Art’s Relationship to Money?

When we study art at school, there is little, if any, discussion about the role of money except maybe indirectly when patronage is mentioned. But to the investor, money is such an important factor that the work of art ‘itself’ risks paling in comparison. What is for sure is that art has always had a slightly inconsistent and contradictory relationship to money. An artist has to live after all, but then you hear lines about ‘living solely for the art’.

The wisdom is that any discussion of money with regard to art tends to harm or undermine the ‘art’. But art has been done for patrons, art is done for commissions, and artists also market their art and personality to get better paid. The story about art and money is not a smooth one because it is always about the contradictions.

Beginnings: Patronage

Art’s relationship with money begins with patronage. When under the shadow of religious ritual, art is financed by the religious body it obediently serves, the artists often remaining anonymous, as in the Middle Ages, when artists were artisans whose duty was to describe the stories and virtues of the Christian faith.

Artistic innovation was not an issue since the artist-artisan's duty was to discharge objectives within set prescriptions. They were paid for their creations as a carpenter would a table or a tailor a coat.

The late Middle Ages saw the advent of trade routes on land and sea, which resulted in a greater influx of goods. People became more demanding and discriminating; suppliers were more competitive. For those in secondary production, in the arts as elsewhere, increased competition accompanied the desire to garner attention through novelty, invention, or efficiency.

And thus, in the Renaissance, the flowering of the notion of genius: the artist attracts patrons for his ability to distinguish himself, reflecting directly back onto the patron's distinction. Patronage is therefore not just a matter of spending riches. It is what secures these riches and justifies them.

The central paradox of patronage is that it brings about a culture of prosperity that reverses the perception of the patron’s fortunes: art comes to be seen not as a result, but a cause of the patron’s success, like securing a birthright after the birth, a favourite ruse of usurpers and bastard princes.

Just as the relationship between artist and patron was so often built on a healthy contempt, the relationship between art and money is agonistic, fraught by inequities, morality, and guilt.

Abstract Value

How can an object like a painting made of cloth, wood, oil, and pigment be worth more than a housing estate? The answer lies in the mystery, which is its religious legacy, that art enjoys, of being above, or outside the world.

Abstract in value and speaking the unspeakable, some works of art do this better than others. Still, the unfortunate pitfall is that artistic merit may become conflated with the price laid on its ineffable power, confusing monetary with spiritual or symbolic value.

This displaces art's function to become just a cog or rivet in the colossal international monetary machine. While art's first encounters with patronage represented wealth, its ensuing purpose was to transcend it, making art all the more desirable, and ironically, monetarily valuable.

The artist's persona was, and is, also an essential tool in marketing the mystique that attracts curiosity and desire.

Patronage from Ancient Rome Onward

Patronage featured in Ancient Rome, which drew the distinction between the dispensing of political favour, or what Renaissance Italy called clientelism, and support of the arts, mecenatismo, coined after the great literary patron and friend of Augustus Octavian, Gaius Maecenas (70-8 BC). Patronage was also a feature in early feudal Japan, where wealth was conspicuously imbalanced.

Nobles were expected to engage in tasks, to wear clothes, dine on plate, and to inhabit places commensurate with their perceived status.

But the system we have today originated with the bankers and princes, as with the Medici and Sforza dynasties, of Renaissance Italy who surrounded themselves not only with artists but with astrologers, alchemists, scholars, and philosophers, as well as the breed that will always dog patronage, the fraud.

Around the mid to late 1300s, this came at a period when princes were beginning to take on such people as part of an inner circle, or familiaris, separate from the family, military, or civic domain. The pursuit of abstract knowledge reserved for an elite few was part of Neoplatonist ambitions of rulers conscious that power lay not solely in tyranny but in ideas.

A new social value had begun to take shape. Courtly prosperity was measured not just on grain and gold but on cultural richness: the people it could attract and the quality of the art produced for which rulers were apt to pay handsomely.

Patronage was always a tricky business. As Ingrid Rowland in her study of the Renaissance suggests, in many cases, the line between mecenatismo and clientismo was muddied, as with, for example, Raphael (1483-1520) or Sebastian di Piombo (c.1485-1527) who had administrative sinecures in gratitude for their artistic services, while Machiavelli and Guicciardini who held political appointments, also nursed literary ambitions. Families with branches in both the clergy and ruling nobility, which was not unusual, found themselves having to manoeuver between their various interests, usually negotiated so they could be covertly met rather than foregone.

Toward the Autonomous Artist

Once artists had forged a separate relationship for themselves and a class distinct from artisanship, and once they were deemed guardians of taste, experience, and feeling, the issue of patronage could often be moot.

By the end of the eighteenth century, works of art were seen to be superior to tribulations about money. But artists need to live, however, inflated their self-importance. For this, an Ersatz form of payment, the honorarium, was invented. Artists could thus be paid without feeling like salaried workers or usurers. It is still a term that is often used today, as in Germany (Honorary), in place of the flat contemporary phrase, artist's fee.

Art about Wealth

From the sixteenth century onward, painting was conspicuously about, and descriptive of, wealth. The development of Dutch and Spanish painting in the seventeenth century is thanks to their naval supremacy and the high rate of foreign trade.

Holland became so prosperous that it suffered from what one historian has called an 'embarrassment of riches'. As a middle-class mercantile culture, the most popular painting in Holland of the time are of people enjoying everyday pursuits (the genre known as genre painting), portraits, and still life, describing the plenty around them.

Still, life had numerous functions, preeminently as the expression of vanitas, the vanity of earthly things that meant relishing the profusion of objects in a transient world when taken optimistically. It was also a convenient way of flaunting possessions, chiefly when curios, flowers, musical instruments, and the occasional parrot were concerned.

In this work by the Flemish artist Peeter Gysels (1621-90), the artist combines landscape with still life to depict a divinely benevolent world. It represents work in this era for the way it combines taught empirical observation with a fanciful design.

Vertumnus and Pomona at the palace terrace. Circa 1660-1680. Peeter Gijsels. Via Google Arts Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/vertumnus-and-pomona-at-the-palace-terrace-peeter-gijsels/HgHBFMUyeAzPrg?hl=en

Vertumnus and Pomona at the palace terrace. Circa 1660-1680. Peeter Gijsels. Via Google Arts Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/vertumnus-and-pomona-at-the-palace-terrace-peeter-gijsels/HgHBFMUyeAzPrg?hl=en

Still, life accounted for what was closest to hand in a culture overflowing with everyday things, an emporium mundi or consumers’ paradise, and a culture whose lowly worker, an astounded Diderot remarked in his visit there, was better fed than many average gentlemen in other lands.

But maybe because of its materialism, many thinkers of the early nineteenth century —Hegel and Hazlitt come to mind—thought Dutch art bland in comparison to the incredible feats of the Venetians and the magnificence of the court of Louis XIV.

The Family of the Grand Dauphin. 1687. Pierre Mignard. Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianons

The Family of the Grand Dauphin. 1687. Pierre Mignard. Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianons

The painting, sculpture, and architecture of the Baroque period, which has to take account not only of France but what was then the Habsburg Empire which stretched from northern Italy to Eastern Europe, produced the most splendidly unapologetic statements of prosperity and luxury—even when the kings and princes were dangerously in the red. (As indeed Louis XIV was in the second half of his reign after spending on a dizzyingly lavish scale and successive defeats at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough.)

And as we see in the massive tomb sculptures of this time throughout Europe, patrons were as lavish in death as they were in life.

Various Coventry tombs. In the C17 effigies no longer lying flat but raised on their sides at St Mary Magdalene Croome. Via Nationaltrust.org. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/croome/features/st-mary-magdalene-church-croome

Various Coventry tombs. In the C17 effigies no longer lying flat but raised on their sides at St Mary Magdalene Croome. Via Nationaltrust.org. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/croome/features/st-mary-magdalene-church-croome

Marketing the Artist

The Napoleonic years taught that people could rise in a society based on talent and birth, which was after all the secret to his Marshals' success, many of whom were born commoners.

For the early nineteenth century's Romantic youth, an individual's worth was directed toward inner experience. When we inspect self-portraits from this era, there have more than the fair share of stern brows, close-set lips, tousled hair, and florid cravats spilling out from tight coats.

References. To Be Advised

References. To Be Advised

The age of the poète maudit, or embattled artist, lasted until the beginning of the next century. He was the paragon of the isolated artist, left to his own devices, inhabiting his own imaginative subjective universe. The revolutionary era was also an era of self-conscious genius.

Talented artists quickly discovered was that educated society had no qualms with making a spectacle of the artistic, bohemian persona. This curiosity became a convenient myth for artists for whom commercial livelihoods were far less secure, owing to the more off-and-on and scaled-down nature of bourgeois patronage and the fact that many more artists were circling the honey pot.

Rather than being integrated into society when art was combined with ritual, artists were purveyors of what could not be accurately valued in a fiscally rationalized society, much less adequately understood. Inevitably, artists without the right social or academic connections found themselves branded outsiders. They marketed themselves as such: radically independent, inward-looking, and tempestuous souls; they were invited to dinner parties as a foil to the proceedings (and they may have needed the feed); they styled themselves as reckless, insouciant dandies. They were snubbed and envied as great lovers; they lived out the pleasures of the flesh and experienced both its punishments and rewards.

Countless works of art have been sold based on the author's personal allure over any real merit.

Like all myths, it has its share of truth. Art is valued because it takes risks above any prosaic, unrewarding job. The artist-bohemian's social phenomenon has now become an accepted dimension of artistic practice, acceptable from the way that artists have literally sculpted their persona so that it cannot be disassociated from what they produce.

Salvador Dalí, Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, 1938. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparition_of_Face_and_Fruit_Dish_on_a_Beach

Salvador Dalí, Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, 1938. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparition_of_Face_and_Fruit_Dish_on_a_Beach

Artists from the last century that come to mind are Salvador Dali (1904-89) with his cane and Dr. Seuss moustache, Yves Klein (1928-62) who patented his own 'signature' blue, self-consciously cast gold leaf into the Seine as a ceremony of his disregard for art commodities, or doctored photographs with himself leaping from a window; and the perennial pièce de résistance, Andy Warhol (1928-87), the ultimate performance artist who played at playing the artist.

Andy Warhol in the Silver Factory. Via Pinterest

Andy Warhol in the Silver Factory. Via Pinterest

He would notoriously turn up to cocktail parties and leave once someone photographed him. His studio, known as The Factory, was less a place of industry than an ad hoc party venue of models, musicians, junkies, weirdoes, artists both failed and made. He also produced and sponsored films and founded the magazine Interview.

Warhol's overall output is one of great ingenuity and subtlety. He was overwhelmingly struck by the idea of death, and behind his apparently imperturbable showmanship, there lurks an impenetrable personal demon which touches us as the dual nature of the satisfaction and hollowness of commercial culture.

Arguably his most significant work of art was his own celebrity. He made himself into a readymade: I point to myself, I am the work of art. Just as important as the works themselves is that Andy Warhol did them—he was the ultimate signatory, the artist as a brand name. Warhol was the pioneer of art's entry into the sphere of mass-market production and entertainment.

He still stands out from his successors because of an inscrutably laconic temperament that lent an air of ironic indifference to everything he did.

The Art Market

The art dealer and the collector is a conspicuously modern phenomenon, born of free trade and speculation. Until around the middle of the nineteenth century, the most standard way for artists to forge a career was through the Salon's public forum (or circus).

Optimal for any artist was to get his or her work purchased by the state or at least a collector. Young artists would be on the lookout for future commissions, portraits being the most common, though religious commissions were still coveted despite the loosening grip of the church.

Until the 1870s, in France and a little later in other centres, the academy, which was attached to government, exercised a crippling dominance on the artistic system, conferring legitimacy on all things artistic: it decided who could enter, decided on the curriculum, dictated priorities, organized all the major exhibitions—to which it gave ostentatious priority to the artists it trained—at which they divvied out the prizes and advised on purchases.

With this in mind, it is understandable that the new breed of independent artist, starting with Courbet (1819-77) and Millet (1814-75), was so antagonistic to the establishment; and obversely, it is easy to see why dominant academicians like Gérôme and Bouguereau (1825-1905) tirelessly, anxiously, obstructed the success of the vanguard any way they could.

Vienna Secession facade. 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://www.frieze.com/article/thieves-strike-vienna-secessions-golden-cabbage-dome

Vienna Secession facade. 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons. https://www.frieze.com/article/thieves-strike-vienna-secessions-golden-cabbage-dome

Detail of gilded leaves, Vienna Secession. 2011. Courtesy: Thomas Ledl. Wikimedia Commons. https://www.frieze.com/article/thieves-strike-vienna-secessions-golden-cabbage-dome

Detail of gilded leaves, Vienna Secession. 2011. Courtesy: Thomas Ledl. Wikimedia Commons. https://www.frieze.com/article/thieves-strike-vienna-secessions-golden-cabbage-dome

A decisive blow was dealt with the academy in Vienna in 1897, when a group of artists led by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) announced their 'Secession', justifying their break on three counts: to keep abreast of the most progressive art of the day, to make exhibitions of a more self-sufficiently aesthetic type, and to defend modern art at every level of society, which meant educating the conservatives of the Hapsburg regime.

The Viennese Secessionists helped widen the notion of exhibition practices. They worked closely with architects and designers, developing sophisticated spaces for display, latter-day temples of art that delighted and barraged the senses. Interestingly enough, however, these formats had already been tried out in the last decade or two before in commercial galleries, albeit on a smaller scale.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Secessionists had built the foundation for the new establishment, an entrepreneurial mentality in the artist that admitted commercial concerns to furthering private experiments. Liaising between academy and public, a shrewd artist would reap the benefits of both.

Dissent between radicals and the establishment had already taken root since 1830, and by the end of the century, rebuffs from academicians held a cachet, certifying rebellious status, from which they and shrewd speculators stood to profit.

As Pierre Bourdieu claims in The Rules of Art, this division between traditional-academic and radical-vanguard was an essential component in the marketplace's growth. The mainstream quickly consumes works of art (he is also talking about novels), which get forgotten in the long-term, but gives the necessary infrastructural support to gallerists of publishing houses to support the minority of radicals whose reputations will outlive their commercially viable peers.

The cycle of radical to established, he argues, is not internal to workings of style; it is external and an effect of perceptions driven by fashion and commercial interest. And curiously enough, it is only with the market expansion that classifications such as 'nude' or 'landscape' become comprehensive and more intricate: 'peasant scene', 'beach scene'. The same goes for how artists are grouped according to their media and subject matter.

If we accept Bourdieu's thesis, we must conclude that a significant vector of the modern experience of art is the market that drives, disseminates, and ratifies it.

The Auction House

In 1852 the French state established the auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, to take advantage of a heated art market. It was a combination of commercial speculation and historical know-how not dissimilar from the Christie's and Sotheby's of today.

As Robert Jensen makes clear in his study of the art market of this time, there were hundreds of dealers in Paris by the 1850s, but few participated in the coterie of experts used by the Hôtel Drouot. Established in 1848, just before Drouot, two firms, the Galerie Petit and the Galerie Durand-Ruel, took part in the driving power of the centralized scheme by guaranteeing the authenticity of objects, making market forecasts, predicting hazards, and calling upon historians and critics to confirm an artist's importance.

Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel. 1910. By Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre-Auguste_Renoir_113.jpg 

Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel. 1910. By Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre-Auguste_Renoir_113.jpg 

Durand-Ruel became what Jensen calls the first major 'ideological dealer', meaning one who dealt with artists in a more than arbitrary way but worked according to groupings of artists, which reflected a particular investment in taste, in their case the best investments of all, the Realists and the Impressionists.

This aesthetic organization has carried through to the present. Galleries have aesthetic biases or generational foci that they target to prospective buyers and institutions. The most prominent galleries are organized like the auction houses (to which in the 1800s they were once more closely affiliated), insofar as they employ a small cohort of administrators and experts which ensure that the artists within their stable are written about, known about by other experts, represented in major collections, in short, made part of a system that secures their marketability.

Such efforts are essential when dealing with an abstract value like art, but they are dubious when mediocre artists are bolstered to ridiculous heights. Since the art market is like the stock market—an expression of confidence in abstract quanta—when many interests are at stake, it takes time for the value to correct itself. Sometimes, it doesn't. The prices for mediocre artworks can remain unindicatively high.

Art and money have a lot in common. Both are unstable. Both pretend to a truth that neither can verify. Both rely on consensus, conviction, desire, and memory.

As auction results have shown, Impressionism and Postimpressionism are the surest bet on the commercial market, indeed anything in the bracket from about 1860 until 1910, perhaps the most sensuous phases of Modernism.

The Pictures for the Highest Prices

It is also curious to note that many of the paintings that have commanded the top prices are of people, lending truth to the journalist’s adage that if you will make a picture interesting, ensure that it has a person in it.

To date, the highest price paid for a work of art is for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for just over $450 million in November 2017. Next in line is work by Willem de Kooning ($300 m), Cézanne ($250 m), Gauguin ($210 m) followed, unusually by several works without people as subjects by Pollock, Klimt, and Rothko.

One painting in the roll-call that once held the top spot for the most expensive work of art is Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), moodily, haughtily peeping out from a trussed-up and flattened neo-Byzantine surface in a cavalcade in gold leaf to Robert Lauder in June 2006 for USD135 million (around $171 m in today’s dollars), for his Neue Galerie in New York (does that make the purchase tax-deductible?). A radiant orgy of gold, the work drips wealth, so perhaps it met its destiny.

Since its purchase, the work became the centrepiece for the story of its reacquisition after the Nazis stole it, aptly titled Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.

Maria Altmann (Hellen Mirren) enlist a lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) to retrieve a painting stolen by the Nazis in “Woman in Gold”

Another in this list is Vincent van Gogh's portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), sold to the Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito in May 1990 for 82.5 million; third, also to Saito, the smaller version of Renoir's work about the young urban party, the Moulin de la Galette (1876) for $78 million. Sums like these defy words.

Commodities, Auctioneering: Jean Baudrillard

For Baudrillard's lively and polemical discourse of the art market, it is necessary to go back to Bataille and the issue of ritual, sacrifice, and exchange. For Baudrillard, the art commodity is the object par excellence of Western society's craving for bygone objects.

Art objects purchased for astronomical sums have only a peripheral bearing on the circumstances which gave rise to them (their historical ‘truth’), but rather are endowed with a special meaning that sanctifies their symbolic nature as eminently precious and obscure.

In other words, there is absolutely nothing we can say about Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that may justify the sum paid for it except maybe that other works of the same artist have had a healthy market history.

The work was bought on taste and personal inclination. Its status as a fetish is double: the buyer fetishizes the work, and, as a result of the sale, the work epitomizes the commodity fetish.

Auction at Sotheby’s. Via Widewalls. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/influence-art-auctions. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/influence-art-auctions

Auction at Sotheby’s. Via Widewalls. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/influence-art-auctions. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/influence-art-auctions

In this crazy process, the historical boundaries which circumscribe the object become more and more tenuous; its interest as 'most valuable object' takes over. For Baudrillard, this kind of slippage is integral to art's role within a society that has lost the continuities of symbolic exchange that bind it to mythic origins.

The myths underlying being are displaced by the myth that emanates from funnelling immense amounts of capital into things; once the signifiers of blood, birth, and title unravel, the symbolic energies invested in them leap into objects: bibelots, jewels, furniture, artifacts, and art.

With undertones of McLuhan’s ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, Baudrillard examines the difference between the ancient object and the modern, functional object as 'heavy' on the one hand and 'light' on the other. Our techno-culture has secured the passage from what he calls 'a metallurgic to demiurgic’ society, from the theatre of ritual to a floating system of indefinite values whose meaning derives from their relation to one another.

The art auction 'this crucible of the interchange of values' is the unrivalled site of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard bypasses Marx's thesis in the Critique of Political Economy, which states that symbolic exchange, money, is buoyed by use-value: in the art auction, 'economic exchange value' is exchanged for a 'pure sign', namely the work of art.

This suggests an endless relay and flux that cannot be atomized to an activity or an equivalent object except those subject to the same kind of exchange. Art auctions are where aristocrat-plutocrats play out their games of dominance, albeit 'microscopically', amongst themselves.

Baudrillard notes the ritual in the auction event and the personal character of the exchange (recorded in the precious artwork’s mandatory provenance: what belonged to whom for how long and sold where).

Moreover, there is no interplay between supply and demand. Value is decided upon according to the whim of the auctioneer and the extent to which the ability to exercise that whim is flaunted.

If there is any parity in the process, muses Baudrillard, it is in the individual buyer and the work he or she buys:

In fact, what we call the ‘psychology’ of the art lover is also in its entirety a reduction from the system of exchange. The singularity that he asserts—that fetishist passion for the object lived as an elective affinity—is established on his recognition as a peer, by virtue of a competitive act, in a community of the privileged. He is the equal to the canvas itself, whose unique value resides in the relation of parity, or statutory privilege, which, as a sign, it maintains with the other terms of the limited corpus of paintings. Hence the ‘elitist’ affinity between the amateur and the canvas that psychologically connotes the very sort of value, of exchange, and of aristocratic social relation that is instituted by the auction. 

And what of the museum as an institution that assembles artworks for the communal good rather than for individual gain? It ‘acts as a guarantee for aristocratic exchange' on a material level, operating as a kind of 'gold bank', and at an 'organic' level, ensuring that art is valuable and that its value plays a part in society, and in deciding which works are worth seeing over those that are not.

For not all museums themselves are benign. Many, such as the Getty, whose trust is 8 billion, were initiated not only out of the love of art but because of the tax breaks, it could achieve by operating as a public museum and trust.

Earlier, at the beginning of the new millennium come to light that the Getty was involved in a series of scandals involving Grecian urns acquired under shady circumstances through the now-discredited Italian dealer Giacomo Medici.

Although they never dealt with Medici directly, it is now known that the Getty acquired fragments of the same urn at different times, which they then assembled. To make matters worse, in 1996, the prominent philanthropic couple Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman donated and sold to the Getty their collection of antiquities, which, as it came to light, was bought on the Getty's behalf. As can be expected, a severe dent was put into Getty’s status as a tax-exempt institution.

Art about Money

In one of those curiosities in the annals of historical beginnings and ends, Pop originated in England, not America (just like Romanticism originated in Germany, not France), attributed to the works of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) (and his signal collage with the ‘Pop’ gun), Peter Blake (b. 1932) (designer of the classic Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’s’ album cover) and the critic Lawrence Alloway (1926-90) (who is credited with coining the term).

Pop Art was, in many ways, a logical phenomenon. America's economy had been artificially heated by the war effort, which led to the boom decades of the 50s and 60s.

Many artists of the generation that followed the Abstract Expressionists were tired of intense navel-gazing, preferring to turn their eye to the teaming outside world of commodity fetishism that drowned out the solitary voices of men caught up in their own internalized tragedies.

Urban nature, as the Pop artists saw it, did not consist in trees, pastures, and peasant girls, but in the objects geared for consumer desire, a world bright in colour and dim on subtlety. Many of the Pop artists came from commercial backgrounds: Lichtenstein (1923-97), graphic design, Warhol advertising, and Rosenquist (b. 1933) billboard painting.

Ten Dollar Bill. 1956. By Roy Lichtenstein. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Dollar_Bill_(Lichtenstein)

Ten Dollar Bill. 1956. By Roy Lichtenstein. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Dollar_Bill_(Lichtenstein)

Pop is an approach to art that has no compunction with poetizing the arbitrary, stereotypical signs that spill endlessly from the capitalist funnel. It was also astonishing to see artists renouncing the transcendent quality of art, so single-mindedly pursued by Abstract Expressionism, to embrace the vulgar commodity.

Pop enjoyed a revival in the boom years of the mid-1980s, in which artists, mostly American, took special license in the notion that art holds a mirror to its times. Their indulgence was to make art that was shamelessly overblown about the shamelessly overblown. Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), reputedly the biggest porcelain in the world, has become something of a symbol of the high-flung art of the ‘80s.

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. 1988. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_jackson_and_bubbles_-_Flickr_-_brennheit_bakst.jpg

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. 1988. Via Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_jackson_and_bubbles_-_Flickr_-_brennheit_bakst.jpg

Works such as these beg serious questions about the artist's social function and the nature of artistic commentary.

Artists like Koons (b. 1955, who also financed his first significant series from money earned from playing the stock market) have no compunction with kitsch since they argue that it is the most accessible and pervasive factor in our lives, and to deny it is to make art that denies the truth.

(At the same time as this, most conspicuously following the 1987 market crash, other artists adopted a newfangled Arte Povera-cum-Dada now know as 'Grunge Art', which aspires to all that is formless, dilapidated and crude, a sign of déclassé urban hardship.)

The critical claims of the disproportionately commodified art object are caught within a cyclic argument, which I will attempt to conclude with here.

One of the reasons why art treasures command such astronomical prices is for the very reason that they are believed to have meanings that are unique or at least hugely rare. But we must question art that is about the commodity which assumes the status of the commodity about which it is a commentary—such art has it both ways, setting itself both above the discourse, commenting upon it, and within that discourse, profiting from it.

When art engages in meanings about those which it proudly sets itself above, and especially money, it deals with something whose virtue is its limiting, simplifying power and is therefore trafficking in fool's gold. The world still subjugates the majority of women.

Does this pardon sexist art that justifies itself with the call that the world is sexist? Or racist, classist art that supposedly reflects a racist world truthfully? How shallow.

But to make affairs more complicated, it might still be tenable to suggest that Koons is a great artist —add to this that his prices are among the highest for any living artist, and that three years after it was made, the Michael Jackson and Bubbles sold for $5,616,750—because he most precisely, graphically and memorably captures after Warhol the socio-aesthetic phenomenon of stardom and the massive accumulation of capital.

It is his work that comes to mind upon any mention of artworks about money which make money. The circle is complete.

To combat what to many is a critically self-defeating practice that is simply about the system's inequities, artists continue to resort to non-material practices that question the market and the museums that represent it.


References & Further Reading:

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing, Chicago and London, Chicago U.P., 1983.

Baudrillard, Jean, De la seduction, Paris, Galilée, 1979.

Baümer, Angelica, Gustav Klimt: Women, London, Winfield and Nicolson, 1986.

Bunskirk, Martha, ‘Commodification as Censor: Copyrights and Fair Use’, October 60, Spring 1992.

Cannadine, David, Mellon: An American Life, New York, Knopf, 2006.

Jaucovic, Milan, ‘Most Expensive Paintings Ever’, http://www.renoir.org.yu/most-expensive-paintings.asp

Lacey, Robert, Sotheby’s—Bidding for Class, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

Marx, Karl, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford, Oxford UP 1977.

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture’, October, 65, Summer 1993.

Niess, Robert, L’Œuvre: Zola, Cézanne, Manet, Anne Arbor, Michigan U.P., 1968.

Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches, New York, Knopf, 1987.

Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, New York, Vintage, 1981.

Secrest, Meryle, Duveen: A Life in Art, Chicago and London, Chicago U.P., 2004.

Tadié, Jean-Yves, Marcel Proust, Paris, Gallimard, 1996.

White, Cynthia and Harrison, Canvases and Careers, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1965.

Adam Geczy

Artist, Educator and Writer… I'm a dedicated teacher, currently lecturing at Sydney College of the Arts, Australia. I have exhibited extensively in Europe, across Australia and in Asia in a variety of media, from painting to video and installation. As a writer, I have authored numerous critical articles and essays and has published some 20 books.

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