Applauding the Price, Not the Picasso

In the second episode of Martin Scorsese's 2021 documentary Pretend It's a City, there is a scene: Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger is hammered down at Christie's for 160 million dollars, and the room bursts into applause. Fran Lebowitz, the New York writer and humorist, quips that if you go to an auction and the Picasso comes out, there is silence; the moment the hammer fixes the price, the applause arrives. So we live in a world that applauds the price, not the Picasso.

Part of me felt Fran's joke strike home. Another, more rational voice reminded me that this is what auctions are, and what they have always been.

The idea of Post Capitalistic Auction erupted from the awareness of contradictions like this one. Until the age of twenty I grew up mainly in Beijing; most of my life since has been lived in the Nordic countries. PCA was created and premiered in 2018. At the time I was living the quiet, settled years of Norway under Janteloven,¹ while my heart still surged with the venture tides of China. Two extremely different systems of social value were being digested inside me like volcanoes, colliding with each other. And the collision threw up a naive question:

Why does money dominate all value?

The art auction is where this contradiction reaches its extreme: the many dimensions of an artwork are flattened, all of them and with no alternative, into the two dimensions of financial value.

From the very beginning I imagined what would happen if, one day, this naive idea arrived in a mature and busy art market like Hong Kong. What if PCA took place on the floor of Art Basel Hong Kong? What if it happened inside Christie's? What if Post Capitalistic Auction were itself auctioned? Now that it has finally come to Hong Kong, the market has reached a turning point. According to third-party data, auction sales in the first half of 2024 fell by 24 per cent in the United States, 26 per cent in the United Kingdom, and 49 per cent in China. There have even been moments when the primary and secondary markets inverted.² People panicked: without money's appraisal, the value of art seemed to have lost its calibration. And so the question of why the value of art can only be measured in money seems today not naive at all, but timely. The non-standard nature of artworks makes some of them ideal vehicles for financial speculation; when the economy turns down, art that exists only as capital's ornament is the first to be discarded. Art cannot remain clear on its own while the whole world grows turbid; it cannot detach itself from society's system of value judgment and form a system of its own. The disorder in how we value art is the disorder of society's entire system of valuation. It speaks for the predicament of everything produced by human intelligence that cannot be standardised and mass-produced. It is instrumental rationality squeezing and swallowing value rationality, again and again.³

In the six years since the 2018 premiere, I have watched NFTs and AI surge and collapse, and I have learned from both. Technology has democratised the creation and judgment of art, but it has also encouraged the public to understand the nature of art, and to judge its value, through the single lens of results and output. AI keeps surpassing us in intellect, and it keeps reminding us that the value systems and rules of human society are built on consensus, and that this consensus concerns not only the world as it is, but the world as it ought to be.⁴ The power to define and renew society's value systems and rules is our final ground to hold.

Post Capitalistic Auction is a real and singular auction, and a small-scale experiment on the art ecosystem. As everyone knows, because price is the only valid bid, a commercial auction can hammer down more than a hundred lots in an hour and a half. Each work is sold or passed within one or two minutes. The artist is absent throughout, and the price has nothing to do with them. Works are selected, first of all, for their market value. PCA breaks these rules. The bidding currencies include money, opportunity, exchange, and understanding, challenging the monopoly of capital and professional discourse over the judgment of artistic value, and opening the possibility to everyone. The artists are present in person, speak directly with the bidders, and make the final decisions themselves; every intermediate layer is stripped away, and the process tests the bidders as much as it tests the artists. The works are chosen by the artists themselves: some invite co-creation, some are fragments of finished works, some are documents of the working process, and some are promises. The artists bring to PCA their own thinking on its questions. What can art be? How can the value of art be understood and expressed? What does it mean to own an artwork? Why own it, and how?

I am often asked what I expect from the Hong Kong edition. First of all, Post Capitalistic Auction is not an auction against capitalism. It has never tried to deny market value or to exclude the expression of capital. What it tries to do is give equal weight to the values that cannot be standardised, quantified, and therefore capitalised, to let them be measured and expressed in currencies other than money, and to show, as truthfully as possible, how different social and art ecologies respond to the question of artistic value. Having travelled through Norway, Japan, and Canada, PCA now arrives in Hong Kong's highly marketised art environment, and I look forward to that environment's honest response to the work. But Hong Kong is not only Gagosian, Christie's, and Basel; it is also the stubborn growth of CHAT, Para Site, and Asia Art Archive. I look forward to PCA flowering, in this singular soil, in its richest form yet.

Notes

1. Janteloven, the Law of Jante, is a Nordic social code that prizes equality and the collective average while playing down individual achievement.
2. In the art trade, the primary market refers to the first sale of a new work, through a gallery, an agent, or the artist himself or herself; the secondary market refers to resale, through dealers, auctions, or private transactions. An inversion occurs when a work's primary price exceeds what it can fetch on resale.
3. Instrumental rationality and value rationality are concepts of the German sociologist Max Weber. Instrumental rationality chooses the most effective means towards a given end; it concerns the relation between action and goal. Value rationality acts from values, beliefs, and moral standards; it concerns the intrinsic meaning of the action itself, not only its results.
4. The is and the ought are standard concepts in philosophy, ethics, and the social sciences: the former concerns facts, the states of affairs that actually exist; the latter concerns values, norms, and the states that ought to be.