Apr

3

The Sale Of The Art, Or The Art Of The Sale?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 3, 2008 |

How do you put a value on a work of art? That’s a question I’ve wondered about quite a bit, especially after the CBS news show Sunday Morning did a piece on the current Armory Show in New York. The original Armory Show, held in 1913, introduced Americans to very avant garde artists like Duchamp, Kandinsky, Matisse, and Brancusi. It caused surprise and outrage and something contemporary art has gotten very used to: a lot of mocking and satire. In fact it’s hard to talk about a lot of contemporary art without trying to put it in some sort of context that will, hopefully, explain why a pile of cigarette butts, ashes, and other trash is worth £5,000, at least as long as it’s been created by Damien Hirst. Such installations make it hard to answer the question, what is art? In October 2001, a janitor at a gallery accidentally “cleaned up” a Hirst installation because he thought it was just trash. Everybody’s a critic, right? Mocking contemporary art–especially installations–is almost as easy as mocking the people who will pay huge amounts of money for a pile of bricks or even a canvas painted by an elephant. This may be simplistic, but I think the high prices of a lot of art works are driven by dealers and collectors who see art as an investment, and who approach art with their own simplistic view of art history. Van Gogh is the prime example of this oversimplification: he lived in poverty most of his life, he only sold two works, he was ridiculed and considered a hack, but his works now sell for millions. Nobody wants to miss investing in the next Van Gogh.Van Gogh is not the only artist for whom this is true, but he’s one of those artists whose paintings have become Very Important Works. The Very Important Works are the ones used to create an imaginary line for art history, as though there were a logical progression from Gothic to Baroque to Rococo, from Romanticism to Impressionism to Post-Impressionism to Cubism to the incredible splintering of art in the 20th Century into a million different –isms. In his novel Immortality Milan Kundera compares art history to a clock. The abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock—the final lifting of the brush from the canvas—is midnight. Everything that follows is repetition and insignificant. Who’d really want to look at art that way, though?

Treating art as an investment has had some unfortunate side effects, especially the fact that an artist’s name can become more valuable than the work they produce. I’ve heard stories of Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol paying for expensive dinners with doodles. Aesthetics has been subsumed by personality.

I thought about this reading a recent article titled The Art Of The Steal, about the collapse of the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, a collapse which occurred right before an exhibition of classic works by Titian, Botticelli, and Caravaggio. The fact that the gallery was in financial trouble just goes to show that even the classics aren’t immune from ups and downs in investing. As Suzanna Andrews explains, “A classicist at heart, [Larry Salander] regarded much of the new art as gimmicky and slick, as art created only for money.” Salander did invest in and exhibit contemporary artists, but he didn’t show “installations”, preferring to stick to paintings and sculptures. Surprisingly, though, the Old Masters don’t sell very well. The prices on some classic works have even declined because, for those who are investing in art for money’s sake, the Very Important Work isn’t nearly as appealing as the Next Big Thing, which, hopefully, will increase in value.

Another side-effect of the surge in art prices is sometimes shady dealing in the art world. The Legacy of Mark Rothko by Lee Seldes details how three of Rothko’s friends, acting as executors after his death, sold 800 of his works to the Marlborough Galleries for a suspiciously low price. Rothko’s daughter brought a lawsuit which would reveal a shocking amount of market manipulation, forgeries, and phony sales in the art world.

People sometimes say, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” We all know what we like, but what are we willing to pay for? The old system of artists painting solely on commission for wealthy patrons is more or less extinct (artists do still sometimes produce commissioned works, especially portraits, of course). Anyone can own an original work–if the price is right. And if you’re not a stickler for originals you can own most famous works as posters. How we determine the value of a piece of wood, canvas, and pigment, or of carved stone or shaped clay, though, seems, well, pretty abstract. Investing in art is no more or less risky than investing in real estate, or stocks. The difference is that with art you may be investing in a future Very Important Work, or, at the very least, something that will have value to future generations…or it might just be thrown out by a future janitor.


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