By way of introduction to his show Economics at the Chateau Joffe Gallery in London, the painter Jasper Joffe has published Economics, an email conversation with painters, collectors, and economists. Artist Kiera Bennett, one of the six interviewees, appears slightly suspicious of Joffe’s motives. She writes: “Having sent these questions to us on the eve of news of the confirmation of the ‘double dip’ and all the recent headlines, I feel that you, Jasper, are truly the king of PR.”
Yet while self-promotion is clearly one aspect of the project, reading the interviews in full does uncover some serious issues, particularly around questions of what could change in the art economy and what success means to an artist.
The questions were tailored to each interviewees field of expertise, and include the everyday (‘How important is money to you?’), the slightly ridiculous (‘Why can’t everyone be rich?’) and the serious (‘How have the recent economic problems and ongoing recession affected you?’). But it’s the question of how the art economy might change that gets the most attention from artists.
Tim Stoner writes: “I became very cynical after winning Beck’s Futures [in 2001], because the art-world-economic expectation was to continue doing the same thing so that I could feed collector demand. Change and development are necessary in order to generate new ideas and further one’s vision, and capitalism does not create much space for this.”
Kiera Bennett agrees: “It is a delicate line between that which ‘enables’ you to make art and being part of an ‘industry’ making a ‘product’… I’ve even stopped making work that started to sell well as I wanted to follow other lines of logical investigation, that those previous buyers weren’t so keen on.”
For the show itself, Joffe has constructed “a visual vocabulary of the abstract terms used in discussing the economy”, taking images from Flickr as his source material. As with his previous exhibitions, expect a mixture of the alternative, the extravagant and the controversial.
Speaking to a-n, Joffe said: “Is there anything I would change about the art economy? Personally, I would like to make more money. Generally, I would like more artists to make money.”
Economics, 10 – 18 August, Chateau Joffe, London www.jasperjoffe.com
More from a-n on the art economy
Artists’ work in 2011 How did artists’ livelihoods and practices fare in 2011, a year in which cuts across the arts, further and higher education and the rest of the public sector began to bite?
www.a-n.co.uk/arts_funding Some routes through the data and food for thought in the wake of recent changes to public funding for the arts.
www.a-n.co.uk/making_a_living Includes sections on the Art market and Self-employment that uncover how artists use employment, business and commercial environments to create and sustain their practice.
The artist’s fees toolkit Richard Murphy’s step-by-step guide to calculating an individual daily rate for an artist.
