Art in the Time of Stasis

The contemporary art market relies on global events, consensus, and good old-fashioned gossip. What happens when all of that grinds to a halt?

- By James Tarmy

Last June the art dealer Alexander Hertling filled his booth at Art Basel with 12 paintings by a young, relatively unknown artist named Xinyi Cheng. The Chinese-born, Paris-based painter depicts lightly surreal scenes: a naked figure cutting prosciutto, a vacant-looking man sticking his fingers into a glass of wine, a bearded nude caught in a circus net. All are executed in a layered, ever-so-slightly hazy, painterly style.

In his booth at the Swiss art fair, Hertling exhibited portraits of people Cheng had met over the past year—one for each month. “We’d sold her work before to some interesting collectors,” says Hertling, who co-founded the Parisian gallery Balice Hertling and was introduced to Cheng by one of his other artists. “But the Art Basel presentation opened her work to an international group of people.”

The setup itself wasn’t ornate: Cheng’s unframed paintings were mounted simply on the booth’s white walls. But her art struck a chord among collectors. Not only did every one of the works sell— depending on the size, they went for €10,000 ($10,874) to €40,000—but Cheng also won the fair’s Baloise Art Prize, which comes with 30,000 Swiss francs ($30,810) and a solo exhibition organized by the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin. Since then, Cheng has gotten more commissions from major foundations, and there’s a waiting list for her art.

Cheng’s meteoric rise might be dizzying, but it’s not unique; in fact, her success illustrates how the contemporary art world uses group settings to form consensus.