Crunch 09: The Art Festival at Hay was characterized by fierce debate and outspoken calls for a more open, honest art market. Over the course of the weekend, Godfrey Barker exposed the “conspiracy” at the heart of the art world and Julian Spalding branded Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Joseph Beuys “worse than junk."   The many hundreds of visitors who braved the rain to make it to Hay included leading curators, artists and enthusiasts, all of whom enjoyed challenging debate and magical live performances from, amongst others, music legend Richard Strange, emerging talent Plaster of Paris, Guardian favourite The Paper Cinema, indefatigable youngsters Clean Bandit and industry stalwart Alan McGee. Art work was provided by T1+2 Gallery, Open Gallery, Hive Projects, artists Eleanor Lindsay-Fynn, Scott London, and curator Gavin Ramsey.  Ephemeral works were created over the festival by graffiti artist Felix Braun and land artist Kate Raggett. London’s Open Gallery, which is devoted to the video painting medium, showed work by Gabrielle Le Bayon, Alys Williams, Isabelle Inghilleri and Sanchita Islam along with the first showing of Hilary Lawson's triptych, Now Revisited Revisited  which incorporated video paintings from a series of installations at Shunt in February 2009. Hilary Lawson, along with sculptor Richard Wentworth and Goldsmiths’ Head of Art Richard Noble were the speakers in a session entitled Exploring the Now chaired by FT Arts Editor Jan Dalley.   Lawson described ‘the now’ as a strange and elusive place, rich with infinite possibilities and meaning.   The art sessions offered speakers the opportunity to grapple with the issues at the heart of this year’s theme, art in an ephemeral age. For film-maker and critic Ben Lewis, art has become increasingly ephemeral because we are living in an age of increasing permanence. “It’s only because every part of our lives are recorded now – whether via our email archives, or Facebook, or video cameras or CCTV – that artists are comfortable making works that are fleeting, will decay or can only be viewed by a tiny public. The ephemera is both a reaction against and made possible by the ubiquity of technologies of permanence.”  In a later discussion on Ephemeral Art and the Cult of Celebrity, Lewis argued that celebrity was an all-consuming, infectious concept that had proved ruinous for the likes of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.    “Warhol’s Celebrity portraits and diamond dust gems ultimately only have a value because they are made by a celebrity. Often the celebrity artist ends up making work that is only about the celebrity they have achieved. Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction provides a further example. Here was a pile of remakes of old work, whose only value was the fame of the author, and some of which was an ironic comment about the gullibility of the viewers who bought into that myth. It is a decadent hall of mirrors – a grotesque cul de sac. Celebrity is the way for an artist to write his own death sentence.”   In a conversation with journalist Freddy Barker, graffiti artist and street art specialist Felix Braun explained how the public's prejudice often stops them from appreciating non-institutional art. “People who don’t like graffiti are often angry in themselves. It’s an odd thing to be threatened by colour. To prefer concrete and rectangular walls more is almost perverse." Using trains and walls as gallery spaces, he argued, meant “accepting the impermanence of your work”.   Former director of the Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow museums Julian Spalding branded gallerists “shop keepers” before warning collectors not to buy into the current crop of contemporary art stars. He railed against museum directors saying that they were fabricating a “totally phoney history of modern art” and creating “a huge financial bubble”. He went as far as to call the guilty parties “self deluded courtiers of a naked Emperor”. Godfrey Barker claimed that the art market is being manipulated by a handful of dealers that engage in bidding wars in order to bump up the prices of their artists. It was no accident, he stated, that certain artists had enjoyed phenomenal market growth in recent years and suggested that “there is a conspiracy at the heart of the art world.”