The Arts and Their Markets

Every now and then, in the blur and scurry of the city streets, you suddenly see a business coming into shape and beginning to suggest the possibility of a real future here.


The first one I noticed was the Russian modern-art business, which was born in 3 A.G. (anno Gorbachev) at a souped-up Sotheby's art sale, but soon descended into an orgy of hype, pretense and borrowed self-importance. After the Sotheby's sale, foreign gallery-owners and dealers flocked to the city, rather like music-agents to Liverpool upon the discovery of The Beatles, and immediately snapped up anyone who could dip a brush into a paint-can or knew the meaning of the word "installation." Suddenly there was money -- hard currency -- to be made out of them there daubs. And it wasn't long before the State lined up for its cut -- followed by the Mafia, who asked (with menaces) for painters to "run up a few for the boys."


The result? The best artists -- followed by the foreign gallery-owners and dealers -- soon fled abroad, and left little behind them. There were few galleries, virtually no exhibition spaces -- though there were at least seven different plans for a Museum of Modern Art -- and hardly anybody who could be called a local collector. The art market was forced to go back to selling to tourists. It died just as quickly as the vogue for modern Russian art did (in the end) abroad.


But then, of course, in 7 and 8 A.G., when the Soviet Union was stolen, money -- real money -- was reinvented here. And suddenly galleries began to sprout up again like fiddle-ferns in the spring thaw. The difference was that there were now Russian buyers: lots of them, banks and corporations and biznesmeni, who reckoned that if foreigners liked this sort of stuff, then that was good enough for them. Critics became purchasing advisers; artists were covered in the magazines for the new rich; and connections were made with the expanding club scene. It may not be on the same scale as London or New York, but the Moscow art-market is now beginning to run on recognizably the same lines.


The next business to come into shape this way will be, I now think, the Russian book business. Yes, I know, I know: Solzhenitsyn can't sell a copy here; pirated romance writers like Barbara Cartland are sold with nudie covers; and if there are best-sellers, then they're probably Tom Clancey, or Stephen King. But then that's only because Russians had basically never seen this kind of literature before. They'd never been exposed to commercial literature -- thrillers, westerns, love stories, science fiction, erotica and so on -- which they would probably have liked a whole lot better than the serious stuff which was all that was available in Soviet times. And yes, I know that what I call serious stuff went totally by the board in all this, pushed aside by commercial trash and by the fact that the old intelligentsia had no money to buy it any more. But now I think there's beginning to be a change.


The problem up to now with the liberated and deregulated Russian book business has been that, with the cost of paper and printing doubling or tripling, every publisher was forced to go for the quickest possible return. So was every wholesaler and bookseller. With fly-by-nights everywhere in the trade, there could be no selling on commission; and books lying around in warehouses were seen -- quite rightly, by the new capitalist imperative -- as a total waste of money and space. But all this held true only so long as the hunger for Western commercial literature produced buyers in enough numbers who could readily afford it. Now, I think, it no longer can. It's the intelligentsia -- but not the hungry thriller- or romance-buyer -- which has more ready money than it used to. And so the temperature in Russian publishing is beginning to come down.


All this coincides, I believe, with the arrival of a lot of young people who understand the operations of the market a lot better than the ex-employees of state publishing concerns who were the first private publishers. They understand that niche markets -- academic books, poetry, literary criticism and so on -- can also be profitable in the long term, so long as costs are kept down. So there they are now -- two or three to a company -- making connections with writers and with a new generation of young booksellers who genuinely love books. I only hope that they know too that an ordered market is in the end more profitable for everyone -- and join in with enthusiasm when the first million-dollar suit for breach of Western-owned copyright is brought -- and inevitably won -- in a Moscow city court.