For a bracingly cynical take on Gerhard Richter, often tagged as the pre-eminent visual artist working today, I recommend this piece by Malcolm Bull in the LRB. (By “recommend” I do not mean “endorse”—nor do I mean the opposite.)
When I first [looked at the rankings on Artprice and Artfacts] more than ten years ago, the artist who came out on top, outperforming all other living artists when the rankings were combined, was Gerhard Richter. When I checked again recently, he was still there in pole position, the undisputed World Number One. This is a phenomenal, Djokovic-level achievement…
It is “all the more astonishing,” Bull writes, since since the rankings are often inversely correlated, the first a measure of corporate taste, the second of curatorial esteem: “It’s as if Pollock and Duchamp had formed a partnership to establish market dominance and the company had stayed in business ever since.”
How has Richter managed this extraordinary feat? Reviewing the epic Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History, by Richter’s longtime interlocutor and friend, Benjamin Buchloh, Bull traces a bathetic double-act, in which Buchloh finds political depths in Richter’s work which Richter repeatedly disavows.
For Buchloh, Richter’s is an art of
‘critical negativity and utopian anticipation’, which simultaneously ‘deprivileges the bourgeois subject and its cultural conventions’ while creating new forms of experience for the emancipated viewer. … Richter is said to share his generation’s scepticism towards the ‘radical and utopian dimensions of abstract art.’ And yet ‘at the same time … he had been desperate to invest it, at least temporarily, with the by then almost traditional aspirations toward universality and its formal perceptual and political egalitarianism.’
When this is put to him however:
Richter does not seek to have an opinion. ‘I want to be like everyone else, think what everyone else thinks, do what is being done ... I don’t want to be a personality or to have an ideology. I see no sense in doing anything different.’ … Asked why he has rejected any political intention in his art, Richter is direct: ‘Because politics don’t suit me, because art has an entirely different function, because all I can do is paint. Call it conservative.’
The implication is that Richter sustains the dialogue not because he agrees with Buchloh about anything but because it is professionally advantageous:
It is … no exaggeration to say that Buchloh may have done more than anyone else to keep Richter in the top spot, not by boosting his prices, but by helping to ensure that he alone has the long-term critical traction needed to balance his market success.
As I said, it’s a cynical perspective; and I don’t know enough to disagree with it intelligently. But it has its quirks. Why would Richter so consistently balk at interpretations he deliberately—and cynically—means to cultivate? Why would Buchloh allow himself to be complicit? Or if, as seems more plausible, Buchloh is sincere, how did Richter get so lucky, for so long? What are the odds that a plausible and indefatigable interpreter would turn up to play the necessary role?
We could ask further questions. Why would Bull decide to frame what could have been a straight critique of Buchloh’s reading as an art-world conspiracy? Why speculate on tawdry motives when one could confine oneself to the (visual) text?
But the questions are pragmatically self-defeating: in asking them, I am doing it myself.
The article delves into a cynical perspective on Gerhard Richter's artistic success and his relationship with critic Benjamin Buchloh. It questions the motives behind interpretations and the balance between critical acclaim and market success. The author navigates complexities in art-world dynamics while contemplating the reasons behind their own perspective.