Art and money

It has occurred to every one of us, 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, does it explain? I mean, if art is money, why pay money for it? Trying to salvage the idea that art is money, 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.  In other words, art is not money, it's a commodity, if you use it to make a profit.
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But even the shrewdest art investor is not in it merely for the money.  Because a work of art is never merely a commodity, right?. 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 pays homage to pricelessness.   By paying too much you signal  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 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, a heaven of socio-cultural prestige 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 is an investment vehicle that pays off with the blessings of history.

Richard Prince on the Paintings of Bob Dylan

Richard Prince’s remarks about the paintings of Bob Dylan recently appeared in a blog published by The New York Review of Books, of all places. This is the staid literary/political mag that used to run simple-minded attacks on Andy Warhol by Robert Hughes, the blunderbuss from Down Under. Did I say simple-minded? Simple-mindedly vicious is more like it. It was as if the world could be made safe for middle-brow solemnity if only The New York Review of Books was snotty enough about Warhol. And now they’re showcasing the faux-hip ramblings of Richard Prince, one of the many faux-Warhols who sprouted like mushrooms in the darkness that came over the New York art world in the 1980s. Did I say faux-Warhol? Sub-Warhol would be more like it. Prince performs as many of Warhol’s tricks as he can manage. The trouble is that he considers them tricks. That is because he is too mediocre in mind and spirit to understand Warhol’s gambits as the subtle plays of irony that they were. Am I being vicious? Yes, Your Honor. Guilty as charged. But I would argue in extenuation that I am not being simple-mindedly vicious, as you will see if you work out the distinction I have made, between Warhol’s still-surprising brilliance and Prince’s rule-bound predictability..
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Prince’s remarks, which appear in the catalog of Dylan’s recent show at Gagosian, are online at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/05/richard-prince-bob-dylan-fugitive-art/.
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In any case, Bob Dylan’s paintings are not bad. He can’t draw but, then, who can? His brushwork is earnest and scratchy. His colors are glum. His compositions, his handling of depth—it’s all respectable but dull. He takes his subjects from daily life in the Far East and presents them from the outside—a slide show of the exotic. So this is the picturesque in a down mood. For a look at Dylan’s paintings, see the Gagosian website. This was not an especially interesting show. What’s interesting is the light it shines on the notion of value in art..
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In recent years, Gagosian has offered exhibitions of work by artists most people would consider major: Picasso, de Kooning, Lichtenstein. He also shows such mediocrities as Richard Prince and John Currin. You see disparities like this at all the powerhouse galleries—Pace, Zwirner, and so on. The usual understanding is that the lousy artists gain some luster from their proximity to great artists. And indeed they do. Thus you hear people saying, well, Currin is no Picasso but Gagosian shows them both, so maybe Currin is better than I think he is. After all, Gagosian is very bright and he’s supporting Currin so it’s possible, I guess, that Currin is really great and I just can’t see it. Anyway, shows at Gagosian are big events, so why not just drop by, check it out, suspend judgment . . . at least I won’t be swimming against any powerful art-world currents . . . .
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Understood this way, the proximity of bad artists to great ones in major galleries is a problem of aesthetic value: the bad artists tend to be overestimated. But Bob Dylan’s appearance on the Gagosian roster shows that the problem is far worse than that. At the art world’s upper levels, aesthetic value is no longer at stake. What counts is the strength of the brand. Dylan’s is very strong. Arguably, it is stronger than Picasso’s. That is what got him into the Gagosian Gallery. And what earned de Kooning’s paintings a place on Gagosian’s walls? De Kooning’s splendid brushwork? No, the strength of the de Kooning brand. This artist’s greatness as a painter is beside the point. Likewise, Currin’s badness is beside the point. Richard Prince’s sheer cheesiness is beside the point. The point is that Richard Prince, like John Currin, is a brand. Their brands are not as big as Dylan’s or de Kooning’s but they’re big enough to be profitable for Gagosian. That’s why he shows them. Aesthetic value has nothing to do with it.

Art Theory and Heidi Klum

How naive do you have to be to think that any art theory is entirely adequate to anything? Never mind that the theories of, say, Rosalind Krauss or Arthur Danto may well be adequate to nothing except the desire to exercise the theorist's power, such as it is. So, staying with the improbability that any theory is entirely adequate, let us consider the further possibility that no theory of art, no matter how old or neglected, is entirely inadequate. Take, for example, the neoplatonic theory that art succeeds when it offers an image of some transcendent something that combines absolute Truth with absolute Beauty. Granted, neoplatonism is less rampant in the art world than in the fashion world, where Heidi Klum is being promoted as "the Perfect One." Still, there is a tinge of neoplatonism to any absolutist judgment about any work of art. My point? A theory of art has no power to render any other theory wrong. Theories of art do not supersede one another. They accumulate, and it is only those looking for shortcuts to wisdom who glom onto a contemporary theory as if it were all that is needed. So sad! To think that Kraussian or Dantesque or Buchlovian theory puts you in touch with the meaning of art is like thinking that, to get in touch with ordinary life, one should wear oven mitts.

Valentine's Day Report Card

To deal with Valentine's Day, let's start with the cast, which is an exercise in covering the demographic bases.
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Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift
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See what I mean? Something for everyone. Young-old, black-white-Hispanic, stars-character actors, movie stars-TV stars, hunks-geeks, babes-mere cuties, and so on. The more you study this cast, the more demographic calculations you see, but it's a game with diminishing returns, and boring to begin with. So, on to the main point, which concerns genre.
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Valentine's Day is a romantic comedy, right? But not just one. It is many romantic comedies interwoven, so many that each snippet of plot is like a clip that a star might bring to a talk show—or, and here it gets interesting, a clip that might be run at an award show. Because that is the other genre in play here: the award show, which is often more popular than anything it celebrates.
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As a mixture of romantic comedy and award show, this movie is an attempt to cash in on the sad state of the contemporary attention span. Stories, however fluffy and obvious, are just too complicated. As for character, it might as well be quantum mechanics. People want logos—in other words, stars not as personalities or emblems of some virtue (Gary Cooper as manly integrity, Katherine Hepburn as feminine elegance) but as sheer image. Image of what? Of some variant on contempo glamor, which, for the contempo audience, is some unarticulated, inarticulable sort of power. Transcendent power, power so dazzling that it blots out everything else and fuses the circuits of the imagination—or whatever you want to call the faculty that a mature mind employs in making sense of such things as fictions, not to mention the real world.
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So that is the brilliance of Valentine's Day. It has been panned and may well turn out to be less than a mega-hit. Still, its mixture of genres shows the way to an ever more efficient delivery of the services craved by today's audience: a quick succession of star images plus snippets of story-lines, just enough to provide transitions from one star-image to the next.
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What does this have to do with art? Stayed tuned.

Loving the Authoritarian

For days, a David Bowie song went around in my head, just out of reach . . . couldn't quite hear what it was . . . then I realized, or thought I did, that it was Loving the Alien--a great song, though not my favorite, which is of course Ashes to Ashes. And then there are sentimental favs like The Prettiest Star. Anyway, when I heard more clearly the song that had been nagging me, it turned out to be, not Loving the Alien, but Loving the Authoritarian . . . quite a different thing, given that authoritarianism presumes to a sort of intimacy. It says: I know you and, even better, you know me. You know what I can do for you, thus you know how much you need me. How much you need to give in to me.
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Speaking again as Art Snark,let me say: don't do it. Don't give in. Works of art claim no authority, try to exercise none. They mean all that they do only if you are free . . . if you are indifferent to authority and those who try to impose it on you. This is obvious, who doesn't know it? No one, for no one would say: I am weak and fearful and am looking for someone to tell me what to think about art. No one would say that and yet the art world is full of art-lovers who love, even more than art, being told what think about art. I don't understand this. Will return to the subject the moment I see even the faintest glimmer of light on the subject.

The High-End Art World-2

In an earlier post , I suggested that the high-end art world is a work of the imagination. Whose imagination? That is difficult to say, for this art world is the product of many imaginations working together—dealers working with collectors, collectors working with artists, artists working with critics and curators and museum directors. All them interacting in every possible permutation. For the high-end art world is an environmental niche where certain forms of life evolve and thrive, and it is through such interactions that such niches are created and sustained. So far, so good. The dynamics of the high-end art world are no different, in principle, from those of any social environment. But, here's the thing. If we view a social environment as a work of the imagination, a collaborative artwork, a question arises: what is its medium? A painter uses paints. A sculptor of a certain sort uses uses sheets of cold-rolled steel. What, then, is the medium of the high-end art world? What else but works of high-end art—pricey items by the likes of Jeff Koons. Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, et al.
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The problem, of course, is that works of art are difficult to see as raw materials, unformed globs of stuff equivalent to globs of paint squeezed from a tube. So the primary job of critics and curators—not to mention the anonymous functionaries who write press releases and wall labels—is to simplify the meanings of the pertinent artworks to the point where they can be seen as raw materials. In the high-end art world, interpretation is simplification, the more brutal the better. The goal is to produce a slogan that can be attached to an artist's oeuvre firmly enough to block the demand for any more nuanced response. So the policy of raising prices to nonsensical levels has a hidden cost. It reduces works of art to empty counters in an ultimately empty game.

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.