The gallery, aptly named Ekaterina Tuomanova, was specialized in broking, acquisition and advisory services. It was amongst the nearly three hundred international galleries at the fair that were offering works by over four thousand artists.
Bond Street and Cork Street, once the centre of London’s art trade along with the Fitzrovia—the district surrounding the British Museum, were either priced out of the market or passé. New comers to London, like Larry Gagosian—the Californian dealer, had opened new galleries, one between Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square and the other near to St Pancras. I wanted something different, nearer to home in Chelsea. There was Knightsbridge and South Kensington, but the image was too staid, conventional.
The challenge was huge. It was a leap of faith. Managing a gallery required working with a team of qualified staff, overseeing security, meeting artists, searching for talent, organizing exhibitions, cultivating relations with collectors and museums, managing the media, and juggling all the accessory needs like lawyers, insurance policies and transport companies.
It seemed daunting, but I didn’t underestimate her courage, or overlook her experience, her training and the will power she had to succeed.
As Katya and I discussed the question of staff for the gallery, the reality of economics could not be avoided. Back in Ireland, at the stud or golf club, they were traditional businesses in rural setting, relatively untouched by the zero-hour gig economy, but in Fulham, London it was another matter.
We contemplated full time jobs, part time jobs, free lancers, zero-hours, exhibition gigs and just about arrangement possible, where most of those employed could earn a liveable income when things went well, but knowing their livelihood could disappear at any moment.
Where would those millions in the zero-hours or gig economy fit into Cornucopia?
Such jobs would be optional for those who wished to work for additional privileges, such as vacations and recreational and leisure activities. In the current economy such jobs were characterised by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work, as opposed to permanent jobs.
Was this a form of exploitation with very little workplace protection by companies such as Uber and Deliveroo, where instead of a regular wage, workers were paid for the gigs they do, such as a food delivery, a taxi ride or some other brief time task.
In general workers in the gig economy were classed as self-employed which meant they had no protection against unfair dismissal, no right to redundancy payments, and no right to receive the legal minimum wage, paid holiday or sickness pay.
Our gallery did not fall into a class of low grade jobs, we had experts, pros, well at least two or three of them.
It would be a long road, but with our network and capital we could fast track our plan with a few of our wealthy friends, like Pat, Sergei and Tom Barton, and their friends. Art was big business and the rich were not only investors, they were collectors.
Gagosian had succeeded with a daring model, breaking conventions, upsetting the staid clique of old fashioned Bond Street dealers. The silver haired Californian, of Armenian parentage, who had the luxury—I mean the wealth, to decorate his office on Madison Avenue in New York with a Francis Bacon, or a Picasso, or even both, was the world's leading gallerist, or art dealer as he often unpretentiously described himself. A dealer who had built a personal collection said to be worth a billion dollars.
The gallerist had lived lived in Harkness Mansion on the Upper East Side, which he decorated with modern master pieces such as Twombly’s ‘Untitled’. Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly, an American painter, sculptor and photographer, with whom Gagosian had maintained a close personal and professional relationship over two decades. When Twombly died in Rome, he legged his work to the Cy Twombly Foundation in New York, which now holds an estimated one and a half billion dollars in assets. So much for garrets.
During their long relationship there was never a written contract between the artist and the gallery, and needless to say it was a profitable one for both. Today, Gagosian makes an annual pilgrimage to Twombly’s house in the small town of Gaeta, between Tome and Naples, where with his friends he has lunch with Nicola del Roscio, Twombly’s long-standing friend and president of the artist’s foundation.
Gagosian who started out very modestly with a poster shop near UCLA in Los Angeles, is now the owner of a billion dollar art business with sixteen galleries in many of the world's greatest cities.
Gagosian was a good business model for us—publishing catalogues and books, a quarterly magazine and gallery shops selling reproductions and other art style souvenirs.
Opening
The opening was celebrated by Ekaterina’s first sale, a Basquiat acquired for Pat Kennedy, which made news in a good number of art magazines and newspapers. The Guardian described the event and the Daily Mail published a picture of Ekaterina and myself, ‘beauty and the beast’.
Pat went in for Neo-Expressionists. Basquiat was fashionable and the prices of his works had gone ballistic, one breaking the record as the most expensive ever sold by American artist in an auction.
Jean-Michel Basquiat had emerged from the New York Punk scene as what was described by The Art Story as ‘a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his downtown origins to the international art gallery circuit’.
Basquiat, who died of an overdose of heroine in his studio when he was just twenty seven, quickly became one of the best known artists in the Neo-Expressionism art movement as well as being one of the most commercially successful.
Art was business, whether or not you liked the work of the painter or not was irrelevant, Basquiat’s works were investment grade in a world where the number of billionaires grew by the hour, where providing each one’s private collection, foundation, museum or bank vault was a full time job for artists, galleries and auction houses.
Painters, like Basquiat’s, regrettably for those concerned, were better dead than living, as their life’s work was not expandable, and if any proof was needed they were selling for ridiculous prices, his ‘Three Delegates’ a painting of three heads surrounded by scribbles, went for eighteen million dollars, a profit of ten or eleven million on its last change of ownership barely two years previously.
Works by Basquiat, Prince, Fischer, Polke, Custom and others, were bought by bankers, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, petrodollar princes, hedge fund managers, art dealers, museums and other collectors.
Pat rubbed his hands in glee when Ekaterina announced she had closed the deal on the work for seven million, which raked in a commission of nearly ten percent for the gallery.
Basel
As the centre of gravity of the contemporary art world temporarily moved to Switzerland, Ekaterina and I headed for Art Basel to promote our gallery.
Each year Art Basel supplanted New York as investors and the elite of the art world flocked to the fair, which was sponsored by UBS, a leading Swiss bank. With billionaires, bankers and collectors there in force the venue was one of the world’s top modern and contemporary art fairs along with New York, Miami, London, Paris and Madrid.
Pat and Lili Kennedy were there along with Liam Clancy and Tom Barton, all staying at Les Trois Rois—a centuries old hotel overlooking the Rhine. They had flown into Basel International airport in Pat’s jet, which joined an impressive fleet of private jets parked on the tarmac ready to fly their rich owners home at a moments notice.
More than three billions dollars worth of works were up for grabs as hedge funds, wealth managers and investors competed for the best prizes, whilst Ekaterina scouted for Sergei Tarasov, Pat Kennedy and other clients of the gallery.
With her expert knowledge she guided Lili, who had invited a group of very rich Chinese investors to the fair, some them knowledgeable, others less so, strolling past the booths filled with works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon or the latest in vogue artists. Never before had so much art been bought by such a diverse collection of buyers as investments.
Amongst Lili’s friends was Liu Yiqian, a nouveau rich businessman, a taxi driver turned billionaire, who paid three million euros for a ten metre wide work by Gerhard Richter, which in terms of value per square metre was small fry compared to Andy Warhol’s, forty by fifty centimetre, Gun, which sold for twelve million dollars.
The global art market had more than tripled in value in a little more than a decade. You only had to look at a Jean-Michel Basquiat, bought for nineteen thousand dollars in 1984, and just sold for one hundred a ten million dollars in New York. For those who had the money the gains were fabulous.
Over four thousand artists were exhibiting at Art Basel, attracting investors, wealth advisors, museums and art lovers from all over the world. There were all the major investment banks with their specialists, PhDs in art history, inspecting the works for sale under their microscopes, together with masters in finance calculating potential added value and risks.
Anybody who made the mistake of thinking it was about art was in the wrong place.
Ekaterina felt the market was looking good as the competition between buyers heated up. She had just acquired an abstract painting by the British painter, Cecily Brown, for almost half a million dollars which she hoped to resell with a comfortable margin to the Garage in Moscow.
Of course it was practically a done deal before the show opened.
The international art business was expanding exponentially with over sixty billion dollars in annual sales, with Christie’s alone marking-up over five billion dollars in sales.
For the world’s rich, art was the ultimate in luxury, it came when you had everything, for the few—elitist, better than a yacht. After all a Francis Bacon triptych, like the one sold in 2013 for a record one hundred and forty plus million, would be around long after Roman Abramovich’s yacht had been reduced to worthless scrap in the breakers yard.
The rich, there were more and more of them. The poor, I mean the middle classes, they were the ones forming longer and longer queues outside of museums and exhibitions around the world, paying to goggle at the possessions of the former.
PART 14 THE HAMMER AND SICKLE
A Brave New World
You will forgive me for these occasional deviations, but being an economist I have to tell you about my world, which now embraces Russia, and my vision of what future holds—for you that is.
My future is mostly behind me, though I still expect to enjoy a few more years of earthly pleasure.
What I want to talk about is my vision of a Cornucopian society, and how it works. A world without work, or almost, a work of material plenty. It sounds like ‘A Brave New World’, perhaps it is.
Did I hear you say it doesn’t work? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, it does, it’s already here, before our very eyes, in its nascent form that is.
Material plenty exists, thanks to the internet and its emanations, it’s already at work, around us, wherever we care to look.
Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, Tesco, Aldi, Carrefour, Home Deposit, to name a few, supply the world’s consumers with their every possible material need. Internet and IoT function with vast automated depots linked to consumers, suppliers and manufacturers, expedited by vast logistic systems and transport networks.
Connectivity has become the driving force of our society, customer orders are received by internet, payment made by bank cards or electronic transfers via a system of interrelated devices and installations linked by a network, with or without the need for human-to-human, human-to-computer or computer-to-computer interaction.
Things, that is any object or system, animate or inanimate, which can be connected to the network and be addressed by an identifier, receive and emit data related to given instructions, data relating to government, science, industry, commerce, transport, communications, health, education and our homes, thus ensuring the delivery of the fruits of our pre-Cornucopian society to every end-user.
Today, human beings input much of that data, typing, scanning codes, images and other data with sensorial devices, soon those human beings will be bypassed, their only role being to consume.
For millennium, sailing ships and galleys linked river and sea ports developing navigable rivers and coastal regions. During most of human civilisation overland transport remained unchanged with goods carried on the backs of men and animals. Nothing changed until the invention of coal fired steam engines to power ships and railway locomotives.
Coal fired steam engines powered the industrial revolution giving birth to the greatest technological advances in human history, transforming transport and manufacturing.
Steam ships opened the way to large scale trade with distant countries and continents with bigger and faster vessels. Rail transport created a quantum leap in the terrestrial exchange of goods and the transport of passengers. Cities and sea ports were linked to distant landlocked regions, opening a vast new potential for the development of trade and commerce.
The early 20th century saw the development of petroleum resources and the invention of the internal combustion engine. First road transport, then aviation. Soon modern road networks ensured the distribution of commodities and goods to every corner of every land, then in the middle of the century airlines invented mass tourism and the transport of high value goods from one continent to another.
Each of these inventions brought with it a quantum leap forward in human development and economic activity.
Until the latter half of the 19th century communications had barely advanced since the invention of the printing press, then came the telegraph, followed by the telephone, radio and television. Each of which accelerated and multiplied the transfer of information, knowledge and data. The internet has now succeeded these as the prime form of communication, thanks to land links, but above all to orbital satellites. In 2016, more than one thousand four hundred functioning satellites orbited the planet with over two hundred more added each year.
A Baby boomer
Myself I was one of the baby boom generation, a generation that had never known a time when work was hard to come by, apart from the days when I was child back home in Francistown, when Ireland was a backwater, not that my privileged family had ever experienced want.
The people of my generation saw credit as something almost shameful, not to be talked about. It was the generation that came after me that discovered the advantages of the consumer society and easy credit, imported into Britain from America, a generation now accused, unjustly, by some of being the most selfish generation in history.
Today’s new generation, Generation Y, those reaching adulthood at the beginning of the second decade of the third millennium, owners of iPhones and such electronic marvels, would not be so lucky. They were faced with a crisis that would certainly be much more drawn out than politicians pretended.
To make matters worse, Generation Y was criticised for not being of the same the metal as those who had lived through the Great Depression, fought WWII and survived the rigours of the post-war austerity.
Once upon a time a university degree had been the key to success, then suddenly, almost overnight, it meant very little, especially when it came to finding a job. The prospect of unemployment, or underemployment, hung over the future of many graduates like the Sword of Damocles, their lives would be considerably more difficult than it had been for the generation of their parents.
Whose was the fault? Had the baby boomers condemned their children by offering democracy and capitalism to Russia and China? Had they created expectations beyond the reach of their children by offering them access to higher education?
Galbraith said, ‘had the economic system need only for millions of unlettered proletarians, these, very plausibly are what would have been provided’. Evidently the economic system no longer needed workers with higher education.
I certainly did not feel uncomfortable about being a member of my own generation, though my case was particular, I was born with a proverbial silver spoon in my mouth.
The hazards of history had played an important role. Those born in the years of austerity that followed WWI were not responsible for the Depression or Hitler’s war.
In retrospective, the late fifties-early sixties were seen as carefree years. I remembered them as years during which people had worked, with few holidays and tight budgets. National Service had ended, leaving soldiering to the professionals, allowing those who had embarked on a career to continue uninterrupted. It was a time when Harold Macmillan, in 1957, had told Britons, ‘they had never had it so good’, which was true, in comparison to the war years and the bleak period of austerity that had followed.
Life in Britain at the time of Macmillan’s government was simple to say the least, at Westminster School life was austere, and on Strutton Ground market, in Pimlico, bananas were hidden under the counter, reserved for the most favoured customers. Family cars were so rare the kids in Pimlico could play cricket in the middle of the streets, whilst I played in Vincent Square. Us Westminster boys, kept out heads down, our uniforms could attract the unwanted attention of some of the rougher kids from buildings on Page Street.
Westminster and Trinity—along with its sister universities, certainly offered the best education, but did so in a shielded environment. Leafy lawns, sporting rivalries, and centuries of history, and a sense of being part of it. Outsiders were non-persons in the exclusive world in which I lived.
Compared to now, those were the good times, without the same material needs, with full employment, a guaranteed career, before jobs were exported to China by globalization, a process that has left countless school leavers without the slightest hope of finding a decent permanent job, in spite of having adequate qualifications.
I had grown-up under the shadow of the Soviet Union, at a time an enraged Khrushchev, backed by his massive nuclear arsenal, harangued the West, banging his shoe on the speaker’s rostrum at the United Nations Assembly in New York. Young as I was, I’d felt a shiver of fear like the majority of ordinary people in the West.
During the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev had warned the West, with the terrifying words, ‘the living will envy the dead’.
The real consumer society came later, much later, in the mid-seventies, when people could still look forward to a future of ever-growing wealth, when the horn of plenty started to spill out its bountiful treasures. Not only that, but people lived longer, in better health, they were also better educated, enjoyed foreign holidays and discovered the world. Life became easier as the hard chores of the previous generation gradually disappeared with the appearance of washing machines, dish washers, microwave ovens, when modern designer kitchens became commonplace. People became better informed with the arrival of cable television and the Internet. What had been luxuries for the previous generation had become essential for families that thought nothing of owning two or more cars.
The crisis of globalisation and the hollowing out of the middle classes brought change. Suddenly higher education was no longer free and graduates no longer guaranteed a job. A university education meant little or nothing for many and for the new generation the future was transformed into one of diminishing expectations.
Under Communism
I always had to remind myself of the kind of country where Ekaterina had gone to school and grown-up, at the heart of the Soviet soul.
When I visited Moscow and Leningrad at the time of Brezhnev, the lives of party members and the nomenklatura under Communism were different compared to those of the people, that is the ordinary citizen, the lumpenproletariat. It was a class society and membership of a particular class determined what goods and privileges were due to its individual citizens.
With the Communist planned economy there were constant shortages, though big cities fared better than small towns and villages where it was often hard to buy even the most basic essentials. It was not unusual to see people returning from Moscow carrying large bags of toilet paper, a commodity they could not find at home.
Higher ranking members of the Communist Party had access to special shops, where they could buy better and more varied kinds of food and drinks as well as imported foodstuffs and consumer goods not produced in the USSR.
They enjoyed better housing with larger apartments in better districts with access to weekend dachas and holidays on the Black Sea. The luckier ones even had a car with a driver and if they behaved themselves there was the possibility of tightly controlled foreign travel.
The workers on the other hand often lived in communal apartments in big cities, those that had belonged to the pre-Revolutionary bourgeois, sharing kitchen and toilets with other families, as had Vladimir Putin’s family when he was a child growing up in Leningrad. Electricity and heating were free, though Russians had to queue longs hours at shops for their daily needs, which naturally encouraged black markets and theft in factories.
Their was no incentive to work harder as goods were produced according to a state plan, which if successful only went to increasing quotas and hence more work.
Individual business or commerces were forbidden and enterprising citizens quickly attracted the attention of the KGB as did any form of individual expression with the obligation for ordinary people to report their every move to petty officials who enjoyed the power of life and death over their comrades.
Life was dull and grey in the Soviet Union, anything foreign, whether it be fashion fashion or culture, was seen as being decadent.
Rejection of foreign ideas and things reached into every corner of Soviet life, such as decadent art and music, starting with jazz, and when jazz became intellectually acceptable, rock was labelled as senseless noise made by long-haired monkeys, then when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were begrudgingly accepted, Punk was targeted.
Arriving in Moscow or Leningrad, in the sixties or seventies and even in the days of Gorbachev, visitors were immediately struck by drabness, the shop windows—empty or filled with dreary old fashioned displays of shoddy goods, the absence of advertising, neon lights and attractions. Panels on most building always proclaimed the glory of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, announcing the imminent victory of Communism.
My friend Elliott Stone23 had once told me the difference between capitalism and Communism was capitalists had goods but no money whilst the Communists had the money but no goods, which was a reasonable description of the Soviet system. We’d of course discovered credit to bridge the money gap.
Queues were part of Soviet life. Every day, everywhere. Long queues, short queues, peaceful or angry queues, even queues to visit Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. But if the queue was too long, and you had the money, knowing the right people was a solution.
In the late seventies real shortages started to appear as the system slid into the long slippery road of decline before coming to an awful standstill under Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformer, who arrived too late to do anything about the rot that had eaten deep into the foundations of the Soviet system.
Speculation and black markets thrived. Everything from sausages to vodka and spare parts for the Lada. Almost anything could be bought for a price. As the USSR gasped its last breath even apartments, private or state-owned, could be bought or exchanged via an acceptable transaction between the interested parties.
On the positive side education was free and of quality, often with facilities, in large towns and cities, that would have surprised many Westerners, Olympic size swimming pools, gymnasiums, concert halls and stadiums. The was a huge choice of free after school activities and classes, from music, ballet, sports and gymnastics. Higher education was of high quality and free, as was student food and accommodation.
Health care was free, with cradle to grave social security. Religion, though it existed, was however generally frowned upon. The real religion was Communism presided over by the Party and its committees that permeated into every corner of society spreading state controlled news and information, with its censorship and its spies to report antisocial behaviour.
The media spoon-fed Russians with state propaganda, eulogising Communist Party achievements, Soviet science, technology and agriculture with production statistics and other mind numbing details.
At the same time the Soviet Union developed its creative culture in the form of ballet and music to world class standards, though the work of writers painters and sculptors shrivelled to nothingness, reined in, stifled by the state’s propaganda machine, producing only what was from an idealogical point of view was approved by the Party.
The absence of freedom of movement did not only concern foreign travel, it was equally impossible for a Soviet citizen, or any other person for that matter, to move between the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, unless on military, official business or work transfer, approved by state manufacturing and distribution organisations.
Non-conformity was punished in many ways, loss of privileges, loss of employment and for recidivists the Gulag, so well described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’.
The foul odour in Russian trains, disgusting public toilets, passport controls conducted by dour often brutal officials, baggage inspection and the confiscation of ‘illegal’ literature, or foreign newspapers and magazines, the cold welcome in hotels, Spartan rooms, unstocked bars and restaurants, the chronic lack of repairs and shabby rooms with their primitive plumbing. Suspicious guides to trained to spy and report any attempt to deviate from fixed itineraries or make unapproved contacts with ordinary Russians.
It was clear even to the blind that Soviet socialism did not work, an impression of Russia that lingered on into the Putin era, the Putin himself openly disapproved of Communism and its aberrations.
Worthless roubles were given in exchange for hard currencies, dollars, pounds and D Marks. Tempting street corner black market deals were best avoided, the risk of expulsion or imprisonment was real with the presence of agent provocateurs everywhere.
In the early seventies the official exchange rate was one rubble for one dollar. For t