Art, Taste, Money

Turquoise Marilyn (1964) by Andy Warhol

Your taste determines what kind of art you like to look at. Taste is intuitive, and also learned. You just know what you like. But when you are asked to explain why you like, say, a Salvador Dali over a Stephen Prina, you are hard pressed. “It’s more beautiful to me,” you reply. The key phrase here is “to me”.

As some of you know, I’m the editor of Escape into Life, arts and culture webzine. We publish art reviews, feature articles, and interviews. Most of the writers have a background in art history, and are familiar with many different schools of art.

Most of our readers, however, do not have art history backgrounds. As a result, they tend to respond more viscerally. There is less intellect involved and this is not always a bad thing. For example, when Aurelio Madrid published a review on Stephen Prina entitled, “Difficult Art”, one reader replied:

I must be stupid, unaware, not intelligent and extremely uncultured because I don't get this thing you're critiquing. When I'm looking at it ... I want to see the intelligence behind it but I only see the naked-reality that there is an unattractive, un-engaging, un-organized collection of dots simply dirtying up someone's perfectly good white wall.

Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 208 of 556 (2004)
by Stephen Prina; [Partie de Croquet (The Croquet Game), 1873]

Maybe the reader overlooked or had simply forgotten Aurelio’s description of the work's origin at the beginning of his review:

The general idea for the project is that Prina will recreate each of the 556 Édouard Manet paintings, as recorded by a (now obsolete) 1960’s catalogue raisonné. Prina does not recreate the works as direct copies; rather he uses only the actual size & title of the original Manet. Each work in the series is a diptych. One ½ of the diptych contains a “legend” of the whole of Manet’s output, represented by thumbnail outlines of each painting (with a number). This is a monochrome (ivory colored) lithograph printed on white paper (in a black frame, under glass). The “legend” is coupled with Prina’s re-painting. Prina’s re-paintings are painted using an ivory colored ink wash on white paper (black frame, under glass), with no visual reference to the original (the size & title are the only similarity). And so the project continues until Prina paints the 556th Manet.

Most likely, the anonymous commenter drifted off at about the third or fourth sentence (as I nearly did myself the first time I read it!). That’s not to say Aurelio should have excluded it; rather it’s essential to understanding the context of the work. Without this context we merely see dots on a canvas, some lighter some darker.

Where Aurelio sees a tradition of minimalism, conceptualism, and “institutional critique”, the anonymous commenter sees, in his words, “fartwork.” He goes on to say, “When I see this ‘Fartwork’ I get sick from the fumes of it's own arrogance.”

Another word commonly associated with taste and art: arrogance. Art critics are arrogant buffoons, declares the anonymous commenter, because they deem that a work of art has value when in truth it has none. Art critics resort to making up ridiculous stories about the “meaning” of the art; art critics fall back on jargon and intellectual babble to justify their impressions. For if the work had value, then at least it would be aesthetically pleasing.

And here we find ourselves in a delicious paradox. “Value” in the art world does not seem to correlate at all with “value” in the people world. Let’s take a look at the most expensive Post-War painting sold at an auction . . .

White Center (1950) by Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko’s White Center, which was created in 1950, sold at Sotheby’s New York auction in 2007 for $72.8 million.

Who can explain this price tag?

Don Thompson can. Thompson’s book called, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, explores the concept of branding in art and skillfully reveals the complex relationship between marketing, mystique, and influence.

“Art professionals talk about Impressionist art in terms of boldness, depth, use of light, transparency, and color,” he writes, “(and) they talk about contemporary artists in terms of innovation, investment value, and the artist being ‘hot’.”

Okay, so our value code changes with contemporary art, and the new value code makes critical judgment slippery at best. At least with Picasso we have some ground to stand on when we declare a Cubist painting as beautiful, appealing, or interesting. But what happens when we’re given Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Burning Car 1), which was created in 1964, and sold for $72.7 million at Christie’s New York auction in 2007.

Green Car Crash; Burning Car 1 (1964) by Andy Warhol

I took one art history class in college, and if I remember correctly, it was Early East Asian Art. While my mother was an oil painter, and I have been exposed to art my entire life, I respond to art mainly from the gut. I’m the same way with literature. While all of my friends were reading Thomas Pynchon and John Barth in college, I was reading Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Intellectual games do not interest me. I want to see a picture.

And so—not unlike the anonymous commenter—I rely on my aesthetic sensibilities. And my aesthetic sensibilities tell me that this work by Andy Warhol is not beautiful. My gut tells me, “It’s too green.”

Does my opinion of the work change when I discover that:

Between the years 1962 and 1964, Andy Warhol created a fantastically morbid series known as Death and Disaster. These serigraphs were all based on grainy, black and white tabloid images of race riots, suicide, fatal accident scenes and instruments of death including electric chairs, guns and atomic bomb blasts. The arguably best-known and most gruesome component of this macabre lot is Warhol's set of Car Crashes, of which the five "Burning Cars" are extremely highly prized.

Here we see Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), created by Warhol and his newly-hired assistant Gerard Malanga (b. 1943) in 1963 from an image taken by photographer John Whitehead and published in the June 3 issue of Newsweek. Whitehead's shot captured the aftermath of the fiery conclusion of a police chase in Seattle. The car that had been pursued overturned at 60 m.p.h., ejecting its driver at a speed sufficient to impale his body on a climbing spike in a utility pole.

Green Car Crash was the only Warhol "Burning Car" painting of five (all based on Whitehead's photograph) to utilize a color other than black and white. It had been privately held for 30 years and generated a tremendous amount of interest in potential buyers. (About.com)

I must say that with this knowledge I have a slightly greater appreciation of the work. Like with Aurelio Madrid’s elucidation of Stephen Prina’s methodology, at least now I understand the context. But on the whole, Green Car Crash does not provoke me to tears and I surely wouldn’t hang it on my living room wall unless Andy Warhol did it and it happened to be worth $72.7 million.

Which brings us to money. Or maybe we’ve been circling around money all along, like a hungry shark in search of prey. Thompson’s masterful thesis gives a perfectly rational explanation for why contemporary art is priced the way it is. There are two major reasons.

1.) Non-contemporary work is becoming an endangered species.

The recent surge in art prices is driven by a shortage in non-contemporary work. While new museums are being built, existing museums expanding, and private collections growing, the availability of masterpieces becomes scarce. Thompson sees a direct correlation between this shortage and the price explosion of contemporary art. He writes, “Contemporary art has achieved its current importance in resale markets in part because the best examples of other schools of art are disappearing from the market, and are never again likely to appear for sale.”

2.) Branding rules the art world.

“You are nobody in contemporary art until you are branded.” (Thompson)

Branding in contemporary art works in much the same way that it does in consumer products, or for that matter, luxury goods. People tend to buy branded products over generic ones because they offer a sense of security. I trust Colgate. I do not trust the toothpaste at the Dollar General, especially after I discovered that a Chinese-made toothpaste contained trace amounts of a poison used in some antifreeze.

Luxury goods offer a different kind of security; they give the reassurance of "prestige" or “elegant fashion.”

Contemporary art seems to need a lot of branding because even “art schools and critics can’t agree on the merit of a work” (Thompson). Furthermore, branding adds personality and distinctiveness.

When Thompson talks about the 25 major contemporary artists, he is mainly talking about artists whose work is represented by branded dealers such as Larry Gagosian, bought by branded collectors such as Charles Saatchi, and sold in the auctions of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which are brands themselves, and by extension, brands of paintings.

“In the end,” he writes, “the question ‘what is judged to be valuable contemporary art’ is determined first by major dealers, later by branded auction houses, a bit by museum curators who stage special shows, very little by art critics, and hardly at all by buyers.”

I mentioned that I’m the editor of Escape into Life, arts and culture webzine. What I didn’t tell you is that I’m introducing a new dimension into the site in less than two weeks.

I have asked a select group of artists to auction their work on my site for the first time. I hired a designer and artist in his own right, named Christopher Cox, who designed the popular site ChangeTheThought. He was commissioned to redesign Escape into Life with an auction/virtual arts gallery. The purpose of the auction is to draw attention to the art.

To bid on a work, viewers on the auction page will click on a bid link that will take them to eBay. Bidding on eBay gives us a larger pool of bidders, combined with the readership of Escape.

Those works that don’t sell in the first round will be moved to the online store. The store will give us more flexibility than the auction—we can set fixed prices for artwork and hold a larger inventory--but I suspect the auction will be more of an attraction.

What are my criteria for choosing the “select group of artists”?

Let me quote an article from the New York Times, “Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy.”

Well-made art is my sole criterion. I'm looking for visually appealing art and essential quality. Let the frenzied mind, fixated on inventing something new and different, rest for awhile.

More essays by the author can be found at Escape into Life

Image Credits:
Turquoise Marilyn (1964)by Andy Warhol
Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 208 of 556 (2004) by Stephen Prina;Partie de Croquet (The Croquet Game), 1873
White Center (1950) by Mark Rothko
Green Car Crash; Burning Car 1 (1964) by Andy Warhol