By Joshua Mack

A while ago a number of art world players, including MoMA's associate director Kathy Halbreich, downtown dealer Jeffrey Deitch, Amy Cappellazzo of Christie's and artist Yinka Shonibare, gathered at the New School for a discussion of the art market, organized by ArtForum and moderated by its editor, Tim Griffin.

Money, especially in the artworld, is a fascinating and repulsive topic, and the overflow crowd seemed hungry for juicy gossip about huge prices and clarity on an artworld where celebrity value appears to trump all, leaving some pining to be in the cultural mix and a few glad to be out of it. What we got on the night was standard fare, with a few staggering bon mots that suggest money not only dominates the market, but the mind.

Take Jeffrey Deitch's assertion that art was now as important to New York's economy as steel had been to Pittsburgh's during the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. We all know what happened to big steel, an association Deitch probably did not intend, and it is doubtful that Larry Gagosian, for example, will become the Andrew Carnegie of his generation, breaking strikes and dispensing largesse to libraries and concert halls across the nation. Taken at face value, such a comment reflects the self importance of money, or the moneyed, in today's cultural sphere.

But in fact, as anyone who has seen the crowds at our major museums knows, the arts – visual and performing – have become an integral part of a larger business on which this city's economy increasingly relies: tourism. As Peter Gelb's successful efforts to reverse declining attendance at the Metropolitan Opera indicate, keeping the customer coming through the door has become a requirement for our institutions, as it is for any business.

At least in this manifestation, culture is now following the model of the consumer economy: prosperity depends on increasing consumption of salable product, and increasing consumption of salable product depends on increasing prosperity. Indeed, with its proliferating fairs, peripatetic dealers, and collectors who double as patrons and investors, the artworld has become highly efficient at delivering new offerings, and expertly managing its existing ones. Nothing communicated this reality better than Cappellazzo's statement that the market for Warhol is 'perfect'. Correctly priced, any piece will trade efficiently. No matter one's budget, everyone can have one. And should: she seemed astounded that Shonibare might not, as he claimed, be able to afford $3,000 for one of Warhol's pornographic Polaroids, or really want one.

What was truly depressing, however, was not such presumption, but the inability of the panelists to even hint at an alternative. I'm all for Kathy Halbreich's belief that insitutions need 'to collect the margins' where there's plenty of historically important, undervalued work. But her assertion begged the questions of why such margins exist, or what happens when they are co-opted by the market.

Shonibare remarked that he'd like to see ideas and not objects fetishized, an off-the-mark ambition that anyway elicited the strongest applause of the evening. Forget, for now, that objects are the bearers of ideas and that the market can co-opt thoughts as quickly as anything – as the strong prices for conceptual work proves. The audience's response seems to reflect a healthy exasperation with things in their current overblown state, and a naive nostalgia for a time when museum shows did not feature accessory boutiques built-in (Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum), our temple of modernism wasn't an $800 million building that resembles a mall, and art magazines were not crammed with more ads than Vogue.

But there is no going back, and the failure of the panel to even hint at a way forward suggests a helplessness vis-à-vis the juggernaut of commerce that parallels a broader consumer passivity in the face of mass consumption. In the same way, the audience for art faithfully follows the market, focusing on the major galleries, museums and artists because it has been trained to do so. Increasingly, we seem to expect our institutions to deliver product to us the way our supermarkets do. Or, more importantly perhaps, institutions themselves expect that we expect this.

As the spiralling costs of resources ($120-a-barrel oil), crumbling infrastructure and the collapse of easy credit suggest, our current business model in the US, which drives the general economy and has increasingly come to dominate culture, may be unsustainable.

Whether this addiction to exponential consumption will prove successful in terms of our cultural institutions will become clear if and when the economic down draft hits the donations, custom and sales on which they rely. The business-as-usual attitude of the Artforum panel suggests that when the economy's woes seep into the artworld, far from having an out – the fact that they/we are meant to think different anyway – many of our cultural institutions don't realize they could be caught in a similar endgame.



Joshua Mack is a critic based in New York and a regular contributor to ArtReview magazine. See his previous blog: The Politics of Aesthetics: Balloondogs, Boilermakers and Junk Empathy