There will still be texts about "how everything is set up," what is called the "basics," but in this text, I will try to go against the generally accepted toward the personal. It is long and will have a continuation. Not just one post, and not two. This is actually the question of questions: "Are there criteria today that allow us to understand whether the art before us is good or bad?". And right now, on the eve of big changes, it is important to understand this. Even if this understanding will have to be rejected tomorrow as obsolete. Without it, all other knowledge about galleries, museums, and the market doesn't matter.
In the professional community, this question no longer even causes debate. Most of my colleagues will say no. You can only evaluate art by seeing it, and it is impossible to say "abstractly," based on some characteristics.
Amateurs attack the criteria apparatus from the other side: ...there are no uniform criteria because everything is determined by taste. You like this, and I like that. And my opinion is no worse than yours.
At the same time, five million visitors to the Venice Biennale—professional art lovers—evaluate 90% of the works identically. On the one hand, this gives us a clue as to how the art environment functions, acting as a single whole despite the absence of vertical connections. On the other hand, it shows that criteria do exist after all. It is just a matter of them being unarticulated.
So, the generally accepted position is this: there are no criteria; for an artist to reach Olympus and be present in the desired list of "world cultural heritage," they need, firstly, to find themselves on a brightly lit stage (museum exhibitions, biennales, documenta, leading art fairs) and, secondly, to receive a positive consensus regarding their work from approximately three thousand international experts (curators, museum professionals, art critics, collectors). CONSENSUS is the only way to evaluate.
A gallerist can only do the first part: transfer art from the shadows into the light. But no one can decide for 3,000 experts what they should like. It is impossible to corrupt them. (A very naive attempt at corruption was made by Tsereteli; he did not sell his paintings, but made a list of 5,000 people to whom he needed to gift a work to become famous). Therefore, all talk that brilliant careers are obtained undeservedly thanks to energetic producers rather than talent is an argument in favor of the poor. Or rather, like this: there are quite a lot of talented and brilliant artists who have not achieved success, but among the successful ones, there are practically no bad ones. If it doesn't seem that way to you, it means you simply did not understand this artist.
I love to tell the story of how the system of criteria collapsed, and the next text will be about that. But this is about something else: just imagine a rationally thinking person who became interested in contemporary art, the art of their contemporaries, is about to make their first purchase, and learns from professionals that there are no evaluation criteria. Yet all the curators, critics, and museum directors praise the same artists in one voice and ignore others? Are they hiding something?
For 20 years as a Russian gallerist, and then for 5 years as a director of a contemporary art museum, I, unlike my European colleagues, was forced to articulate these criteria to my clients. A Russian collector, at the beginning of his journey, is the most insecure buyer. You must first explain to him that "this is art," then that "this is good art," in a way that he can understand and retell to his friends. And then answer an endless number of "whys." At the same time, his understanding of art is mostly limited to the paintings of Cézanne (in the Russian version, Falk). That is if he comes from the intelligentsia. For the rest, it is the so-called "Native Speech" school textbook (Repin, Aivazovsky, Levitan, Kustodiev, Vrubhel).
Therefore, I have developed a rather coherent NON-SCIENTIFIC system of criteria, which I share with collectors, and they, by asking their questions, develop it further. Well, yes, this system does not work in all cases—say, in about 80 percent—but for the beginning of a journey into this world, it is quite sufficient. And after 3–4 years, the collector already possesses his own visual experience and intuition.
In my system, it is very important not only to formulate a criterion but also to explain its nature—how it appeared. Therefore, the conversation will be long. But we do understand that there are no simple answers to complex questions. In fact, simple questions also have complex answers.
Therefore, I decided that we can move away from a monologue and ask artists simple questions about their work:WHAT? (content, plot, narrative)HOW? (form, language)WHAT FOR? (mission)—hello to Marina KoldobskayaWHO? (how your art relates to you as a person, agency)
Art lovers can answer these questions regarding the works they like or have in their collections. A kind of label where, along with the year of creation and technique, there are answers to simple questions.
