Why don’t we buy art anymore?

Having recently joined a contemporary Art Gallery in Surrey on a traineeship, the first couple of exhibitions I have assisted on have been a fairly steep learning curve.

And after several very wall-friendly exhibitions where promotion was full-scale but sales were astonishingly negligible, I couldn’t help but scratch my head and ask – why don’t we buy art anymore?
 

We scoff at the big name collectors; when an immeasurable worth of Saatchi’s collection went up in smoke in the Momart warehouse fire of 2004, the collector’s devastation was met with apathy if not outright sardonic humour and scorn from a disheartening majority of the nation (see this article).

And our galleries – let’s look at Tate Modern; we construct this monolithic temple to modern art, and then cruise through it, layer by layer, on epic escalators, stopping only at the restaurant or the shop where, if we really like an art work we can take it home, pocket-sized, on a £1.50 postcard.

So, is it a generational thing?
In this age of disposability, brevity of mode is celebrated; we buy for the season, endlessly hungry for what is fed to us as the next big thing, no longer pausing to savour this big thing, or investing in timelessness.

My mother has always lived by William Morris’s dictum, ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. But what do we see as useful these days? Now, every experience must be bold and interactive, visceral, tangible and immediate. And surrounded by this drive to consume, are aesthetics still enough to ensure value? When even the humble picture frame can now show a scrolling slide-show of images, is beauty alone enough to validate expenditure, particularly in this climate of tightened purse-strings?

Furthermore, who now says what is beautiful? Of course, we have our own opinions on the matter, but when investing in a work of art to hang in one’s home, there may be compromises that take place (rightly or wrongly).
For example, let’s say you buy a painting to hang in your dining room. The next dinner party you hold, you want people to admire your taste, your knowledge of art, and your canniness in spotting what will surely be “an investment” in years to come – a valuable heirloom to the children. This artwork needs to simultaneously be stimulating enough to convince people you didn’t just stumble into the nearest country art sale, and yet palatable enough not to put people off their dinner.

In our modern art world, where piped-out Scottish laments and diamond-encrusted baby skulls are the plat-du-jour, maybe it’s no wonder we’ve stopped buying art.