Michael Reid: The Art of Seeing What Comes Next - In Conversation.
Michael Reid has spent almost four decades in the art world, which is long enough to have acquired expertise, scars and, one imagines, a fairly low tolerance for people explaining to him how the art world works.
His career has taken him through Christie’s, journalism, collecting, education, galleries and now the chair of a business that extends from Sydney to Berlin and beyond. Yet the interesting thing about Reid is not the accumulation of positions. It is the persistence of the appetite behind them.
He remains interested in what has not yet settled.
That is a less comfortable position than it sounds.
The art world has an extraordinary talent for turning uncertainty into history. Once the consensus arrives, yesterday’s risk begins to look like foresight; yesterday’s obscurity acquires a catalogue essay; and somebody, somewhere, will invariably explain why it was obvious all along.
Reid has spent much of his career operating a few steps earlier than that.
He is interested in the instant when an artwork makes an impression before there is a respectable vocabulary for explaining why. He is interested in collectors before institutions, artists before reputations and possibilities before they become plans. He is equally interested in the business surrounding art - not as an unfortunate intrusion upon culture, but as part of the complicated human arrangement through which culture is actually made visible.
There is something almost Old World about this understanding of the dealer as intermediary, advocate and occasional nuisance. But Reid is hardly nostalgic. His gaze is directed forward, often rather further forward than is comfortable for those who prefer the cultural landscape to remain recognisable.
Perhaps this is why he seems to regard the art world with two apparently incompatible attitudes: He takes it seriously, and he enjoys it.
The contradiction is productive.
Art can be profound and commercial, beautiful and strategic, culturally consequential and faintly ridiculous. Museums can confer legitimacy; collectors can anticipate it. Artists need independence, but rarely work entirely alone. Galleries sell art, but they also help determine what gets seen. Markets can distort judgement, but they can also reveal enthusiasms that institutions have yet to notice.
None of these tensions needs resolving. Indeed, Reid seems to find much of the fun in refusing to resolve them.
There is a line running through his thinking that is less about certainty than velocity: Make the call, back the instinct, move when the circumstances change. It is an approach better suited to a living culture than a museum catalogue, and perhaps explains why, after so many years, he remains more interested in the next move than in admiring the ones already made.
The conversation that follows ranges widely, as it should. It considers the eye, the market, collecting, artists, institutions, influence and the curious business of deciding what deserves to endure. But underneath those subjects sits a more personal question, i.e. what happens to judgement when you have been exercising it for almost forty years?
Does experience make the world smaller because you know it better?
Or does knowing where the boundaries are simply make you more interested in what lies beyond them?
For Reid, the answer appears to be the latter.
And that may explain why, after four decades in a business built around looking, he still seems to be searching for something he has not seen before.
You have spent almost four decades looking at art from very different positions - dealer, collector, writer, educator and now chairman. Which of those perspectives has changed your eye most profoundly, and what can you see now that the younger Michael Reid could not?
Michael Reid: Like most people, the younger me was more accepting of the world that I was born into and then inhabited. The younger me worked within the horizons that were presented to me, as nearly everyone does. The older me has embraced a boundless horizon. For there are few shackles, and no sacred cows, in business - and few in life. The older me is more anarchic and inquisitive of mind: More open to difference and change, more willing to look beyond the immediate horizon and see art through a wider world, one with more possibilities.
So, within this change in how I live, my eye has not been changed by a particular physical experience. It has been changed by a profoundly different philosophical outlook. Not an event, but a belief that there are no restraints, no closed doors in the way I look at the world. The older me takes in a far greater range of factors instantaneously, things the younger me simply wasn’t attuned to. I’m now always looking to the outer edges of the never-ending.
For the last few years, for example, I’ve been investigating demographic change in Australia, particularly the Indian community. Indian-born Australians are now the largest overseas-born group in the country, having just overtaken those born in England for the first time. That’s almost a million people, most of whom have arrived in recent years, and they are profoundly changing our cultural taste. We’ve had a long engagement with India, going back to colonial days, the Raj and the Empire. But the cultural shift of the last decade, and the one still to come from a young, dynamic group of new Australians, is reshaping our cultural landscape. I’m very aware of that.
Several years ago, seeing this change coming, I began working with the artist Sid Pattni. His explosion onto the art scene comes from his remarkable technical ability, but also from his focus, as an Indian Australian, on questions of identity. That eye was also mine.
The younger me would have accepted the cultural landscape and the art market I was dropped into. The older me says: Whatever is now soon will not be. My eye looks to the future.
When you first encounter an artist, what makes you believe there is a practice there rather than simply a compelling body of work? And after all these years, what do you know better than to mistake for promise?
Michael Reid: I look for things that make me go “wooow.” That’s rarer than one imagines. Alongside that first physical, whole-body response, there’s a constant calibration running in the background: where does this work sit within the artist’s wider practice, the market, my galleries and so on.
As in music, where one-hit wonders are celebrated with a begrudging, slightly mocking affection, art has plenty of one-hit wonders. Entire careers can be founded on, and sustained by, a single idea, subject or even aesthetic.
Look at John Coburn, the Australian artist who came to prominence in the 1960s. I like his work and would happily own one, but there’s no doubt he reproduced the same aesthetic over and over throughout his career. In fact, his market was in the doldrums until a major new development on Sydney’s Macquarie Street in 2016 featured a Coburn on its hoarding. That placement, in such an affluent setting, reintroduced his work to a legion of new-money buyers, who fell in love with the ’60s nostalgia.
So, long story short: I get hit by the “wooow,” and then I do my homework across the artist’s practice to find the depth. But I have never dismissed the eternal joy of the one-hit wonder.
The market is remarkably good at recognising an artist once a consensus has formed. What do you think it remains particularly bad at recognising before that consensus exists?
Michael Reid: The most important players in the art market are private collectors. When something captures their interest, they have a strong inclination to collect. They are often well resourced, highly focused and can move on a dime. And unlike art museums, private collectors hang their collections in homes and buildings that many of their well-heeled peers walk through.
Of far less consequence to an early consensus in the market is the thundering herd of art museums. They are ponderous decision-makers with often stretched resources, and the artworks they acquire ultimately head into storage. Their acquisition eye is often driven more by social theory, social fads and the personal taste of curators than by the actual reality of the artwork in front of them.
It could be said, publicly at least, that a consensus has well and truly formed when an art museum collects an artist’s work. However, the real recognition occurred three to five years before the museum discovered the artist, when a legion of early-adopting private collectors had already formed the consensus that the museums arrive late to. So private collectors don’t wait for the consensus. They create it.
You have built a business around Australian art while increasingly taking Australian artists into international contexts. What changes when the work is encountered in Berlin, Los Angeles or elsewhere - and what, if anything, do those audiences see that Australians themselves can overlook?
Michael Reid: Every nation has its own art history, and much of it runs in parallel across the Western world, increasingly with little lag time. France had its plein air school; we had ours. America had Abstract Expressionism, and so did we. So international collectors are not looking to Australia for an echo, pastiche or derivation of what they already have in their own visual culture. They are looking for the shock of the new, and the notions of originality that come with it. Many very well-known Australian artists have failed to gain traction overseas precisely because their practice, as an aesthetic, can already be found there in depth.
What overseas audiences look for are the areas of our art practice that cannot be found anywhere else. Two fields stand out, where we do well when benchmarked internationally: First Nations art and photography. Our First Nations practice is absolutely original; nothing anywhere else is remotely like it. Similarly, in the late 19th century Australia was a world player in photography. This nation has always been an early adopter of technology, which historians believe is driven by our isolation and our need to connect. Be that as it may, Australian photography stands well among its international peers.
Your commitment to emerging artists and First Nations practices places you in a position of considerable influence over whose work is seen, collected and remembered. How do you think about that responsibility, particularly when cultural significance cannot always be translated into the language of the market?
Michael Reid: You speak of a disconnect between the notion of socially worthy and the market, one that does not exist to that emphatic degree. For everything of cultural significance is ultimately uncovered, amplified and valued. Everything of value is ascribed a value in the market. My responsibility, my part in all this, is as one part among many. The bigness, over often some considerable length of time that these things take to coalesce, makes my influence episodic amidst the whole.
Beyond takes exhibitions into studios, empty buildings, outdoor locations and regional museums rather than treating the gallery as the fixed centre of the experience. What becomes possible when you remove the familiar architecture of the white cube?
Michael Reid: Creative business is about creating energy. Physically moving exhibitions or even an art gallery creates fission. An explosion of energy: the new in the now.
In addition, there is a great deal to be said for an art gallery physically connecting with its people - where its collectors live. So, with our Beyond program, we move out of the white cube gallery to exhibitions in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle. Art fairs in Auckland and so on. We service our collectors by going to our collectors.
We take this notion of movement and energy very seriously. I have just moved the Northern Beaches gallery from Newport to Brookvale after six years. This move, to a larger gallery, enables my colleagues to activate an entirely new creative community.
You have spent much of your career helping people become collectors. What, in your experience, separates a collection with genuine intellectual or emotional coherence from an accumulation of valuable objects - and has your own understanding of collecting changed with time?
Michael Reid: These questions are very value-judgey. There is nothing wrong with assembling a body of artworks that you like and that is fit for your home. Most, if not the vast, vast majority, of art buyers buy with an eye to what they like and what fits in their house. They are none the lesser for doing so.
Having clearly stated that, an art collection clearly separates itself from an assemblage (which can also be a good thing) when it tells us something about the history of now, an artist, the collector themselves, or a school or movement. Whatever the narrative hook, a collection tells a story through its thread of artworks. That conversation is made by the individual works as they present to the viewer, and as those artworks talk to each other.
Collecting has changed greatly; there is a doctoral thesis in that simple question. In a nutshell, driven by the self-validation of social media, collectors today take far less guidance from connoisseurs than they once did. Social media, and the liberation of personal experience and opinion as something that needs to be heard, have unleashed the individual, with or without the knowledge to inform their decisions and opinions. It is what it is.
Are there moments when the market and the deeper importance of an artist move in completely different directions?
Michael Reid: As for the artist and the dealer moving in different directions: First up, I need to place my broad theory of the artist and art gallery creative partnership firmly on the table. No artist - as in no painter, no sculptor, no filmmaker, no writer, no singer, no dancer, and so on - works alone. Creativity is a collaborative endeavour. The art dealer, composer, producer, choreographer, curator, and editor work hard to make the creative look better than they are.
Rudolf Nureyev worked with several world-renowned choreographers throughout his career, but the choreographer most famously and closely linked to him was Sir Frederick Ashton. As the principal choreographer and director of The Royal Ballet, Ashton created the landmark 1963 ballet Marguerite and Armand specifically for Nureyev and his legendary dance partner, Margot Fonteyn.
Rudi did not achieve stardom on his Pat Malone.
Back in the day, when I wrote weekly for the Business section of The Weekend Australian (1.2 million readership), I railed against the copy editor who changed a word, a comma, or God forbid, questioned the logic of a sentence. I grew up - and indeed there was much growing up to do - when I finally realised that these sub-editors, the chief sub-editor, the production editor, layout and picture editors, my Business section editor, and the big editor worked hard to make my work look better than it was, for us all.
I learned, and to this day I place myself into the hands of those who are very good at what they do and, in doing their job, have my interests in those hands and in mind.
To me, a professional relationship within the art world is a Venn diagram. There are the abilities, desires, and needs of the artist, and there are the abilities, desires, and needs of the gallery. If those fields intersect in a Venn diagram, then that is the space within which you work. If my circle parallels but does not intersect with an artist, I would imagine the artist would have nothing professionally to do with me. For in the other view of the diagram, the absolute same applies to me.
And an artist has every right to walk, for reasons that are entirely their own and often entirely fair. A gallery can stop selling, its audience exhausted. A gallery can go stale, content to trade on a name it once made and no longer feeds. There are more than a few art galleries in Australia today that have closed up but have not, as yet, shut the front door. An artist’s career can simply outgrow the room - bigger ambitions, bigger institutions, a bigger stage than can be offered - and it would be vanity for galleries to hold them to a circle that has stopped intersecting.
Sometimes the gallerist is at fault. I have been the reason more than one artist has left me - for I am professionally uncompromising and will suck the oxygen from a room - and on reflection, for them, they were right to go. The Venn diagram cuts both ways, or it is not a Venn diagram at all.
So yes, there are moments when the artist, their dealer or the market moves in a different direction, and I let that happen and move on.
Experience is often assumed to make judgement more certain. Has the opposite happened to you - has seeing more art made you more aware of how provisional any judgement really is? What, after all these years, do you still find yourself unsure about?
Michael Reid: I am capable of being decisively right and decisively wrong. Being absolute in action, being a first mover, comes with a strong advantage. If I am wrong, I change course just as decisively. The speed of my ability to change is the core factor here. As the line commonly attributed to John Maynard Keynes goes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I do so very quickly.
So I remain, as I have always been, sure of my judgement until change is required. I am not bolted to dogma, and I do not suffer the crushing weight of indecision and inaction.
What am I still unsure about? Nothing, until I am.
If you put aside the exhibitions, sales, prizes, galleries and expansion plans, what do you think a serious gallery is actually for? And when Michael Reid is eventually remembered not as a business but as a contribution to Australian art, what would you most like to have left behind?
Michael Reid: A good friend - at the top of the finance tree - once told me that he had met few people in his entire business career as focused as me. Thank you, the Dyslexic Aspie, within. I have the ability to endure. I have the ability to dedicate myself. Like a young boy who becomes immersed in trains, or another interested in dinosaurs - broadly understood compulsions of a type - along the way my interest was awakened by the art game.
As a child, I absolutely knew that I would work for an art auction house. In 1977, Sotheby’s Rothschild Mentmore Towers auction was mentioned on the ABC television news. I remember seeing piles and piles of silver in a big tent. I can still bring up the image. I knew instantly that this world was for me. And it was - at Christie’s.
Gaming the art game is my existence. Art - yes, I like it, and I have a formidable eye. But the art game - I like very, very much. The fun of one who plays to game the game is my fun: Reconfiguring, manipulating or exploiting the art world, often by understanding its rules so well that I can bend, twist or smash them to gain an advantage and for the fun of ensuing outrage in doing so. It’s not just playing the game but playing with and within the art game itself.
The complexity of an art world conundrum engages me. Juggling the peccadillos of collectors, the protocols of museums, hidden prices, shifting tastes, powerful gatekeepers, market swings, cultural politics, and the blurred lines between art, status, and commerce - and then, overlaying all of this, simply running a business. For me, it can be a rather brassy and gaudy circus act, and however the acrobatic balls in the air may tumble and fall, when the performance steadies, I can, in the dullness of ease, drift off and float away.
I have considered drifting away from the art game entirely, and I expect that, having no interesting lands left to conquer, like Alexander, a tear would be shed - and I may well float off to another more engaging world. But right now the art world continues to engage me.
So what is a serious gallery for? It is the creative partner that makes the artist look better than they are, and the place where collectors form the consensus long before the museums arrive. If I leave anything behind, I would like it to be that: Artists better seen, and collectors who backed their own eye early.
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Words and questions by AW.
Answers and photo courtesy of Michael Reid.
