Aura Hunters

Who attends art fairs, sees dozens of exhibitions and enters auction houses?
In the art market, especially the contemporary one, which in the last decade has experienced not
only an economic boom but also a progressive standardization, it is possible to find different roles.
Therefore, this question could be answered by naming these actors of the art system, whose
contribution is very complex, subtle and increasingly hybrid: merchants, galleries, museums,
publishers, auction houses and collectors, curators, critics, art advisors, analysts, financiers as well
as artists.

The most naive or simply the less experienced, approaching this symbolic economy can remain
dazzled by the extended frenzy and the eccentricities, and perhaps be fascinated by anecdotal book
like Sarah Thornton's Seen Days in Art World. But the reality is far more intricate. Moreover, as the
anthropologist Daniel Miller said, "Culture has a contradictory nature, and its contradictions are
insurmountable"1. Consequently, the economy around the visual arts and the intangibles powers
that motivate it, are essentially antithetical; these elements have constituted the culture of all times
and have always lived with their tangle. That’s way we shouldn’t believe that all players in the
panorama of art are interested in art or are moved by passion.

Piroschka Dossi, thanks to a interdisciplinary approach, discussed in a shrewd way in her book Art
Mania how the emerging contemporary art is conquering the world and why. Here, there are plenty
of ideas on how to raise the quality of the artistic level and therefore the collectors’, obviously
hoping that this development will come along with the evolution of a very young market, if the
current boom does not blow up in a crisis bringing consequently a stagnation of culture.2

At this point, if you have not given up reading, I advance that the solution might lie in the "aura’s
hunters”. Before explaining who are these "knights" of the new millennium are, some words about
postmodernism must be spoken.

In the postmodern era, many artists created works of art based on works that already existed, as the
focus was on working with already circulating objects. Thus, to be an expert in contemporary art it
is essential to have a deep knowledge of art history and to be constantly updated.3
That being said, although in the economic sphere during the same period, words such as fair value,
fundamental true value and investment value have started to be common language; one should not t
forget to take as valid Umberto Eco’s definition of a work of art as "an object produced by an
author organizing a network of communication effects in a way that any user may cover (through
games of responses to the configuration of effects experienced as a sense of sensitivity and
intelligence) the work itself, the form imagined by the author ".4
Indeed, in current terminology of financial markets intersecting art, the real value can undeniably be
determined; it implicitly asserts that an independent assessment may exist, that can be intangible
value or aura, as suggested by the philosopher Walter Benjamin.
In very simple words, we are talking about something that makes people who can perceive it,
become more and more addicted to it; when even the followers can grasp it, the pioneers have the
opportunity to achieve economic benefits as well as cultural ones.
In fact, taking into consideration Andy Warhol's words, it is possible to realize the opposite to what
Benjamin had announced:

1 Quotation brought from a lecture of Angela Vettese during the course Teoria e critica dell'arte contemporanea at
University IUAV of Venice, January 2010.
2 Piroschka Dossi, Art Mania, Come l'arte contemporanea sta conquistando il mondo (e perché), Silvana Editoriale,
2009.
3 Nicolas, Bourriaud, Postproduction, Come l'arte riprogramma il mondo, Postmedia, 2004.
4 Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta, Forma e Indeterminazione nelle Poetiche Contemporanee, Bompiani, ed. 2006.
“Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura”. They didn’t want my product. They
kept saying, ‘We want your aura’. I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to
pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to
figure out what it is. I think ‘aura’ is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see
as much of it as they want to. It’s all in the other person’s eyes”5.

Aura (in Latin, wind or breeze) expresses things that are related to the shimmer and the charisma of
an object or an individual. In roman mythology Aurora was the light of dawn.
Aura can be an emotionally charged experience, anxiety, for example, or supreme happiness.
Aura is not a phenomenon that exists depending if we as human beings exist or not. It is something
that is constructed in society. Within a culture, there are certain areas or sites that evolve producing
more aura than others are (Maquet, 1979). Today, in our western society, aura is usually connected
to an individual and to certain kinds of cultural forms.
Aura is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the role it plays in our society. In primitive societies
aura was fetishism: the belief that everything in nature could have a soul. For example, a hunting
bow had a spiritual power. Many would say, that these kinds of beliefs are not representative for our
civilized society, expect as an outcome of something that is not normal. But there are objects,
people or organizations in our society that attracts similar to how primitive people interpret fetish
objects.

As for contemporary art, nowadays more and more people collect works of young artists, there are
even artist-collector (Maurizio Cattelan) or artists that use collectionism as artistic work (Michael
Johansson).
In the new private social network of indipendent-collectors there are hundreds and hundreds of
interested people all around the world. What is appealing is how such a melting pot interacts on
variegate art’s themes; what is peculiar is that there are moderators which guide every discussions
in an appropriate way, ethically and professionally.

Concluding, what comes out it is an artistic scenario where art works which own, from their
creation, a particular “original aura”(arising from the “intellectual taste”). Ones the work introduced
into the market, further kind of aura can be added: the “artist aura”, the “status aura”, values
influenced by prices and led by personal gaze. People who can distinguish these shades are few, the
aura hunters.

They have the gift and feel the necessity (nearly an addiction) of identifying what are the expression
and the creative power of an individual. They are in this light able to recognize the “objects” that
will satisfy the primordial need and the imagination of whomever will own them.

Giorgio Agamben observed in a lecture following his essay What is the contemporary?, that “The
contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the present, grasp a light that can
never reach its destiny; he is also the one who, diving and interpolating time, is capable of dividing
it and interpolating time. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to ‘cite it’ according to a
necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an axigency to which he cannot not
respond ”.
Aura hunters are contemporary. The final result (successful or unsuccessful) of our seminar
depends on our ability to listen and follow the vision of these hunters, instead of considering them
dangerous sharks or hypnotic vipers.

5 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Pen Book, 1975.