The recent record $4.3 million paid by an anonymous buyer for Andreas Gursky‘s bland and featureless view based on a fairly bland and featureless stretch of the Rhine, Rhine II, provides yet more evidence of the art world’s inability to understand photography. But then the art market isn’t about understanding images, but about making money from them, something it does extremely well.
Although Christie’s write (and possibly even think) that this work is “a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship with nature on the cusp of the 21st century“, to me it seems profoundly shallow and to almost exactly negate our growing understanding of our place on this planet and how we might possibly attain a sustainable relationship to it. If our civilisation continues into the future I’m confident that it will not be too long before this work will be hidden away in the basement store of some museum never to see the light again. Although at some point doubtless rediscovered by some eager curator keen to make a reputation by re-evaluating and recycling the rubbish of the ages.
Is it worth $4.3 million? Well, of course not, except in the sense that anything is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. In the short term it might even be a good investment, able to be sold on for even more, though I think in the longer term more likely to become an expensive embarrassment, it’s overblown size at 80 x 140 inches making it very much a green and grey elephant.
I’ve stood in front of many if not most of Gursky’s giant images and remained largely unimpressed. I’ve seldom found their size makes them any better, except in terms of décor. Huge modern offices and public buildings need works on a giant scale, hence the ‘healthy’ sales of giant photographs of very little that sometimes seem to dominate photographic dealer trade shows such Paris Photo (which I’ve just missed), boredom on an industrial scale.
Of course these vast empty walls could be filled more cheaply by painting images direct on them using the kind of techniques used for giant adverts such as those covering the backs of some buses, and there are plenty of out-of-copyright masterpieces that might be suitable for such treatment. But covering walls with expensive artworks isn’t really about the visual experience, more an affirmation of affluence. It’s a slightly more tasteful way of covering your wall with gold bricks or papering it with thousand dollar bills.
Gurksy’s approach to ‘Rhine II’ is essentially anti-photographic, although he starts with a photograph or photographs he then Photoshops out what he considers ‘intrusive features’ – people walking their dogs, cyclists, factory buildings and so on – but what to me are the essential guts of photography. It’s not really possible to know how much of the photograph remains, and what has been cloned or otherwise generated. It’s an image that for me has lost touch with reality, and that relationship with the real which is the essence of our medium.
It reminds me not of a photograph, but rather of some of the entirely computer generated images that many now produce. Drawn a few straight lines across the window, pick some appropriate fills, set randomness close to zero and blandness near infinity and you have your own Gursky. Though possibly also a copyright suit.