A reader of this blog recently sent me an article from Bloomberg News entitled, “Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen Over 1,000 Percent.” That statement is undoubtedly true, although, as with all “hot” tips on Wall Street, by the time the tip reaches the general public, insiders have already made their profit and moved on. New buyers will pay much higher prices. The savviest contemporary collector I know transitioned his buying from Black art to Native American contemporary art at least three years ago.
It’s easy to get cynical about the art market. Is Native American contemporary art just the new Flavor of the Month? With art, there is no inherent demand. You have to eat; you need someplace to live. Prices for food and housing may go up or down, but there will always be a market. The market for works of art, by contrast, is influenced by any number of things, all of them artificial, no pun intended. Dealers are seeking to get in on the ground floor of the latest thing, trying to create a demand they can stoke. Curators are aware of political concerns as much as aesthetic ones as they try to organize shows that will receive critical approbation while still bringing in crowds. Critics are looking for new movements on which they can make their names. The climate is constantly changing, and art fads can be as short-lived as those of the world of fashion.
After centuries in which art markets and art museums were dominated by white men, hitherto under-represented artists are now being aquired with a vengeance, particularly by institutions. The rise of feminism fifty years ago (and the agitation by the Guerilla Girls and other activists in the 1970’s) started a reassessment of art made by women, and the market began to respond.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s threw light on the exclusion of Black artists from art history, most notoriously in “Harlem On My Mind,” a 1969 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York which purported to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance while not including a single painting or sculpture by a Black artist. The situation has changed – Black art has been a hot item in recent years.
The problem is that artistic segregation, self-imposed or imposed by institutions, tends to be limiting to an artist’s career. Does an artist want to be seen in a particular context or as self-standing? Throughout her career, Georgia O’Keeffe consistently refused be part of women-only exhibitions. She wasn’t a “woman artist,” she insisted, she was an artist who happened to be a woman. She knew that, as the Supreme Court in 1954 ruled in another context, separate is inherently unequal.
Categorization cuts both ways. Being included in a group can help shine a spotlight on a young artist’s work, but the problem lies in trying to escape the confines of that group later. In the case of Native American artists, there’s been a “buckskin ceiling” in the art scene.
The Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick (born 1935), in a recent interview with The New York Times, spoke of ignoring the advice of a dealer early in her career who warned her not to exhibit with other Native American artists, telling her that the resultant pigeonholing would make it harder for her art to reach a broader audience. “Maybe that happened,” she mused. Her work now reaches a wider audience, most notably in an exhibition held last year at the New-York Historical Society, but she has toiled in obscurity for most of her career.
