Wise to Art

Because the commercial value of a work became the primary way of evaluating its value, work became good because it was expensive rather than expensive because it was deemed to be good.

Such astonishing naïve comments are thus given in this late month of March 2009 by an exercising art fair director and former auction-house specialist, and this in the solid framework of a Newsweek article on the current art market situation.

Not only is this ‘revelation’ a pure banality; it’s fundamentally false in its assumption that in ‘normal’ circumstances good work is paid more than bad work – as in these sober times when the artificially created buying frenzy has exhausted itself. The commercial value of art has always been and will always be manipulated. If not artificially pushed, art does not sell well, whatever its qualities. The exceptional Hirst and Yves Saint-Laurent sales were both brought to the limit in this respect and the results were comparable, regardless of all quality criteria and notwithstanding the absence or presence of a recession.

Any plain screenprint by Warhol will sell at a higher price than a Velasquez oil painting if the controlling market forces want it to. You can collect monetary value or you can collect art. If you are in fact collecting money, the amount of art that you’ll get with your purchases is always relative. In this respect it’s extremely instructive to browse through the catalogue of any major artist’s life’s work. Without exception, only a fraction of the whole is worth our appreciation. The rest should be looked upon as exercises, failures, studies, and preparations. The overwhelming majority of the pieces on the market by Van Gogh, Manet, Monet etc. any average mediocre artist could have executed, in fact so badly accomplished are they. It’s the comparatively small output of masterpieces that make great artists stand out. And these pieces museum curators have long acquired. Commercially, however, the story is quite another. Commercial success is a question of marketing, and marketing is make-believe. And collectors of monetary value, in great difference to collectors of art, are abundantly present and for the most part conveniently stupid or, why not, clever, all depends on how you look at it.