THE BUSINESS OF JAPANESE ART
by
TAJ
The art of Japanese business -- How often that phrase echoes in reverential tones in Western discussions of manufacturing, trade, and finance. Awe-inspiring though Japan's postwar economic achievements may be, the country clearly cannot claim a monopoly on enlightened management techniques or industrial policy. But what of the business of Japanese art? Here Japanese hegemony is undisputed. In the field of fine arts, and the visual arts in particular, Japan trails no nation. She boasts a multimillion dollar market for sculpture, drawing, and painting, both foreign and domestic, and a highly productive local arts community backed by a centuries-old heritage that few cultures can match.
Mention Japanese art to most outsiders, and they will immediately envision traditional wood-block prints (hanga) and brushed ink drawings (sumi-e) - two art forms often regarded as representative of Japanese aesthetics and artistry. Even in Japan today, a strong interest remains in such works. Most families own at least one piece of old-style art, usually a hanging scroll, which occupies a place of honor in the tokonoma.
Ancient religious art also attracts considerable patronage, as evidenced by the success of museums and exhibitions featuring Shinto and Buddhist artifacts. In 1980, for example, the Asahi Shimbun, a nationwide newspaper, shelled out US$3.5 million to sponsor a display of Buddhist works. Billed as a celebration of the completion of the restoration work on Nara's Todaiji temple, the show toured five cities and drew an estimated attendance of more than one million visitors.
Yet in comparison with the appeal of Western-style art, traditional forms now lag far behind. The Tokyo National Museum's Mona Lisa exhibit brought in a record 1.5 million visitors in the spring of 1974. Of the 83 most popular exhibitions held in Tokyo during 1954 - 1979, only five focused on traditional Japanese themes. Displays of works by Picasso, Utrillo, Renoir, and Degas appear like the tip of the art-world iceberg, indicating the nation's deep interest in Western-style oils and watercolors. And this interest extends beyond Japan's buyers and viewers of art to the artists themselves.
Gathering in Groups
Infatuation with imported art forms dates back to the Meiji Era (1868 - 1912), when the government brought Antonio Fontanesi from Italy to teach painting. In the ensuing years, the Post-Impressionist and School of Paris creations of 1875 - 1925 gradually became accepted in Japan as orthodox European art. Ever since, Japanese artists have been following this lead, taking cues from French modernists in developing their own works. In fact, powerful art cliques have grown up around these forms, and they struggle just like their counterparts in other areas of Japanese business to control market shares.
Among the 200-odd art associations which sprang to life since World War II, three major ones emerged: the Japan Art Academy (Nihon Bijutsuin) for Japanese-style painters; Nitten for calligraphers; Western-style painters, and other artists; and the New Works Association (Shinseisaku Kyokai), which attempted to bridge the gap between Japanese and foreign styles of painting. Customs, personalities, and group factionalism have helped keep these groups separate and strong throughout the postwar period.
Nitten, for instance, served as the national government's vehicle for official art display from 1907 to 1958, before being reorganized as a private organization. In this sense, it boasts Japan's oldest group show. Out-of-Tokyo curators and collectors wait anxiously for its annual tour of the country, expecting it to set the standards for the year's art. Showing at Nitten is a sure step to professionalism for local artists, who submitted roughly 9,000 works for the exhibitions 1,769 openings in 1980-1981. Membership among the group's 480 elite means "you can sell your work at prices high enough that you can hope to make a living entirely from painting," according to oil painter Junichi Maki, although he readily admits success at Nitten also requires "the patronage of your old teacher and other artists senior to you." Nitten is, in fact, the most conservative of all Japan's art associations.
Galleries are another force to be reckoned with in Japanese art circles. The Japanese gallery system underwent abrupt commercialization in 1972 when wealthy purchasers suddenly discovered art as an investment opportunity, driving prices so high that an estimated US$2,000 million worth of works - 90 percent of them domestic - changed hands that year. So many people wanted art, and so many persons were producing it, that two types of galleries eventually evolved: the kashigaru, or rental galleries, and the kikaku, or professional galleries. The former will rent space to practically anyone for the right price; they usually offer one-artist shows and small group displays by newcomers hoping to build up a reputation and a following. The latter operate on strictly on a commission basis, frequently presenting works from overseas in addition to those of talented locals whose contemporary or avant-garde styles would preclude acceptance in association shows.
Andrew Watsky, formerly employed by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and now with the Gallery Ueda, a kikaku-type gallery with two locations in Tokyo, notes that although modern masters like Picasso and Dali sell well in Japan, support for contemporary art is still weak compared to what it is in America. "American collectors often buy art indiscriminately for tax purposes, donating works to museums at a later date as a tax write-off, but there are no real tax incentives of this sort in Japan. Also, because Japan has such a long history of art, there's less emphasis attached to newness. For investment purposes, it makes more sense to purchase something very old which has already proven it will increase in value."
On the surface, this sounds like a disadvantage for contemporary Japanese artists, but Watsky points out how it also works to the benefit of art in general: "The environment for contemporary art in Japan is healthier in a way because it's more critical. A person really has to want a piece here before buying it."
At a typical kikaku gallery, the owner or manager decides whose works to exhibit. Artist and promoter decide the works to be displayed and the artist alone sets the sale price. When a piece is sold, the gallery generally splits the payment fifty-fifty with the artist, though the latter sometimes receives as much as 70 percent or as little as 10 percent, depending on the arrangement. The gallery covers advertising mailing, lighting, framing, and opening-day catering costs. Expenses involved in publishing a catalog for the show are borne fifty-fifty by organizer and artist, though the artist may sometimes pay his/her share in artworks at cost in lieu of cash. Such catalogs are a virtual necessity, because only a very small percentage of the works on display are actually sold during the week-long run of a show.
Portrait of the Artist
Altogether, some 30,000 people consider themselves professionals in the world of Japan's visual arts. Of these, the number of artists who make a living wholly off their work hovers around a mere one percent. Like Shingo Honda, a contemporary print maker who drives a pickup truck and gathers old newspapers for recycling to earn his keep, the vast majority must hold part-time or even full-time jobs in order to maintain themselves.
Yet each year, over 10,000 students of Western art apply for admission to enter the 50-member freshman class of the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, while some 30,000 others graduate with art majors from the nation's other universities.
This flood of new talent supplies Japan with an abundance of art teachers and commercial artists - dropouts, usually, from the rigors of competing for a position in Nitten or the professional galleries. But some go on and make it despite the difficulty. Hideko Urushibara, one of them, is a contemporary artist whose oils and drawings "lean toward surrealism." Nine of her earlier paintings are currently on loan to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, "presumably reposing peacefully in the darkness of the TTM storage vaults." How does she view Japanese art?
"I have relationships with very few galleries," she says. "I am more or less friends with the owners, but if I were to have exhibitions or participate in shows at their galleries, it would be on a business basis and my personal manager would make the arrangements. The only association I belong to is the Japan Artists' Association, which is a kind of union. If you belong to it, you can get health insurance, buy art materials at a discount, and even borrow small sums of money free of interest."
"As far as marketing my work goes, I don't mind adjusting my style a bit or trying something different, if I can still do what I want to do. I once started using acrylics to paint faster and produce more. I'd even do cartoons if I were good at them. Some categories of art pay better than others. The only things that I can think of now that might be able to do to increase the price of my work would be to change my style or die. But basically I just want to create what I want and hopefully what others want too."
Pleasing the Public
If exhibitions are any indication, what the public wants are Renoir and Monet, da Vinci and Chagall. Large newspapers took note of this back in the 1950s and began staging elaborate shows of imported art, the first of which was Asahi Shimbun's Louvre show in 1954 - 1955. It was the largest and costliest exhibition Japan had ever witnessed, with 365 items of French art dating from the Middle Ages to 1840 drawing 1.1 million spectators in Tokyo, Kyoto and Fukuoka.
The newspapers also brought the King Tut display to Tokyo from Egypt, the Venus de Milo to the 1964 Olympiad, and a Goya exhibition, which dazzled more than half a million Japanese in 1971. Such wanderings into the art field are not so much to make money as they are to build up an image of culture and sophistication for the sponsoring papers. Not to be outdone, Japanese television stations have embarked upon similar projects, and local department stores have opened up their own penthouse galleries and museums to act as come-ons for customers. During 1954 - 1979, 19 of the 50 largest art exhibits took place at department stores, mainly the big three: Mitsukoshi, Seibu and Isetan. Public museums, with their limited budgets, lag far behind the private sector in staging such gala shows.
Needless to say, any gallery that can offer a modern master like Picasso or Renoir stands to make a quick and easy sale to a large Japanese corporation, a museum, or a monied patron of the arts. But observers note that the really big money is not in single sales; rather it is in the cultivation of art appreciation within Japan's huge middle class, where buying art is tantamount to buying culture or status. Unable to afford famous French oils of their own, but preferring originals to good facsimiles, salaried workers are the major buyers of locally produced works. Galleries and department stores thus do their best to cater to this massive market by featuring "respectable" indigenous art, sometimes with mixed results.
At a recent department store exhibition entitled "one Hundred Japanese Artists," almost all of the paintings were oils - no prints and no sumi-e - and some two-thirds were done in a distinctively European style. One couple in the market for a piece were astonished by the sales pitch they received. The husband explains: "The clerk greeted us warmly and took us straight to one of the biggest and most expensive pieces at the exhibition. He explained that its artist was famous, showed us the fellow's name in an artists' "Who's Who," and advised us that this painting would appreciate considerably when the creator died, which might be quite soon since he was over 75. The painting cost over 1,000,000 Yen. All we wanted was something nice and inexpensive to hang on the living room wall, but he showed us one ‘investment opportunity' after another. Finally, we gave up and went home. The next day, we ended up buying a 90,000 Yen watercolor of a Paris street scene -- on credit."
Outsiders Allowed?
This situation raises an obvious question: If the Japanese buyers like foreign work, why don't they but lesser known or new foreign art?
As Thomas R. Havens points out in his study Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 1982), "Japanese collectors and speculators alike came to the market only recently and are still reluctant to take chances on unfamiliar names. The same is true for corporations -- Art is bought like other fashionable items in Japan. The intricate web of social obligations requires that status be continually recognized and reconfirmed."
Entering the Japanese art market from the outside is much like entering any other Japanese market. It takes connections, patience, money and compromise. Open art auctions, a common occasion in most Western countries, are still a rarity in Japan. American collector John Powers has pointed out that auctions seem to risky to most Japanese purchasers; they prefer to work directly through dealers who will agree to take back what they sell.
Being recognized abroad is not enough to gain access to the Japanese market, either. Showings must be arranged through respected channels - galleries, museums, or privately sponsored exhibitions - and given adequate coverage in the local arts press, which has been known to operate according to a patronage system all its own. One American sculptor learned this the hard way, spending two-years getting ready for a one-man show in Tokyo and going so far as to pay for a small exhibition space in the Ginza out of his own packet, only to find out it wasn't covered at all in the vernacular press. The show closed after three days with just his personal friends and friends of friends attending; no sale was made.
Gallery contacts and friendships with working Japanese artists can be the best start for outsiders coming into the Japanese market. And there is every indication that it is worth the effort: More than 100,000 foreign art works are now being brought into the country each year, mainly paintings and prints, especially recent French and British works which sell for a few hundred dollars each. Once the marketing channels are established and the artists publicized, there are numerous doctors, securities dealers, real-estate agents, financiers and other middle-class buyers more than willing to make their selections based on the advice of Japanese dealers - the experts in the dynamic business of Japanese art.
This article first appeared in Tradepia International, Spring 1984
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