Art plays a big role in “House Key”, and promises to play a bigger role in its sequel (in progress!). I’ve been busy writing, researching in museums, and working on art projects. But it was a reader’s comment from my earlier post that really got me thinking. Thinking about when art works, what makes it relevant, and how we reflect our own history in the creative process. It’s the auto-reflection that keeps history active, real. Real Art happens when artists look in the mirror, look around them and say, “This is who I see; this is what it is.”
Artists create Real Art when our reaction is so immediate that the skill and execution of the work is transparent to us in that moment. We study it after we’ve responded to it. That’s Art History. But where is Real Art right now? How do we find it as it’s happening? We might want to check out the current Art Market, but skeptics among us say, “Think again!”
When we consider Real Art and its relationship to Art History, we can agree it is simply a retrospective study of Real Art created during certain times in history. We are drawn to artists that used their skills to make unique commentaries about their culture and society at their present time. Real Art has the important social function of articulating our world, explaining it, and reflecting it back to us.
With color or without, a visual synthesis of an entire event, or a single moment as perceived by the artist, suffices. Art can’t lie. Guileless, it stands on its own merit. Intellectually, we decide to believe in it or not. Our reaction, however, is an involuntary but reliable indicator of the degree to which we believe it. That’s why we cannot integrate into our experience art that leaves us unmoved. It simply has no lasting impact. But art that raises more questions than it answers, like Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”, still rivets us inside the painting itself, making us part of it. Art that sends chills up our spines like Picasso’s 25-and-a half-foot monochromatic headline, “Guernica”, is just as relevant. Whether we’re talking three hundred sixty or seventy-eight years ago, the art is still very much alive. It is Real Art.
This is how the relationship between Real Art and Art History remains active and vital. We study Real Art of the past in order to make sense of the present, and navigate our way into the future. Influence it. That’s why museums are in business.
And while museums are the gatekeepers for such essential experiential learning and reflection, we need to look at what is happening outside its doors. Museums can’t be solely responsible for gathering art that impacts us and helps us grow. Individuals are equally responsible for their own art, whether they create or collect it. The idea doesn’t just apply to visual arts, but to all artistic and creative endeavors. They not only reflect the times now, but our lifestyles. We tend to create and collect what inspires us; what resonates with our worldview, what defines us.
At least that used to be true, for the Art Market now is a completely different beast. When I think of collectors, the first one that jumps to mind is Isabella Stewart Gardner. A nineteenth century contemporary of Emaline in “House Key”, Isabella is a model visionary woman, eclectic and bold. She was a patroness of emerging artists of her times, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Anders Zorn, and novelist Henry James. Today, her eponymous house museum is a must-see iconic Boston destination. This didn’t happen randomly. Isabella was brilliant at cultivating relationships, now called networking. She also had some good advice from trusted dealers and connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson, a published and preeminent authority of the Art Market of their time.
Currently, the Art Market seems to have emancipated itself from Real Art and Art History. Today I saw an Artspace article by Andrew Goldstein that confirms this and worries me. He interviews collector Alain Servais on “insider trading in the art market.” The Gardners of Art History were certainly wealthy, but educated, as well. Servais states that today’s Art Market is flawed, that collectors are newly rich buyers uneducated in art. They discuss the current spirit of collecting, of “branding” art, of new collectors buying what is “trending” as opposed to discovering new artists creating relevant art. Hence, “unbranded” artists are often undervalued and go unrecognized. Branding art implies mediocrity, which is the antithesis of spontaneity, of what makes something 360 years old still fresh today.
Buyers appear to have lost touch with Real Art, shopping pre-processed art at go-to galleries with up-scale addresses and high price tags determined not by the merit of the art, but driven by the real estate in which it is displayed. The Art Market as Servais defines it is about art gallery sales and brokering strategies. He compares it to the fashion industry, in which the runway piece is unaffordable except to the wealthiest, but that buying something similar in that bland for a lot less still evokes luxury and status.
Likewise, the wealthiest collectors drive the Art Market, despite brokering strategies that are risky and controversial, such as guaranteeing prices. This enables auction houses to attract sellers to part with their collections by guaranteeing a minimum sales price. The auctioneer’s job is to beat that number on the sales floor so everyone makes money, but the downside is that the broker loses out if they overestimate the dollar amount a piece may bring. Recently, the upside has prevailed.
The Art Market seems bullish at the moment thanks to a new legion of global collectors that Quartz.com identify as “newly minted” Asian and Russian billionaire businessmen. In a fit of “art-world madness,” they are busy buying up major works that have not found their way into museum collections. According to Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield, “There’s one sense in which this art economy, crazy as it seems, need not concern the ordinary person; it’s a small, closed club of the super-rich, outbidding one another in an attempt to boost their prestige (paywall). A bubble in the art market says nothing about a bubble in the wider economy. Yet as the veteran art critic Jerry Saltz lamented, the higher their prices climb, the likelier it is that these superb works will now vanish into private homes—or worse, and increasingly often, secure warehouses—rarely, if ever, to be seen again in public. That goes against the very reason the artists made them in the first place.”
But the ordinary person is concerned. A recent Quartz article about Christie’s blockbuster May 11 auction titled “Looking Forward to the Past” helps us understand and confirms what we suspect is happening in the Art Market. “Most art collectors are not in need of more money. Their art is a personal passion, a status symbol or a piece of cultural currency. On occasion, auction houses can count on the fabled three “D”s of Death, Divorce and Debt to force work into the market. But today’s growing ranks of new collectors who are impatient to own anything but the best works has created a new business model for the auction houses, a business model that Christie’s is accused of over-exploiting.”
In his Vulture.com article, Jerry Saltz goes on to say “Under the guise of so-called ‘quality,’ auction houses fabricate a pervasive psychic field that sees art in terms of price and profit. This seductive shallow field forces collectors with similar work or similar -isms to rush the same artists and -isms to auction the following season to reap ever-higher prices. Auctions are not only doing this with historical material; they’re now doing it with contemporary art. And this has escalated prices for new work artificially, exponentially, and in ways that I think are bad for everyone and can’t possibly be sustained.”
Nonetheless, no one is in a position to challenge that Christie’s knows Real Art. In fact, their website quotes Picasso on this point: “To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was…”
Christie’s backs this up with their scoreboard, a sales event that Bloomberg Business Report called a “$2.7 Billion Sales Frenzy, ” a milestone in the Art Market with Pablo Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) commanding the highest art auction price ever at $179,365,000.
This ups the ante for art galleries, fostering an acquisitive appetite that does little to nourish our need for Real Art. Rather, a gluttony for “brand” art fills us up with fast-food art that cannot sustain us into the future. This makes it hard for new collectors to identify what is real, what they believe in, to define what will endure and what will become the Art History of Now. Servais challenges to “ask yourself if someone will want to look at that [art] in a museum in 30 years, when it has been done 150 times in the last 150 years. Not a chance.”
I’m with Servais on that one. Art is compelling when it achieves something never done before and never to be repeated. We’ve seen where the real art is going. In fact, Servais concurs with Lichfield in that the Real Art getting bought up in the Art Market will likely end up in secure warehouses, what Servais refers to as ‘schaulagers’. Servais suggests, however, that private collectors should make their warehouses known to museums so that the pieces can travel on loan for the rest of us to see and enjoy, as well.
Yet given the privatization of major works and the rising general unaffordability of art, Servias makes another scary point: That collectors are going “virtual” by virtue of the fact that we are reflecting our times through our art, that we experience much of our lives online, through social media and the Internet and, hence, that the “art of the future is partly virtual.”
I suspect museums large and small are aware. Many, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery have pretty extensive digitized collections. Ironically, Isabella, still a visionary from beyond, is already on it. The museum website has a sophisticated “Explore” section that allows visitors to peruse the museum in a virtual sense so that we still have access to Real Art.
Ultimately, there is no substitute for experiencing art personally. But given that we are so virtually oriented, I will share my museum findings as well as look at new, emerging art. I invite you to share your comments so that we may continue debating and exploring art in an on-going dialog. Whether we’re creating, collecting, studying, or admiring art, it remains our responsibility to look at ourselves, at each other, at our times, and say, “This is who I see; this is what it is.”
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