Art and Money

Visual art is the the artistic medium most directly associated with money. A successful writer or composer may become financially successful. And a famous actor is usually well paid. But the painting that becomes famous goes, in many cases, from being a low priced community when it is made to a well guarded luxury good, a commodity owned by a grand collector or a museum. This movement is especially dramatic for contemporary artworks. You cannot fully understand visual art without knowing why masterpieces are extremely valuable. Everyone has heard stories about the impoverished misunderstood young painters whose works eventually become very valuable. And we art critics are often frustrated when the larger public is overly interested in just the financial value of art, as if there was nothing more to the story. Often the implication is that the artwork is a fraud. Conceptual and minimal art which doesn’t require elaborate physical skills to be made especially attracts this reaction.

Perhaps I have often thought about this issue in part because I came to art criticism from philosophy. There is no comparable way in which studying philosophy involves a concern with money. Art critics, it’s true, are generally poorly paid, and so are unlikely to buy artworks. But we can watch, at least occasionally, when paintings with little initial economic value become gold mines. What changes when the same artifact that had only a small exchange value becomes very valuable? In our culture, a popular movie or song swiftly attracts a great volume of commentary. And at that point, it can be hard to recall that you saw or heard it before it was well known. And when an actor or writer becomes a celebrity, people respond to her differently. Analogously, an artwork is seen differently when it becomes very valuable. In my experience while my fellow art critics are be happy to talk about aesthetic values, they are not especially interested in discussion of art and money. To the extent that they have any interest in that subject, they are likely to be disdainful about that connection. At art world dinners celebrating openings sometimes the critics are set together, apart from the tables devoted to the collectors and curators.

For reasons that I well understand, right now the unseemly privileges of the highly privileged are much despised. Certainly that is the way that anyone with sound moral judgment, or even just a concern for ecology, is likely to think. Someone interested in Nicolas Poussin’s paintings inevitably has a certain myopic fascination with privilege under the old regime. And, I expect, that anyone who loves reading Marcel Proust has a modest interest in the aristocratic world he chronicles. But when we get to our own time, the relation of outsiders the very privileged may be a little different. I admit, I did publish an interview with the American novelist of the upper classes, Louis Auchinchloss (1917-2010), because I was fascinated by his literary world. But on the few occasions where my art writing has gained me audiences with the grand privileged and their collections, I always felt that I was in a very foreign place, a sort of human zoo. Like many people I know, I have politically and personally a very real nervous distaste for the trappings of extreme wealth. And yet, like it or not, you cannot really understand great art, especially contemporary works, unless you have some sense of the life of the people who own such art, the collector-class. My teacher, Richard Wollheim, who was a leftist (from a privileged background) claimed that the great artists painted for the larger public. That was an optimistic way of thinking.

Once, just once!, when young I purchased an inexpensive artwork that eventually became very valuable. Watching that artifact appreciate was instructive, for I saw that my belief in its aesthetic value was justified. But the art world is an isolated place, for apart from an art dealer who told me that he could sell this painting; people from outside paid no attention to it. But of course the art market is often fickle and so the practical life of the collector, like that of the artist, is likely to be risky. Once I had the good fortune to eavesdrop on the conversation between a great artist and a famous museum director, who asked if when the price of art went up, the proceeds should be shared with the artist. ‘But what is to be done’, the wily artist asked, ‘if the artwork loses value? Does the collector deserve to be repaid?’

When I was paid in cash for a lecture in Tokyo, I engaged a Japanese grad student to accompany me to a print store, and there set out to see what I could purchase for that modest honorarium. You can learn about art by training your eye, which involves taking risks. You lose aesthetic distance when you are deciding what to purchase. My colleagues at Hyperallergic are trying to imagine an art world in which premium prices wouldn’t be so important. (This is my way of describing their goals, not exactly what they have said.) In a future essay I hope to discuss that very important project.

The politically conservative Auchincloss took me to lunch and provided smart frank answers to my questions, which I published; see 1 October 1997. “Louis Auchincloss by David Carrier”. Bomb Magazine online. He was wellt organized, not a word wasted. And he said something remarkably prescient. “I think we’re moving dangerously into a have and have not situation…for the first time in 150 years the rich are sneering at the poor.” Sometimes you can learn from the rich. I wish now that I’d asked him more about art and money..

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