The Art World's Lamest Idea

We've all had it, the idea that stratospheric prices turn art into money, nothing more and nothing less. This idea certainly simplifies things. It even seems to explain things. But what, exactly? I mean, if art is money, why pay money for it? Trying to salvage the idea, you might say, well, people pay cash for more abstract kinds of money--shares of stock, options, futures, securitized mortgages. . . . so maybe at the high end of the market artworks are financial instruments of some sort. Or, at the very least, vehicles for investment, and of course some collectors--or, shall we say, buyers--do use art that way. Buy low, sell high. But that which is bought in the art market is not, after all, money, not even metaphorically. It is a commodity, and its value owes everything to our idea that a work of art is never merely a commodity. It has a value you can't quantify. It is priceless. So, whatever you pay for it, you've gotten a bargain--and often it feels that, the more you pay, the better the bargain. An outrageously high price serves as a homage to pricelessness, a sign of your devotion to transcendent greatness. And what does transcendent greatness transcend? Mere money. So the transcendently great work of art--or the work of art so pricey that it simply must be that great--functions as a sort of money laundering machine, but better, for it doesn't simply render your money clean. It lofts your money to a place far above the market, an empyrean where considerations of price are lost in the glow of art-historical significance. So, no, art is not money, not even at the high end of the market in the hottest of boom times. Art brings, for a price, the blessings of history.

A True Image of the High-End Art World

First comes our ideal image of the true artwork. It is utterly original and its originality convinces us that it was created in total freedom. We admire the artist's freedom. It is exemplary. We take the artist's freedom as proof that our society and our culture are, at least to some degree, good. Now, here's the twist. The high-end art world models itself on our ideal image of the true artwork.
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One difference: artworks are made by individuals. This art world is a collaborative work--the product of cooperation between certain artists, collectors, dealers, critics, academics, and others. Like the ideal work of art, the high-end art world is an exercise in the total, unqualified freedom that shows just how good our society, our culture, and of course our economy are. Because this is a world enabled by freedom--just as a work of art is enabled by freedom--moral constraints do not come into play. High-end curators and museum directors and collectors will say, by rote, all the things we expect them to say about avoiding conflicts of interest, keeping institutions open to all, discharging their responsibilities to the community at large, and so on, but they do not mean a word of it. For they have no interest in any of that. Their only interest is in elaborating their collaborative creation: the world that grants them total freedom and endows them with the status that accrues to those who need not play by the rules.
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This is a just a sketch, I realize . . . more in later posts . . .

The Horror, the Horror

There is a scene in Dragnet, starring Jack Webb, in which he wears snazzy sunglasses. Or maybe it’s an atypically stylish tie. Anyway, he has modified his usual dowdiness to a degree that delivers a severe shock to a female acquaintance, the other character in the scene. “You’ve gone hip!” she gasps, and drops her bag of groceries. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying a bag of groceries as I read Hal Foster’s “Precarious,” his most recent piece in Artforum.I definitely would have dropped it. Not that Foster has gone hip. He’s gone all touchy-feely, in the elegiac mode of an old-fashioned liberal. An amazing change. Foster praises Robert Gober for a 2005 installation evoking the awfulness of America's behavior on the world scene after 9/11—no explication of a thesis from the once hard-nosed theorist, just sympathy for the artist's horror. Jon Kessler conjures up the same subject with another installation, only the mood is even grimmer and Foster is even more sympathetic, and still more so, as the lugubrious parade goes on and on, right to the end of the decade.
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I don’t want to exaggerate the degree of Foster’s transformation. He was never an October apparatchik on the Benjamin Buchloh model. Where Buchloh was nastily dictatorial, Foster was merely pompous and peremptory, misreading artworks in service to the great cause of reducing them to slogans. This policy gave off more than a hint of bondage fetishism, as Barbara Kruger, for example, cooperated with Foster’s need to tie her up in a single, extremely constricting role: lead prosecutor in the case against consumerism and the male gaze. Playing along with this bondage game was supposed to be empowering—and it was empowering, in the market place.
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Now Foster is lamenting the horrors of the decade just past, as we all should, and praising the art that lamented those horrors when they were fresh. Gone is the October idea of the artwork as a finely honed, precisely targeted weapon in the ideological wars. In its place is Foster’s variation on the old idea of art as the mirror that moral sensitivity holds up to a cruel world. From artwork as active agent to artwork as passive reflection. As I said, an amazing transformation, and not entirely welcome, in my snarky view of things. I mean, if you are concerned with contemporary horrors, why not look them in the face? As if I didn’t know . . . as if I didn’t do the same as Foster and everyone else, looking away from current events, finding them bearable only second-hand, in the representations supplied by our more sensitive artists.

It's Not all That

At a certain point in his illustrious career, one of the ancient Greek painters—not sure which one—Zeuxis, possibly—anyway, at a certain point, he began to give his paintings away. They were so good, he said, that he couldn’t put a price on them. By putting a price of $100 million on one of his recent works, Damien Hirst admits it's not all that good.

The Stockholm Brillo Box Syndrome

Andy Warhol's first retrospective was organized in 1968 by Pontus Hulton, esteemed director of the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm—and I'm not being snarky here. Hulten, who died in 2006, was indeed esteemed, for that exhibition and many others. In 1990, he organized another Warhol retrospective, for the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. As you might expect, it featured a batch of Brillo Boxes. The show would have been incomplete without them. The trouble was that the Boxes on view at the St. Petersburg museum were not products of the Warhol Factory. Hulten had them manufactured by Swedish carpenters.
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If they were authentic, the Stockholm Boxes would be worth more than $75 million. But they're fakes. Not only that, they are flagrant fakes—a cinch to distinguish from Andy's Boxes, just as Andy's Boxes are a cinch to distinguish from the supermarket kind.
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What to do, what to do? I mean, if we believe in a free and unencumbered art market, what sense does it make to deprive that market of $75 million worth of merchandise?
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Here's my suggestion. Add Arthur Danto to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Why? Because Danto claims that there is no visible difference between a Warhol Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes manufactured by Purex Industries. From this silly claim follows Danto's “end-of-art” theory—more on that in a later post. The point for now is this: having said that he can't tell a Warhol Brillo Box from a real Brillo box, Danto should be willing to say that he can't tell a Stockholm fake from a real Warhol. And this is just what the Authentication Board would love to hear, given its cozy relations with the dealers who have become the approved outlets for authenticated Warhols.
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This would not be win-win. It would be win-win-win. Danto's willful blindness to the obvious differences between a Warhol Brillo Box and a real one would receive institutional recognition. By settling once and for all the problem of the Stockholm Boxes, the Authentication Board would solidify its relations with certain dealers by doing them a substantial favor. As the recipients of this favor, these dealers would see impressive improvements in their bottom lines. Yay, market! Yay, authentication games! And, above all, yay to the fog that conveniently descends upon all those who need to be blind if they are to formulate their theories about visual art!