Art market in Mexico, a decade of change
The art market and the entire artistic field have been undergoing a reconfiguration in Mexico for the last decade. Not only has the offer of fairs and galleries grown exponentially in Mexico City (and timidly in Guadalajara and Monterrey), but its predominance has turned it into the main legitimizer of the art world, far above institutions (museums) and agents (curators and art critics) who until a few decades ago had greater influence on the circulation and consumption of artworks on a national and international scale.
The systematic dismantling of the material infrastructure and public support for artistic production in the country, which has led to the increasingly alarming precariousness of work in public museums in favor of grandiose projects like Chapultepec, Naturaleza y Cultura (which so far this six-year term has diverted more than 11 billion pesos from the cultural sector), has tipped the balance towards an art market that continues to grow and requires new artists every year to boost its economy.
It is important to clarify that this growth is not necessarily reflected in a better distribution of its profits in the artistic environment, thinking primarily of the artists, but also of the managers who support the infrastructure demanded by the market.
Although there are Mexican artists in their 20s and 30s who sell their work in galleries, these represent the tip of the iceberg of a long and heterogeneous field in which creators are not only responsible for production, but also for all the labor necessary to move and exhibit their work, without ensuring remuneration for it.
The interesting question here is what does this great mass of creators live on? According to the Manual de Acción para los Derechos Laborales de Arte Contemporáneo en Latinoamérica[1], published in 2021 by the organization Trabajadores de Arte, 75 percent of the creators in the region are supported by jobs linked to academia, private and public; between 10 and 13 percent do so through grants, from public and private funds; another 10 percent, from income generated by management work, and only between 2 and 5 percent live off money generated by the sale of their work within a gallery.
It is not an exaggeration to say that a large art market in Mexico City has grown exponentially in the last five years, but only to benefit between 2 and 5 percent of the creators who animate the scene. The rest maintain a precarious production and/or management that offers no real options for growth or social mobility for the bulk of the sector.
As pointed out by the Ecuadorian artist based in Mexico, Juan Carlos Leon, there is an “exhaustion of the current art economy model where situations of imbalance are increasingly present: supply exceeds demand”.[2]
Another factor that has modified the local art market is based on two events that unite the historical with the economic: on the one hand, the exhaustion/failure of the predominance imposed by the artists of the nineties[3]; but more importantly, the rapid advance of an emerging generation that has opted for traditional media, especially painting. All framed within a new political and social agenda that reacts to historical delays in gender issues and minority rights.
I will try to describe this change, but first, it is necessary to clarify that the purpose is not to make a moral judgment of the art scene, on the contrary, it is to point out events that, seen historically, contribute to this generational change. Art in Mexico has experienced a change of this type approximately every three decades, or at least that is how it has been recorded by the history of art during the 20th century.
When did this transition begin? It is difficult to pinpoint, since there has not yet been an event that would allow us to mark a starting point, or if it has already occurred we do not have the elements to evaluate it. Perhaps we are facing a shift that is happening without much noise (like the one that occurred between the Generación de la Ruptura and the Neomexicanistas). A possible indicator is the fact that there is a generational dialogue that shows no signs of confrontation. In fact, what is perceived is a contamination of practices between consolidated and emerging artists. This is easy to see, since now many artists of the nineties, who had shown no interest in painting, are seriously engaged in this medium, a clear reflection of what artists in their 20s and 30s are doing, who have quickly gained visibility.[4]
To continue with this review, it is necessary to clarify that there was always painting among the so-called artists of the nineties, but as a format that accompanied other media in a practice that was understood more as a project/research than as a finished work; or in the logic that Cuauhtémoc Medina called “rarefied painting”[5]. The difference now is that painting has once again become the hegemonic medium, driven by the market and by the deterioration of public and private institutions, which no longer fund installations or more complex works that were previously financed by museums or institutional collections.
Casting my memory back, the first time I noticed this marked shift towards painting in the art market was not at a fair, but at a Soma Auction, which annually offers works by contemporary artists to fund its educational program. In 2014 there was a big buzz about a small painting (55 by 63 cm) by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu. At that time, the auction started the bidding for all her works at one thousand dollars, but in this case it began at 40 thousand dollars and the paddles began to rise, as far as I remember, it exceeded the 55 thousand dollars that the artist herself had suggested as the price.
Although Mehretu is part of that generation of artists who gained visibility on a global scale in the 1990s, her case was peculiar for having large-format painting as her main medium. On the day of the auction, the curiosity made me stop to see the painting made in ink, graphite, and watercolor on offset proof. I remember the piece was not promising. A rather gestural work that echoed the tired abstract expressionism but was essentially a sketch for her complex large-format works. The idea that they were buying the name rather than the work applied in every sense.
It would be a mistake to say that this year marked the beginning of this change in the local art field; in any case, we can see it as one of the signs that were outlining the current preeminence of painting in the local contemporary production.
A year earlier, in 2013, Museo Jumex opened its doors in Plaza Carso and left behind a whole era in its former venue inside the facilities of the Jumex factory in Ecatepec, which offered a series of reviews of the Eugenio López collection (and the most epic parties of Mexican art), which served as a thermometer to measure the trends of contemporary art for more than a decade (2001-2013). The change of venue had several effects: its programming stopped reviewing its collection to bet on blockbuster exhibitions and, transcendentally, it gave up collecting works by Mexican artists. As demonstrated by its exhibition “Excepciones normales” (2021), which in theory reviewed 20 years of Mexican art, more than half of the exhibition consisted of works borrowed from the artists themselves.[6]
While new collectors appeared in the Mexican ecosystem (the Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, the Fundación M, to mention the cases that made their collection public), the reality is that collecting grew but at a level that cannot be considered institutional, with collections that have the function of decorating their homes and/or workspaces. This buyer profile became standardized, and after a couple of years it led to the birth of new galleries and even fairs (Material, Salón Acme, Clavo, Bada, Quipo) that standardized a type of work that was easy to transport and assemble in domestic spaces.
At the same time, a new generation of independent spaces were born and/or disappeared in Mexico City (Bikini Wax, Cráter Invertido, Ladrón Galería, Salón Silicón, among others) that were the ideal platform for emerging artists to explore media and formats that, although their central strategy was installation, provided the raw material for the production of small and medium-sized works, These galleries (Karen Huber, Pequod Co, Agustina Ferreyra, Proyecto Nasal, Campeche, General Expenses, Peana, among others), which have bet on the production of young artists, mostly born in the 1990s, have been in constant circulation for the last five years.
As already mentioned, this new generation has systematically bet on what we can consider traditional media, such as painting or sculpture. Although particular cases can be reviewed, the group found its differential from the previous generation by betting on media in apparent disuse: tempera, encaustic, fresco, embroidery, oil, caricature or engraving, which reconfigured the local art scene, with a thriving body of work that, unambiguously, is aimed at the market and no longer at the ruinous institutional apparatus.
Here, it is worth noting a change in the art world. The disappearance of the so-called “institutional artist” who was the artist circulating through museums and biennials around the world, with the clear differential from the “commercial artist,” meaning one who had sales success, but whose work was not attended by cultural institutions. Today nobody talks about institutional artists, but two or three decades ago it was a category that operated above the art market, although in the end it did have an impact on the sale of their works.
Currently, cultural institutions have experienced a perennial decline, and the same can be said of curatorial discourse and art criticism. There are no longer spaces or institutions that position artists’ work on a global scale. The market has become the true balance of power and this phenomenon directly affects artistic production itself. During the 1990s and the 2000s there was a large body of creators who burst into the public space or into the white cube itself to create works of a magnitude and complexity that was inversely proportional to their materiality and permanence[7]. Ephemeral pieces that reconfigured not only the artistic field, but also altered reality at times in different scenarios in Mexico City. This search was one of the insignia of the art of the nineties that emerging artists did not take up again. Their problems in terms of exhibition space are marked by the gallery and the art market, which keeps painting as a longseller. Now, fairs and the art market in general need not only a saleable medium such as painting to maintain their growth, but it is also necessary to add the idea of novelty (in the 20th century it was called avant-garde) to boost sales. One cannot be naive about the persistent campaign that established galleries (Kurimanzutto, Proyectos Monclova, OMR) have to invite emerging artists to occupy (for free) their spaces. What they are looking for is not only to maintain that new smell that an artist over 50 years old no longer offers, but at the same time serves as a casting to add new blood to their stables.
Edgar Alejandro Hernández
[1] Available at https://www.trabajadoresdearte.org/sitio/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MANUAL_DE_ACCION_v1-1_abril2021.pdf
[2] In his text ‘Reflections from the SOUTH: Art Week in Mexico,’ available at https://coolhuntermx.com/industrias-arte-diseno-02-24-reflexiones-desde-el-sur-la-semana-del-arte-en-mexico-juan-carlos-leon-cdmx/
[3] The term ’90s artist refers to that heterogeneous group that began their careers in the so-called Independent Spaces of Mexico City during the 1990s. Among the most cited names are: Yoshua Okón, Teresa Margolles, Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderón, Melanie Smith, Santiago Sierra, Damián Ortega, Sofía Táboas, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Eduardo Abaroa, Luis Felipe Ortega, Minerva Cuevas, Carlos Amorales, and many others.
[4] You can review the debate on painting led by Daniel Montero and Ilán Lieberman in the Cubo Blanco magazine at https://www.cuboblanco.org/revista/affaire-pintura-4
[5] Cuauhtémoc Medina. “Estrategias mexicanas. Pintura enrarecida”, in Abuso mutuo. Ensayos e intervenciones sobre arte postmexicano (1992-2013), Mexico, 2017, Promotora Cultural Cubo Blanco, pp. 209-212.
[6] This argument is developed in Excepciones normales. Vacío al arte contemporáneo mexicano. https://artishockrevista.com/2021/07/15/excepciones-normales-vacio-al-arte-contemporaneo-mexicano/
[7] See the book “Sin límites. Arte contemporáneo en la Ciudad de México 2000-2010”, by Inbal Miller and Edgar Alejandro Hernández, published by Editorial RM in 2013.
