Had things worked out differently and I’d become insanely rich, I would spend all my money on works of contemporary art. Conceptual visual art in particular has opened doors in my mind that remain closed to other forms. I may be of the generation that grew up with the visionary ad people of the YBAs, and so inherited the grand gestures of Marcel Duchamp as reinvented by this rambunctious crowd, but it was when The Face magazine gave away some stickers of Jenny Holzer’s slogans that I was first hooked by the speedball fix of the concept: art that takes a simple and clear idea and delivers it in visually arresting fashion, like a dried flower affixed to the canvas so that it might blossom again in the mind of the viewer.
Increasingly, I think I could really dig experiencing that in my own home without the itchy guy who stands next to you in a gallery and announces, uninvited: ‘It’s all just bollocks, though, isn’t it?’
I love art, but – break out those tiny violins – much of the art I love is inordinately expensive.
I find this strange and upsetting, but it is true. It is upsetting because it is largely to do with a market in which global wealth treats these works as tokens of status or stores of capital, rather than acts of awesome creation that make a doomed shot at transcendence. It is strange because the producers of the works traded in these markets have traditionally had very little control of, or ability to influence, the value of their works, and indeed have created them specifically in opposition to these kinds of fetishisation and marketisation. Duchamp’s Fountain, the manufactured ceramic pissoir signed by R. Mutt in a gesture that literally invited anyone to declare themselves an artist by dint of exhibiting something, has sold for £1.3 million. Copies of his L.H.O.O.Q., the Mona Lisa with a moustache added, now go for £570,000. Without wishing to get into debates over the failures of the historical avant-gardes, this is a bitter irony. These are ideas that want to be free!
How to deal with such emotional turmoil? The answer seems obvious: to follow in Marcel’s footsteps (you know what they say: not being an oligarch is the mother of invention). So that readers of The Fence might join me in breaking down the hypercapitalist barriers of the auction house, I’ve researched and trialled workarounds that require little more than a few clicks or phone calls to produce approximations of seminal works, and promise unbelievable savings into the bargain. Caveat emptor: these really are very approximate copies.
beginner
Marcel Duchamp – Rotoreliefs;
Value £43,600 – cost £40 approx.
Often described as the first multiple, this set of six two-sided discs were designed to be played on turntables at between 40 and 60 rpm to produce optical illusion-like effects when rotated. Duchamp printed up 500 sets and tried selling them himself at an inventor’s fair in 1935. He didn’t shift many units but when two public schoolboys playing hooky rocked up at Antiques Roadshow with a set, it was valued at around £30k.
Source images of Rotoreliefs online. The Carnegie Museum of Art has a full set and arthistory.com has nice large images of the first two. The Ernő Goldfinger house at 2 Willow Road in London has a set so you might always make an appointment to photograph them yourself.
