Confusing Art with Bullion

By ROBERT HUGHES

There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks, people now respect art. They flock to museums to see it; its spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner.

But what, exactly, does it mean? On the most obvious level, it means what everyone knows: that money is losing value. But it also means that we are in the grip of a wave similar to what, in 17th century Holland, was known as the Tulip Mania. The tulip was then a comparatively new import from the Near East, and mutant specimens, with irregular stripes, were prized as rarities--so prized that men would mortgage their villas and their fields. The tulips had little intrinsic value. Their worth as commodities was a function of pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate proved that nothing is more manipulable than desire. When the mania fell away, the flowers were as pretty as they had been before. It was just that now few people wanted them very much, whereas before they had been invested with a kind of fetishistic and obsessive "rarity." Bullion is not absolute; its value is a matter of assignation, of social agreement. Tulip bulbs are no longer bullion, and it is not hard to imagine a time when art will not be either. It has happened before, and can easily happen again. Those who pronounce on art's power as a hedge against inflation--as a commodity that rides the inflationary spiral, always ahead of money--tend not to mention that when runaway inflation lays waste an economy, as it did in Weimar Germany, the value of art collapses.

The second flaw in the euphoric confidence of today's art traders is a matter of historical myopia. How wonderful, we are told, that all things rise in price, as though in some universal resurrection and canonization of the dead. Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression--indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture--that art prices can only go up; the market has transcended its old uncertainty, whether the objects are million-dollar Titians or ten-buck trash "collectibles."

Fashion, in other words, is taken not to exist. But the unpleasant fact is that no reputation is immune to fashion. The art market is built on it. The French cattle painter Rosa Bonheur, a favorite of Victorian merchant princes, got -L- 4,059 (then almost $20,000) for her Highland Raid in 1887; in 1952 it was resold for under -L-200, or $560. Sir Edward Burne-Jones' Love and the Pilgrim, sold in 1898 for .-L-5,775 ($28,000), dropped to -L-21 ($85) within less than 50 years. If artists who in their day were considered outstanding, whose work was underwritten by the capital and by the social opinions of a powerful empire, could vanish into the oubliette, there is no reason to suppose that the same thing may not happen to their modern equivalents--the Rothkos and Newmans, the Warhols and Johnses, and even (blasphemous thought!) some of the Picassos. What goes up is quite able to come down. It only needs a little crack in the wall of confidence.

The flood of undiscriminating investment capital that flows toward art these days may yet produce a crisis analogous to the one that nearly sank the Bordeaux wine industry in the early 1970s. A surge of investment in Bordeaux vintages, to some extent by people who could not tell Medoc from camels' urine, shoved prices so high that traditional consumers of claret switched to Italian and other wines, thus tearing the bottom out of the market.

In any case, whom does the art boom benefit? Only collectors and middlemen. Few artists get to share in it. This is partly because boom conditions create an unreal system of reputation, with most of the benefits going to a handful of stars at the top and scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture for years and then reap a tax benefit by giving it to a museum at its enhanced value, fueled the art boom. The inequity of such laws has been that, if the artist gives his own work to the same museum in the same year, he cannot claim its fair market price as a write-off: all that the IRS gives him back is the cost of canvas and paint. The unfairness is compounded when the artist dies: the state then assesses the paintings in his estate at their highest market value and makes his heirs pay tax on that. This may be why the geese are not cackling with rapture as they lay golden eggs for others. A dull thump and a sigh are enough.

For most of us who cannot make or buy art but do want to look at it in peace, the art boom has been a disaster. The confusion of art with bullion may have done more to alter the way people experience works of art than any event since the arrival of mass color reproduction. It may well be that my generation --the people born between 1935 and 1940 --will be the last to remember what a truly disinterested museum visit was like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look at a work of art without its "value"--which means simply price, real or hypothetical--intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price was all nonsense: in ten years' time nobody would care or even remember what the Met had laid out for this "supreme masterpiece."

Nine of those ten years have passed, and the painting is still contaminated by the fallout from its price. The dance of digits in front of one's eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velazquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the cliches of art appreciation--"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian--become, in the face of a spiraling market, a dead language, analogous to advertising copy and producing the same kind of knee-jerk reverence in a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire.

This culture is now getting to the point where everything that can be regarded, however distantly, as a work of art is primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches. In the eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities, becomes simultaneously prominent and invisible. It can no longer speak as it once spoke. It is asked to become not an object of contemplation, but a spectacle. In the show-biz world that replaces the more subtle processes of art appreciation, there are two kinds of artwork, Treasures and Masterpieces. Anyone can tell the difference. Treasures have gold in them, Masterpieces don't.

As museums become more dependent on corporate funding, this drift away from serious, intelligent exhibition toward spectacle will increase. There will be much more wrapping for mass appeal, in the form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate Art Show, a display of all the gold in Fort Knox relocated to the Whitney Museum or some other institution, stacked up as a minimal sculpture. By then, price will have completely supplanted meaning. The Treasure and the Masterpiece will have fused, the triumph of the art boom will be achieved, and we can all creep home. -- Robert Hughes

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