Displaced Values

By ROBERT HUGHES

The past six months have seen some of the highest prices ever paid for works of art. From this ebullience one might deduce a healthy art market. In fact, the market is utterly schizophrenic. Living artists and their dealers are the casualties; dead artists and auction houses have been the beneficiaries.

The recession in America has been hardest on those serious painters whose work has not yet entered the $20,000-minimum empyrean where the De Koonings, Motherwells and Stellas reside. In bad times, there is almost no free money to buy anything but sure bets. And, since the collecting of art has largely surrendered to the principles of investment and tax deduction, the question of what is or is not a sure bet has acquired a nervous obsessiveness.

So where have all the dollars gone? They have fled to the august past. It is apparently easier to sell a painting for $250,000 than for $2,500. But what would the vitriolic old curmudgeon Edgar Degas--who prophetically remarked that there are some kinds of success indistinguishable from panic--make of the $530,000 paid for one of his pastels at Parke-Bernet last May? How would the impoverished Van Gogh have greeted the news that 80 years after his death his later oils would routinely go for anything between $250,000 and $1,000,000 to exactly the same sort of people who, when he lived, bought Meissoniers?

In the auction house, amid the deep carpets and the reverent murmur of bids, such prices are made to look like a belated homage to genius. In fact they are nothing of the kind. They represent a crass transformation of aesthetic experience into commodity. They stem from two iron rules of the market: 1) that as money devalues, it seeks to embody itself in commodities that seem more stable than bank notes or stock; 2) that a painting or sculpture has no "real" value at all. It is worth what some collector can be induced to pay for it, not a cent more or less.

Tourist Object. This might seem harmless enough. But inflated prices feed a numbness back onto art itself. The Impressionist and old master market has been big news for so long now that nobody can look at a Monet without seeing in front of that exquisite paint a wall of dollar signs. The hedge against inflation inevitably becomes a hedge against perception. Its price has made the painting different, of an order other than art. Museums, which should resist this syndrome, tend to exploit it. Thus the Metropolitan got untold mileage out of the fact that it paid $5,544,000 for its new Velasquez, which therefore became more "interesting" than other and greater paintings in its collection. The picture becomes a tourist object to be gawked at rather than an experience to be enjoyed in all its complexity.

The worst irony is that the paintings on which big investment money has fastened recently--the Impressionists--are precisely the ones most betrayed by conversion into a means of exchange available only to a small elite. The vision of Impressionism was at root democratic --not in the political sense, but in the way of shared, accessible experience: sunlight on dappled green water, young men and women drinking wine under a striped awning, the rosy bottom of a girl. The Impressionists set out to reconstruct a world one could enter, not just admire and be awed by--the common territory of sensually integrated people. Now it is being parceled and sold in $100,000 lots by art developers.

Perhaps the most attractive fantasy would be a total worldwide collapse in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prices. There would be a panic, and grave gentlemen with faces like silver teapots would commit hara-kiri in galleries from Los Angeles to Paris. But at the end of it, it might become possible once more to see these works with the freedom they deserve, not as monuments of capital but as art interacting with other art, past and present.

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