s just media sensation and nothing else?
Erm... yeah. I think the point of being an artist is to push things forward and to contribute, to understand what has gone before, appreciate it, interpret it, and then contribute to that history of art. To make something that is left for other people to enjoy and work alongside, I don’t think those things contribute at all.

From this decade, is there anything that you recognise as having a direct influence on the work you do today?
It’s less other artists and more a way of thinking, walking around with your eyes open, trying to conceive a conceptual art work from being aware. Associative thought methodology has been influential, where you think everything is relative so you could take a Mars bar wrapper and a Capoeira dancer and you could link the two together.

Is there anything in your work that you think makes it easy to identify as being from a particular trend in this decade?
For me the point in being an interesting artist is that you understand what you dislike and you don’t understand what you do like. You know what you can rule out and that puts you in a place where you don’t know what you are going to do, and you respond to it and the trend and encompassing aesthetic is behind you. A good example of that for me comes from French art in the last decade, Pierre Huyghe and that way of working, where the idea is paramount and you let the idea dictate everything.

So working on the basis of ideas as opposed to a medium, that’s what being a conceptual artist is about?
Yeah.

And how do you think conceptual art has changed over the last ten years?
I think it can be more fun and it looks less intellectual, and I like that. I think there is a bad history of conceptual art looking very dry. We have moved away from that and you can have conceptual art that is funny or tongue-in-cheek. It’s still as challenging and interesting but the presentation is more often something that everyone can relate to.

Where do you think art is going over the next ten years?
I’m not too sure, maybe it will go off in many different directions all at once, and if you try to interpret what will be in the future, you’re kind of modelling a parallel reality without letting things take their course. I would be happier not knowing about it.